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richardmurray

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    Former Racial Justice Task Force chair explains ballot questions
    By Deanna Garcia New York City
    PUBLISHED 8:40 PM ET Oct. 27, 2022
    With voters hitting the polls this weekend for early voting, New Yorkers will also have the chance to weigh in on four ballot proposals.

    Three of the proposals are for city voters only. They explore how to create a statement of values for the government to form a racial equity office and define how the cost of living is calculated in the city.

    The Racial Justice Task Force, formed under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the wake of the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder, recommended these citywide questions.

    Jennifer Jones Austin, former chair of the city’s Racial Justice Commission, joined Bobby Cuza on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to explain these proposals.

    “We can’t policy our way out of racism, we can’t program our way out of racism,” she said. “But what we can do is look at the structures that have birthed it and perpetuate it and when we look at the laws, the New York City, the charter, is our Constitution.”
    Article
    https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2022/10/28/former-racial-justice-task-force-chair-explains-ballot-questions
    MY THOUGHTS

    Trying to get equality financially between parties who started unevenly is the question. i ask, have any two peoples in one country repaired one being the oppressed with the other the oppressor to become equal kin? does anyone know?

     

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    Democrats block Latina Republican from joining Congressional Hispanic Caucus
    Opinion by Brad Polumbo - Oct 27

    Rep. Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican, made history after taking office as the first female member of Congress who was born in Mexico. You’d think that partisanship aside, the Latina Republican would be considered a win for diversity in Congress.

    You’d be wrong. The Democrat-controlled Congressional Hispanic Caucus is reportedly blocking Flores after she requested to join it.

    “Flores requested to join CHC in early October and was rejected shortly thereafter,” Townhall’s Julio Rosas reports. “Flores is not only first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, but she also represents a district along the U.S.-Mexico border that is overwhelmingly Latino. CHC used to have [Republican] members but they went on to create the Congressional Hispanic Conference as their own version of the CHC in the 2000s.”

    At first glance, this doesn’t make much sense. Flores is indeed Hispanic, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is not supposed to be a partisan entity.

    Per its website, the group exists to address “national and international issues” and “craft policies that impact the Hispanic community,” and “serve as a forum for the Hispanic Members of Congress to coalesce around a collective legislative agenda.” There’s nothing on its about page about only being open to progressives or members of a certain political party. Yet the group denied Flores membership in what’s clearly a partisan snub.

    Flores isn’t having it.

    “As the first Mexican-born American Congresswoman, I thought the Hispanic Caucus would be open in working together,” Flores remarked of the snub. “This denial once again proves a bias towards conservative Latinas that don’t fit their narrative or ideology.”

    It’s hard to see any other explanation.

    The situation is eerily reminiscent of similar snubs from ostensibly neutral (but Democrat-controlled) diversity caucuses. As Rosas notes, Rep. Byron Donalds, a black Florida Republican, was similarly denied admission to the Congressional Black Caucus.

    “The Congressional Black Caucus has a stated commitment to ensuring Black Americans have the opportunity to achieve the American dream,” Donalds said after his snub. “As a newly elected Black Member of Congress, my political party should not exempt me from a seat at the table dedicated to achieving this goal.”

    Whether you politically agree with Flores and Donalds, this is deeply wrong. These partisan acts of discrimination reveal the contempt many Democratic elites actually have for diversity. One is not any more or less black or Hispanic because of how one thinks or how one votes — and these decisions implicitly suggest otherwise.

    That’s bigoted. There’s simply no other word for it.

    If they have any integrity at all, these groups should open up their ranks and actually represent their respective minority communities, which are not partisan or ideological monoliths. If they’re not willing to do that, they should at least rename themselves and reorient their groups’ values to reflect their partisan nature. Anything less is an insult to the diverse Americans they claim to represent and, frankly, pretty racist.

    Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a co-founder of Based-Politics.com, a co-host of the Based Politics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.

