richardmurray

Time to Break Up Hollywood
Hollywood is trapped in a death spiral, with streaming giants struggling to profit while smothering the industry itself. Finally the writers stood up. But will it be enough?
MATT STOLLER
MAY 14, 2023

 

Today I’m writing about the biggest Hollywood labor dispute in decades, as screenwriters enter their third week striking against streaming giants like Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros, and Comcast. Far from a narrow conflict over money, this fight is existential, a question of whether America can be a place where stars are born and movies are made.

As one striker put it < https://strikegeist.substack.com/p/daily-digest-why-this-strike-feels > , the strike is “about the whole corporate dominance of America.” 

(The Ankler’s excellent Strikegeist < https://strikegeist.substack.com/ > newsletter is covering the strike, and I highly recommend it if you are interested in what’s going on day-to-day.) 

Of America’s many inventions, reality TV does not rank as highly as, say, the semiconductor, the laser, the polio vaccine, or manned flight. But from Candid Camera in the 1940s to MTV’s The Real World in the early 1990s, the medium of reality TV has been as influential in its own way as rock music and hip hop. But today, it’s Great Britain, not America, creating many of the most popular reality shows

Here are some of the shows that got their start in the U.K., and then were licensed for an American audience: American Idol, America’s Got Talent, X-Factor, Dancing with the Stars, Wife Swap, Undercover Boss, Super Nanny, Who Wants to be a Millionaire. And there are hundreds more. In the U.K, independent producers have increased their TV related revenues from £1.5 billion in 2004 to more than £2.6 billion in 2017.

What happened? Put simply, governments changed laws so that independent producers gained bargaining leverage in the U.K., and lost it in the U.S.

Let’s start with the U.K. In the early 2000s, the British government embarked on a strategy to grow its independent production industry. It facilitated something called the “Terms of Trade,” < https://cmpa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Appendix-C-Oliver-Ohlbaum-Associates-2018-The-impact-of-the-UK-te...-1.pdf > a broadcaster code of conduct to remedy the bargaining asymmetry between dominant broadcasters and independent producers. This pact required four big public channels in the UK - BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 - to commission < https://www.smallscreenbigdebate.co.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/221955/annex-2-statement-future-of-public-service-media.pdf > 25% of their production from independent producers, and to allow those producers to retain copyrights from their work they could license abroad. 

This was a soft break-up of the industry along vertical lines, and it made the U.K a great place to do business. As the CEO of the firm that makes American Idol, The X Factor, and Britain's Got Talent said, "There is no other country where you have these terms of trade. In the UK, it's brilliant!" In 2010, independents held 50% of the market, beating in-house network programming. Exports of British content exploded.

In the U.S., by contrast, legal changes over the last thirty years stripped independent producers of their bargaining power with distributors, diminishing the ability to create great products. In 2019, I laid it out in one of my first newsletter issues, titled The Slow Death of Hollywood < https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood > , explaining why weirdly themed movies like Back to the Future became smash hits in the 1980s, and why that wouldn’t happen today. 

In 1985, theater owners had more choices about what content to sell, and could decide to distribute content that was well-liked and popular without assuming a massive barrage of marketing would force them to stock the most popular stuff immediately. So they could afford to show different movies, experiment, and then bring in the popular ones over time. The industry was more decentralized. Stars, directors and writers with good track records, studios, distributors, movie theaters, critics, and moviegoers shared power.

[This market structure harkens] back to bitter battles in the 1930s and 1940s between New Deal antitrust attorneys and studio heads, which culminated in the Paramount Decrees of 1948 < https://www.justice.gov/atr/paramount-decree-review >  and the end of the autocratic so-called ‘Studio System.’ These decrees forced studios to sell their theaters, and prevented them from engaging in tying and bundling practices to force theater owners to take their films. New Hollywood, with countercultural stars like Jack Nicholson, emerged in the 1960s to revamp the industry. In 1985, weird popular movies like Back to the Future took advantage of this open market structure. 

A similar situation existed in the television industry, which was broken apart in 1970 by Richard Nixon’s FCC with Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (‘fin-syn’) < https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0404/finsyn.html > , and a related rule called the Prime-Time Access Rule (PTAR). These rules blocked TV networks from distributing their own content in prime time, opening the market for TV content to third party producers who would take more creative risks. The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and All in the Family were some of the results of this policy choice to open up the TV market. 

Both the Paramount Decrees and the Fin-syn rules were designed to eliminate conflicts of interest by splitting the studio from the distribution. Studios had to create high quality work, and if they didn’t, distributors could choose to sell someone else’s art.

The rules structured a profitable and high-quality industry, with different kinds of TV shows and movies. Media was a series of markets, from movie theaters and prime time TV, to hundreds of local TV networks for syndication, to video tapes and DVDs, to foreign markets. Creators experimented, while audiences ruled with their preferences. Hollywood is a politically left-wing place, but conservative religious hits, like The Passion of the Christ, got into theaters, and sold tickets.

In the 1980s, antitrust enforcers, influenced by Chicago School scholars like Robert Bork, became far more tolerant of concentration economy-wide. This legal revolution had significant implications for movies. In 1995, the top five movie chains owned a third of U.S. theaters, with the biggest, Carmike, owning < https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/07/business/media/amc-biggest-movie-theater-chain.html> around 2,500. By 2016, the top five held over 53% of the movie theaters in the country, with the largest, AMC, owning 8,380. 

This consolidation changed movies. In the late 1990s, giant new multiplexes “jolted the Hollywood power structure,” < https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB885343258697290000 > as theater operators played the biggest hits on several screens at once. Films began to do most of their business in the first few weeks, so well-branded tent pole movies with strong IP - aka Marvel-style movies - displaced word of mouth. As Adam Mastroianni noted with this chart, movies, along with much of pop culture, became an oligopoly. < https://www.experimental-history.com/p/pop-culture-has-become-an-oligopoly?s=r > 

The Clinton administration enacted another legal change by ending fin-syn rules, causing a merger boom of content and distribution. Immediately, for instance, Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company behind shows like Seinfeld, sold out to Turner Broadcasting, which in turn sold out to Time Warner. Disney bought ABC, and then rolled-up a series of rivals < https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disney-part >  to acquire large amounts of well-known intellectual property - like Marvel and Star Wars. 

Then came streaming, which wasn’t very important at first. Prior to 2010, the major studios sold movies to theaters, and TV shows to cable and TV networks. Several sold to Netflix, which they saw as just another distributor. But in 2010, the Obama administration approved the merger of NBC and Comcast, a further erosion of the vertical separation at the heart of the Paramount Decrees and the fin-syn rules.

Technological innovation happens along the legal framework it is born into, so streaming, which could have decentralized had it happened in another era, did the opposite.

When Comcast bought NBC, Netflix, then a minor player, feared it would lose access to content from studios. So it began buying its own movies and shows, combining distribution and production as the first studio-streamer. Apple and am*zon, for whom Hollywood revenues were a rounding error, eventually entered the business. Netflix, Apple, and am*zon put pressure on the traditional studios, who were judged based on profit and loss. Studios realized Wall Street was valuing Netflix stock more highly as a ‘tech’ company. They wanted in on that as well. All except Sony followed Netflix and became studio-streamers.

But something wasn’t right with the streaming model Netflix introduced. There was no way to know ratings or box office take, since Netflix held its own data without third party auditors. Its then-CEO, Reed Hastings, pretended Netflix used its data to scientifically know what users wanted. But that wasn’t true. (See “The Algorithm is a Lie.” < https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-is-a-lie?s=w > ) Netflix was just overpaying for content, and losing money to acquire market share, a technique known as predatory pricing (that used to be illegal until the Supreme Court de facto legalized < https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/509/209/ > it in 1993.) 

Netflix’s model was an attack on the bargain between creators and studios at the heart of the industry. This bargain is that everyone who makes movies or shows - production houses, studios, writers, actors, or directors - split the profits from any individual piece of content, profits generated by selling movies or shows into actual markets. Producers, for instance, often retained the intellectual property of a show, and licensed it. Traditional labor compensation packages, known as ‘residuals,’ are based on theatrical releases, or what ratings TV shows achieved when broadcast. Additionally, both categories might qualify for additional compensation through syndication or DVD sales, foreign market sales, and sometimes streaming. (It’s why the cast of Friends is still making millions of dollars a year even today.)

When Netflix sought to fully integrate the production and distribution, this bargain broke down, because there were no markets or prices to use to value anything. Netflix paid creators an upfront fee, and then that content was on Netflix, with no opportunity to syndicate or sell it elsewhere. Beyond breaking down price signals, Netflix wouldn’t even tell creators how their shows did in terms of ratings. It also refused to allow American production houses to retain IP. Other studios copied Netflix, upending the labor model for content. No one knew what anything was worth.

The lack of market signals screwed up the industry because markets, as it turns out, have an important function in Hollywood. They represent a feedback loop to the studios, telling executives the preferences of the audience, based on whether the audience (or advertisers) are willing to pay. The tacky way to understand this dynamic is that when a movie did well at the box office, other studios would often copy that kind of movie, in hopes of appealing to the large audience that saw the original. But what happens when you can’t get distribution for mid-market movies because the few theater chain owners don’t want it? What happens when there are no TV ratings because it’s all streamed? What happens when, as happened during the pandemic, there is no box office?

Obviously, at some level, people are still paying money in the form of subscription fees. But decisions for what to make happen about individual pieces of content are difficult without this feedback from the audience. A creative executive can’t, after all, green light a streaming service, they can only green light a movie or TV show.

 

When pricing went away, when customers were simply paying a subscription fee every month instead of buying tickets or DVDs, executives had no way to know what to make or how to value anything. As just one example, in 2021, Warner Brothers put their whole slate of films onto their streaming service at the same time as they went into theaters, revealing how executives were mis-pricing their products. Another illustration of a deep structural problem with the industry is that bankable movie stars, the most important commodity in Hollywood, are aging, because you can’t break new stars.

In an attempt to monopolize, studio-streamers accidentally transformed a high-wage, high-profit business into a low-wage low-profit commodified one. For a time, this decline in industry health wasn’t obvious. Netflix had told Wall Street a story that its overall goal was to get customers locked in, and this convinced the street to give the capital to make lots of content regardless of profit. Other studios followed, overpaying for content in the hopes of being the last man standing, in the era of what was known as “Peak TV.” < https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/peak-tv-over-golden-age-hbo-streaming.html >  As Discovery board member John Malone put it < https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/john-malone-talks-streaming-wars-1235264416/ > , “Everyone went for this mad Oklahoma land rush of streaming … That was a fool’s errand.” 

The lock-in was a mirage, as consumers switched services to find content they wanted to watch. No one, as it turns out, wanted a streaming service, they wanted individual shows and movies. Vertically integrated streaming services, contrasted with markets where consumers pay for what they want, aren’t very profitable. HBO, Peacock, and Paramount all lost money < https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/5/23539590/streaming-losses-netflix-hbo-peter-kafka-media-column >  in the first three quarters of 2022, and this year, Disney’s streaming services raised prices < https://deadline.com/2023/05/disney-pulling-content-off-streaming-in-strategic-rethink-1235362374/ > and removed content, and still can’t make a penny. 

Most of the consolidation discussed so far is vertical, where studios and distributors combined. But throughout this period, traditional mergers, where rivals bought rivals, also continued. In 2019, Disney bought Fox, shrinking the number of major studios into a narrower oligopoly (and cutting the output of films < https://theankler.com/p/the-disney-fox-deal-whos-right?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=15657&post_id=97369692&isFreemail=false> ). Last year, Discovery bought Time Warner, combining two big buyers of reality TV. 

Consolidation, combining both production and distribution, and shrinking the number of studios, led to budget cuts. For writers, this meant smaller writer rooms, shorter seasons, and worse terms. Writer pay fell by 14% over < https://www.wcvb.com/article/what-do-striking-hollywood-writers-want/43791834 > the last five years, with sweatshop conditions < https://theankler.com/p/showrunner-crisis-its-a-sweatshop > even for those with the most creative control, the showrunners. Others felt it too; independent TV production houses, such as firms who create reality TV shows, struggled. They no longer have any choice but to sell to one of a few studio-streamers. Streamers demanded the intellectual property of anything they bought, which meant independent production houses began working as contract players for a fee, almost like chicken farmers or gig workers. There was no point in creating something great, since all the upside went to the streaming giants. 

Nothing in Hollywood, in other words, is working now that the underlying pricing system has been reduced in importance. The studio-streamers aren’t making money, the workers aren’t getting compensated like they used to, and the cultural relevance of Hollywood is declining. (And that last point is very weird, because Hollywood should have been able to take advantage of the remarkable telecommunications revolution of the last thirty years, but hasn’t.)

This industry-wide collapse is at the heart of the writers strike that’s taking place right now, ever since the industry contract with screenwriters expired at the beginning of the month. What the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) wants, is a fix to the devastation vertical integration has wrought on the industry. Their official demands are more money, access to data on how their shows do, as well as also minimum staffing requirements for shows and better lengths of employment for writers. To add to the pressure, over the next few months, the Director’s Guild and the Screen Actors Guild will also be renegotiating < https://abc7.com/hollywood-writers-strike-los-angeles-guild-of-america-directors/13229141/#:~:text=The Writers Guild of America's,Editor in Chief Cynthia Littleton. > their contracts. 

Some of the WGA demands address the power imbalance more directly than others. More residuals is a standard labor demand, while better data on streaming would actually ameliorate industry structure. Minimum staffing requirements are a bit more controversial, according to The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield. But fundamentally, the problem the writers face is much bigger than an unfair deal. It is in fact the same problem that everyone - writers, actors, directors, producers, crew members, and executives - all face; the industry itself is badly structured, and there is no political leadership < https://theankler.com/p/rushfield-the-very-bad-choices-that > among studio CEOs to address the dysfunction.

Most in Hollywood feel in their gut the dysfunction, and the proof is in the support unions are showing one another. Believe it or not, labor solidarity in the industry is rare. During the 2007 writers strike, for instance, Teamsters would drive past picket lines and give the strikers the middle finger. Two weeks ago, however, Teamster leader Lindsay Dougherty told < https://strikegeist.substack.com/p/rushfield-day-3-netflix-bears-the >  writers at a strike rally, “If you put up a line, the trucks will fucking stop... The only way we’re gonna beat these mother fuckers is if we do it together."

It’s not just unions. Agents are pitching in, even though agents and writers had been at war relatively recently. And the producers are backing the writers as well, quietly. One strike captain told Elaine Low that “they’ve received boxes of doughnuts from producers who refused to share their names,” but that “the anonymous drive-by doughnuts were well received.” It’s remarkable that producers are afraid to have their names associated with a strike they support, but in a sense, the fear is the point.

Even the Wall Street financiers themselves see the problem, in the form of stagnating share prices. From their point of view, however, the problem isn’t that studio-streamers are too powerful, but that they are too weak. As media tycoon John Malone last year told the New York Times, studios, especially smaller ones, don’t have enough pricing power, and will ”inevitably have to combine in order to try and become profitable.” This view is near-consensus in the C-Suite; former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar recently wrote in the WSJ < https://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-kilar-chaotic-streaming-wars-11670177734 > , he expects there will only be two or three studios remaining after another merger wave, and a bevy of billionaires from Comcast and Discovery are all planning < https://puck.news/lazard-fears-nbcu-c-suite-tea-leaves/?_cio_id=f6c60604e79a01a8c408&utm_campaign=The+Daily+Courant+-+LEADS+(5%2F1%2F23)&utm_content=The+Daily+Courant+-+LEADS+(5%2F1%2F23)&utm_medium=email_action&utm_source=customer.io > for the “inevitable” merger of NBC and Warner Bros. Discovery. And am*zon is reportedly interested < https://nypost.com/2023/03/28/am*zon-reportedly-interested-in-buying-amc-entertainment/ >

 in buying the AMC theater chain.

In other words, rather than returning the industry to profitability by separating out distribution and studios once again, the goal is to further consolidate Hollywood to squeeze pricing power out of consumers and creators.

And that’s why this fight is existential. For the strikers, the problem is how to negotiate a deal providing a reasonable living making commercially viable TV shows and movies. For the studio-streamers, however, preserving a domestic creative industry is fundamentally unimportant. Their problem is a lack of pricing power, aka too much competition among relatively undifferentiated streaming services who must bid against each for both talent and audience. Their way out is to drive a hard bargain, while trying to engineer another set of mergers.

As the Entertainment Strategy Guy notes < https://entertainmentstrategyguy.com/2023/05/09/sending-a-strategy-postcard-from-strike-land/> , and as the reality TV imports from the U.K. show, there is now production capacity all over the world, and shows and movies are regularly imported into the U.S. The South Korean show Squid Game was the most popular show on Netflix, ever. This CNBC headline says it all: “‘Squid Game’ success shines a light on how cheap it is to make TV shows outside the U.S.”  < https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/16/netflixs-squid-game-success-shines-light-on-international-discounts.html > As unimaginable as it might be to think of Hollywood itself disappearing, why couldn’t TV and movies just be one more industry the U.S. outsources? 

In other words, this strike is more than just a problem for the writers, it’s about whether the U.S. wants to have the capacity to make commercially viable movies and television shows. If we do, then we’ll need a real political coalition to break up the studio-streamers.

It’s a good moment to have this conversation, because the strike has focused everyone in Hollywood on problems in the industry. Different stakeholders in the industry are going to have to build a political argument for a revival of some form of the fin-syn or Paramount Decrees. We need Congressional hearings, and industry commissions with recommendations. It could be a Terms of Trade type arrangement so producers get to keep IP, or it could be something else. But it will have to split the industry giants so they are either distributors or studios, but not both. Markets have to exist again. I don’t know how to address consolidated theater chains, but that’s a problem as well.

Finally, I would note that this strike is just one of a series of battles over who controls our media systems. There are of course many legislative proposals and antitrust suits to address social media and big tech, but it goes far beyond that. Last year, for instance, the Biden antitrust division blocked < https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/book-publishing-mega-merger-blocked > a merger of Penguin and Simon & Schuster, foiling consolidation in books. At academic publishing monopolist Elsevier, 40 scientists just resigned < https://www.salon.com/2023/05/10/elsevier-editor-resignation-neuroimage/ > from editorial positions at a journal on brain imaging to protest the “greed” of their publisher. 

There is also anger in the national security world, and on the right, over this problem. Congressman Mike Gallagher, from the Special Select Committee on China, led a delegation < https://deadline.com/2023/04/disney-china-bob-iger-mike-gallagher-interview-1235322443/ > to Hollywood to meet with CEOs about Chinese influence in the industry (which is another consequence of consolidation). There’s a public fight between Tucker Carlson and Fox News, which is about media control as well. Carlson was fired, and was subjected < https://www.axios.com/2023/05/07/fox-news-tucker-carlson > to a non-compete agreement to block him from creating a rival. And who else is fighting with studio giant Disney? That would be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and at some level this conservative anger is with corporate power. Maybe a ‘break up Hollywood studios’ battle cry would have some pull with them. 

America is a fractured society, but the truth is, most of us have something in common. We love storytelling, and we don’t want a small group telling us what stories we can tell one another. A coalition is possible to save this magnificent art form. When push comes to shove, very few Americans, in Hollywood or elsewhere, are happy “about the whole corporate dominance of America.”

 

 

ARTICLE URL
https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/can-a-writers-strike-save-hollywood?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 

THE IMPACT OF TERMS OF TRADE ON THE UK's TELEVISION CONTENT PRODUCTION SECTOR

 

PRODUCING PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA CONTENT
 

 

 

First act, a set of educators, i think college are helping a colleague leave but they all have an affinity to this colleague, a curiosity about his nature. I concur with Bixby, real human beings are not alarmist and in this select case, all of these are seasoned educators used to slowly thinking about something, so they wouldn't call the cops or paddy wagon immediately. 

Why did I not guess the black leather jacket would call someone from outside first. I thought it would be billingly's character the physics or chemistry professor.

Second act, a female teacher loves him, reminds me of that twilight zone , Long Live Walter JAmeson, by the dead early Charles Beaumont, but extended.

I love Crude demonstration , hilarious, I am not superman. Loving Tony Todd's acting. 

27:34 first seeing the ocean

28:42 he studied with the buddha, and i loved the earlier birth of the vampire myth

29:06 the first betrayal of character, leather jacket should had considered he think of being outed. Considering he called someone he is either biding time or betraying himself.

29:38 ahh well done, he was expecting, 

30:31 i wish i had been here from the beginning, I concur:) 

32:16 he survived the bubonic plague, typhoid , smallpox

32:53 good point, being immortal in a cage isn't desired

33:33 black leather is wrong, common sense isn't insulted by an immortal being, common sense accepts tthe unique is plausible even if it can't not be explained.

35:19 true Tony todd, but time is also the most precious thing in existence.

35:52 exactly, the second is a human construct. an algorithmic truth, not assessed from nature.

36:27 funny moment. slow movie but for those who like to overthink and like dialog fun

37:21 is he lucky? that is the point of the story

39:41 exactly, he is outside most of humanity yet still human, a minority of one

41:46 I love that he didn't go into his past wives or children by the invasive psychiatrist

42:50 good point, the one great chaotic moment is the "immortal man" chose to even do this. I comprehend the writer's point. It is a random idea in one of many lives. But I must admit, my long lived characters wouldn't do this, unless they wish to be caught or have their cycle of lives undone.

43:07 he didn't think of these people's feelings before he told them ahhh, i disagree bixby.

43:37 the psychiatrist, white haired is trying to pull off a guilt trip, i bet he was diagnosed to die soon

44:50 ahh i knew it was a tragedy, the psychiatrist wife died yesterday
I love it, permit me to be infantile by myself. 

46:58 my first wedding funny charades

47:54 this movie clearly couldn't make it in theaters.

48:48 love his answer to 1292 ad

50:04 funny, about the primitive tribe in new guinea:)

51:03 the older woman is a hard core christian

51:47 no way skipping the biblical figure, and now he wants to call it a night, this is what you get when you ask those who study knowledge about a person who has lived longer than common

53:10 he is jesus hahaha! 

53:24 sit down edith, i know 

54:16 yes, sit down edith, lovely honesity from the biologist about his kin

54:41 tony todd, modern, that's good:)

55:29 ahh he is espousing the old belief that jesus learned buddhist ways. it makes sense historically in one way. Buddhism is older than the roman empire, and from the travelers, who were common at that time, labeled magi, who traveled freely in the roman empire because of the might of the roman empire... ok.

56:41 exactly, Tony Todd, christianity was born from the multiracial roman empire. 

58:26 good point, buddha /jesus/the christian god, may not be happy 

59:04 you can tell this was written on bixby's deathbed, a great mortuary story. I wonder what I will write in my last moments.

59:35 hhahaha, the psychiatrist came back:) haha soul saved:) 

1:00:00 nice bridge, we don't need to reintroduce the old topics for the psychiatrist, his shame on leaving.

1:00:53 great joke, nothing unusual in the path of the psychiatrist until the day he met a caveman who thought himself jesus

1:01:46 piety is the mistake they bring to the lessons haha, he is on a roll, Bixby is enjoying himself in his last days

1:03:10 thank you biologist, people make to light the influence of drugs, no, if he is taking a drug it isn't making him go up or down be violent or peaceful, it isn't changing him at all

1:04:20 thank you tony todd, i don't blame you, stay calm and relax.

1:04:55 exactly, psychiatrist, or the modern mythologies of MLKjr or Adolf Hitler

1:07:42 Its funny , in a group called african american literary book club, do you know how many black members suggest the usa will be forever? why is that? why is it, black people who knows kemet has all other human communities by thousands of years will be bested by the usa? what are blacks in the usa afraid of?.... 

1:08:20 how do you know?  I don't smell it. 
exactly, you know when it will rain , all humans do. 

1:09:20 etymology, this does happen. words matter.

1:10:25 good acting, they are all trapped by this story of their colleague

1:11:00 if edith says you aren't jesus one more time

1:11:56 edith have broken down , the psychiatrist had to shed light

1:12:49 the psychiatrist is wrong, he doesn't demand the truth, he demands the lie to keep peace

1:13:44 he is bluffing, well done, he is giving them safety

1:14:22 easy tonny todd:) he want to kill him

1:15:44 it ends safe, well done bixby, he lets the thinkers get off easy

1:16:25 exactly , the woman who lives him is right. 

1:17:59 edith knows. she will leave it

1:18:14 Tony Todd, a latitude in what we call reality... anything is possible
I am going to watch star trek. and yes, good move tony todd
Drop me a line whenever

1:19:34 the psychiatrist found out
easy psychiatrist , the break down. ahh well done, Bixby, ahh the psychiatrist was a man he knew. 

1;21:45 exactly, he never saw his own child again.

1:22:34 yes, let her decide

hahaha, great hook, who knows, let the viewer decide.

IN CONCLUSION
Ok, this movie was fun, but not for the general audience. Alittle careless of him, but that is part of John's humanity, humans even long living one's will make mistakes. 
I know this is an aside, but i love the credits , they are large enough to see and slow enough to follow, many movies have very uncaring or cheap credits.

I say, this is a well constructed example of someone long lived revealing themselves in a paraspontaneous way.

Just thoughtfulness.

I didn't time index from the begining cause I was watching it side relatives , we do those things in our home, but I am glad my relatives went to watch other things as I could write more specifically and i forgot some points early on:) 

 

NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is
By Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney

Mr. Anderson is the editor of “Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance Since the Cold War,” to which Mr. Meaney is a contributor.

NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to toast their success.

Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of “brain death.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed. As NATO plans to welcome Sweden into its ranks — Finland became a full-fledged member in April — and dispatch troops to reinforce its eastern flank, European Union allies are finally making good on long-deferred promises to increase military spending. Public opinion has followed suit. If Russia sought to divide Europe, President Biden could plausibly declare last spring that it had instead fully “NATO-ized” the continent.

This turnabout has understandably energized the alliance’s supporters. The statement of purpose from Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary general, that “the strength of NATO is the best possible tool we have to maintain peace and security” has never had more loyal adherents. Even critics of the organization — such as China hawks who see it as a distraction from the real threat in East Asia and restrainers who would prefer that Washington refocus on diplomatic solutions and problems at home — concede that NATO’s purpose is primarily the defense of Europe.

But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Fielding 100 divisions at its Cold War height, a small fraction of Warsaw Pact manpower, the organization could not be counted on to repel a Soviet invasion and even the continent’s nuclear weapons were under Washington’s control. Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful.

Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organization truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

When European populations proved too stubborn, or undesirably swayed by socialist or nationalist sentiments, Atlantic integration proceeded all the same. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later. The new century brought more of the same, with an appropriate shift in emphasis. Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans. The war in Ukraine, for all the talk of Europe stepping up, has left that asymmetry essentially untouched. Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined. European spending pledges may also turn out to be less impressive than they appear. More than a year after the German government publicized the creation of a special $110 billion fund for its armed forces, the bulk of the credits remain unused. In the meantime, German military commanders have said that they lack sufficient munitions for more than two days of high-intensity combat.

Whatever the levels of expenditure, it is remarkable how little military capability Europeans get for the outlays involved. Lack of coordination, as much as penny-pinching, hamstrings Europe’s ability to ensure its own security. By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap. U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s annual budget — less than 6 percent by a recent estimate. And the war has only strengthened America’s hand. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, roughly half of European military spending went to American manufacturers. Surging demand has exacerbated this tendency as buyers rush to acquire tanks, combat aircraft and other weapons systems, locking into costly, multiyear contracts. Europe may be remilitarizing, but America is reaping the rewards.

In Ukraine, the pattern is clear. Washington will provide the military security, and its corporations will benefit from a bonanza of European armament orders, while Europeans will shoulder the cost of postwar reconstruction — something Germany is better poised to accomplish than the buildup of its military. The war also serves as a dress rehearsal for U.S. confrontation with China, in which European support cannot be so easily counted on. Limiting Beijing’s access to strategic technologies and promoting American industry are hardly European priorities, and severing European and Chinese trade is still difficult to imagine. Yet already there are signs that NATO is making headway in getting Europe to follow its lead in the theater. On the eve of a visit to Washington at the end of June, Germany’s defense minister duly advertised his awareness of “European responsibility for the Indo-Pacific” and the importance of “the rules-based international order” in the South China Sea.

No matter their ascendance, Atlanticists fret over support for the organization being undermined by disinformation and cybermeddling. They needn’t worry. Contested throughout the Cold War, NATO remained a subject of controversy into the 1990s, when the disappearance of its adversary encouraged thoughts of a new European security architecture. Today, dissent is less audible than ever before.

Left parties in Europe, historically critical of militarism and American power, have overwhelmingly enlisted in the defense of the West: The trajectory of the German Greens, from fierce opponents of nuclear weapons to a party seemingly willing to risk atomic war, is a particularly vivid illustration. Stateside, criticism of NATO focuses on the risks of overextending U.S. treaty obligations, not their underlying justification. The most successful alliance in history, gathering in celebration of itself, need not wait for its 75th anniversary next year to uncork the champagne.

 

Article Link

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/opinion/nato-summit-vilnius-europe.html

 

I WROTE A LETTER TO NY TIMES IN REPLY TO THIS OP-ED

 

If NATO isn't what it says it is, then Putin's leadership of Russia is mischaracterized. Did as leader of Russia he initiated the current war in Ukraine? yes. But was this unwise for Russia? no. Based on the op-ed's words, Russia will never be an appropriate NATO member as a nuclear power, while the actions of NATO members or Europe West of Russia based on the article are clearly prepared and wanting to be modern satraps <tributary states of the Persian empire> of the USA. And to the future, the Pax Statian has a countdown or conditional , either the condition that Ukraine is a buffer between the militaries of the USA + Russia will end or a countdown to violence will begin as NATO has no where to grow. 

 

IN  AMENDMENT

 

Putin argued that the USA is trying to close around Russia, this opinion piece essentially says, through the will of Europe west of Rusia, Putin is 100% correct and sequentially it is in Russia's interest to stake a claim before Russia is totally surrounded and becomes a satrap of Europe west of Russia while Europe west of russia is a satrap of the usa. 

 

 

 

Many people in the usa are complaining about the supreme court's rulings as if the supreme court didn't make rulings that upended centuries of prior conditions. Making rulings that upend fifty years worth of rulings isn't as devastating. 

But the key here is state power. The future USA will be based on gangs of states in its fold. Those who try to fight that coming reality are fools. 

 

 

KWL Live Q&A – All About Audiobooks with Karen Grey

All About Audiobooks featuring Karen Grey

The Kobo Writing Life team is happy to announce our next Live Q&A on June 29th from 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST. KWL Director Tara and author engagement manager Laura will be joined by audiobook narrator, author, and audiobook production consultant Karen Grey! Be sure to have your questions about everything to do with audiobooks ready for this amazing talk.

Hello authors!

For our sixth live Q&A of the year (we’re halfway through, everyone – amazing!), audiobook narrator, author, and all-around audiobook expert and founder of Home Cooked Books, Karen Grey (who narrates under Karen White), will be in conversation with KWL’s director Tara and author engagement manager Laura, discussing all there is to do with audiobooks! We will be discussing everything from Karen’s career as an audiobook narrator to audiobook production processes to marketing your audiobooks and more.

https://kobowritinglife.com/2023/06/01/kwl-live-qa-all-about-audiobooks-with-karen-grey/

 

Questions to your experience: 
What must/need to/can't/shouldn't be in the description of an audiobook?
What is the most effective audio book excerpts or samples?
What is the most/least effective audiobook covers?
How should an audiobook be utilized in a newsletter?
What is the most unique utilization of audiobooks you know of?

 

Untimed Index Notes

How she started in the industry
The different labors in the industry: readers/profers/editors- you have to give the different labors time: readers will need to reread. Profers will ask for things to be reread. Editors will massage the audio for the audience.
Picking an reader- wait for the best voice, readers are booked. A reader needs to have read at least twenty books before.
Voice tags and changing your writing to fit audiobooks- read words aloud
If you are an indie author, if the narrator spoke it better than you wrote it, change the ebook. 
Give narrarators a pronunciation list
Accept the suspense of disbelief in a story involving characters not your native or multilingual
You can be the producers in terms of paying narrators
People are paid for how long when book is done not how long they work in composition, the rates are wide, be careful if they are for the full production or just narration
https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/audiobooks
Cheapest marketing offer is her newsletter
https://airtable.com/shrwJOoufJITREr5H
Any do or do nots for audiobook samples or covers? 
Cover should be professionally created, a square, be recognizeable as ebook. Include narrators.
Sample- less than 5 minutes, choosing a good meaty section, if multiple narrators, represent all of them., highly recommend posting online, avoid any flag words
https://airtable.com/shrwJOoufJITREr5H
https://airtable.com/shrzWXKgatyH0qpny
Advertising on Kobo
Talk about audiobooks in newsletter
Link to use kobo graphics in advertising
https://kobowritinglife.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059386211-Rakuten-Kobo-Logos-and-Website-Buttons
Audiobook publishers associations have done research , people are liking shorter books, audible has a rule, a book can only be in one bundle
One point of recording short thing, if anything is under an hour for Screen actors guild, you have to pay for one hour. 

 

Juneteenth 2023 review

 

This Juneteenth 2023 I asked the larger community to come up with a unique cultural tradition and none came forth. 

White people say : 1949-1973 displacement programs removed over a million people and two thirds were black. 

Name an idea for a unique Juneteenth celebration
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10318-juneteenth-2023-name-an-idea-for-a-unique-celebration/

Most Black Leaders didn't advocate for reparations even though most Black people wanted and that made the usa, but it came with a negative price for Black people
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10327-most-black-leaders-didnt-advocate-for-reparations-even-though-most-black-people-wanted-and-that-made-the-usa-but-it-came-with-a-negative-price-for-black-people/

 

Movement to return land taken from Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. gains momentum
Jun 9, 2023 6:35 PM EDT
As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. This includes African Americans and Native Americans. But as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Read the Full Transcript
Amna Nawaz:

As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. That includes African Americans and Native Americans.

But, as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Stephanie Sy:

The story of Bruce's Beach is a story about what could and should have been.

Over 100 years ago, an industrious Black woman in Southern California dreamt of owning a beach resort, but was refused whenever she tried. Willa Bruce eventually acquired land in Manhattan Beach, telling The Los Angeles Times in 1912: "I own this land, and I'm going to keep it."

She and her husband, Charles, built a lodge, a place where Black vacationers could enjoy a stay at the beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, Relative of Bruce Family: They were having a beautiful time, and they built it to share, because whenever people came to California, they wanted them to have somewhere to go.

Kavon Ward, Founder, Where Is My Land:

When I think about Charles and Willa Bruce, I think about entrepreneurs, I think about Black excellence, I think about community.

George Fatheree III, Attorney For Bruce Family:

The reality is, the Bruces and their patrons were wealthy.

Stephanie Sy:

A stately photo of the Bruces on their wedding day, decked out in finery, foretold the makings of a power couple. The display of Black success outraged the white neighbors and powers that be, says attorney George Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

In the light of harassment, intimidation, violence, their business just got more and more successful, and until the city of Manhattan Beach hatched a scheme to take the property via a racially motivated eminent domain.

Stephanie Sy:

The Bruces' dream was stolen, their property essentially seized for a pittance in compensation, and only after they sued.

Kavon Ward:

This is it, I would say from right here to maybe this building here.

Stephanie Sy:

Community activist Kavon Ward first learned of the Bruces a few years after she moved to Manhattan Beach in 2017.

Kavon Ward:

This country often tells us that — Black people, that we're lazy, or we don't work hard enough, or all we have to do is pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And here we are in the 19-teens and the 1920s, and this Black couple did exactly that, only to have their land stolen and to die as cooks in someone else's kitchen, when they had this whole beachfront resort here.

Stephanie Sy:

Ward began campaigning for the land to be returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce during the summer of 2020.

Less than two years later, she succeeded, with the help of Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

For a century, our government at every level has enacted policies to dispossess Black people of the right to own property and create wealth. And what was so powerful about the return of the property of the Bruce family is, we see a path forward to finally counter some of those false narratives.

Stephanie Sy:

As unique and complex as the Bruce's Beach land back deal is, it does offer a path forward for other groups that might seek a return of land, not least of which are the original inhabitants of Los Angeles.

Before Spanish missionaries arrived, the Tongva roamed a 4,000-square-mile swathe of Southern California called Tovaangar stretching from the coast to the mountains.

Samantha Morales-Johnson, Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Land Conservancy:

We have been very systematically erased. We were enslaved. We have gone through about three waves of genocide.

Stephanie Sy:

Twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Morales-Johnson recently became the land return coordinator for a Tongva conservancy, a job she could only have dreamed of as a child.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This land was returned, which I was not expecting in my lifetime, let alone my grandfather's.

Stephanie Sy:

The one-acre property in Altadena was transferred last year by a Jewish landowner whose own family faced displacement and oppression.

Johnson said the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd raised the nation's consciousness.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it made people more aware of all of the injustices that happen in America.

Stephanie Sy:

When Johnson was growing up, council meetings and holiday parties were held in a borrowed space.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it was a converted taco restaurant with, like, a little parking lot. There was no earth to even grow anything in that concrete building.

Stephanie Sy:

The Altadena property, which overlooks a scenic canyon, marks the first time in nearly 200 years the Tongva have legally owned land to use as they wish.

So, this is the white sage.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This is the white sage. This is the only place where we can plant all Native trees with full sovereignty and Native plants with full sovereignty.

Stephanie Sy:

Work is under way to remove the overgrown invasive species that were planted here. The old resilient oaks will remain. Eventually, the site will host tribal gatherings and offer educational programs.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

So, the beautiful thing about this land is that there is a lot of hope for restoration even underneath all of the mess that we have.

Stephanie Sy:

So-called land back agreements are still rare. Other recent examples include the purchase of nearly two square miles of land for $4.5 million by the Esselen Tribe in Central California.

And the city of Oakland recently returned five acres of a local park to the East Bay Ohlone Tribe. In L.A., different Tongva groups are looking for more opportunities to reacquire land.

Angie Behrns, Founder, Gabrielino/Tongva, Springs Foundation:

It's not really just about the land. It's preserving what's left of our land.

Stephanie Sy:

Long before the land back movement had gained traction, Angie Behrns, now 86, fought to lease this two-acre property in West L.A. It was the early 1990s, and the Kuruvungna Springs, which had been the site of a Tongva village, had fallen into neglect.

A small museum on the land shows the journey.

Angie Behrns:

When I stood at that gate and saw this area, I was so upset. I couldn't believe it. That's an archaeological and a historical society.

Stephanie Sy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the land and built a high school next to the springs, agreed to lease the site for $1 a year.

Bob Ramirez, President, Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation:

This is the medicine garden we have, which has many varieties of medicinal plants.

Stephanie Sy:

The president of the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation, Bob Ramirez, says the land is now abundant with Native plants and pristine drinking water.

Bob Ramirez:

Would you like to try some?

Stephanie Sy:

Yes, I would like to try some.

Bob Ramirez:

Yes.

Stephanie Sy:

Now is the time for the land to be returned, Behrns says.

Angie Behrns:

This is a sacred site. This is our place of worship. You have your temples. You have your churches. And what do we have?

Stephanie Sy:

But Ramirez says the "we" is debatable.

Bob Ramirez:

And there may be other people that say, well, wait a minute, if you're going to get that land, well, what about me? So it becomes contentious, I think.

How do you compensate this group and neglect somebody else? Is that fair? Is that just?

Stephanie Sy:

What is fair and just is also in dispute at Bruce's Beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, a distant relative of Charles Bruce, was at the ceremony in 2022 when county officials return the land to the Bruces' direct descendants. She thinks about what could have been if the land had remained in the family's hands all along.

Patricia Bruce-Carter:

I'm sure, at this time, there would have been multiple hotels and beachfront properties, and, I mean, just living the life.

Stephanie Sy:

A lifeguard administration center and parking lot stand where the Bruces' resort did. The descendants' lawyer, George Fatheree, says it would not be easy to develop.

And so less, than a year after the land was returned, the four recipients of the land decided to sell it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

George Fatheree III:

As an attorney, my responsibility is to advocate in the interests of my clients. As a citizen, as an — and as an African American citizen,I think that's an important question.

Who are the benefactors of restitution? Who should be the benefactors of reparations?

Stephanie Sy:

After her work getting the Bruces their land back, this is not the outcome community activist Kavon Ward wanted.

Kavon Ward:

I wanted to see strong, young Black entrepreneurs like Charles and Willa Bruce take up space here and be able to build and develop here, like the Bruces once we're able to do.

Community is what got the land back. So, yes, the family won, but the community did not.

Stephanie Sy:

The work, Ward says, will continue, the reckoning far from over.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Stephanie Sy in Los Angeles.

URL
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/movement-to-return-land-taken-from-black-and-indigenous-people-in-the-u-s-gains-momentum

The War Between The States
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10332-the-war-between-the-states/

Cornell West and the problem with Third Parties
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10336-cornell-west-the-peoples-party-and-the-problem-with-third-parties-in-the-usa/

How a shipping error poisoned Michigan
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2347&type=status

 

 

Work from Lilac Phoenix

 

 

I end with this paraphrase from Brenda stevenson < https://www.drbrendastevenson.com/ > from a PBS segment below, and a postparaphrase reply.  

It's a strange dance that we have with race in the USA. We come forward with many steps,, twirl around, and we are going in the opposite direction. So, this continues to happen. But I think everyone had to own up to the fact that we live in a racialized society. The ways in which we find ourselves or define ourselves as being American, in part, is to have digested some of that racism. So, no group is- does not have it. No group does not act on it. And we have to understand that and we have to have some real hard discussions with ourselves, our families, our communities, and with other communities about how we fit into this dynamic of race within our society. Do we perptuate racism, stereotypes, et cetera, or are we actively trying to recognize that we hold some of that within ourselves and that we act on it and we need to eliminate it, or at least get it to a level where we can all act towards one another with respect, dignity and equality? But it's very very difficult. It is bound in the roots of American society. And once you eat of the tree of the USA , it becomes part of you. 

For Juneteenth I have pondered freedom and the black community in the usa, and after various multilog side black people in various places I realize many, not necessarily most, but many black people are in denial about our village. The denial is through their preaching, and when I said preaching, I don't mean from a pulpit but in their desire for multilog that is inevitably dysfunctional. 
I repeat, when the usa was started three tribes in the black village in the usa existed. Enslaved to whites/Free fighting side whites against the usa being created/Free fighting side whites supporting the usa being created. 
Based on Sister Stevenson's quote, whenever a black person demands all black people in the usa are bettered for being in the usa, or nonviolence must occur in the black community, they are denying the internal reality all black people should know but don't because of the black tribes in the usa one common trait. NEarly all are filled with people afraid to admit the friction in the black community in the usa  based on the three original black tribes. 
Most free black people fought against creating the usa, and again after the colonies freed themselves against the usa hoping britian take over. That means most free blacks didn't accept the usa's constitution of any aspect of the usa culturally that so many blacks in the usa today say all blacks do or need to. 
And moreover, when the black community , as James Baldwin said of his father's religious community, has most who hate whites with a silent impotent passion. having black people who want to live with or comfort or find peace to whites or non blacks talk about why most blacks aren't engaged is a sign of their denial. 
The black community in the usa, has never done the hard work of reaching in itself, even while the whites watch and accept what its majority wants doesn't suit the desire its minority, that is in most positions of leadership want. 
Black people in the usa are individually freer in the usa than ever before. But, the Black Village communal desire isn't to be statian and most black leaders know it, and they don't know how to handle it, except to try and preach it away or hope some black person in the usa is born who can fit the usa's multiracial maze with their nonviolent, integrationist mantra while acquire or have the resources to guide the majority of black people with what black leadership in the usa usually doesn't have, opportunity, not talk.

 

 

The Ancestral Tree
A juneteenth poem
the full poem
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-ancestral-tree-1

 

More Juneteenth art + poetry
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Juneteenth-2023-966928866
 
 

Youtube video

 

Tiktok video

@richardmurraytiktok The Ancestral Tree excerpt - a juneteenth poem - the full poem https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-ancestral-tree-1 more juneteenth poetry or art https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Juneteenth-2023-966928866 my free email newsletter for more content https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/#rmaalbc #aalbc #juneteenth #poetry #poem #rmtja ♬ original sound - richardmurraytiktok

 

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Juneteenth 2023 review

 

This Juneteenth 2023 I asked the larger community to come up with a unique cultural tradition and none came forth. 