    MY THOUGHTS

    Polumbo's argument has a great flaw. The flaw is in all the parties of governance that exist in the USA, especially the largest two. I call the largest two parties of governance in the United States of America, the POAL <party of abraham lincoln, commonly called the republicans> side POAJ <party of andrew jackson , commonly called the democrats>
    Both of those parties, like all the littler ones,  are on racial lines. The problem here is race isn't restricted to phenotype or gender or religion or age. Race/classification/order/ranking are based on any factor. Philosophical races are ... races.
    Functionally while Unfortunately, the populace in the USA likes to not consider philosophical races... races? Why? the populace in the usa doesn't have a physical/financial/geographic/religious binder. The only binder the USA populace can have is philosophical.
    The populace in the USA has majorities in various racial categories, mostly white, mostly christian, mostly hetero, mostly fiscally poor, but none of the majorities are large enough in modernity to say the USA is explicitly any specific category. It is mostly white but not all white. It is mostly of immigrants but humanity outside the usa is even more multiracial so immigration doesn't yield to cohesion in thinking. 
    So all the USA populace has in modernity to bind itself is like mindedness in philosophy as the one racial element that can survive the ever growing multiracial composition.
    But, philosophy can be more fracturing than any other racial category, as the war between the states proved in USA history. 
    And, this is the problem  with the caucasus. The parties of governance each governing official is a part of is racists, based on philosophy on how to govern, sequentially, how can the caucasus be absent a similar racial reality.
    The question going forward is, why not have a latino party of governance, why not have a negro party of governance?
    A caucus is designed to represent a union across parties but what about making parties for those agendas? 

    ARTICLE
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-block-latina-republican-from-joining-congressional-hispanic-caucus/ar-AA13r419?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=25415f3082f940ba832dcd62cbd3c117

     

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    “AND THERE WAS LIGHT: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE”
    NOVEMBER 02, 2022 AT 6:30 PM

    Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and historian Jon Meacham takes fresh look at Abraham Lincoln in a new book “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” Meacham describes how a president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Tonight, Meacham opens up on the former president’s leadership and explains why he chose to dissect his legacy now.

    TRanscript or Video 
    https://www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/2022/11/abraham-lincoln-and-american-struggle-whqkwd/

    MY THOUGHTS

     

    Lincoln was challenged harder than any other president in terms of domestic issues. I argue, that his murder conveniently didn't allow him to shape his success. People forget Lincoln never got to be president in internal peace. and that is important cause the peace after the war between the states needed great management and didn't get it. 

     

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    Chaka Khan Reveals Why She Turned Down Steven Spielberg For 'The Color Purple'
    The iconic singer shared who she could have played in the award-winning film.
    Jazmin Tolliver
    By 
    Jazmin Tolliver
    Nov 4, 2022, 09:10 PM EDT

    Chaka Khan wasn’t too keen on the opportunity to star in “The Color Purple.”

    The iconic singer, who appeared on “The Jennifer Hudson Show” Friday, said she turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer for a lead role in the beloved 1985 film.

    “Funny you should ask that,” Khan said after Hudson asked her about projects she had declined during her long career. “Well, you know I turned down ‘The Color Purple,’ the movie.”

    Hudson, who appeared shocked, replied, “What?”

    Khan said Spielberg approached her about being in the movie when she was “20, 22 tops,” but nervousness and an aversion to studying kept her from jumping on the opportunity.

    “I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid,” the Grammy-winning singer said. ”I was like, ‘Oh God, a movie, oh my God.’”

    “I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’” Khan added.

    The “Through the Fire” singer said that the Oscar-winning director asked her to play Celie, the role that Whoopi Goldberg ultimately portrayed in the critically acclaimed film.

    After Khan revealed who Spielberg asked her to play, Hudson told her audience: “Imagine Chaka Khan as Celie, y’all?”

    “Woulda been hot,” Khan replied.

    “That would have been a whole other Color Purple,” Hudson quipped.