White people say : 1949-1973 displacement programs removed over a million people and two thirds were black. 

Name an idea for a unique Juneteenth celebration
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10318-juneteenth-2023-name-an-idea-for-a-unique-celebration/

Most Black Leaders didn't advocate for reparations even though most Black people wanted and that made the usa, but it came with a negative price for Black people
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10327-most-black-leaders-didnt-advocate-for-reparations-even-though-most-black-people-wanted-and-that-made-the-usa-but-it-came-with-a-negative-price-for-black-people/

 

Movement to return land taken from Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. gains momentum
Jun 9, 2023 6:35 PM EDT
As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. This includes African Americans and Native Americans. But as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Read the Full Transcript
Amna Nawaz:

As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. That includes African Americans and Native Americans.

But, as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Stephanie Sy:

The story of Bruce's Beach is a story about what could and should have been.

Over 100 years ago, an industrious Black woman in Southern California dreamt of owning a beach resort, but was refused whenever she tried. Willa Bruce eventually acquired land in Manhattan Beach, telling The Los Angeles Times in 1912: "I own this land, and I'm going to keep it."

She and her husband, Charles, built a lodge, a place where Black vacationers could enjoy a stay at the beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, Relative of Bruce Family: They were having a beautiful time, and they built it to share, because whenever people came to California, they wanted them to have somewhere to go.

Kavon Ward, Founder, Where Is My Land:

When I think about Charles and Willa Bruce, I think about entrepreneurs, I think about Black excellence, I think about community.

George Fatheree III, Attorney For Bruce Family:

The reality is, the Bruces and their patrons were wealthy.

Stephanie Sy:

A stately photo of the Bruces on their wedding day, decked out in finery, foretold the makings of a power couple. The display of Black success outraged the white neighbors and powers that be, says attorney George Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

In the light of harassment, intimidation, violence, their business just got more and more successful, and until the city of Manhattan Beach hatched a scheme to take the property via a racially motivated eminent domain.

Stephanie Sy:

The Bruces' dream was stolen, their property essentially seized for a pittance in compensation, and only after they sued.

Kavon Ward:

This is it, I would say from right here to maybe this building here.

Stephanie Sy:

Community activist Kavon Ward first learned of the Bruces a few years after she moved to Manhattan Beach in 2017.

Kavon Ward:

This country often tells us that — Black people, that we're lazy, or we don't work hard enough, or all we have to do is pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And here we are in the 19-teens and the 1920s, and this Black couple did exactly that, only to have their land stolen and to die as cooks in someone else's kitchen, when they had this whole beachfront resort here.

Stephanie Sy:

Ward began campaigning for the land to be returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce during the summer of 2020.

Less than two years later, she succeeded, with the help of Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

For a century, our government at every level has enacted policies to dispossess Black people of the right to own property and create wealth. And what was so powerful about the return of the property of the Bruce family is, we see a path forward to finally counter some of those false narratives.

Stephanie Sy:

As unique and complex as the Bruce's Beach land back deal is, it does offer a path forward for other groups that might seek a return of land, not least of which are the original inhabitants of Los Angeles.

Before Spanish missionaries arrived, the Tongva roamed a 4,000-square-mile swathe of Southern California called Tovaangar stretching from the coast to the mountains.

Samantha Morales-Johnson, Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Land Conservancy:

We have been very systematically erased. We were enslaved. We have gone through about three waves of genocide.

Stephanie Sy:

Twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Morales-Johnson recently became the land return coordinator for a Tongva conservancy, a job she could only have dreamed of as a child.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This land was returned, which I was not expecting in my lifetime, let alone my grandfather's.

Stephanie Sy:

The one-acre property in Altadena was transferred last year by a Jewish landowner whose own family faced displacement and oppression.

Johnson said the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd raised the nation's consciousness.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it made people more aware of all of the injustices that happen in America.

Stephanie Sy:

When Johnson was growing up, council meetings and holiday parties were held in a borrowed space.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it was a converted taco restaurant with, like, a little parking lot. There was no earth to even grow anything in that concrete building.

Stephanie Sy:

The Altadena property, which overlooks a scenic canyon, marks the first time in nearly 200 years the Tongva have legally owned land to use as they wish.

So, this is the white sage.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This is the white sage. This is the only place where we can plant all Native trees with full sovereignty and Native plants with full sovereignty.

Stephanie Sy:

Work is under way to remove the overgrown invasive species that were planted here. The old resilient oaks will remain. Eventually, the site will host tribal gatherings and offer educational programs.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

So, the beautiful thing about this land is that there is a lot of hope for restoration even underneath all of the mess that we have.

Stephanie Sy:

So-called land back agreements are still rare. Other recent examples include the purchase of nearly two square miles of land for $4.5 million by the Esselen Tribe in Central California.

And the city of Oakland recently returned five acres of a local park to the East Bay Ohlone Tribe. In L.A., different Tongva groups are looking for more opportunities to reacquire land.

Angie Behrns, Founder, Gabrielino/Tongva, Springs Foundation:

It's not really just about the land. It's preserving what's left of our land.

Stephanie Sy:

Long before the land back movement had gained traction, Angie Behrns, now 86, fought to lease this two-acre property in West L.A. It was the early 1990s, and the Kuruvungna Springs, which had been the site of a Tongva village, had fallen into neglect.

A small museum on the land shows the journey.

Angie Behrns:

When I stood at that gate and saw this area, I was so upset. I couldn't believe it. That's an archaeological and a historical society.

Stephanie Sy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the land and built a high school next to the springs, agreed to lease the site for $1 a year.

Bob Ramirez, President, Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation:

This is the medicine garden we have, which has many varieties of medicinal plants.

Stephanie Sy:

The president of the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation, Bob Ramirez, says the land is now abundant with Native plants and pristine drinking water.

Bob Ramirez:

Would you like to try some?

Stephanie Sy:

Yes, I would like to try some.

Bob Ramirez:

Yes.

Stephanie Sy:

Now is the time for the land to be returned, Behrns says.

Angie Behrns:

This is a sacred site. This is our place of worship. You have your temples. You have your churches. And what do we have?

Stephanie Sy:

But Ramirez says the "we" is debatable.

Bob Ramirez:

And there may be other people that say, well, wait a minute, if you're going to get that land, well, what about me? So it becomes contentious, I think.

How do you compensate this group and neglect somebody else? Is that fair? Is that just?

Stephanie Sy:

What is fair and just is also in dispute at Bruce's Beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, a distant relative of Charles Bruce, was at the ceremony in 2022 when county officials return the land to the Bruces' direct descendants. She thinks about what could have been if the land had remained in the family's hands all along.

Patricia Bruce-Carter:

I'm sure, at this time, there would have been multiple hotels and beachfront properties, and, I mean, just living the life.

Stephanie Sy:

A lifeguard administration center and parking lot stand where the Bruces' resort did. The descendants' lawyer, George Fatheree, says it would not be easy to develop.

And so less, than a year after the land was returned, the four recipients of the land decided to sell it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

George Fatheree III:

As an attorney, my responsibility is to advocate in the interests of my clients. As a citizen, as an — and as an African American citizen,I think that's an important question.

Who are the benefactors of restitution? Who should be the benefactors of reparations?

Stephanie Sy:

After her work getting the Bruces their land back, this is not the outcome community activist Kavon Ward wanted.

Kavon Ward:

I wanted to see strong, young Black entrepreneurs like Charles and Willa Bruce take up space here and be able to build and develop here, like the Bruces once we're able to do.

Community is what got the land back. So, yes, the family won, but the community did not.

Stephanie Sy:

The work, Ward says, will continue, the reckoning far from over.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Stephanie Sy in Los Angeles.

URL
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/movement-to-return-land-taken-from-black-and-indigenous-people-in-the-u-s-gains-momentum

The War Between The States
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10332-the-war-between-the-states/

Cornell West and the problem with Third Parties
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10336-cornell-west-the-peoples-party-and-the-problem-with-third-parties-in-the-usa/

How a shipping error poisoned Michigan
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2347&type=status

 

 

Work from Lilac Phoenix

 

 

I end with this paraphrase from Brenda stevenson < https://www.drbrendastevenson.com/ > from a PBS segment below, and a postparaphrase reply.  

It's a strange dance that we have with race in the USA. We come forward with many steps,, twirl around, and we are going in the opposite direction. So, this continues to happen. But I think everyone had to own up to the fact that we live in a racialized society. The ways in which we find ourselves or define ourselves as being American, in part, is to have digested some of that racism. So, no group is- does not have it. No group does not act on it. And we have to understand that and we have to have some real hard discussions with ourselves, our families, our communities, and with other communities about how we fit into this dynamic of race within our society. Do we perptuate racism, stereotypes, et cetera, or are we actively trying to recognize that we hold some of that within ourselves and that we act on it and we need to eliminate it, or at least get it to a level where we can all act towards one another with respect, dignity and equality? But it's very very difficult. It is bound in the roots of American society. And once you eat of the tree of the USA , it becomes part of you. 

For Juneteenth I have pondered freedom and the black community in the usa, and after various multilog side black people in various places I realize many, not necessarily most, but many black people are in denial about our village. The denial is through their preaching, and when I said preaching, I don't mean from a pulpit but in their desire for multilog that is inevitably dysfunctional. 
I repeat, when the usa was started three tribes in the black village in the usa existed. Enslaved to whites/Free fighting side whites against the usa being created/Free fighting side whites supporting the usa being created. 
Based on Sister Stevenson's quote, whenever a black person demands all black people in the usa are bettered for being in the usa, or nonviolence must occur in the black community, they are denying the internal reality all black people should know but don't because of the black tribes in the usa one common trait. NEarly all are filled with people afraid to admit the friction in the black community in the usa  based on the three original black tribes. 
Most free black people fought against creating the usa, and again after the colonies freed themselves against the usa hoping britian take over. That means most free blacks didn't accept the usa's constitution of any aspect of the usa culturally that so many blacks in the usa today say all blacks do or need to. 
And moreover, when the black community , as James Baldwin said of his father's religious community, has most who hate whites with a silent impotent passion. having black people who want to live with or comfort or find peace to whites or non blacks talk about why most blacks aren't engaged is a sign of their denial. 
The black community in the usa, has never done the hard work of reaching in itself, even while the whites watch and accept what its majority wants doesn't suit the desire its minority, that is in most positions of leadership want. 
Black people in the usa are individually freer in the usa than ever before. But, the Black Village communal desire isn't to be statian and most black leaders know it, and they don't know how to handle it, except to try and preach it away or hope some black person in the usa is born who can fit the usa's multiracial maze with their nonviolent, integrationist mantra while acquire or have the resources to guide the majority of black people with what black leadership in the usa usually doesn't have, opportunity, not talk.

 

 

Juneteenth 2023 review

 

This Juneteenth 2023 I asked the larger community to come up with a unique cultural tradition and none came forth. 

White people say : 1949-1973 displacement programs removed over a million people and two thirds were black. 

Name an idea for a unique Juneteenth celebration
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10318-juneteenth-2023-name-an-idea-for-a-unique-celebration/

Most Black Leaders didn't advocate for reparations even though most Black people wanted and that made the usa, but it came with a negative price for Black people
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10327-most-black-leaders-didnt-advocate-for-reparations-even-though-most-black-people-wanted-and-that-made-the-usa-but-it-came-with-a-negative-price-for-black-people/

 

Movement to return land taken from Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. gains momentum
Jun 9, 2023 6:35 PM EDT
As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. This includes African Americans and Native Americans. But as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Read the Full Transcript
Amna Nawaz:

As cities and states across the country consider various forms of reparations, California has led the way in returning land to the descendants of the dispossessed. That includes African Americans and Native Americans.

But, as Stephanie Sy reports, the wealth, the community and the opportunities lost are not easily recovered.

Stephanie Sy:

The story of Bruce's Beach is a story about what could and should have been.

Over 100 years ago, an industrious Black woman in Southern California dreamt of owning a beach resort, but was refused whenever she tried. Willa Bruce eventually acquired land in Manhattan Beach, telling The Los Angeles Times in 1912: "I own this land, and I'm going to keep it."

She and her husband, Charles, built a lodge, a place where Black vacationers could enjoy a stay at the beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, Relative of Bruce Family: They were having a beautiful time, and they built it to share, because whenever people came to California, they wanted them to have somewhere to go.

Kavon Ward, Founder, Where Is My Land:

When I think about Charles and Willa Bruce, I think about entrepreneurs, I think about Black excellence, I think about community.

George Fatheree III, Attorney For Bruce Family:

The reality is, the Bruces and their patrons were wealthy.

Stephanie Sy:

A stately photo of the Bruces on their wedding day, decked out in finery, foretold the makings of a power couple. The display of Black success outraged the white neighbors and powers that be, says attorney George Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

In the light of harassment, intimidation, violence, their business just got more and more successful, and until the city of Manhattan Beach hatched a scheme to take the property via a racially motivated eminent domain.

Stephanie Sy:

The Bruces' dream was stolen, their property essentially seized for a pittance in compensation, and only after they sued.

Kavon Ward:

This is it, I would say from right here to maybe this building here.

Stephanie Sy:

Community activist Kavon Ward first learned of the Bruces a few years after she moved to Manhattan Beach in 2017.

Kavon Ward:

This country often tells us that — Black people, that we're lazy, or we don't work hard enough, or all we have to do is pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And here we are in the 19-teens and the 1920s, and this Black couple did exactly that, only to have their land stolen and to die as cooks in someone else's kitchen, when they had this whole beachfront resort here.

Stephanie Sy:

Ward began campaigning for the land to be returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce during the summer of 2020.

Less than two years later, she succeeded, with the help of Fatheree.

George Fatheree III:

For a century, our government at every level has enacted policies to dispossess Black people of the right to own property and create wealth. And what was so powerful about the return of the property of the Bruce family is, we see a path forward to finally counter some of those false narratives.

Stephanie Sy:

As unique and complex as the Bruce's Beach land back deal is, it does offer a path forward for other groups that might seek a return of land, not least of which are the original inhabitants of Los Angeles.

Before Spanish missionaries arrived, the Tongva roamed a 4,000-square-mile swathe of Southern California called Tovaangar stretching from the coast to the mountains.

Samantha Morales-Johnson, Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Land Conservancy:

We have been very systematically erased. We were enslaved. We have gone through about three waves of genocide.

Stephanie Sy:

Twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Morales-Johnson recently became the land return coordinator for a Tongva conservancy, a job she could only have dreamed of as a child.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This land was returned, which I was not expecting in my lifetime, let alone my grandfather's.

Stephanie Sy:

The one-acre property in Altadena was transferred last year by a Jewish landowner whose own family faced displacement and oppression.

Johnson said the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd raised the nation's consciousness.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it made people more aware of all of the injustices that happen in America.

Stephanie Sy:

When Johnson was growing up, council meetings and holiday parties were held in a borrowed space.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

I think it was a converted taco restaurant with, like, a little parking lot. There was no earth to even grow anything in that concrete building.

Stephanie Sy:

The Altadena property, which overlooks a scenic canyon, marks the first time in nearly 200 years the Tongva have legally owned land to use as they wish.

So, this is the white sage.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

This is the white sage. This is the only place where we can plant all Native trees with full sovereignty and Native plants with full sovereignty.

Stephanie Sy:

Work is under way to remove the overgrown invasive species that were planted here. The old resilient oaks will remain. Eventually, the site will host tribal gatherings and offer educational programs.

Samantha Morales-Johnson:

So, the beautiful thing about this land is that there is a lot of hope for restoration even underneath all of the mess that we have.

Stephanie Sy:

So-called land back agreements are still rare. Other recent examples include the purchase of nearly two square miles of land for $4.5 million by the Esselen Tribe in Central California.

And the city of Oakland recently returned five acres of a local park to the East Bay Ohlone Tribe. In L.A., different Tongva groups are looking for more opportunities to reacquire land.

Angie Behrns, Founder, Gabrielino/Tongva, Springs Foundation:

It's not really just about the land. It's preserving what's left of our land.

Stephanie Sy:

Long before the land back movement had gained traction, Angie Behrns, now 86, fought to lease this two-acre property in West L.A. It was the early 1990s, and the Kuruvungna Springs, which had been the site of a Tongva village, had fallen into neglect.

A small museum on the land shows the journey.

Angie Behrns:

When I stood at that gate and saw this area, I was so upset. I couldn't believe it. That's an archaeological and a historical society.

Stephanie Sy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the land and built a high school next to the springs, agreed to lease the site for $1 a year.

Bob Ramirez, President, Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation:

This is the medicine garden we have, which has many varieties of medicinal plants.

Stephanie Sy:

The president of the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation, Bob Ramirez, says the land is now abundant with Native plants and pristine drinking water.

Bob Ramirez:

Would you like to try some?

Stephanie Sy:

Yes, I would like to try some.

Bob Ramirez:

Yes.

Stephanie Sy:

Now is the time for the land to be returned, Behrns says.

Angie Behrns:

This is a sacred site. This is our place of worship. You have your temples. You have your churches. And what do we have?

Stephanie Sy:

But Ramirez says the "we" is debatable.

Bob Ramirez:

And there may be other people that say, well, wait a minute, if you're going to get that land, well, what about me? So it becomes contentious, I think.

How do you compensate this group and neglect somebody else? Is that fair? Is that just?

Stephanie Sy:

What is fair and just is also in dispute at Bruce's Beach.

Patricia Bruce-Carter, a distant relative of Charles Bruce, was at the ceremony in 2022 when county officials return the land to the Bruces' direct descendants. She thinks about what could have been if the land had remained in the family's hands all along.

Patricia Bruce-Carter:

I'm sure, at this time, there would have been multiple hotels and beachfront properties, and, I mean, just living the life.

Stephanie Sy:

A lifeguard administration center and parking lot stand where the Bruces' resort did. The descendants' lawyer, George Fatheree, says it would not be easy to develop.

And so less, than a year after the land was returned, the four recipients of the land decided to sell it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

George Fatheree III:

As an attorney, my responsibility is to advocate in the interests of my clients. As a citizen, as an — and as an African American citizen,I think that's an important question.

Who are the benefactors of restitution? Who should be the benefactors of reparations?

Stephanie Sy:

After her work getting the Bruces their land back, this is not the outcome community activist Kavon Ward wanted.

Kavon Ward:

I wanted to see strong, young Black entrepreneurs like Charles and Willa Bruce take up space here and be able to build and develop here, like the Bruces once we're able to do.

Community is what got the land back. So, yes, the family won, but the community did not.

Stephanie Sy:

The work, Ward says, will continue, the reckoning far from over.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Stephanie Sy in Los Angeles.

URL
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/movement-to-return-land-taken-from-black-and-indigenous-people-in-the-u-s-gains-momentum

The War Between The States
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10332-the-war-between-the-states/

Cornell West and the problem with Third Parties
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10336-cornell-west-the-peoples-party-and-the-problem-with-third-parties-in-the-usa/

How a shipping error poisoned Michigan
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2347&type=status

 

 

Work from Lilac Phoenix

 

 

I end with this paraphrase from Brenda stevenson < https://www.drbrendastevenson.com/ > from a PBS segment below, and a postparaphrase reply.  

It's a strange dance that we have with race in the USA. We come forward with many steps,, twirl around, and we are going in the opposite direction. So, this continues to happen. But I think everyone had to own up to the fact that we live in a racialized society. The ways in which we find ourselves or define ourselves as being American, in part, is to have digested some of that racism. So, no group is- does not have it. No group does not act on it. And we have to understand that and we have to have some real hard discussions with ourselves, our families, our communities, and with other communities about how we fit into this dynamic of race within our society. Do we perptuate racism, stereotypes, et cetera, or are we actively trying to recognize that we hold some of that within ourselves and that we act on it and we need to eliminate it, or at least get it to a level where we can all act towards one another with respect, dignity and equality? But it's very very difficult. It is bound in the roots of American society. And once you eat of the tree of the USA , it becomes part of you. 

For Juneteenth I have pondered freedom and the black community in the usa, and after various multilog side black people in various places I realize many, not necessarily most, but many black people are in denial about our village. The denial is through their preaching, and when I said preaching, I don't mean from a pulpit but in their desire for multilog that is inevitably dysfunctional. 
I repeat, when the usa was started three tribes in the black village in the usa existed. Enslaved to whites/Free fighting side whites against the usa being created/Free fighting side whites supporting the usa being created. 
Based on Sister Stevenson's quote, whenever a black person demands all black people in the usa are bettered for being in the usa, or nonviolence must occur in the black community, they are denying the internal reality all black people should know but don't because of the black tribes in the usa one common trait. NEarly all are filled with people afraid to admit the friction in the black community in the usa  based on the three original black tribes. 
Most free black people fought against creating the usa, and again after the colonies freed themselves against the usa hoping britian take over. That means most free blacks didn't accept the usa's constitution of any aspect of the usa culturally that so many blacks in the usa today say all blacks do or need to. 
And moreover, when the black community , as James Baldwin said of his father's religious community, has most who hate whites with a silent impotent passion. having black people who want to live with or comfort or find peace to whites or non blacks talk about why most blacks aren't engaged is a sign of their denial. 
The black community in the usa, has never done the hard work of reaching in itself, even while the whites watch and accept what its majority wants doesn't suit the desire its minority, that is in most positions of leadership want. 
Black people in the usa are individually freer in the usa than ever before. But, the Black Village communal desire isn't to be statian and most black leaders know it, and they don't know how to handle it, except to try and preach it away or hope some black person in the usa is born who can fit the usa's multiracial maze with their nonviolent, integrationist mantra while acquire or have the resources to guide the majority of black people with what black leadership in the usa usually doesn't have, opportunity, not talk.

 

 

How a simple shipping error poisoned most of Michigan
Story by Matt Jaworowski • 8h ago

ST. LOUIS, Mich. (WOOD) — In many ways, St. Louis, Michigan, is your typical small town. Main Street is one of the city’s primary throughways. The “downtown” shopping district spans just a few blocks. St. Louis doesn’t have a Walmart to call its own. That requires a quick drive over to the nearby city of Alma. 
But St. Louis has its own claims to fame. The town of approximately 6,800 people prides itself on being the “Middle of the Mitten” — measured to be the geographic center of the state of Michigan. Signs throughout the city boast about that fact.