    “The Color Purple”, which starred Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover and Goldberg, was produced by Spielberg and Quincy Jones.

    Based on Alice Walker’s classic 1982 novel, the film centers on Black women from the rural South during the early part of the last century, trying to survive and thrive under cruel conditions.

    The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Goldberg and Best Supporting Actress for both Winfrey and Margaret Avery.

    A new movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” produced by Spielberg and directed by Blitz Bazawule, is currently in the works.

    The upcoming musical is set to star Taraji P. Henson as Shug Avery, Fantasia Taylor as Celie, Colman Domingo as Mister, Danielle Brooks as Sofia, Halle Bailey as Nettie, Corey Hawkins as Harpo and singer H.E.R. as Speak.

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    well, I think she lied on herself. she said "“I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid ....I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’ ""  But Chaka your uncle is quincy jones and you have learned tons of songs, and how to sing them. no,she mischaracterized herself. She likes studying and tests in terms of music, not literature. Chaka khan knows how many songs now? learning the script is hard:) The truth is revealed in the blues brothers. Chaka khan played the head of james browns chorus. She played herself. James brown played the head of the church, himself. the only musicians in blues brothers that some can argue had to act was aretha franklin, but aretha franklin does like to cook and has a strong temperament. Chaka khan is comfortable playing herself. In modernity so many artists push being the multimedia agent and many fail at it. But in the role spielberg wanted for her in the color purple, chaka khan who is very independent minded or strongwilled, former black panther of self defense member, would have to play, small/weak/little/abused Celie who does turn around but I don't think chaka khan felt comfortable with celie. and in defense a better thespian in whoopie goldberg got it. As a comedian who did one person shows, whoopie goldberg had experience shifting in character on stage.  I want to end with , Speilberg wasn't wrong. The man danny glover played would choose a woman that look like chaka khan over whoopie goldberg. He is a wife beater, a black land owner in the usa when it wasn't... common:) <meaning whitey kill black landowners> so.. he want a trophy woman, and i apologize to any woman who may read this and feel insulted, but a trophy woman has physical requirements. Chaka khan in her 20s large or firm breast/buttocks/hourglass shape, natural hair, is what you want over whoopie goldberg if you are looking for a trophy wife. 

     

    IN AMENDMENT

    ..Someone pointed out Chaka khan couldn't had been asked about the color purple in 1975 when she was 20 or 22 so... . I don't know anything about chaka khan's age. The color purple was published in 1982, so spielberg couldn't had asked anyone to be in the movie in 1981 or earlier. And I checked , the blues brothers was made in 1980. I wonder her experience on set


    ARTICLE
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chaka-khan-the-color-purple_n_63659fdae4b08f849aab6d9b

     

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    Former presidents of Gabon and France, Omar Bongo (L) and Jacques Chirac (R)

     

    Why ex-French colonies are joining the Commonwealth
    Published
    29 June

    Gabon and Togo have moved to strengthen their diplomatic armoury in a bid to ease their reliance on France.

    They have been admitted to what was originally founded as a club of former British colonies but has been steadily diversifying its composition. These two small francophone African nations are now the Commonwealth's 55th and 56th members.

    Rwanda joined in 2009 and Mozambique came into the group in 1995. None of these states had particular past historical ties to the UK.

    The fact that they have opted to join the Commonwealth suggests that they see the organisation as a useful network of diplomatic and cultural influence, and for exercising "soft power" on the world stage.

    It also testifies to the importance of English as a language of business, science and international politics and the necessity of building a range of connections to support economic development and get diplomatic messages heard.

    For Gabon and Togo, Rwanda offers an encouraging precedent: just 13 years after joining, it has now hosted the organisation's summit meeting, attended by heads of state and government from all over the world, though there were some notable absentees, including South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa.

    Youth appeal
    Gabon and Togo's entry to the Commonwealth also comes at a time when the relationship between Africa and France has become so contentious.

    A growing number of younger urban citizens demand an end to the CFA franc currency which is pegged to the euro under an arrangement guaranteed by the government in Paris. The French military presence in the Sahel is also controversial.

    So joining the world's largest anglophone bloc is likely be popular among many young Togolese and Gabonese.

    That helps to modernise the image of two regimes that were for many years perceived as particularly emblematic of the traditionally close relationships between leaders in Africa and in France - "la françafrique".

    There was a time when such a development would have provoked angst among Paris policymakers fearing an erosion of influence south of the Sahara. But today's French governments take a much more relaxed view of such trends.

    For the same arguments about diversifying contacts and building up new vehicles of international connection have also fuelled the steady expansion of the Commonwealth's francophone sister, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

    It actually claims 88 member states and governments - including Rwanda, whose former Foreign Minister Louis Mushikiwabo is its secretary general. Its regional offices for West and central Africa are in fact hosted by Togo and Gabon, and it too is growing.

    In March Ghana's Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey announced that her country, a former British colony which has been an associate member of the OIF since 2006, would complete the transition to full membership of the organisation.

    Ghana, with strong democratic institutions and a dynamic economy, will be one of a growing number of countries that are full and active members of both the Commonwealth and the Francophonie - for solid diplomatic and practical reasons.

    Most of its neighbours in West Africa are French-speaking and the government has been taking steps to equip its young people to make the most of this economic, cultural and political reality - for example, there are now 50 bilingual schools.

    Nor should one forget the significant development of the small but still influential Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) - most of whose members are African.

    Democracy tests
    But all three groupings - the CPLP, the Francophonie and the Commonwealth - face the delicate challenge of how to promote good governance, democracy and human rights - an issue with which the African Union and some of the continent's regional blocs, notably the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), are also wrestling.

    Both the Commonwealth and the OIF send experts to help member states improve their electoral systems, but when it comes to membership conditions they tend to opt for inclusion and gentle encouragement rather than the assertion of a strict line.

    Togo was ruled by the notoriously brutal dictator President Gnassingbé Eyadéma from 1967 to 2005, and has since then been led by his son, Faure Gnassingbé.

    Gabon's President, Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba, is the son of Omar Bongo, head of state from 1967 to 2009, who swam with the trend towards multi-party politics in the 1990s but took care to maintain the predominance of his ruling party and the role of his family in government. Before succeeding to the presidency, Ali Bongo was defence minister.

    The Commonwealth's official press release announcing the admission of Togo and Gabon stated: "The eligibility criteria for Commonwealth membership, amongst other things, state that an applicant country should demonstrate commitment to democracy and democratic processes, including free and fair elections and representative legislatures."

    Yet Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, although lauded for overseeing undoubted social and economic development progress, is accused by rights groups of being uncompromisingly authoritarian in the exercise of power. Critics say the opposition is cowed and marginalised.

    Mr Kagame claims his government upholds human rights, and there is "nobody in Rwanda who is in prison that should not be there".

    Gabon will face a key barometer of governance with next year's presidential elections. But for Togo, there is a fairly immediate test.

    The very day of the Commonwealth announcement, the authorities banned a planned demonstration by the opposition Dynamique Monseigneur Kpodzro (DMK) movement to protest against the rising cost of living, and what it called bad governance and injustice.

    The DMK has rescheduled the protest for 16 July. It will be interesting to see whether Togo's new status as a Commonwealth member prods the government into taking a more lenient line.

    Paul Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61967842

     


     

     

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    Her #1 - First Impressions
    The mysterious immortal known as Her finds herself in a new time, a new life, but threats from her long past still want her dead.
     
    from
    Malachi Bailey
    Washington, DC
    Hailing from Long Island, NY, Malachi Bailey has always been unabashedly a lover of books! His passion for superhero stories paved the way to online superhero role-playing where he developed his craft. He is currently the writer and creator of HER, a novel series, and an ongoing comic with Wingless Comics.
     