A cynic could call it the middle of nowhere, but that isn’t necessarily true. At one time, St. Louis wasn’t just the “middle” of Michigan, it was also the center of a statewide controversy.

Just a couple of short blocks from Main Street, there is a giant swath of open land, about 54 acres in all. It’s surrounded by chainlink fence, with construction equipment and power stations lining the paths. The warning signs are faded by the sun. The lettering that was once a bright red is now a pale pink, but all these years later they still read “Private Property, No Trespassing.”

There is a gated driveway with a sign of its own. You have arrived at the former Velsicol Chemical Plant, now an EPA Superfund Cleanup site. < https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0502194 > On the other side of the driveway is a ceremonial bench, built on behalf of the city. The inscription reads, “We declare our mutual aim that our river and land be restored to their natural condition safe for any use.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been working off and on at the site for more than 40 years now — and the work continues. The Pine River and surrounding areas have been contaminated for much longer than that. But 50 years ago, a simple error at the since-demolished St. Louis plant spread that contamination from a handful of communities to the entire state.

“It is the most underreported disaster I have known in my long journalistic career.”

That’s how Joyce Egginton ends the first paragraph of her book, “The Poisoning of Michigan.” At the time, Egginton was an American correspondent for the London Observer. She says she stumbled onto the story tucked away deep inside an issue of The New York Times.

“I remember calling out to my husband halfway through the task, ‘Can you believe this one?’” Egginton wrote. “Way down on an inside page of the New York Times was a brief account of how in Michigan a large quantity of a highly toxic industrial fire retardant, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB), had been confused at the manufacturing plant with a nutritional supplement for cattle feed. As a result, there had been a massive, slow poisoning of dairy herds for almost a year before the accident was discovered. It was estimated that throughout that time virtually all 9 million people living in Michigan had been ingesting contaminated meat and milk on a daily basis.”

That snippet from The New York Times led Egginton to years of research and interviews, culminating in more than 300 pages packed with details, outlining a quietly escalating tragedy that centered around PBB.

PBB is a group of man-made chemicals that were first manufactured around 1970 and sold primarily as a fire retardant. They were also mixed into many plastics for consumer products, including computer monitors, televisions and textiles. But chemical manufacturers didn’t fully understand the health or environmental impact from these chemicals. Those questions came after the infamous “PBB Disaster.”

It was a late spring day in 1973 when a truck driver made a delivery from Michigan Chemical to the Michigan Farm Bureau’s central mixing facility outside of Battle Creek. The driver thought he had dropped off 50-pound bags of Nutrimaster — Michigan Chemical’s product name for magnesium oxide.

America’s first high-volume ‘PFAS Annihilator’ is up and running in West Michigan
Farmers regularly mix in magnesium oxide as a supplement for milking cows. The compound provides iodine, which cows need, and it also makes the cows thirstier. The more water cows drink, the more milk they produce.

This magnesium oxide was a grayish-white powder and was packed in 50-pound brown paper sacks. The powder tended to get clumpy when exposed to moisture. What the driver had actually delivered was Firemaster, another grayish-white clumpy mixture that was packed in 50-pound brown paper bags.

“Except for the color coding on the bags, Nutrimaster and the powdery form of Firemaster could easily have been mistaken one for the other,” Egginton wrote. “Which is exactly what happened when, during a temporary nationwide paper shortage in the winter of 1972-73, Michigan Chemical Corporation ran out of preprinted bags and made do by simply hand-stenciling the trade names in black.” 

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

Tens of thousands of animals tainted with PBB were slaughtered and buried in pits on state land to limit contamination spread. (Courtesy Archives of Michigan)
© Provided by WOOD Grand Rapids

 

In the ensuing few years, < https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmental-health/topics/dehbio/pbbs/history > more than 500 farms across the state had to be quarantined. Approximately 30,000 cattle, 4,500 swine, 1,500 sheep and 1.5 million chickens either died from PBB-related ailments or had to be killed. That doesn’t count the sick animals that showed clear signs of PBB toxicity but were still allowed to be sold off and slaughtered.

Rick Halbert, one of the first farmers to press the Farm Bureau on a problem with his feed, explained to Egginton how his herd’s health fell off a cliff.

“As months went by the toxic symptoms in his herd progressed, producing a mangey appearance, matted hair, thickened skin, diarrhea, emaciation,” Egginton wrote. 

Many cows also showed signs of distress during pregnancy, leading to a spike in aborted or stillborn calves.

Gerald Woltjer bought a farm in Coopersville from a farmer who was forced to sell because of PBB contamination. He figured the property could still be successful with a new herd. He was wrong.

“Within two years, Woltjer’s herd — which was never quarantined — was so sick and useless that he was on the verge of bankruptcy,” Egginton wrote. “He told of scrawny cows with perpetually bloody noses ‘who acted like they were blind;’ cows so weak that they could not get up to be milked; cows which had bodily infections but passed inspection to be butchered for human consumption.”

Woltjer realized the land was contaminated and PBB exposure had spread to his herd.

“The longer I lived on that farm, the worse it became,” he told Egginton. “After a time, there were no worms in the soil. There were no field mice, no rats, no rabbits, no grasshoppers. As the cattle were dying, the cats and dogs were dying, too. A fully grown cat would live only six weeks on that farm. Our three dogs went crazy. Our neighbors had bees that were dead in the hives. The frogs were dead in the streams. There was a five-acre swamp that used to croak at night so you could hardly sleep. Then, it was silent. And it was a long time before I knew why.”

Most farmers, completely baffled by the sudden changes, fell into financial ruin. Even with the state eventually instituting PBB testing standards and a program to help compensate for their losses, many farmers faced drastic decisions. For some, it came down to killing your animals or selling an obviously sick one to market in an attempt to make any money back on a floundering investment. Many farmers, like Garry Zuiderveen from Missaukee County, refused to pass along the PBB-contaminated animals.

“We should never have had to make that decision,” Zuiderveen told Egginton. “It was the darkest day in my life when I shot those cows. A farmer is an immensely proud person. Anything wrong with his herd reflects on his husbandry and his herdmanship.”

The Michigan Department of Agriculture eventually opened a large tract of state-owned land in Kalkaska County to be used as a burial pit for tainted animals. But for farmers like Zuiderveen, who clearly had a poisoned herd but tested below the state’s safety threshold, there was no help offered.

Zuiderveen ended up digging a burial pit on his own property. His neighbors and friends came to help, knowing it would be a difficult day.

“We hauled the milk cows from the barn to the burial site on three stock trailers and put them in six or eight at a time. Within 20 seconds after they were unloaded, we shot them with high-powered rifles. This finished them instantly. They did not suffer,” Zuiderveen told Egginton. “My dad would not look at them. Tears were running down his face, a man of 78. … Those fellows don’t know what they put us through. We should never have had to kill our own cows; we were too emotionally involved.”

Zuiderveen wouldn’t take any credit for doing “the right thing.” He credited his Christian upbringing and the concept of being “our brother’s keeper.”

“I knew that, from the information we had at the time, it was the only decision we could make and still face ourselves in the mirror,” he said.

Still, plenty of other farmers couldn’t pull the trigger. Between facing bankruptcy or foreclosure, many felt like there was no other rational choice. As a result, lots of PBB-tainted meat and dairy products were sold at market and scientists estimate virtually everyone who lived in Michigan at the time was exposed to PBB and had some level stored within the fats in their body.

 

Though there were studies being conducted and clear symptoms that could be traced to PBB exposure, specific findings on how PBB impacts the human body came long after the 1973 disaster. By the 1990s, researchers had been able to tie chemical pollution to a rise in hormone-related abnormalities, including breast cancer.

Michele Marcus is a professor of epidemiology at Emory University and is the lead scientist on the Michigan PBB Registry, < https://sph.emory.edu/pbbregistry/about/index.html > which began in 1976. She said that PBB essentially acts as estrogen in the human body. A PBB buildup throws off the body’s hormonal balance, leading girls to mature earlier and boys to mature later and be born with abnormalities in their urinary or reproductive systems.

Researchers also found that PBB was being passed down from one generation to another, even today finding a higher rate of miscarriages in women who were born from mothers or grandmothers who were directly exposed to high levels of PBB.

“The children of the mother are exposed as it crosses the placenta and then again in breast milk because (PBB) is lipophilic. It is stored in fat, and breast milk has a very high fat concentration,” Marcus said.

The latest studies are focused on how PBB impacts a person’s DNA. Marcus explained that PBB does not mutate a person’s genetic sequence, but it can impact how certain genes are “expressed.”

“You start from a single cell. You’ve got your DNA and then the cells change and they differentiate into heart cells, stomach cells, liver cells. And each cell type has a gene expression pattern. So genes are turned off and turned on depending on the function of the cell,” Marcus said. “This is kind of a new field, which is looking at the impact of chemicals or substances on gene regulation, not on the genes themselves. … We found that PBB does impact this methylation pattern and, in fact, that’s part of the evidence that it acts like estrogen because it affects this methylation pattern in the same way as estrogen.”

Some good, some bad: Michigan DNR updates endangered species list < https://www.woodtv.com/news/michigan/some-good-some-bad-michigan-dnr-updates-endangered-species-list/ > 
So can that gene regulation be inherited? Researchers haven’t come to a unanimous conclusion yet, but Marcus believes it can.

“This is a very controversial question and for many years the dogma was no, it can’t (be inherited) because those things are stripped when the sperm are developed. When the DNA replicates that is supposed to be all stripped off,” Marcus said. “But now it seems that that’s not complete. … There have been a lot of studies that are very, very clear in animals that it happens, and the human evidence keeps accumulating.”

The Michigan PBB Registry was launched in 1976 to gather data that could eventually be used to answer these kinds of questions. The study started with approximately 4,000 people and eventually added in their children and grandchildren. Eventually, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wanted to shut down the research project. But thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health, it was transferred to Emory University.

Decades later, the St. Louis community remains heavily invested in the PBB disaster and anxious to learn more about how it impacted their health and environment. In 1998, after meeting with the EPA and other state departments, a community group launched the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. < https://www.pinerivercag.org/ > 

Jane Jelenek now serves as the chairperson of the task force. She didn’t live in St. Louis in 1973, but her husband worked at the chemical plant and had other friends and relatives who had direct exposure.

Jelenek said her work is not focused on looking to the past or securing compensation for people who were exposed; those efforts have long failed. Instead, the task force is focused on working with the EPA and holding it accountable to make sure the land is restored. She said it has been an up-and-down relationship.

“We found at our (monthly meetings) that they were more interested in the amount of dollars that they could get to do something that determined how much cleanup they actually would do. We did not think that was a very good measure,” Jelenek said. “And I remember saying at one meeting, ‘We don’t care about the money. We don’t care how much it costs. We just want it done.’”

When will it be done? Thanks to an influx of investment because of the latest infrastructure legislation, work has gotten a boost. Tom Alcamo, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, hopes work will be done by 2026. Eventually, the Superfund site will be deemed clean and the land will be turned over to the community.

But the scars will remain. And traces of PBB are still being passed down from one generation to the next.

 

Instead of mixing in a nutritional supplement, the Farm Bureau was unknowingly poisoning thousands and thousands of animals. Even worse, the problem wasn’t limited to one specific type of feed. Any feed that was processed through the same mixer that used Firemaster was now being exposed to PBB, making it even harder for the investigators trying to find the root of the problem.

URL
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-a-simple-shipping-error-poisoned-most-of-michigan/ar-AA1c7k2n?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=1b3fa566178a4d0795f5d87c6d30bf42&ei=93
 

 

An illustration of the Union prisoners’ cemetery in Charleston, published in Harper’s Weekly two years after the May 1865 celebration.
© Alfred R. Waud/New York Public Library

 

Black people may have started Memorial Day. Whites erased it from history.
Story by Donald Beaulieu • Yesterday 6:00 AM

On May 1, 1865, thousands of newly freed Black people gathered in Charleston, S.C., for what may have been the nation’s first Memorial Day celebration. Attendees held a parade and put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who had helped liberate them from slavery.

The event took place three weeks after the Civil War surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable moment in U.S. history — at the nexus of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, servitude and emancipation.

But the day would not be remembered as the first Memorial Day. In fact, White Southerners made sure that for more than a century, the day wasn’t remembered at all.

It was “a kind of erasure from public memory,” said David Blight, a history professor at Yale University.

The contested Confederate roots of Memorial Day
In February 1865, Confederate soldiers withdrew from Charleston after the Union had bombarded it with offshore cannon fire for more than a year and began to cut off supply lines. The city surrendered to the Union army, leaving a massive population of freed formerly enslaved people.

Also left in the wake of the Confederate evacuation were the graves of more than 250 Union soldiers, buried without coffins behind the judge’s stand of the Washington Race Course, a Charleston horse track that had been converted into an outdoor prison for captured Northerners. The conditions were brutal, and most of those who had died succumbed to exposure or disease.

In April, about two dozen of Charleston’s freed men volunteered to disinter the bodies and rebury them in rows of marked graves, surrounded by a wooden, freshly whitewashed fence, according to newspaper accounts from the time.

Then, on May 1, about 10,000 people — mostly formerly enslaved people — turned out for a memorial service that the freed people had organized, along with abolitionist and journalist James Redpath and some White missionaries and teachers from the North. Redpath described the day in the New-York Tribune as “such a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina or the United States never saw before.”

The day’s events began around 9 a.m. with a parade led by about 2,800 Black schoolchildren, who had just been enrolled in new schools, bearing armfuls of flowers. They marched around the horse track and entered the cemetery gate under an arch with black-painted letters that read “Martyrs of the Race Course.” The schoolchildren proceeded through the cemetery and distributed the flowers on the gravesites.

Other attendees entered the cemetery with even more flowers, as the schoolchildren sang songs including “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “John Brown’s Body.”

“When all had left,” Redpath wrote, “the holy mounds — the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them — were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen; and as the breeze wafted the sweet perfume from them, outside and beyond, to the sympathetic multitude, there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy.”

In 1865, thousands of Black South Carolinians signed a 54-foot-long freedom petition < look after the first image below >

The dedication ended with prayers and Bible verses from local Black ministers, followed by speeches from Union officers and Northern missionaries, a picnic on the racecourse and drills by Union infantrymen, including some African American regiments. The observance didn’t end until sundown.

And then, Blight said, the event was forgotten. Not right away — but within a few decades, any recollection persisted merely as rumor, in verbal anecdotes.

The reason, he said, is that “by the middle and end of Reconstruction, the Black folks of Charleston were not creating the public memory of that city.”

The Southern generals who stuck with the Union in the Civil War
The portrayal of the Civil War and its aftermath was controlled in the South by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ladies’ Memorial Association, as well as Confederate veterans, Blight said.

“The Daughters of the Confederacy were the guardians of that narrative,” said Damon Fordham, an adjunct professor of history at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston. “And much of that was skewed toward the Confederate point of view.”

Blight chronicled the 1865 Charleston ritual in his 2001 book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” based on evidence that Fordham helped him uncover. Blight had been researching the book in 1999, in an archive of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, when he found a collection of papers written by Union veterans that contained a description of the May 1, 1865, events in Charleston.

If the description was accurate, Blight said, he knew that “that event in Charleston deserves its own full commemoration, just because of the poignancy of it, the sheer scale of it.”

But first he had to corroborate it. One of the first places he contacted was the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. “I called up the curator there,” Blight recalled, “and I said, ‘I just found this in a collection of veterans materials. Have you ever heard of this story?’ And the guy said, ‘No. That never happened.’”

The “guy” was Fordham, who at the time was a graduate student at the college and a research assistant at Avery. Despite his doubts, Fordham knew the center had microfilm of the Charleston Courier, a daily newspaper from that time, so he checked it.

“About two hours later, he called me back, and he said, ‘Oh my God, here it is,’” Blight said. It was a Courier article from May 2, 1865, “describing this extraordinary parade on the old planters’ racecourse.”

Blight went on to find more proof, including an illustration of the fenced cemetery that was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1867. “Pretty soon I had all these sources that no one had ever bumped into, so one thing kept leading to another,” he said. “But even people in Charleston said, ‘No, never heard of it.’ That shows the power of the erasure of public memory over time.”

In the book, Blight describes a 1916 letter written by the president of the Ladies’ Memorial Association in Charleston, replying to an inquiry about the May 1, 1865, parade. “A United Daughters of the Confederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their white abolitionist friends had engaged in such a burial rite,” he wrote. “Mrs. S.C. Beckwith responded tersely: ‘I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.’”

In the 1880s, the bodies of the Union soldiers, the “Martyrs of the Race Course,” were exhumed and moved to Beaufort National Cemetery. The horse track closed shortly after that, and the 60 acres of land became Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general and Charleston native who became governor of South Carolina in 1876. Hampton enslaved nearly 1,000 people before the war, and his governorship was supported by the Red Shirts, a White paramilitary group that violently suppressed the Black vote.

After slavery, Black people desperately searched for family through newspaper ads <look after second image below>
By the end of the century, no vestige of the racecourse, the cemetery or the 1865 parade remained.

More spring graveside memorials followed the one in Charleston. Several occurred in towns across the country in the spring of 1866, and many of these places — such as Columbus, Miss., whose commemoration became annual — claim to have held the original Memorial Day observance. Officially, the nation recognizes Memorial Day as having started in Waterloo, N.Y.

In Charleston, the freed people didn’t have the power to develop an annual tradition after 1865. But the city now recognizes itself, regardless, as the holiday’s birthplace.

“On May 1, 1865, a parade to honor the Union war dead took place here,” reads a state historical marker erected in Hampton Park in 2017. “The event marked the earliest celebration of what became known as ‘Memorial Day.’”

 

URL

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/black-people-may-have-started-memorial-day-whites-erased-it-from-history/ar-AA1bPFSs?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=07a93f22676c4438d2e3eafde7baa12e&ei=5

 

 

This 54-foot-long petition bears the signatures of hundreds of men who participated in the State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina in 1865. (Gwenanne Edwards/Library of Congress, Conservation Division)

 

In 1865, thousands of Black South Carolinians signed a 54-foot-long freedom petition
It goes on display Friday for the first time at the African American history museum in Washington.

By Michael E. Ruane
September 23, 2021 at 7:43 p.m. EDT

 

In November 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, a group of African Americans formed a convention in Charleston, S.C., drew up a petition demanding their civil rights and sent it to Congress in Washington.

“We the undersigned colored citizens of South Carolina, do respectfully ask … in consideration of our unquestioned loyalty [that in the] re-establishment of civil government in South Carolina, our equal rights before the law may be respected,” the handwritten document begins.

What followed were 3,740 signatures, then-Sen. Jacob M. Howard (R-Mich.) told his Senate colleagues after receiving the petition — on a document that was 54 feet long.

It was a striking appeal from the newly freed, and previously free, African Americans, asking that they not be forgotten in the country’s postwar reconstruction. Never displayed publicly before, it goes on exhibit Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“The petition is a real touchstone for the expectations and the will of … African Americans …[who saw] this moment in the county’s history as a new beginning,” said Katy Kendrick, exhibitions curator at the museum. It’s a “very powerful and very direct claiming of full rights of citizenship.”

The petition is part of a new exhibit of 175 objects at the museum entitled “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies.”

The exhibit covers the turbulent postwar era of Reconstruction as the vanquished Southern states sought to recreate prewar racial oppression, and African Americans fought, ultimately in vain, to prevent it.

And it examines the legacy of that struggle today.

It includes a frightening Ku Klux Klan head mask with horns, made of cloth and animal fur, owned by a Confederate army officer in North Carolina and used to terrorize Black residents.

It includes a document from the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency set up to help the 4 million people newly freed, that tells of a mother’s attempt get her two children back from their former enslaver.

Caroline Atkinson went to the bureau’s office in Vicksburg, Miss., in September 1867, two years after slavery had been abolished in 1865.

But her daughters Elizabeth, 10, and Mary Jane, 11, were still in the hands of one William Atkinson, who had refused to return them unless he was paid $100 — roughly $1,600 today.

She signed the document with an X. The bureau investigated and ordered the children returned to their mother, according to the museum.

There’s an old pew from a former Black church, as well as the stained glass windows picturing Confederate generals that was removed from Washington National Cathedral in 2017.

The Cathedral announced Thursday that the windows would be replaced with racial justice-themed windows created by Black artist Kerry James Marshall.

The exhibit also includes a Bible and nine-page Bible study guide loaned by a survivor of the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine African Americans were murdered on June 17, 2015.

That church is across the street from the site of the old Zion Presbyterian Church, where the freedom petition was drawn up 150 years before. (Zion Presbyterian was demolished in 1960, according to a study by the College of Charleston.)

“Reconstruction was a pivotal moment … when the nation had an opportunity to make amends for the injustices of slavery and rebuild itself on a new foundation of racial equality,” Kevin Young, the museum director, said in a statement.

“While some gains were made, this was also a period of voter suppression … violence and unlawful incarceration,” he said. “Because of the work left unfinished … and the decades of discrimination that followed, the struggle … continues in society today.”

The signers of the petition to Congress met at the “State Convention of the Colored People of South Carolina” over six days in late November 1865 at Zion Presbyterian, according to an account of the proceedings printed by a local newspaper. At the time, Zion Presbyterian was the biggest church in Charleston and a center for the Black community.

In addition to the petition, the convention issued a number of resolutions, including:

“That in the death of the late President of the United States, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, this nation has sustained an irreparable loss and we, as a race, deprived of a noble friend. We sympathize with his afflicted family and will ever hold his name in grateful remembrance.”

Lincoln had been assassinated the previous April.

The convention resolved: “That we hereby object to a ‘negro code’ [of law]. … In our humble opinion a code of laws for the government of all, regardless of color, is all that is necessary for the advancement of the interests and prosperity of the state.”

Oppressive state laws restricting the lives of African Americans, called “Black Codes,” soon became a grim hallmark of Reconstruction.

The convention issued an address to the people of South Carolina:

“Heretofore we have had no avenues opened to us or our children — We have had no firesides that we could call our own. … The laws that have made white men great have degraded us because we are colored. …

“But now that we are free, now that we have been lifted up by the providence of God … we have resolved to come forward, and … speak and act for ourselves.”

And it resolved:

“As the old institution of slavery has passed away … we cherish in our hearts no hatred or malice toward those who have held our brethren as slaves, but we extend the right hand of fellowship to all and make it our special aim to establish unity, peace and love amongst all men.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/23/african-american-freedom-petition-museum-reconstruction/

 

 

Mary Bailey searches for her children. Her ad ran Nov. 24, 1866, in the Daily Dispatch newspaper in Richmond.

 

‘My mother was sold from me’: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in ‘last seen ads’

By DeNeen L. Brown
September 7, 2017 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

 

Ten months after the Civil War ended, an enslaved woman who had been ripped away from her children started looking for them.

Elizabeth Williams, who had been sold twice since she last saw her children, placed a heart-wrenching ad in a newspaper:

“INFORMATION WANTED by a mother concerning her children,” Williams wrote March 17, 1866, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia. Her ad was one of thousands taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for lost relatives after the Civil War.

Those ads are now being digitized in a project called “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” < https://informationwanted.org/ >which is run by Villanova University’s graduate history program in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel AME Church.

In four column inches, the mother summed up her life, hoping the rich details would help her find the children. She listed their names — Lydia, William, Allen, and Parker — and explained in a few words that she last saw them when they were “formerly owned together” by a man named John Petty who lived about six miles from Woodbury, Tenn.

She explained how her family was split apart when she was sold again and taken farther south into captivity.

“She has never seen the above-named children since,” the ad said. “Any information given concerning them, however, will be gratefully received by one whose love for her children survives the bitterness and hardships of many long years spent in slavery.”

The “Last Seen” ads started appearing around 1863. By 1865, when the Civil War ended, they were coming out in streams. Black people torn away from family members by slavery placed thousands of “Information Wanted” notices in black-owned newspapers across the country, seeking any help to find loved ones.

In the ads, mothers looked for their children; children looked for their mothers; fathers placed ads for lost sons; sisters looked for sisters; husbands sought their wives; wives tried to find their husbands. The ads showed in real time the destruction slavery wrought on black families, tearing people apart and scattering generations like leaves in the wind.

The ads often gave detailed physical descriptions of the missing, names of former slave owners, locations subscribers “last saw” family members and sometimes maps, tracing how many times they were sold from one owner to the next until they so far from family members all they had to cling to was sketchy memories.

Many of the Last Seen ads, dating from 1863 to 1902, were placed in the Christian Recorder, the official newspaper of the African Methodist Church. Others ads were placed in the Black Republican in New Orleans, the South Carolina Leader in Charleston, the Colored Citizen in Cincinnati, the Free Men’s Press in Galveston, Texas, and the Colored Tennessean in Nashville.

Judy Giesberg, the graduate program director at Villanova’s History Department, began noticing the newspaper ads while researching the story of Emilie Davis, a free black woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War and kept a diary while there.

“Emilie Davis would write about a lecture she would see or some event in Philadelphia,” Giesberg said. “If she said she went to see Frederick Douglass, we would look in the newspaper to see where he was. It was hard to overlook these ads.”

Sometimes the ads took up columns and columns that would make up whole pages, which captured the weight of the missing and the desperation of subscribers to find them.

Giesberg started collecting the ads with the intention of one day making them available to people online. “I started with the AME Church newspaper,” Giesberg said. “It was the first place I noticed the ads. When I started looking in other black newspapers, I found this was a common phenomenon to include ads taken by people who were one step out of slavery.”

Last August, Giesberg created the “LAST SEEN: FINDING FAMILY AFTER SLAVERY” website, where genealogists and other researchers can search for specific names and locations. Two graduate students — Margaret Strolle and James Byrd — read microfilm to find the material. The site uses volunteers to help transcribe the ads. There are now more than 2,000 ads on the site, of which 1,500 have been transcribed. Since January, the site has been visited by more than 1 million unique visitors.

“There are comparable projects that have collected runaway slave ads,” Giesberg said. What is unique about Last Seen ads, she added, “is they were taken out from the other perspective. They were taken out by the enslaved people.”

The Last Seen ads break down what genealogists and researchers call the “1870 Census Wall.” Before the 1870 Census, there were very few official records of black people.  Enslaved black people were often listed as property, by a check mark, a number or by a gender. They were often listed on bills of sale, like chattel. When researchers try to get information on enslaved black people, they often hit a brick wall when searching for information before 1870.

“What the ads do is reach from the other side of the 1870 Census Wall,” Giesberg said. “The ads place people together in a time before 1870.”

The ads tell real stories of real people with real names, humanizing enslaved people, something slave owners often tried to prevent.

“Slave owners often painted a portrait of enslaved people as part of a happy family in which white men were patriarchs,” Giesberg said. The ads go “beyond that myth, the myth of the benign slaveholder who believes he was a good slaveholder and all the slaves belonged to him. These ads are where real truth lies.”

Enslaved people lived with the constant fear that they or a family member would be sold.

“Slave owners’ wealth lay largely in the people they owned, therefore, they frequently sold and or purchased people as finances warranted,” according to a report by the National Humanities Center, a nonprofit that collects primary historical resources. “An enslaved person could be sold as part of an estate when his owner died, or because the owner needed to liquidate assets to pay off debts or because the owner thought the enslaved person was a troublemaker.”

An exhibit entitled “The Weeping Time” at the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History and Culture explains the circumstances that often split families apart.

“Night and day, you could hear men and women screaming … ma, pa, sister or brother … taken without any warning,” according to a witness account in the exhibit. “People was always dying from a broken heart.”

Another witness described an emotional scene at a slave auction. A mother clings to her baby while being whipped with a lash because she refused to put her baby down and climb an auction block.

The woman pleaded for God’s mercy, Henry Bibb recounted.

“But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and the bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other,” Bibb recalled. “Finally, the poor child was torn from the mother while she sacrificed to the highest bidder.”

In a “Last Seen” ad placed on April 17, 1902, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia, a woman seeks information about “my people.”
“My mother was sold from me when I could but crawl,” the woman writes.

Since the sale, “I never saw any of my people. I was about 39 years old last March and am married and living at Panama, Vernon Co., Mo. My name is Mary Delaney; it used to be Mary Long. Address me at Post office: Panama, Vernon county, Mo.”

In a “Last Seen” ad placed on April 17, 1902, in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia, a woman seeks information about “my people.”
“My mother was sold from me when I could but crawl,” the woman writes.

Since the sale, “I never saw any of my people. I was about 39 years old last March and am married and living at Panama, Vernon Co., Mo. My name is Mary Delaney; it used to be Mary Long. Address me at Post office: Panama, Vernon county, Mo.”

Some of the ads were intentionally vague, masking details, and  mysteriously leaving out specific names and locations. These ads showed mental calculations of a people one step out of slavery. Even after Lincoln declared enslaved people in Confederate states to be freed, they were suspicious about the terms of that Emancipation, fearing that at any time they could be pulled back into slavery.

In a June 7, 1883, ad placed in the Southwestern Christian Advocate in New Orleans, an unnamed man searched for his son. The ad is brief: “Mr. EDITOR,” the man wrote, “I desire to hear from my son. His name was Tony Jones. I have not seen him since the war. He lived with Thomas Jones. His mother was Julia Jones.”

If anyone should know Tony Jones — the enslaved man with the same name as his “master”— he asks them to write to him care of P.P. Brooks in Shelbyville, Tex.
The ad is unsigned.

Other ads gave insight into how people lived, their aspirations and successes.

In an ad placed June 28, 1883, in the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper in New Orleans, Betty Davis inquires “for my people.” Davis explained that she was separated from her mother when she was three years old.

“I am now 55 years of age,” she wrote. “I learned how to read when I was 50. I take and read the SOUTHWESTERN, it is food for my soul. I am anxious and would be glad to hear something of my mother or my brother Henry. Someone help me.”

Sometimes, the ads led to happy endings.

In an Aug. 26, 1886, ad that ran in the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper, which did not charge for publishing letters from subscribers, Alcy Boone wrote a letter to the editor saying she found who she was looking for:

“I have found my mother through the dear SOUTHWESTERN. God bless you and your paper; it resurrects the forgotten, the lost can be found.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/07/my-mother-was-sold-from-me-after-slavery-the-desperate-search-for-loved-ones-in-last-seen-ads/

Vanessa Walters’ ‘The Nigerwife’ Explores The Dangers Of Wealth, Lust And Tradition in Lagos
Amy Aniobi is developing the book into a series for HBO.
Kellee Terrell

By 
Kellee Terrell
May 11, 2023, 12:04 PM EDT

Vanessa Walters, author of the new novel "The Nigerwife."ILLUSTRATION: HUFFPOST; PHOTO: JERRIE ROTIMI, ATRIA BOOKS

Right on time for summer, Vanessa Walters’ thriller debut novel “The Nigerwife” < https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Nigerwife/Vanessa-Walters/9781668011089 >  is the perfect beach-ready read. Set in modern-day Lagos, Nigeria, we are introduced to a rarely-known world of the nigerwives — uber-wealthy ex-pat stay-at-home wives who left their home countries and former lives for Nigerian-born husbands. Now, they spend their days in glorious mansions, dripping in lavish jewels and designer clothes and seemingly not a care in the world.

But for Nicole Oruwari, that facade of her perfect life with her handsome husband Tonye and two sons has finally come crumbling down. Then, one night, she goes missing from a boat in the affluent Ikoyi harbor. Terrified, her estranged aunt, Claudine, who raised her back in London, is determined to get to the bottom of her niece’s disappearance and bring her home — alive. But as soon as Claudine arrives, she realizes nothing is what it seems, especially regarding Nicole’s in-laws. Oscillating between the past and the present and Nicole and Auntie Claudine’s perspective, “The Nigerwife” catapults you into a world that most of us have never seen before — and will have you glued to every page.

For Walters, who currently lives in Brooklyn, her book also served as a way to explore her own identity, not just as a Black Brit with Caribbean roots, but as a former nigerwife. Through her critical yet empathetic lens, that authenticity is brilliantly weaved throughout the book as she captures the beauty and chaos of Lagos, all while fearlessly tacking a slew of themes, including generational trauma, colorism, misogyny, the Diaspora and colonialism. It’s no wonder Amy Aniobi bought the book’s rights and is developing it into a series for HBO.

HuffPost chatted with Walters about what inspired her to write this book, tackling the complexities of the Diaspora and her excitement to see “The Nigerwife” on the small screen.

What inspired you to write this book?

Like Nicole, I’m a London girl, and that’s where all my family is, but then I was plunged into a very different life in Lagos. Ultimately, over the years, I had some profound existential questions about life that I’d never had before about community, identity and marriage. I couldn’t read about these things anywhere else. I know firsthand this sense that you’re totally dependent on your husband. Therefore, this sparked questions about what marriage is, what it’s supposed to be, and growing as a person. So being a writer, this is the natural medium for talking through these things and telling the stories of the women I met over the years.

I also wrote this book for the same reason I wrote my first YA book, “Rude Girls,” when I was 16 — I wanted to read about girls like me. Back then, I wrote it so my friends had something to read, but this time, I was more intentional. I wanted to articulate this experience for the wider world.

Having been a nigerwife, what are some of the personal experiences that you and Nicole share?

Absolutely. I was part of the nigerwife community for over seven years, and I believe there’s a universal nigerwife experience, especially around cultural isolation and lack of community. Being from London, growing up with a certain generation, we all listened to the same music and wore the same clothes. In Lagos, nobody could understand me in that way or sing the same lyrics to a song with the same joy my friends in London would. I felt that I had been forgotten. I was no longer part of the particular community I came from. That’s Nicole’s story, and it’s very poignant and important to tell. It’s not easy to articulate because it’s such a specific experience because most people don’t travel that far from their homes. But even in that, readers can still relate to this story.

I also come from a big, complicated family like the Roberts family — definitely not as dramatic, but still one that’s been complicated by years of separation and trauma. My mother was a barrel child (a child whose parents migrated to another country to work, leaving them behind), and my great-great-grandmother was a sugar cane worker, seemingly in slavery-like conditions. How does one live and love when they have a whole life with this level of labor? So looking at my own family paved the way for these characters to come to life and for me to explore similar issues.

 

 

I love how in your book, the city of Lagos is more than just the setting; it’s like its own character.

Lagos is such a thrilling city — a very dramatic city. There’s also so much tension there, partly because of these huge extremes of wealth and circumstance. It reminds me of New York, but here, we shout about it from every rooftop. We’re always having conversations about struggle and trauma, which is one of the most beautiful things about living in New York. But in Lagos, these topics become taboo because of the patriarchy and the more traditional aspects of society, along with this projection of wellness and social success. Poverty becomes taboo. Hardship becomes taboo. All that helps create this tension between the outward perception and what’s really happening.

This book also shows the dark side of marriage — one riddled with control, mistrust, infidelity and a lack of connection. What real-life advice do you want readers to take away from Nicole and Tonye’s relationship?

Marriage is complicated, and I intentionally made Nicole a very complicated and, at times, selfish character. She has an affair with someone who clearly isn’t the love of her life, but she also wants freedom because she doesn’t always have that in her marriage.

I didn’t want to make Tonye a textbook villain, but he makes a lot of mistakes. Yes, he’s good-looking with tons of money, but he isn’t perfect. I wanted to ask questions about what marriage is and how it can go wrong and even under the “best” of circumstances. In a place like Lagos, where there are a lot of labels on people, traditions, and boxes to fit in, how does this impact their marriage?

We go into marriage as individuals and think we have this blueprint, but it only sometimes matches up. Marriage can be amazing and freeing, but it can also feel like being in a straightjacket. (Laughs) Whatever it is, people need to be honest with themselves. Did you make a mistake? Did you give up on yourself and your desires? Are you being respected? Please, don’t be locked into a mistake for the rest of your life because you believe marriage is everything.

You also don’t shy away from the Diaspora wars between Americans, Brits, Caribbeans, Africans, etc. Which we know can be a little too real sometimes on Twitter. Remember the whole tea kettle fiasco? (Laughs) Why was including that important?

It was almost easier to have these conversations in a fictional way in the book than in real life. This way, we can enjoy the exploration and find our own answers. But, I am always interested in observing people and am curious to know why we are the way that we are and how where we come from plays a role in that. It’s fascinating. I remember moving to Nigeria and having people tell me they didn’t realize they were Black until they lived abroad as teens. Before then, they never had to think of themselves that way. But it was more just that because, as a descendant of enslaved people, watching these same people dismiss racism because they didn’t understand it the same way was not an easy conversation to have. How do you know the struggles of colonialism and all the terrible things the British did in Africa and diminish it because you didn’t have the same ancestry as the Caribbean or African-American people?

But I also found that having this understanding of race versus the Caribbean or African-American experience can impact your understanding of feminism and other issues. They’re all connected.

Finally, the book is being developed into a drama series for HBO, thanks to “Insecure” and “Rap Sh*t” writer-director Amy Aniobi. How excited are you for this story to come to the small screen?

It’s a dream. Actually, it’s a dream because this wasn’t even a dream I had before. And Amy is a total inspiration, boss chic. Look at “Insecure.” So many older Black women “grew up” on that show whether they’ve seen it or not; we’ve all been influenced by that show and how we see ourselves as Black women. Most importantly, that show really encouraged me to even tell this story.

Amy is going to bring her writing and directing talent and nuance to this. Plus, she’s Nigerian, and I know she will approach it with that perspective. This is why having Black women in the room is so important. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vanessa-walters-the-nigerwife_n_64596f9ce4b09eef83016c4d

The items returned on Tuesday included an ivory mask that formerly belonged to a museum in Stuttgart, Germany.Credit...Kola Sulaimon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

How Germany Changed Its Mind, and Gave the Benin Bronzes Back
A ceremony in Nigeria on Tuesday was the culmination of a yearslong process that upended Germany’s approach to museum items looted during the colonial era.

By Thomas Rogers, Rahila Lassa and Alex Marshall
Dec. 20, 2022

When the airplane of Germany’s foreign minister touched down in Abuja, Nigeria, this past weekend, it carried precious cargo: 20 Benin Bronzes, priceless artifacts that were looted in a violent raid more than a century ago, and which were finally coming home.

At a ceremony in Abuja on Tuesday, the German official, Annalena Baerbock, handed the stolen items back to Nigerian officials. “It was wrong to take the bronzes, and it was wrong to keep them for 120 years,” she said.

In a legal sense, the 20 artifacts Baerbock brought with her belonged to Nigeria even before she took off from Berlin; more than 1,100 bronzes in German museums have become Nigerian property since the countries signed an agreement in July. But Tuesday’s handover was an important symbolic gesture, and many more of the artifacts are expected to come back to Nigeria next year. Others will remain in Germany on long-term loan.

The foreign minister’s trip is the culmination of a yearslong process that upended Germany’s approach to handling cultural items unjustly obtained during the colonial period. It is also part of a pioneering model for large-scale restitution, in which ownership is swapped before any artifacts change hands. Crucially, that approach allows for items to be restituted even if the country of origin does not yet have the facilities to store and exhibit them.

Baerbock described the return of the bronzes as “just the first step.”

“More of these agreements will follow,” she said. “And this moment is also historic to us. We are facing up to our history of colonialism.”

The bronzes consist of thousands of sculptures and plaques that British forces looted from Benin City, in what is now southern Nigeria, during a raid in 1897. Many wound up in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the British Museum, in London; and several major German institutions.

Nigeria has been calling for the objects’ return for several decades, and its deal with Germany is the largest yet. It is also notable because the effort was spearheaded not by individual museums, but by a national government.

The items returned on Tuesday included an 18th-century throne stool and a sculpture commemorating a Benin “oba,” or king. A pavilion to store and display the treasures is being built in Benin City and will most likely be completed in 2023. The building will be next to the planned Edo Museum of West African Art, an ambitious institution designed by the acclaimed Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye.

This outcome had seemed far-fetched as recently as five years ago. As in other European countries, the subject of restitution had been largely ignored in Germany until recently, and some museum leaders had been reluctant to part ways with artifacts.

The about-face was driven — as interviews with eight German and Nigerian officials showed — by a changing social consensus about the ethics of holding on to such items, and further strengthened by a backlash against Germany’s flagship cultural project: the Humboldt Forum, an $825 million institution in Berlin, conceived as Germany’s equivalent to the Louvre or the British Museum.

According to Andreas Görgen, the secretary general of Germany’s Federal Culture Ministry and one of the architects of the restitution agreement, the deal was also a testament to a careful, incremental strategy, which he contrasted with a flashier approach from France.

In 2017, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gave a groundbreaking speech during a visit to Burkina Faso in which he pledged to make returning unjustly acquired items to African countries “a top priority.” Although some objects have been given back, the French effort has floundered, in part because museum objects are property of the French state, meaning Parliament must sign off on transfers of ownership.

“Macron took the very French route: a great speech by a great president, then it takes years for reality to match those words,” Görgen said. “We are operating in a German way,” he said. “It isn’t especially sexy, but it can be efficient.”

Germany’s approach also contrasts with those of the United States and British governments, which have left decisions up to individual institutions. Some organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, have acted alone. Last month, the Horniman Museum, in London, held a ceremony to transfer ownership of 72 objects, including bronzes, to Nigeria’s government, and immediately returned six to Nigerian hands. A museum spokeswoman said the other 66 items would stay in London, on loan from Nigeria, for at least the next year.

Yet some of the most important museums in England cannot return their Benin Bronzes, even if they wanted to, without a change in the law. That includes the British Museum, which owns about 900 of the artifacts, arguably the world’s finest collection.

According to officials in Germany, a key turning point there occurred in 2019, amid growing public pressure. It was partly spurred by Macron’s speech and a rising awareness in Germany of its own colonial crimes — including the killing of tens of thousands of Nama and Herero people in what is now Namibia. The atrocity, carried out between 1904 and 1908, is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Until then, the main vehicle for discussing the return of the Benin Bronzes had been the Benin Dialogue Group, a network founded in 2010 that brought together Nigerian representatives and figures from European museums with bronzes in their collections. The group, however, favored loans over transfers of ownership.

Some prominent German museum officials were already on the record opposing complete restitution. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel in 2018, Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which held the largest collection of Benin Bronzes in the country, said, “It is too simple to say that they were all stolen and to send them back.” He added, “Politicians should not try to outdo each other with pronouncements.”

Parzinger was among those overseeing the construction of the Humboldt Forum, a controversial project uniting several museums’ collections in a reconstructed Baroque palace in the center of Berlin. Although many Germans initially bristled at the project because it required the demolition of the former East German Parliament, which was seen as an act of historical erasure, that anger soon refocused on the provenance of many objects to be exhibited in the building, including about 500 Benin Bronzes.

In 2017, Bénédicte Savoy, a historian who advised Macron on restitution, resigned from the Humboldt Forum’s advisory board in protest, comparing the project to the Chernobyl nuclear accident site. Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian at the University of Hamburg, accused the Humboldt Forum’s leaders, including Parzinger, of having “colonial amnesia.”

As public anger mounted, German lawmakers began looking for ways to salvage the country’s most ambitious cultural project in decades.

According to Zimmerer, a key moment occurred in February 2019, when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, invited a small number of historians and experts to a dinner to discuss restitution. Zimmerer recalled telling Merkel that an agreement with Nigeria about the bronzes needed to be reached before the Humboldt Forum’s upcoming opening, lest “the spotlight of the entire world” be focused on criticism of the project. He recalled her saying later that evening, “Then why don’t we give them back?” (A spokeswoman for the former chancellor declined to comment.)

Germany’s federal and state culture ministers convened the following month to approve guidelines for handling museum items from “colonial contexts.” The agreement stipulated that all objects that had been obtained “unethically” would be liable for return and directed institutions to facilitate claims by producing publicly available inventories.

Those guidelines also overruled reluctant museum leaders. “Society applied the pressure on the politicians,” Zimmerer said, “and the politicians applied the pressure on the museums.” He argued that the sudden rise in public support for restitution had been enhanced by an awareness of earlier moves to return artwork stolen by the Nazis. “People know that looted art is something you give back,” Zimmerer said.

In an interview, Parzinger, the museum official, explained his own change of heart. “The Benin Bronzes are so symbolic for colonial-era cultural theft that one cannot simply push it away,” he said.