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    Various constitutional amendments prohibit denying voting rights to women, racial minorities and other groups. But the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote.Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

    Does the Constitution Guarantee a Right to Vote? The Answer May Surprise You.
    For decades, the courts and Congress have taken the lead in expanding the legal right to vote, but the founders never explicitly included it.

    By Michael Wines
    Oct. 26, 2022
    The Constitution makes reference to voting 15 times in the original document and another 22 in the amendments. But somewhat surprisingly, none of those mentions makes an explicit declaration that Americans have a right to vote — something many politicians and their supporters consider fundamental to democracy. Here’s a look at why that is, and what rights voters actually have.

    What did the founding fathers believe about the right to vote?
    If it seems odd that such a fundamental right was not enshrined in writing, the explanation is simple enough: The authors of the Constitution, many of them deeply suspicious of universal suffrage, could not agree on a single standard for the right to cast a ballot.

    For all their talk about “We, the people,” most of the founding fathers wanted to limit voting rights to property owners like themselves, the Harvard law professor and historian Michael J. Klarman wrote in his 2016 book “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.”

    Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, argued that “the ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest” as could children, Dr. Klarman wrote. James Madison warned that voting should be restricted to the wealthy, “the safest repositories of republican liberty,” because the poorer classes would be swayed by populist appeals. Benjamin Franklin, the most prominent dissenter, pointed out that it was the commoners who had fought for and won American independence and that the rich were hardly immune to corrupting influences.

    In the end, the property requirement failed to make it into the Constitution in part because many states already had extended the franchise beyond landholders. Disenfranchising those voters, the constitutional convention delegates feared, could wreck what already seemed to be shaky prospects for approving the new Constitution.

    Their compromise left decisions on voter qualifications to the states, but it placed the choice of United States senators and the president in the hands of state legislators, not voters. That changed in the early 19th century, as state legislatures increasingly delegated the choice of presidential electors to ordinary voters, and in 1913, after the 17th Amendment decreed the popular election of senators.

    Does a right to vote exist today?
    Various constitutional amendments prohibit denying voting rights to women, racial minorities, citizens over age 18 and people unable to pay election-related fees like poll taxes.

    But the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. Rather, the Supreme Court has recognized an implicit right to vote via the 14th Amendment, enacted in 1868 after the Civil War, which aimed to protect the civil rights of people who had been enslaved and guarantees “the equal protection of the laws.”

    The court has recognized it in a handful of decisions dealing with the meaning of those amendments. “Undeniably the Constitution of the United States protects the right of all qualified citizens to vote, in state as well as in federal elections,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the historic 1964 ruling, Reynolds v. Sims, that cemented the concept that every vote has an equal value. But even a Supreme Court ruling falls short of the guarantees of rights such as freedom of speech and religion that are embedded in the Bill of Rights.

    In practice, the Constitution leaves most decisions about the ballot to state and federal legislators, saying that the “times, places and manner” of elections are state matters unless Congress sets nationwide standards.

    What most Americans see as an inalienable right to vote is actually the product of decades of court rulings and legislative decisions, most of them — but hardly all — slowly expanding a legal guarantee of the ability to cast a ballot. Congress could give everyone the right to vote by mail, but since it has not, mail balloting is subject to a jumble of state laws. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote, but by then, Wyoming had been letting women vote for 50 years, even when it was a territory, not a state.

    What does the future hold?
    For decades, courts and Congress have taken the lead in upholding a legal right to vote — in the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in the 1966 Supreme Court case, Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which outlawed poll taxes; in federal legislation in 1993 that set ground rules for registering new voters and removing existing voters from the rolls.

    In lawsuits seeking to enforce or protect existing election laws, the 14th Amendment’s implicit guarantee of voting rights has become a mainstay of plaintiffs’ arguments.

    “As long as those precedents are respected, I think it’s fair to say there’s a constitutional protection of a basic right to vote,” Edward B. Foley, a leading scholar of election law at Ohio State University, said in an interview.