A group under the leadership of Markus Hilgert, a leading cultural official representing Germany’s 16 states, began working on an online catalog listing the bronzes being held in disparate collections. “Objects are often not inventoried or digitalized, and it raised the question of how you can have a dialogue with a country of origin when you don’t even know what is in Germany,” Hilgert said. The resulting database, he said, “was the material foundation for taking up conversations with Nigeria.”

As the Germans signaled they were moving toward restitution, obstacles remained on the Nigerian side. Although the country had requested the return of the bronzes since the 1970s, there was conflict over who would take ownership of the artifacts. Both the Nigerian government and the oba of Benin, whose family ruled the historical Kingdom of Benin from which they were looted, claimed that they owned the items. Godwin Obaseki, the governor of Edo State, where Benin City is, said he acted as a facilitator to resolve the dispute.

“Things happened so quickly that we couldn’t get everybody on the same page fast enough,” Obaseki said.

Nigeria also lacked the facilities to safely store and exhibit the delicate items. Phillip Ihenacho, a Nigerian financier, said that in 2019, Obaseki asked him to find a solution to the country’s “deficit in museum infrastructure.” He noted that “there was pressure from the German end.”

Ultimately, he said, the oba’s family, Nigeria’s museum commission and the government of Edo State agreed to join a trust together, with independent directors that oversee the construction and operation of the new museum.

Görgen, the culture ministry official, said the announcement of the museum plans in late 2020 helped eradicate any remaining doubts in Germany. After several rounds of negotiations in the spring of 2021, Germany and Nigeria signed a “memorandum of understanding,” and then the official agreement in July 2022. The agreement was finalized weeks ahead of the opening of the Humboldt Forum’s ethnological exhibits.

Visitors to the Humboldt Forum can still view several dozen Benin Bronzes, accompanied by signage clarifying that the objects belong to Nigeria. According to Parzinger, the agreement allows for 168 pieces chosen by Nigeria’s museum commission to remain in Germany “so that Benin’s art can be shown to the world.” The approximately 350 other bronzes that were part of the Berlin museum collections will be transported to Nigeria once the pavilion is completed.

Officials in Benin City hope the return of the artifacts and the construction of the Edo Museum of West African Art will herald a cultural revival and a boom in tourism. Obaseki, the Edo governor, said its effects would ideally resemble those of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is credited with transforming the fortunes of that formerly gritty port city.

Ihenacho, however, made it clear that the bronzes’ return brought with it a new set of practical challenges for Nigeria. It remains unclear who will pay for the shipment and insurance of the remaining items in Germany, and he noted that the bronzes’ storage and upkeep will come at a considerable cost, including electrical bills for climate control. “These objects are going to cost a lot of money, so you had better be prepared,” Ihenacho said, noting that the country’s museum infrastructure was still being built up.

“To the West, this story is very much about the return of the Benin Bronzes,” Ilhenacho said, “but for most Nigerians, this is the beginning.”

URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/arts/benin-bronzes-nigeria-germany.html
 

MY THOUGHTS

Many talk of Black Unity in black countries  but this history highlight  one of the true problems with black unity in black countries. The fact that when Germany on its own, said nigeria owned all the bronzes that Nigeria had an internal battle to figure out who in nigeria will own them speak volumes to me. The first question in my mind, is how many other black countries will have similar difficulty? The good news is Nigeria figured out how to find a solution between all the parties in nigeria. and maybe this art venture may create a new approach in nigeria to administration. As Ilhenacho said, this is the beginning.

I.S.D. cup for the I.R.C.L. Tour of Earth.

 Il Sol Depth cup for the champion of the Interplanetary Recycle Craft League Tour of Earth.

This is the I.S.D. cup or Il Sol Depth cup for champions of the twenty third Interplanetary Recycle Craft League Tour of Earth.

Each element represents something. The base represents the Interstellar Medium, the space outside the Sun's gravitational power. 
The golden-esque cup looking like dust/gas is the Heliosphere, yes the sphere of the sun, created by the sun which the solar system we live in exist in. I chose the color for the effect. 
The greyish spirals above is an interpretation of the Heliospheric current, which is shaped like an archemides spiral but after hours and hours and some lost attempts:) I just went for spiral rings. One day I may upload the sketches. 
In the center is the sun and the planets from mercury to Jupiter are present at top. 
And yes, it can be used as a sipping cup. 
At the bottom is a small indentation representing the milkyway.  The eye where our sun resides. 

 

Sketchfab URL: https://skfb.ly/oGJuE

Still image : https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/I-S-D-cup-for-the-I-R-C-L-Tour-of-Earth-960470478

 

The trophy was made for @arcencieldigitalart 3D art contest
https://www.deviantart.com/arcencieldigitalart/journal/Contest-3D-Art-in-all-it-s-forms-956559237

 

The story the trophy is for is the following
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Final-Distance-Of-The-Twenty-Third-I-R-C-L-To-947551245

 

The story was made for the promoting positivity challenge from @rtnightmare
https://www.deviantart.com/rtnightmare/journal/Promoting-Positivity-December-Challenge-937526879

 

It was because of @moonbeam13 I learned of the contest so consider following her folks
https://www.deviantart.com/moonbeam13/status-update/ArcencielDigitalArt-is-hosting-a-new-956762859

 

image aided in use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:PIA22835-VoyagerProgram&Heliosphere-Chart-20181210.png

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:UGC_12158.jpg

 

I used Figuro to create
https://figuro.io/Designer
and Sketchfab to display
https://sketchfab.com/richardmurray3d
 

 

Commission
The Aevemor from TheBootesArtVoid
Black and white
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Commission-TheBootesArtsVoid-04-26-2023-b-w-960001249

Colored version
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Commission-TheBootesArtsVoid-04-26-2023-color-960000846

If you like the work, commissions are open

microcalligraphy
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/commission/Microcalligraphy-signatures-1487995

 

Half of NYC households face cost of living crisis

Half of working-age households in New York City do not make enough money to cover basic needs, according to a new report.

That marks a significant jump from the group's 2021 study, when it found that 36% of households were struggling.

It said the surge was driven by the sharp rise in prices in recent years - especially for housing and childcare.

It comes as families around the world are facing rising living costs.

In 2023, a family of four would need to make more than $100,000 (£80,000) to match costs anywhere in New York City.

That is significantly higher than the roughly $70,000 median household income in the city reported by the US census.

The report was commissioned by the Fund for the City of New York, which is backed by the Ford Foundation, and the charity, United Way of New York City. A similar study has been conducted periodically since 2000.

The analysis examines the "true cost of living", a measure that reflects local costs and housing size.  

It is more comprehensive metric than the official poverty measure in the US, which was developed in the 1960s. By that measure, just 16% of households in New York City are living in poverty."There are many more people in New York City who struggle to meet their basic needs than the government's official poverty statistics capture," the authors of the report write.

"We find that New York City families struggling to make ends meet are neither a small nor a marginal group, but rather represent a substantial proportion of households in the state."

The report found that single mothers, people of colour and foreign-born were disproportionately likely to be struggling, but the problem also affected those with jobs and higher education.

Among households with at least one person working, 40% could not cover basic costs, it found, while more than half of those who did not make enough to cover the cost of living had at least some college education.

The report comes as many countries are struggling to rein in rapidly rising prices, which were once thought to reflect temporary shocks stemming from the pandemic and war in Ukraine but have proven stubbornly persistent.

Inflation, the rate at which prices rise, is expected to be 7% globally this year, according to the IMF's most recent outlook.

In the UK, inflation is at 10.1%, close to a 40 year high.

ARTICLE
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65394860

 

FULL REPORT
https://1drv.ms/b/s!ArspJ5yABJDqg8EsiSlQIdYn0kDlcA?e=LnBJgs

 

The problem with the film industry in the USA and Kemet

 

OPENING THOUGHTS

Historical fact versus Film industry goals. 

 

A film, with chadwick boseman before the black panther called, Gods of egypt , had only one Black god of egypt. Thoth. But, all the gods of Kemet, which the hellens< the romans called the hellens greeks, the greeks called kemet egypt> took over through the macedonian rule of hellens, are Black, all of them. So all the gods of egypt should had been Black. 

In parallel, Cleopatra is white. I didn't say she wasn't Egyptian. She spoke the native tongue. In the same way the Mamluks , who are from eastern europe, are not native to Kemet but lived most of their lives in Kemet, they called egypt, while being muslim. So, the problem is the film industry in the USA has a goal with many projects. The goal is simple. Unbind all characters from racial definition, a key to araciality. The problem is, history isn't a false thing, history is fact. Cleopatra was not black, just like the Mamluks. But this doesn't mean most people in Kemet or Egypt are white. 

But i wanted to do research and find out, who is the lawyer that filed the complaint because as always, the internet story linked to me has no citation. 

I found the following and I will end with lcosing thoughts

 

ARTICLES

 

TITLE
Egyptians complain over Netflix depiction of Cleopatra as black

 

CONTENT
by David Gritten
BBC News
A Netflix docudrama series that depicts Queen Cleopatra VII as a black African has sparked controversy in Egypt.

A lawyer has filed a complaint that accuses African Queens: Queen Cleopatra of violating media laws and aiming to "erase the Egyptian identity".

A top archaeologist insisted Cleopatra was "light-skinned, not black".

But the producer said "her heritage is highly debated" and the actress playing her told critics: "If you don't like the casting, don't watch the show."

Adele James made the comment in a Twitter post featuring screengrabs of abusive comments that included racist slurs.

Cleopatra was born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 69 BC and became the last queen of a Greek-speaking dynasty founded by Alexander the Great's Macedonian general Ptolemy.

She succeeded her father Ptolemy XII in 51 BC and ruled until her death in 30 BC. Afterwards, Egypt fell under Roman domination.

The identity of Cleopatra's mother is not known, and historians say it is possible that she, or any other female ancestor, was an indigenous Egyptian or from elsewhere in Africa.

Netflix's companion website Tudum reported in February that the choice to cast Adele James, a British actress who is of mixed race, as Cleopatra in its new documentary series was "a nod to the centuries-long conversation about the ruler's race".

Jada Pinkett Smith, the American actress who was executive producer and narrator, was meanwhile quoted as saying: "We don't often get to see or hear stories about black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them!"

But when the trailer was released last week many Egyptians condemned the depiction of Cleopatra.

Zahi Hawass, a prominent Egyptologist and former antiquities minister, told the al-Masry al-Youm newspaper: "This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black."

Mr Hawass said the only rulers of Egypt known to have been black were the Kushite kings of the 25th Dynasty (747-656 BC).

"Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilisation is black," he added and called on Egyptians to take a stand against the streaming giant.

On Sunday, lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary filed a complaint with the public prosecutor demanding that he take "the necessary legal measures" and block access to Netflix's services in Egypt.

He alleged that the series included visual material and content that violated Egypt's media laws and accused Netflix of trying to "promote the Afrocentric thinking... which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity".

Three years ago, plans for a movie about Cleopatra starring the Israeli actress Gal Gadot triggered a heated debate on social media, with some people insisting that the role should instead go to an Arab or African actress.

Gadot subsequently defended the casting decision, saying: "We were looking for a Macedonian actress that could fit Cleopatra. She wasn't there, and I was very passionate about Cleopatra."
 

URL

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65322821

 

<Rough translation of the arabic to english from google translate>
TITLE
"Falsification of facts and Cleopatra was not black." Zahi Hawass comments on Netflix's latest movie

 

CONTENT
Zahi Hawass, former Minister of Antiquities and archaeologist, commented on the film "Cleopatra", which was revealed by Netflix yesterday, and drew criticism from public opinion in Egypt for portraying the "black" Ptolemaic queen, considering it a falsification of history.
Hawass commented in an exclusive statement to «Al-Masry Al-Youm» on the film, saying: «That is a falsification completely, Cleopatra was Greek, in the sense that she was blonde and not black», and considered that the film «falsification of facts and an attempt to attract illustrious historical names such as Queen Cleopatra, with the aim of promoting that the Egyptian civilization is black».
Hawass pointed out that there is a trend in the world in recent years led by American blacks and blacks in South America, to claim that the Egyptian civilization is originally black, stressing that «this talk has no basis at all».

The archaeologist pointed out that the black civilization has no connection with the Egyptian civilization, pointing out that the black civilization did not rule Egypt except in the twenty-fifth dynasty during the era of the Kingdom of Kush, that is, at the end of civilization. (The number of families of the Egyptian civilization is 30 families).

Hawass proved that the Egyptian civilization is different from other African civilizations, pointing out that the Egyptian temples have drawings of Egyptian kings, and the Egyptian king is depicted beating his enemies, explaining that the temples depict his enemies either «African, Nubian, Libyan or Asian, and all of them have a different shape».

Hawass continued that «Netflix is trying to create confusion to spread false and false information that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is black», and called on Hawass to take a stand against the Netflix platform.

Netflix launched a promotional advertisement for a documentary about Queen Cleopatra, directed by Jada Ninket Smith, wife of the famous American star Will Smith, and will be shown on the platform on May 10, and actress Adele James was chosen to play the role of the Ptolemaic queen.
Queen Cleopatra, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, was born in 69 BC and died in 30 BC in Alexandria.
 

URL

https://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/2864818

 

<Rough translation of the arabic to english from google translate>
TITLE
After the crisis of the movie Cleopater the brunette. Public prosecutor's complaint against Netflix demanding that the platform be banned

 

CONTENT
Lawyer Mahmoud Al-Samri submitted a report to the Public Prosecutor to close the Netflix platform, after the announcement of the documentary film Cleopater Al-Samra, and to take all legal measures against those in charge of this work, and against the management of the platform for its participation in this crime, and to investigate them and block its broadcast in Egypt and address all concerned authorities, especially the National Media Authority, to achieve this.
The complaint filed against Netflix stated: It was recently noted that the Netflix platform broadcasts some visual materials and content that violate the controls of media content, which we are accustomed to in Arab and Eastern societies in all countries of the Arab and Islamic region, as most of what is presented by this platform contradicts Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian.
As stated in the communication after the crisis of Cleopater's black film: The platform's management reached them to display advertising and attractive ads seen by millions in the world, and spread on their official pages documented via Facebook, recently, an invitation to watch a documentary film about Queen Cleopatra, who was of Greek origin that she is black and all the pharaohs at the time have black skin, unlike Egyptian history and civilization, to promote the thought of Afrocentric spread widely on social media, which have slogans and writings aimed at distorting and obliterating the Egyptian identity In a crude and worrying way for us as Egyptians we have a historical civilization that nations talk about over time and the issue of these owners of this thought is largely supported by large external parties to falsify the facts of the Egyptians.

The communication against Netflix continued on the Black Cleopatra Declaration: From the standpoint of preserving the Egyptian national and cultural identity among Egyptians all over the world and taking pride in it, and consolidating the spirit of belonging to the homeland, and accordingly, we ask and request you to take the necessary legal measures against this platform, and to stop displaying every work whose purpose is to obliterate and distort the Egyptian identity, by playing in the minds with attractive advertisements and films aimed at falsifying and distorting history in Egypt, and also accusing those in charge of forgery of this work jointly And assistance from the management of the platform.

At the end of his communication, Al-Samri called for taking all legal measures against those responsible for this work and against the platform's management for its participation in this crime.

URL

https://www.cairo24.com/1783644

 

CLOSING THOUGHTS

My first thought in closing is a question. Did Zahi Hawass or  Mohamed-El-Sayed-El-Semary file a lawsuit against gods of Egypt. Because don't tell me that the gods of Egypt were nordic ? How is that not a falsification? 

And even though, and I quote

 

... the world of Gods of Egypt never really existed. It is inspired by Egyptian mythology, but it makes no attempt at historical accuracy because that would be pointless — none of the events in the movie ever really happened. It is about as reality-based as Star Wars — which is not real at all ... Maybe one day if I get to make further chapters I will reveal the context of the when and where of the story. But one thing is for sure — it is not set in Ancient Egypt at all.

—Director Alex Proyas, December 2015

 

if Gods of Egypt can be forgiven for that then the African Queens series by Jada Pinkett Smith can be forgiven. These films are meant to make Black women of African descent feel good about themselves. These films are not meant to be documentaries. 

 

Now Adele James who portrays Cleopatra said, if you don't like the casting don't watch the show.  And to be fair, the lawsuit, though gaining global attention isn't for a global ban, it is for a ban in Kemet itself. Which is not unusual in film. Many governments ban films involving the history. China banned Seven Years In Tibet. This is not uncommon. 

 

But Hawass and James and Jada Pinkett for me, offer an interesting question about the series and casting and identity. 

The first thing I thought was, why didn't they chose Nefertiti ? 

They could had chosen Hatshepsut but she is to dominant. Hatshepsut goes into other arguments about women's role in general and Jada Pinkett probably wanted to step away from that. But Nefertiti is legendary and she has a bust that is preserved. I want you to take a look at the show poster and then Nefertiti bust.

 

Adele James as Cleopatra

 

The bust of Neferitti

 

Doesn't ADele James look like Nefertiti? 

Why not Nefertiti?  Why did Jada Pinkett SMith have to use Cleopatra, whom I have said countless times in AALBC is a white woman. I didn't say she wasn't egyptian and I didn't say she didn't have black blood. 

Take a look at the following image of an actor named Ty Burrell. A white man.

 

Said actor, Ty Burrell has an ancestor, as Black as the night. And, in his own words <you search the "finding your roots" episode, he admitted that people in his community growing up stated that in whispers about his clan>

So Cleopatra being white doesn't mean she doesn't have Black ancestors. It doesn't mean she can't claim Kemet. Charlize Theron says she is south african. She isn't XHosa or Zulu. 

The point is Cleopatra is a white woman. But being in the phenotypical ranges commonly labeled white or black doesn't define one's background or how one defines themselves. Look at the following of Fredi Washington, who played the first Peola in the first film version of Imitation of Life 

She look more like Betty Davis than Lena Horne and Lena Horne is extremely Yella. And Fredi Washington never called herself anything but Black. Hawass would call Fredi Washington light skinned. 

So I see three points, in any order. 

 

Phenotype in modern USA based media, film in particular but even outside ala Hamilton the play with all the white or blanco historical figures being played by negros/mullatoes/mestizoes, likes to suggest an araciality to historical figures. Anyone can play anybody is the message, in my mind at least. So, The Dagda of the Tuatha de danaan  can be played by a male or female person, kid or elder, with blue black skin and a large black afro. While... Ogun of the Yoruba Orishas can be played by a male or female person, kid or elder, with long blonde hair and snow white skin. Now the question is why? well, the USA has a problem. It's population is the most multiracial or multicultural or multiheritaged in modern humanity and is only growing more multi every day. But, alot of negativity or hatred or dislike is between the parts of the people. The USA populace doesn't have enough love  in its populace to become a family, a set of loving ones. But maybe it can be engineered to be a clan <ala the country of immigrants claim which is false to the native american or partial to enslaved black people as they were unwilling>, perhaps even better a creed<ala the shared belief in individual rights, government of elected officilals through voting, a set of laws that need to be abided and respected absent the use of arms>. Various individuals or groups of people in the USA across all racial spectrums are trying to make the USA into a clan or creed and in the arts, this has led to hamilton or this film of Cleopatra. I see two goals, the first is to deracialize historical figures to support the idea that one can be a racial stranger in a community, the usa, and be part of it instantaneously if they abide by the rules of the clan or creed. The second is to support the idea that one can idolize, be proud of, adopt someone who isn't of their race as part of their essence.   Do I artistically like this? no. I prefer historical truth. But that is only a matter of taste, it doesn't warrant a large multilog for me. Any artist knows, no work makes everybody happy, and it shouldn't. 

 

Phenotype outside the USA, race, is simpler but when applied to the USA media's portrayals of race, become very complicated. I have been to africa. I can tell you, many women <not most> of North Africa, today, are white women. Now, they are african. They are muslim. And they are not nordic in appearance. Many Northern African women do share the mediterranean look with Southern European women, ala why in Europe, many northern europeans would call southern europeans dark. But they are white women. But they don't see themselves as Europeans. and this is the problem with race outside the usa in comparison to in the USA. In the USA race in general is usually reduced, made simpler, rightly or wrongly. But in BRasil you have Pardo, you have the brown skinned. In African there is no one drop rule, being black doesn't equate to african in africa.  In India, people who look like my mother's father, will argue they are not black because in asia, black equates to african. In asia, the word dark is used for people who in the usa will be deemed black. So outside the USA phenotype, appearance, has other rules and when you apply the goals , the phenotypical goals,  in USA media to places outside the USA it is dysfunctional. But, part of the dysfunction doesn't merely stem from the combination of two unequals or the attempting to find a multiracial center in the USA end, but also the old rigidities of race in many places outside the USA. I live in New York City and anyone who knows latin americans knows that in their homes, the dark or black or negra members of the familia are not treated like in the disney film encanto. Rosie Perez said it best herself, that in the latin community a colorism exist deeply. So when latin americans talk about latin unity, I scoff at that because I know fully well that in their homes, in their community that unity dissolves into a rulership by whites or light skins or alveno's or blancos over everybody else, negra, zambo, indios, et cetera. And it is the same in an India or in Egypt or other North African governments. The communities under said governments have rigid inequal racial categories that are accepted as part of their essential identity. Thus El Semary talks about national Identity even though most people in Egypt if they were in Mississippi in the 1960s would be called nigger on a daily basis. while most of the wealthy in Egypt if in the same Mississippi would be deemed the White elite. Which in Egypt is how the whites treat the blacks, as an elite. 

 

The importance of media. Hawass is correct. Video media in modernity are the books of yore. The video is how many or most learn, rightly or wrongly. Sequentially, any historical lies in video will be treated as truth or history by many. The question is, it is dangerous. I argue it isn't. But I will explain why. Growing up as a kid my parents provided me with nonfiction or fiction by black people that allowed my perceptions of black people to exist without need of white people. I didn't need public school. I didn't need colleges or universities. I didn't need the television or some video media. Sadly , many people in modernity need an external because their parents are ignorant, they don't know. In the black community in the USA, many black people like to say that the black community doesn't know enough about itself, but the truth is, that is all communities in humanity. The reason why is simple, most communities in humanity are recovering from being completely dominated by another community in humanity and that recovery tends to be a crude or complicated thing. Rarely as smooth as in the fiction books, Sequentially, media serves a huge role, like the images on the early european christian church walls to the illiterate in europe. It doesn't convey the truth, but it conveys a message easier. 

 

Preproduction in the arts, is an underrated thing. What I know on the outer rim boundaries of the entertainment industry in the usa is how often arts are produced absent a lot of quality preproduction. I am not suggesting a system exist to evade negative criticism. But, I wonder about Jada Pinkett's series. Why go from Nzinga to Cleopatra. In my mind, Jada Pinkett wanted to show being African is not equal to being african. While that is the truth I would had advised her to use another.  I can see why Nefertiti was not used based on the phenotypical range. Nefertiti is black, looks black, regardless to people like Hawass saying otherwise. But, I think the one of the Kandake's, like Shanakdakhete or Amanirenas<one of my personal favorites>, or other queens of Nubia or Kush and its descendants to Sudan or Aksum, like Gudit<who I learned of doing research for this post>,  and its descendants to modern ethiopia. Hawass is correct. Cleopatra is not black. But he is incorrect in one key way. The problem with Kemet and Egypt is that the Upper Nile, the south of the land because in the nilotic world the north is where the Nile flows from which is south if you base north on the pole nearest Europe which is what most in modern humanity do, has always been in a cohabitation with the peoples south of it, whether Nubia or Kush or Aksum. In the same token, the Lower Nile, which is the one that border the modern day mediterranean, has always been in connection to Hellens/the larger Europe or Asia. So, when Hawass talks about the non Blackness of Egypt I argue the Kandake's are to the upper nile what cleopatra is to the lower nile. Female rulers representing the external communities to either half of kemet. And that kind of interpretation is needed in preproduction. It doesn't mean it will happen. But in preproduction it is rarer than people think. 

 

The power of negative media. The first season involved Nzinga of congo and the second involved Cleopatra. Now considering the slap from her husband to chris rock happened nearly a month after the first season with Nzinga started, it proves the power of negative media. The show from Jada Pinkett wasn't mentioned alongside the slap. The slap was mentioned as the central issue of Jada Pinkett, Will Smith, plus Chris Rock. Her series was barely mentioned if at all. The movie, Emancipation, starring Will SMith was prejudged through people's view to the actor, and Chris Rock's standup was expected and eventually did rotate around this issue, one negative moment dominated all three of their recent time. 

 

I conclude with a simple point. All EL Semary wants is the show banned in egypt itself. Not an issue. And neither is the depiction of Cleopatra. I already spoke of Hamilton. None of the key points advertised in the media are important.

 

The location of Mohamed El Sayed El Semary 

https://yellowpages.com.eg/en/profile/Mohamed-El-Sayed-El-Semary/315467

 

IN AMENDMENT

I finally found evidence to answer my question about gods of egypt in the post above, I didn't find a page and quit on it as I have other things to do but after @Troy asked the same question. I tried again, and read the following

 

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3847128833/weekend/

Mar 2-6    -    $39,360    -    1    -    $39,360    $39,360    1
Mar 9-13    -    $14,958    -62%    1    -    $14,958    $60,950    2
Mar 16-20    -    $13,675    -8.6%    1    -    $13,675    $77,216    3

 

So, Gods of Egypt wasn't banned, wasn't called to be banned in Egypt. People saw it in egypt. So, this invalidates the desire of the few in Egypt to pan the cleopatra film by Jada Pinkett Smith. And what does it prove. It proves that, the issue here isn't  that the Cleopatra film in question isn't phenotypically or other racially correct, it is that, it is produced by Jada Pinkett SMith, a Black woman of the USA in the NEtflix zone, which is going to be mostly seen online in streaming. This is the true issue. Black produced and mostly on streaming not in theaters. Hawass and  EL Semary realize that most of the young in egypt, like most poor people in the usa , get film through streaming, not theaters, they are afraid of said Cleopatra's visions being displayed amongst the youth, which will get some youth to question the Europhilic-whitephilic aspects of egyptian culture that have been peddled or enforced by those in power in egypt.

 

REFERRING COMMENT

https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10236-the-problem-with-the-film-industry-in-the-usa-and-kemet/?do=findComment&comment=60302

 

Preserving Our Memories for the Future A Webinar with the South Side Home Movie Project + Orientation to New Online Tagging Tools Hosted by the Chicago Public Library 6:30pm, Wednesday, March 29, 2023 Register here before 3pm for the Zoom link   Home movies capture a range of details about everyday neighborhood life in Chicago, from fashion to food to how people walk down the street. During moments of social change, they also show historic events from a unique perspective, revealing what it was like to watch Myrlie Evers receive a posthumous award for her husband Medgar in Grant Park in 1963, or to visit the Wall of Respect in Grand Boulevard in 1968. The South Side Home Movie Project has been collecting and preserving home movies from Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods since 2005, and now holds over 700 of these rare glimpses of South Side life in their local film archive. For Women’s History Month, join the SSHMP team in partnership with Chicago Public Library for a virtual guided tour of the project, featuring home movies with women both behind and in front of the camera, from the 1920s-1980s. SPECIAL NOTE: This session will also debut SSHMP’s new Community Tagging Tools, which let you add your own memories to the home movie database and identify the people, places and events you recognize. For the first time, Chicagoans from across the city are invited to try out this custom crowd-sourcing interface so that your stories become part of SSHMP’s virtual archive. Join us for a live demonstration and hands-on orientation to this new way to contribute your memories to Chicago’s history.  How to Attend This event takes place on Zoom; click here to register by 3:00 pm Weds, 3/29/23. Only one registration per household is needed. You’ll receive an email link to the secure Zoom link before the event. Automatic transcription is included in all CPL events using Zoom. Image: Dr. Helen Nash filming at Niagara Falls, 1959, from the Dr. Helen Nash Collection.   BLACKWOOD POST   My first thoughts on BlackWood, my label for the black statian, of the u.s.a.,  film industry.  https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1837&type=status  Alien VS Predator review from Movies That Move We and the existence of the BlackWood before modernity, 2023 https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1855&type=status  What is the definition of a Race Film, and the supposed last Race Film  https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1860&type=status  South Side Home Movie Project being awarded https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1882&type=status  How Maya Glick's independent film based on Storm exposes the flaw in Black Thespians approach to fantasy or science fiction in Hollywood and why they ignore Blackwood https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1981&type=status  The problem in wanting Hollywood to be aracial while knowing it is white, and wanting hollywood to be aracial while knowing blackwood will be limited in outreach beyond black people https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2006&type=status  Most fiscally wealthy blacks are extreme anti-segregationists and why that curtails black development in fiscal capitalism. If you only want images that cater to all audience and no images that cater to one then you don't want to see birth of a nation which caters to a white audience, but you also don't want the mirror to birth of a nation that no one black financed. https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2029&type=status  the importance of the film industry on the self esteem of Blacks in the U.S.A. https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2109&type=status

Michelle Yeoh and opportunity

Silicon Valley Bank and risk in fiscal capitalism

Tiktok and the war over who owns the internet

Maternity Deaths in the usa

Londonium, the roman name for london

The live streaming former elected official in japan

 

Michelle Yeoh with her historic trophy. She has roles lined up but no starring ones.Credit...Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

 

After Her Oscar Win, Will Michelle Yeoh Get to Lead Again?
The historic victory should mean opportunities to star again, but too often after such milestones, Hollywood doesn’t find central roles for women of color.

By Kyle Buchanan
Published March 15, 2023
Updated March 17, 2023

We’re conditioned to think of an Oscar win as the endpoint to a journey. For some actors, holding that trophy is the realization of a dream held since childhood. For others, it’s the culmination of a well-deserved comeback.

But what happens after that win? In our eagerness to treat Oscar victories as career capstones, do we pay too little attention to the opportunities that are supposed to come afterward, yet often don’t?

I’ve been mulling that over since Sunday night, when Michelle Yeoh took the best actress Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It happened at the 95th edition of the Academy Awards, the kind of big, tantalizing milestone that prods you to contemplate what has come before, and Yeoh’s win proved especially historic: The first Asian star to win best actress, she was greeted onstage by Halle Berry, the first Black woman to have pulled off that feat.

Asking Berry to announce the winner with Jessica Chastain (the previous year’s winner) was a gamble twice over. If Yeoh had lost to one of her four competitors — all of whom were white women — the ensuing photo op would have served as a stark example of a best-actress category that has been hostile to women of color for 95 years. And though Berry has returned to the Oscars several times since her 2002 win for “Monster’s Ball,” it has always been as a presenter and never as a nominee. To see her there is to be reminded that an Oscar win carries no guarantees when an actress is already liable to receive fewer scripts and career opportunities than her white counterparts.

So though Yeoh’s triumph was a long time coming, and I teared up as she addressed “all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight,” I also found myself worrying that it won’t be enough. The people in the Dolby Theater looked awfully proud of themselves after Yeoh’s win, but if they really want to do right by her, they have to keep writing lead roles for 60-year-old Asian actresses; otherwise, it’s just empty back-patting.

That, after all, was the real breakthrough of “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh told me in October. We were at an awards event where, flanked by the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, she reminisced about a Hollywood career that had mostly been filled with supporting parts.

“Look, I’ve been very blessed — I’ve continuously worked, and I’ve worked with great directors,” she said. “But for the first time, I’m No. 1 on the call sheet, thanks to these guys. I do meaningful roles, like in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Shang-Chi,’ but it was not my movie.”

Yeoh said she hoped that “Everything Everywhere” would not be a one-off, but more than a year after the film’s release, it’s unclear when, or if, she will have another lead film role. Coming projects — including the big-screen musical “Wicked,” the third “Avatar” movie, and the ensemble mystery “A Haunting in Venice” — all consign her to supporting parts. Though she is a headline-making superstar who led the hip studio A24 to its biggest ever worldwide hit, Yeoh is still too often treated as additional casting rather than the main event.

“Even you, Michelle Yeoh — on the top of the world — has struggled to find the right roles,” Kwan told her when we met in October. “I think that has taken a lot of people by surprise.”

Yeoh laughed ruefully. “I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”

Few Hollywood movies are conceived with a woman over 50 as the central character, and the ones that are greenlit tend to offer those leads to a triumvirate of white women: Meryl if she’s older, Cate if she’s younger and Tilda if she’s weirder. To ensure that Yeoh can be first on the call sheet again, filmmakers must think more creatively, as Kwan and Scheinert did when they revamped “Everything Everywhere” for Yeoh after conceiving the film as a Jackie Chan vehicle. (And while they’re at it, can they find something juicy for last year’s best supporting actor, Troy Kotsur, similarly a boundary breaker — with “CODA,” he became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar — who has been seen in little since?)

As momentum in the best-actress race swung from the “Tár” star Cate Blanchett to Yeoh over the last few weeks of awards season, I kept hearing a common refrain from voters: While Blanchett already had two Oscars and would surely be nominated again — she has eight nominations overall — this could be Yeoh’s only chance at gold. Though I understand the practicality of that argument, I hope those voters understand that their job isn’t done simply because of how they marked their ballot. Yeoh’s Sunday-night win is a big one, but the real victory will come when the lead roles that had long eluded her grasp start to become commonplace. If Hollywood can make that so, then instead of an endpoint, Yeoh’s historic Oscar will serve as a long-needed new beginning.

Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times. He is the author of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.” @kylebuchanan

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/movies/michelle-yeoh-oscars-next.html

 

A bank official trying to reassure worried depositors in 1933. Credit...Associated Press

The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Just Changed Capitalism
March 15, 2023

By Roger Lowenstein

Mr. Lowenstein is a financial journalist and author of “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.”

After a career of writing about bank failures, I wound up in the middle of one when my bank, Silicon Valley Bank, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. On Saturday, when I tried to pay a bill online, I was greeted by this not very reassuring missive:

“This page will be unavailable throughout the weekend, but will resume next week in accordance with the guidance provided by the F.D.I.C.” I wasn’t truly worried; small depositors like me had long ago internalized the rule that it made no sense to worry about your bank’s condition, since the risks of failure were borne by the F.D.I.C.

Federal deposit insurance was introduced 90 years ago during the heart of the Great Depression. Ever since then, small depositors within the F.D.I.C. limit of coverage have slept soundly. Now, in light of the bank failures of the last few days and the F.D.I.C.’s extension of coverage, why will any depositor worry about risk? Having bailed out depositors of two banks in full, how will the government refuse others?

Established as part of the landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation initially provided deposit insurance up to $2,500, supported by premiums from member banks. The act was written by two Democrats, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry Steagall of Alabama. Steagall wanted to protect rural banks, which had many small depositors, from contagious panics.

In that era, banking “progressives” were centered in the heartland. During the 1920s, low farm prices led to waves of bank failures. Various states adopted insurance, but the statewide systems failed. Scores of bills for federal insurance were also introduced.

The idea was controversial. The president of the American Bankers Association protested that insuring deposits was “unsound, unscientific and dangerous.” It was opposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and by his Treasury secretary, William H. Woodin. Roosevelt opposed insurance because he thought it would be costly and also encourage bad behavior. If there was no need to mollify depositors, then banks would be free to take all sorts of risks. Today we call this “moral hazard.”

In 1933, an estimated 4,000 banks failed. Roosevelt took office in March, and declared a national bank holiday to prevent more failures. After a pointed debate, in June Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act.

The F.D.I.C. definitely prevented panics. From its creation until America’s entry into World War II, banks failed at a rate of close to 50 per year, not bad considering the economic depression in most of that period. And most of the banks that failed were small.

By the postwar period, deposit insurance seemed to have been created for an era that no longer existed. Bankers schooled in the 1930s tended toward prudence, and the industry was risk averse. The failure rate was exceptionally low. That all changed in the 1970s and ’80s. A combination of financial deregulation, revived animal spirits on Wall Street, and rising inflation led to financial instability and swings in interest rates. Voilà — bank failures returned.

In recent days, many have been reminded of 2008 and ’09 (165 banks failed in those two years alone). But for the most part, that crisis was not the result of depositors pulling funds. Bear Stearns, Lehman and others failed or sought bailouts because overnight funding from professional investors disappeared. It dried up for two good reasons: Banks like Lehman had too much leverage, and they were overexposed to a very weak and widely held asset, mortgage securities.

That was not the case with S.V.B.

This panic was a classic bank run, and it bears an echo to a different historical episode. In the 1980s, lenders known as savings and loans had invested their funds in long-term mortgages paying a fixed rate of interest. When the Federal Reserve, under pressure of rising inflation, began to jack up rates, S.&L.s had to pay higher rates to attract deposits.

The mismatch between the cost of their money and the (lower) rate that their mortgages earned sank the industry. Many switched to riskier assets to juice their returns, but as these investments soured, their problems worsened. Roughly a third, or about 1,000, S.&L.s failed. The F.D.I.C. was not (luckily for it) involved, because the S.&L.s were covered by a separate federal insurer. This agency, known as F.S.L.I.C., became insolvent, and the subsequent bailout was estimated to have cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looks a bit like an S.&L. crisis in miniature. Like its 1980s counterparts, S.V.B. grew extremely rapidly, had many assets parked in fixed, long-term bonds, and was done in when inflation caused the Fed to raise interest rates, raising the cost of keeping deposits.

Like the S.&L.s, Silicon Valley Bank was heavily concentrated. It catered to start-ups for whom an S.V.B. account was a matter of status. One tech savant who had recently changed jobs (aren’t they always switching jobs?) told me that in his experience, roughly two thirds of start-ups banked with S.V.B. (the bank claimed that nearly half the country’s venture capital-backed technology and life science companies were customers).

These crises provoked a widening of the federal safety net. Until the 1970s, the F.D.I.C. limit on deposit coverage increased only slowly. But in 1980, as banks came under pressure from soaring inflation, Congress raised the cap to $100,000, over the objections of the F.D.I.C. itself. In the 2008 crisis, the limit was raised to $250,000. And after the failure of IndyMac in 2008, the F.D.I.C., when possible, quietly protected uninsured depositors.

In the rescue of S.V.B. on Friday and of Signature Bank in New York two days later, the F.D.I.C. overtly ignored the cap and rescued all depositors, irrespective of size. This is a breathtaking leap.

Rescued seven-figure depositors were primarily venture companies steeped in the ideology of investing. The first plank of capitalism is that it entails risk. You cannot sensibly invest without assessing the chance for loss. If venture firms relied on groupthink rather than financial due diligence, that was their doing. In the case of Signature, which was exposed to the crypto industry, the rescue probably bailed out gamblers on speculative assets.

Federal officials have seized on a technicality to claim that it is not a bailout: Any required rescue payments will come from a special assessment on (private) banks, not the public. Prudent banks, which hedged their exposure to interest rates and suffered a competitive cost for doing so, will be hit with the added expense. Most likely, banks will pass along the rescue costs in the form of higher fees to consumers.

Strictly speaking, President Biden’s assurance that taxpayers are not on the line was accurate. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the “public” will be affected.

Moreover, the hazardous effect on behavior will be the same.

The regulators clearly failed to monitor S.V.B.’s unhealthy mismatch of assets and liabilities. Their job will be more difficult in the future, as risk taking on deposits has effectively become socialized. What if a bank opts to attract more funds by raising its interest rate on deposits? Can the regulators permit it? Wait a second, this is what all banks do.

Once you take risk out of a part of a bank’s operations, it is hard to let market principles govern the rest. We should expect, at a minimum, tougher standards on bank capital (as now exists at the biggest banks), more regulation and higher costs. As this newspaper’s DealBook newsletter has predicted, more loans will move away from F.D.I.C.-member institutions to so-called shadow banks such as hedge funds, outside the purview of regulators.

In past bank failures, uninsured depositors did not lose all — 10 to 15 percent was typical. And in this episode, there wasn’t any systemically bad asset à la mortgages in 2008. Given that the risk was contained, and that the Federal Reserve provides liquidity to banks facing runs (and provided emergency liquidity this week), allowing uninsured depositors of banks that fail to suffer a haircut might have been healthier for the system in the long run.

And the bailout does nothing to address the condition that fostered financial instability: inflation. It may even exacerbate it. This is not what Henry Steagall had in mind.

Roger Lowenstein is a financial journalist and the author of “Buffett” and, most recently, “Ways and Means:Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/opinion/silicon-valley-bank-rescue-glass-steagall-act.html

 

TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, in the ByteDance offices in Singapore. The White House is hardening its stance toward the Chinese-owned video app.Credit...Ore Huiying for The New York Times

U.S. Pushes for TikTok Sale to Resolve National Security Concerns
The demand hardens the White House’s stance toward the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

By David McCabe and Cecilia Kang
March 15, 2023
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban, TikTok said on Wednesday, as the White House hardens its stance toward resolving national security concerns about the popular video service.

The new demand to sell the app was delivered to TikTok in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the matter said. TikTok is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.

The move is a significant shift in the Biden administration’s position toward TikTok, which has been under scrutiny over fears that Beijing could request Americans’ data from the app. The White House had been trying to negotiate an agreement with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data and eliminate a need for ByteDance to sell its shares in the app.

But the demand for a sale — coupled with the White House’s support for legislation that would allow it to ban TikTok in the United States — hardens the administration’s approach. It harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.

TikTok said it was weighing its options and was disappointed by the decision. The company said its security proposal, which involves storing Americans’ data in the United States, offered the best protection for users.

“If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem: A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,” Maureen Shanahan, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said in a statement.

TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week. He is expected to face questions about the app’s ties to China, as well as concerns that it delivers harmful content to young people.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which has led the negotiations with TikTok. The Justice Department also declined to comment. The demand for a sale was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

TikTok, with 100 million U.S. users, is at the center of a battle between the Biden administration and the Chinese government over tech and economic leadership, as well as national security. President Biden has waged a broad campaign against China with enormous funding programs to increase domestic production of semiconductors, electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The administration has also banned Chinese telecommunications equipment and restricted U.S. exports of chip-manufacturing equipment to China.

The fight over TikTok began in 2020 when Mr. Trump said he would ban the app unless ByteDance sold its stake to an American company, a move recommended by a group of federal agencies known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

The Trump administration eventually appeared to reach a deal for ByteDance to sell part of TikTok to Oracle, the U.S. cloud computing company, and Walmart. But the potential transaction never came to fruition.

CFIUS staff and TikTok continued to negotiate a deal that would allow the app to operate in America. TikTok submitted a major draft of an agreement — which TikTok has called Project Texas — in August. Under the proposal, the company said it would store data belonging to U.S. users on server computers run by Oracle inside the United States.

TikTok officials have not heard back from CFIUS officials since they submitted their proposal, the company said.

In that vacuum, concerns about the app have intensified. States, schools and Congress have enacted bans on TikTok. Last year, a company investigation found that Chinese-based employees of ByteDance had access to the data of U.S. TikTok users, including reporters.

Brendan Carr, a Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, said the administration’s new demand was a “good sign” that the White House was taking a harder line.

“There is bipartisan consensus that we can’t compromise on U.S. national security when it comes to TikTok, and so I hope the CFIUS review now quickly concludes in a manner that safeguards U.S. interests,” Mr. Carr said.

The White House last week backed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give it more power to deal with TikTok, including by banning the app. If it passed, the legislation would give the administration more leverage in its negotiations with the app and potentially allow it to force a sale.

Any effort to ban the app or force its sale could face a legal challenge. Federal courts ultimately ruled against Mr. Trump’s attempt to block the app from appearing in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. And the American Civil Liberties Union recently condemned legislation to ban the app, saying it raises concerns under the First Amendment.

David McCabe covers tech policy. He joined The Times from Axios in 2019. 

Cecilia Kang covers technology and regulation and joined The Times in 2015. She is a co-author, along with Sheera Frenkel of The Times, of “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @ceciliakang

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/technology/tiktok-biden-pushes-sale.html

 

Tammy Cunningham with her son, Calum. She gave birth while hospitalized with severe Covid-19.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

 

Covid Worsened a Health Crisis Among Pregnant Women
In 2021, deaths of pregnant women soared by 40 percent in the United States, according to new government figures. Here’s how one family coped after the virus threatened a pregnant mother.

By Roni Caryn Rabin
March 16, 2023
KOKOMO, Ind. — Tammy Cunningham doesn’t remember the birth of her son. She was not quite seven months pregnant when she became acutely ill with Covid-19 in May 2021. By the time she was taken by helicopter to an Indianapolis hospital, she was coughing and gasping for breath.

The baby was not due for another 11 weeks, but Ms. Cunningham’s lungs were failing. The medical team, worried that neither she nor the fetus would survive so long as she was pregnant, asked her fiancé to authorize an emergency C-section.