    But the evolution of an increasingly conservative Supreme Court with a skeptical approach to voting rights and an emerging record of upending precedents means that the current interpretation of the right to vote is no longer a sure bet, he said.

    The court is considering two major voting cases this term — one that could limit the Voting Rights Act’s power to remedy racial disparities in political districts, the other arguing that state courts have no authority to overturn legislative decisions on political redistricting and election laws — that could reverse once-solid precedents.

    Indeed, what most voters would consider a foundational right — electing a president — exists nowhere in the Constitution, which says presidential electors may be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

    Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate filed legislation last year that would establish a statutory right to vote, but neither bill has received a hearing. And for years, voting-rights advocates have pressed for a new constitutional amendment affirming citizens’ right to cast a ballot. So far, it’s all been to no avail.

    Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/article/voting-rights-constitution.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    The problem is relates to Roe vs Wade, Roe vs Wade is a supreme court decision. the odd thing about Roe vs wade is how people treat it like a legislative act or an amendment to the constitution. it is a decision by the supreme court which the supreme court is totally free or legally allowed to change. 
    Voting isn't guaranteed in the usa. But the issue here is how the usa came to be? 
    PEople speak of democracy, rule of the people. But the people in the thirteen colonies did not gain the rule based on voting or elections, they gained it by arms, violence, murder, death.
    PEople in the USA today speak as if the USA came about through some non violent merit. It came about through killing/death/murder/war, that is where the rule of the people always is. No matter what government style, the people rule through violence. It is the cheap readers of history who mistake  appeased populaces as symbols of the masses power to rule itself. 
    It isn't. If the masses want a king/a council/a clan/elected officials, the masses make it happen. 

     

    How Elon Musk Became a Geopolitical Chaos Agent
    The world’s richest man has inserted himself in some of the world’s most combustible conflicts.

    By Cade Metz, Adam Satariano and Chang Che
    Cade Metz, Adam Satariano and Chang Che reported this story from San Francisco, London and Seoul.

    Published Oct. 26, 2022
    Updated Oct. 28, 2022

    In the last four weeks, Elon Musk has offered a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine that outraged Ukrainian officials. He has posted a tweet about Iranian internet access that exposed government protesters to a phishing scheme. He has also suggested in a newspaper interview that China could be appeased if it were given partial control of Taiwan. An official in Taipei demanded that he retract his suggestion.

    Mr. Musk has in recent months emerged as a new, chaotic actor on the stage of global politics. While plenty of billionaire executives like to tweet their two cents on world affairs, none can come close to Mr. Musk’s influence and ability to cause trouble. He has sometimes waded into situations even after he was advised not to, and has already left behind plenty of messes.

    While the bulk of Mr. Musk’s wealth comes from his stake in his electric car company, Tesla, his influence stems largely from his rocket company, SpaceX, which runs the Starlink satellite network. Starlink can beam internet service to conflict zones and geopolitical hot spots, and it has become an essential tool of the Ukrainian army.

    Mr. Musk’s influence will grow with the close of the deal to buy Twitter. He has called himself a free speech absolutist, and he is expected to take a light touch to moderating Twitter’s content.

    His critics — and there are many — worry that it is difficult to separate Mr. Musk’s opinions from his business interests, especially when it comes to Tesla, which is increasingly dependent on China.

    “Technology has become central to geopolitics,” said Karen Kornbluh, a director with the German Marshall Fund, a geopolitical think tank, and a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “It is fascinating and it is messy and there is Elon Musk in the middle of it.”

    In some cases, Mr. Musk has been a boon. When he provided Starlink internet access in Ukraine earlier in the year and funded at least part of the hardware and service, he equipped both civilians and soldiers with a crucial means of communication during the ongoing conflict with Russia.

    But the messages he has delivered have also caused problems. This month, in a Twitter post, he said he could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink, before suddenly reversing course.