“I asked, ‘Are they both going to make it?’” recalled Matt Cunningham. “And they said they couldn’t answer that.”

New government data suggest that scenes like this played out with shocking frequency in 2021, the second year of the pandemic.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday that 1,205 pregnant women died in 2021, representing a 40 percent increase in maternal deaths compared with 2020, when there were 861 deaths, and a 60 percent increase compared with 2019, when there were 754.

The count includes deaths of women who were pregnant or had been pregnant within the last 42 days, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy. A separate report by the Government Accountability Office has cited Covid as a contributing factor in at least 400 maternal deaths in 2021, accounting for much of the increase.

Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation. The coronavirus worsened an already dire situation, pushing the rate to 32.9 per 100,000 births in 2021 from 20.1 per 100,000 live births in 2019.

The racial disparities have been particularly acute. The maternal mortality rate among Black women rose to 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, 2.6 times the rate among white women. From 2020 to 2021, mortality rates doubled among Native American and Alaska Native women who were pregnant or had given birth within the previous year, according to a study published on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The deaths tell only part of the story. For each woman who died of a pregnancy-related complication, there were many others, like Ms. Cunningham, who experienced the kind of severe illness that leads to premature birth and can compromise the long-term health of both mother and child. Lost wages, medical bills and psychological trauma add to the strain.

Pregnancy leaves women uniquely vulnerable to infectious diseases like Covid. The heart, lungs and kidneys are all working harder during pregnancy. The immune system, while not exactly depressed, is retuned to accommodate the fetus.

Abdominal pressure reduces excess lung capacity. Blood clots more easily, a tendency amplified by Covid, raising the risk of dangerous blockages. The infection also appears to damage the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, and may increase the risk of a dangerous complication of pregnancy called pre-eclampsia.

Pregnant women with Covid face a sevenfold risk of dying compared with uninfected pregnant women, according to one large meta-analysis tracking unvaccinated people. The infection also makes it more likely that a woman will give birth prematurely and that the baby will require neonatal intensive care.

Fortunately, the current Omicron variant appears to be less virulent than the Delta variant, which surfaced in the summer of 2021, and more people have acquired immunity to the coronavirus by now. Preliminary figures suggest maternal deaths dropped to roughly prepandemic levels in 2022.

But pregnancy continues to be a factor that makes even young women uniquely vulnerable to severe illness. Ms. Cunningham, now 39, who was slightly overweight when she became pregnant, had just been diagnosed with gestational diabetes when she got sick.

“It’s something I talk to all my patients about,” said Dr. Torri Metz, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of Utah. “If they have some of these underlying medical conditions and they’re pregnant, both of which are high-risk categories, they have to be especially careful about putting themselves at risk of exposure to any kind of respiratory virus, because we know that pregnant people get sicker from those viruses.”

Lagging Vaccination
In the summer of 2021, scientists were somewhat unsure of the safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy; pregnant women had been excluded from the clinical trials, as they often are. It was not until August 2021 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with unambiguous guidance supporting vaccination for pregnant women.

Most of the pregnant women who died of Covid had not been vaccinated. These days, more than 70 percent of pregnant women have gotten Covid vaccines, but only about 20 percent have received the bivalent boosters.

“We know definitively that vaccination prevents severe disease and hospitalization and prevents poor maternal and infant outcomes,” said Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, chief of the C.D.C.’s infant outcomes monitoring, research and prevention branch. “We have to keep emphasizing that point.”

Ms. Cunningham’s obstetrician had encouraged her to get the shots, but she vacillated. She was “almost there” when she suddenly started having unusually heavy nosebleeds that produced blood clots “the size of golf balls,” she said.

Ms. Cunningham was also feeling short of breath, but she ascribed that to the advancing pregnancy. (Many Covid symptoms can be missed because they resemble those normally occurring in pregnancy.)

A Covid test came back negative, and Ms. Cunningham was happy to return to her job. She had already lost wages after earlier pandemic furloughs at the auto parts plant where she worked. On May 3, 2021, shortly after clocking in, she turned to a friend at the plant and said, “I can’t breathe.”

By the time she arrived at IU Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, she was in acute respiratory distress. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia and found patchy shadows in her lungs.

Her oxygen levels continued falling even after she was put on undiluted oxygen, and even after the baby was delivered.

“It was clear her lungs were extremely damaged and unable to work on their own,” said Dr. Omar Rahman, a critical care physician who treated Ms. Cunningham. Already on a ventilator, Ms. Cunningham was connected to a specialized heart-lung bypass machine.

Jennifer McGregor, a friend who visited Ms. Cunningham in the hospital, was shocked at how quickly her condition had deteriorated. “I can’t tell you how many bags were hanging there, and how many tubes were going into her body,” she said.

But over the next 10 days, Ms. Cunningham started to recover. Once she was weaned off the heart-lung machine, she discovered she had missed a major life event while under sedation: She had a son.

He was born 29 weeks and two days into the pregnancy, weighing three pounds.

Premature births declined slightly during the first year of the pandemic. But they rose sharply in 2021, the year of the Delta surge, reaching the highest rate since 2007.

Some 10.5 percent of all births were preterm that year, up from 10.1 percent in 2020, and from 10.2 percent in 2019, the year before the pandemic.

Though the Cunninghams’ baby, Calum, never tested positive for Covid, he was hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. He was on a breathing tube, and occasionally stopped breathing for seconds at a time.

Doctors worried that he was not gaining weight quickly enough — “failure to thrive,” they wrote in his chart. They worried about possible vision and hearing loss.

But after 66 days in the NICU, the Cunninghams were able to take Calum home. They learned how to use his feeding tube by practicing on a mannequin, and they prepared for the worst.

“From everything they told us, he was going to have developmental delays and be really behind,” Mr. Cunningham said.

After her discharge from the hospital, Ms. Cunningham was under strict orders to have a caretaker with her at all times and to rest. She didn’t return to work for seven months, after she finally secured her doctors’ approval.

Ms. Cunningham has three teenage daughters, and Mr. Cunningham has another daughter from a previous relationship. Money was tight. Friends dropped off groceries, and the landlord accepted late payments. But the Cunninghams received no government aid: They were even turned down for food stamps.

“We had never asked for assistance in our lives,” Ms. Cunningham said. “We were workers. We used to work seven days a week, eight-hour days, sometimes 12. But when the whole world shut down in 2020, we used up a lot of our savings, and then I got sick. We never got caught up.”

Though she is back to work at the plant, Ms. Cunningham has lingering symptoms, including migraines and short-term memory problems. She forgets doctor’s appointments and what she went to the store for. Recently she left her card in an A.T.M.

Many patients are so traumatized by their stays in intensive care units that they develop so-called post-intensive care syndrome. Ms. Cunningham has flashbacks and nightmares about being back in the hospital.

“I wake up feeling like I’m being smothered at the hospital, or that they’re killing my whole family,” she said. Recently she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Calum, however, has surprised everyone. Within months of coming home from the hospital, he was reaching developmental milestones on time. He started walking soon after his first birthday, and likes to chime in with “What’s up?” and “Uh-oh!”

He has been back to the hospital for viral infections, but his vocabulary and comprehension are superb, his father said. “If you ask if he wants a bath, he’ll take off all his clothes and meet you at the bath,” he said.

Louann Gross, who owns the day care that Calum attends, said he has a hearty appetite — often asking for “thirds” — and more than keeps up with his peers. She added, “I nicknamed him our ‘Superbaby.’”

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/health/covid-pregnancy-death.html

 

Two skeletons that were found last year as part of an archaeological dig in northern England.Credit...West Yorkshire Joint Services

A 1,600-Year-Old Coffin May Shed Light on Roman Britain
A lead-lined coffin that was discovered in northern England could offer clues about the area’s transition from the Roman Empire to its Anglo-Saxon period.

By Jenny Gross
Published March 15, 2023
Updated March 16, 2023
LONDON — British archaeologists have uncovered an ancient coffin in a 1,600-year-old cemetery in northern England, a discovery, they said, that could shed light on the end of Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Discovered during an archaeological dig in Leeds, the lead-lined coffin contained the remains of an aristocratic woman who most likely lived in the fourth century.

Archaeologists also found the remains of more than 60 people who lived in the area more than a thousand years ago. Some bodies were buried on their backs with their legs straight out, in accordance with late-Roman customs. Others adhered to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, within which burials often included items such as clothes fasteners and knives.

The archaeological dig was part of a consultation process for a company applying for permission to build on the site. Archaeologists had previously uncovered late-Roman stone buildings and a number of structures in the Anglo-Saxon architectural style in the area.

“Very quickly, we started finding burials,” said David Hunter, the principal archaeologist of the West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service, which works with the West Yorkshire planning authorities. “The potential is there to give us much better information on how this transition from the Roman population to Anglo-Saxon England happened.”

Mr. Hunter said that the presence of both late-Roman and early-Anglo Saxon people on the same burial site was unusual. Whether the use of the graveyard had overlapped between the two eras would determine the significance of the find, he added.

The Roman occupation of Britain, from 43 A.D. to around 410, transformed the culture, as settlers from Europe, the Middle East and Africa arrived. Around the third century, market towns and villages were established, and Roman objects became more common even in poor, rural areas, according to English Heritage, which manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England.

After the Romans retreated from Britain, society became much more insular and parochial, Mr. Hunter said. A lot is unknown about the period, including how the area transitioned from being part of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century to part of the English nation in the 10th.

“Different people have different theories as to how this could have happened: It could’ve happened by cooperation, it could’ve happened by aggression,” he said.

These findings may add to knowledge about an era that is largely undocumented, Mr. Hunter said. Radiocarbon dating could help determine exactly when the remains were buried. Chemical tests could reveal the diets and ancestry of the people.

Researchers would also like to understand why there were a number of instances in which two or three people were buried in the same grave, as well as why there were multiple burial styles in the same cemetery.

Mr. Hunter said that the two different burial styles could be for reasons of practicality; Since the area was already recognized as a burial place by Roman Britons, it would have been easier for subsequent groups of people to have used the same site.

While the discovery was made in February 2022, the findings were only announced on Monday, in order to keep the site safe and conduct tests on some of the findings, the Leeds City Council said in a statement. The discovery of a lead-lined coffin is rare, with only a few hundred having been discovered in Britain, said Kylie Buxton, on-site supervisor for the excavations.

The council has not released the exact location of the dig. After the analysis is completed, the lead coffin may be displayed at the Leeds City Museum, in an exhibition on death and burial customs, officials said.

A correction was made on March 16, 2023: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to English Heritage. The organization manages prehistoric sites, medieval castles and Roman forts in England, not in the rest of Britain. (Other groups manage such sites in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.)
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Jenny Gross is a general assignment reporter. Before joining The Times, she covered British politics for The Wall Street Journal. @jggross

ARTICLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/europe/uk-roman-burial-leeds.html#:~:text=By Jenny Gross March 15%2C 2023 LONDON —,Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

 

Mr. Higashitani, seen on a computer monitor, celebrating after winning his election to a seat in the House of Councillors in July 2022.Credit...Kyodo News, via Getty Images

 

How to Get Kicked Out of Parliament: Livestream Instead of Legislating
The upper house of Japan’s Parliament almost unanimously voted to expel an eccentric YouTuber who won a seat last year. The reason: He never showed up for work.

By Tiffany May and Hisako Ueno
March 15, 2023
Since he was elected to Japan’s Parliament in July, Yoshikazu Higashitani has spread celebrity gossip on his YouTube channel, explored the sights of Dubai and handed out snacks to children displaced by an earthquake in Turkey.

One thing he has not done is show up for work.

On Wednesday, he was expelled from Japan’s upper house of Parliament, the House of Councillors, making him the first elected lawmaker in the country to be removed from office in more than seven decades.

Before his short-lived career as a lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani, 51, was well-known for his lengthy livestreams during which he dished out salacious celebrity gossip under the alias “GaaSyy.” He ran for Parliament from Dubai, claiming that he could not return to Japan because the police were investigating him for fraud. While in self-imposed exile, he campaigned and promised to expose dozens of celebrity scandals.

To the surprise of many, he won — running as the candidate of the single-issue NHK Party, which is dedicated to making changes to how Japan’s national broadcaster is funded. But he has missed every session in the House of Councillors since then.

In the meantime, he has maintained diverse interests, balancing his lengthy rants about celebrities with breezy posts about touring La Sagrada Familia in Spain and playing water sports in Thailand, using the hashtag “#endlesssummer.”  Last week, he said he traveled to Turkey, and in videos posted online was seen distributing snacks to children in areas devastated by a February earthquake, in front of a camera crew.

The founder of the NHK Party, Takashi Tachibana, told reporters in January that the police had asked Mr. Higashitani, a fellow party member, to cooperate with investigations related to accusations of defamatory comments and threats he had made in his videos, and that the YouTuber would return to the country in March. (The police declined to comment.)

In February, the House of Councillors demanded that Mr. Higashitani apologize in an open session, a disciplinary act second only to expulsion. He had agreed to do so, only to backtrack on that decision last week, saying that he did not feel safe enough to return, despite having immunity from arrest as a lawmaker.

Mr. Tachibana said last Wednesday that he would step down as head of the party. “As party leader, I will take responsibility for GaaSyy’s failure to keep his promise that he would come back to the upper house to make an apology,” Mr. Tachibana said at a news conference.

He added that the party would be renamed “Seijika Joshi 48 To,” which translates to Politician Girls 48 Party, and that the actress Ayaka Otsu would replace him. Mr. Tachibana said that the party would broaden its goals and would also recruit only female candidates to run for upcoming local elections.

Koichi Nakano, a professor of comparative politics at Sophia University in Tokyo, said that the party’s rebranding was a response to a movement to increase the number of female candidates in elections.

“NHK Party must have thought that they can poke fun at that in a right-wing, misogynist way, by treating female candidates as if they were teen pop idols like AKB48,” Professor Nakano wrote in an email, referring to a popular female pop group.

He added that Mr. Higashitani’s notoriety and what he characterized as the populist appeal of his party got him elected. “It’s unusual, to a degree, but Japan has had its own share of media-celebrities who are complete amateurs of politics, including comedians, actors and pop singers, though none was as unserious as GaaSyy,” Professor Nakano added.

Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus, wrote in an email: “The NHK party, despite rebranding, has achieved little except to register discontent with the establishment and unhappiness with the mandatory fees every household has to pay, even if they don’t watch NHK.”

Muneo Suzuki, who heads a key disciplinary committee in Parliament, told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Higashitani had already been given ample time to correct his behavior, but that he had ultimately undermined the electoral process. “GaaSyy doesn’t understand what democracy means in principle,” he said.

Dozens of protesters, mostly members of the Seijika Joshi 48 Party, rallied in front of the legislature before lawmakers cast votes over whether to expel Mr. Higashitani. Among the 236 lawmakers who attended the session, all but one voted in favor of his ouster.

Mr. Higashitani could not be immediately reached for comment, but in a statement read on the House floor by Satoshi Hamada, a fellow lawmaker, Mr. Higashitani said that his removal was unjust.

“There will continue to be people like me running for office. If you do not want the world you have made to be destroyed, please exclude those people from candidacy from the very beginning,” he wrote in the statement. “I wish the same punishment upon lawmakers who leave their seats immediately after propping up their nameplates and ones who are asleep and don’t show up like myself.”

Tiffany May covers news from Asia. She joined The Times in 2017. @nytmay

Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. @hudidi1

Article
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/world/asia/japan-parliament-youtuber-expelled.html
 

 

Lance Reddick

rest in peace

PHOTO LINK

if you want to make donations to his memory

MOMCares or https://www.momcares.org/

 

 

Stephanie Mills Interview

 

your thoughts? I am just simply a stephanie mills fan

 

GDBEE COLORING PAGES for Black History Month 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

High resolution versions , support gdbee and give what you can please

https://gdbee.gumroad.com/l/coloring2023

 

I have some coloring pages as well in my gallery. Here are a few, enjoy as well

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Princess-Candace-ink-899639286

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Ebonee-in-my-style-ink-shape-897403440

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-26-creepy-clown-ink-896624091

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/My-Cookie-in-Cookie-Run-Style-BW-895979382

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-17-bugs-ink-895211656

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Retrofuturism-pinup-model-R-black-and-white-894908633

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-7-JAck-O-LAntern-ink-894195815

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-5-Black-Cat-Ink-894114250

 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Addietober-Day-11-Crows-ink-894624695

 

GDBEe pages

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest

 

 

CELEBRATING BLACK JOY

 

My thoughts in reply to the source
I don't see a problem at all. But I grew up in a home where my parents worked together to pay bills, to rear me. This concept of the male role or the female role is silly or dysfunctional.
A woman has the right to have a dominant charater type like a man has the same right. 
The following image is shared as a photo of proper gender representation

https://twitter.com/ShadayaKnight/status/1626159504575414274

I don't see the problem with either. If Oprah side her partner/husband wants to appear side to side while Rihanna's partner/husband want to be seen with her in the lead and him being led carrying their child what is the problem? 
I am a heterosexual man, a rare thing I tout , but I do now cause a dysfunctional mentality exist among many, and I argue most, of my fellow heterosexual men. And that is this idea that the man is lessened, or taken out of masculinity, ala emasculated, when he appears in any role where a woman is in a superior posture.
I do not know Rihanna, but if we actually knew each other, and we became intimate, and she said she wanted to have a child side me, and I said yes, I will not feel lessened or emasculated because we are in a photo shoot like the one above. 
I can't even comprehend why I will feel lessened or emasculated. I will not feel embarassed or insulted by Rihanna or the photographer. In the photograph, Rihanna doesn't have a chain around the man's neck. She isn't walking in front disconnected which was a common and still visible married posture in public in Nippon or Japan. 
The best question is, if Rihanna was holding the baby and being led by the male, would that then be an image of proper gender roles by those who judge the Rihanna photo above as emasculating to men? 
Not for me. If my wife, no too easy, if my girlfriend wants to create a baby side me and I concur, then I have no problem at all with her wanting to have such a photo shoot. Notice I didn't mention money. I wouldn't mind this photoshoot. Now if my girlfriend has Rihanna's money, I daresay this photoshoot is warranted. I don't mind being the father whether my girlfriend is rich or poor if we both agree. But, I am not ashamed to say my girlfriend who has joined me in creating a baby, and another baby:), who is a billionaire warrants the photo. I am not less of a man because a woman is a billionaire and I am looking for work/hustling/struggling through my own road. 
I think men who feel emasculated by Rihanna's photo are why so many women who are financially successful don't trust men. Cause many, and i argue most in global humanity, heterosexual men, whether rich or poor, feel/think/believe/know a woman , whether she is financially superior to them or not, needs to act like a housewife. 
I recall a scene in Crazy Rich Asians, I never read the book, when a male character fiscally poorer than the female character he is married to couldn't handle their environment or reality in their community.
My fellow Heterosexual Men, calm down:) Your manhood isn't lessened because a woman can make more money than you, can want children without marrying you, can not need to rely on you for what men forced women to rely on men for in the past. Men in the USA...Embrace the opportunity to have only love as what is needed living side women. Don't undermine women as men in most other places in humanity who seem infatuated to a male dominant gender structure in their community. 
Calm down and be happy women are free. Wouldn't you want your daughter to be able to be whatever she wants and not feel through peer pressure in her mind or where she lives she has to give a man an unfair or unwarranted or unnecessary role to her, just for his ego side the ego of many , and I argue most, in his gender community.

CITATIONS

source

https://twitter.com/ShadayaKnight/status/1626112523190648833

The emasculation of men continues...you can already tell who the man is in this relationship...that dude about to be a proud mother of 2

 

referral
https://twitter.com/MisterLassiter/status/1626639429153738752

 

This guy has 260K plus followers. We are doomed to more of his fragility and stupidity...pretty much forever

IN AMENDMENT to the referral
I oppose the position of the source but I don't think men who are unafraid of women are near extinction. The reality is, the future will have many men who feel/know/think a woman has a natural subservient place. The good news is that the future will also have at least as equally strong spaces for men who oppose that position. 
It isn't doom and gloom. And I comprehend the frustration. I am a heterosexual man. Yeah, lust isn't a sin, it is powerful, necessary, human. And shouldn't be cast aside. Lust all to often plays a huge role in men's, heterosexual men's physical desires for women. The key isn't to delete lust or run away from it or succumb to it, but to embrace love + liking more than lust. For when you love or like a woman, your lust can exist without guiding you to desiring a woman ill. 
 

 

KWL Live Q&A – Setting Up for Publishing Success: an AMA with the KWL Team
Setting Up for Publishing Success – Looking at the Year Ahead

The Kobo Writing Life team is excited to announce our latest Live Q&A on January 26th, 2022, from 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST. KWL Director Tara will be chatting with all of our viewers, alongside author engagement manager and KWL podcast co-host Laura, about how to set up for a successful year of publishing in 2023. If you can’t make it to the event, feel free to comment on this post with your questions and we can ask them for you!   

Hi authors!  

In our first live Q&A of the year, we are going to feature Tara, Kobo Writing Life’s director, Laura, author engagement manager, and Rachel, promotions specialist, as they discuss relevant topics and answer questions sent in by all of YOU, our wonderful community of authors, regarding how best to set up for success in the coming year!

This AMA-style chat is a great opportunity to hear about developments at KWL, learn some new tips and tricks, and gain some inspiration for the publishing year ahead.

We’ll be discussing and answering questions related to the following:

How to make the most of your pre-orders
Reaching new readers – with Kobo Plus and OverDrive
Audiobooks and audiobook marketing
Setting up a successful release schedule
New series, new releases, and opportunities for new authors in 2023
Market research – staying ahead of the seasons
And much more!
We will also have time for questions at the end, so be sure to join the live event and bring your questions! And, as always, happy writing.
https://kobowritinglife.com/2023/01/13/kwl-live-qa-setting-up-for-publishing-success-an-ama-with-kwls-director-and-author-engagement-manager/
 

Finding Your Readers: a KWL Recap
elements
Using Patreon as an Indie Author with Lindsay Buroker
Finding Your Ideal Reader with Sue Campbell
Learning the Habits of your Readers with Emma Chase
https://kobowritinglife.com/2022/12/12/finding-your-readers-a-kwl-recap/