    Late last month, Mr. Musk attended a private event in Aspen called The Weekend. Organized partly by the former Google chief executive and government adviser Eric Schmidt, the event brought together American business and political leaders, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Al Gore and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford.

    At lunchtime, under a tent on a golf course, Mr. Musk took the stage for a sweeping conversation with the billionaire businessman David Rubenstein, according to two people who attended the event and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    At the end of the conversation, to the surprise of many in attendance, Mr. Musk proposed a peace plan for the war in Ukraine that would allow Russia to annex Ukrainian land, seeming to align himself with the Kremlin.

    The idea outraged many at the event, according to attendees. The next day, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to President Biden, gave a video talk at the event and a questioner raised the issue of Mr. Musk’s peace plan. Mr. Sullivan did not comment on Mr. Musk’s remarks at the event, according to a National Security Council spokesperson. Nonetheless, Mr. Musk revealed his plan 10 days later on Twitter. The Kremlin publicly supported the idea.

    President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his top aides fiercely rebuked Mr. Musk’s plan. But his shifting positions put them in a bind: Starlink terminals have become a crucial means of communication for the Ukrainian Army.

    Mr. Musk did not respond to several requests for comment.

    In mid-September, as the army advanced into southern territories previously occupied by Russia, it lost access to Starlink in some areas near the front lines, four people with knowledge of the matter said. Two of them said this was because Mr. Musk had “geofenced” the service so that it was available only in certain areas. It was not clear why the satellite system was not working, and others in Ukraine reported that it was working fine.

    Mr. Musk has discussed the matter with both the Ukrainian government and the U.S. government in an effort to determine the locations where the army will have access to Starlink, according to the people. A National Security Council spokesperson said that the council, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and “officials across the U.S. government have spoken to Starlink and answered questions about U.S. policy like we do with all companies.”

    This month, Mr. Musk delivered more uncertainty to Ukraine when he said he could not keep paying for Starlink service to the country, making it seem like he was shouldering the expense. In fact, the United States, Britain and Poland have paid SpaceX for at least part of the Starlink cost, according to a document outlining the expenditures reviewed by The New York Times.

    “He has to decide whether Starlink is a commercial service that provides sometimes lifesaving technology to its customers or a service that is highly dependent on the geopolitical interests of its management and, thus, unreliable for customers who have concerns over national security,” said Dimitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitical think tank in Washington.

    While he was in Aspen laying out his peace plan for the war in Ukraine, Mr. Musk also waded into unrest in Iran.

    As protests spread across the country and the authorities responded by blocking internet access in some areas, he appeared to come to the rescue. “Activating Starlink,” he said in a Twitter message after the U.S. government lifted some sanctions that limited the ability of American tech companies to operate in Iran so that they could aid protesters.

    Starlink offered the potential to bypass the government’s blockade of land-based internet connections that had taken Iranians in many cities offline.

    But as many Iranians soon learned, Mr. Musk’s promise did not hold up. Left unsaid by Mr. Musk was any context on what was needed to get Starlink up and running, how long it would take and why Iranian government restrictions would make it nearly impossible to offer the service widely inside Iran.

    While Starlink remained unavailable in Iran, hackers believed to have links to the government began a phishing campaign, sending messages inside social media channels with links claiming to provide access to Starlink, according to Amir Rashidi, a digital rights expert from Iran. Rather than providing access to Mr. Musk’s satellite system, the links were malware that gobbled up information from the users’ phones, said Mr. Rashidi, who analyzed at least five versions of the malware.

    A small amount of Starlink internet access is now available in Iran with equipment smuggled across its border, Mr. Rashidi said. That is creating additional concerns that the authorities will be able to identify data transmitted because the satellite signals may be traceable to individuals on the ground.

    Mr. Rashidi, who fled the country in 2009, commended Mr. Musk for trying to help but said his tactics were “very irresponsible.”

    “It was just someone who wanted to jump up to say, ‘I’m doing something good,’ without understanding what the consequences would be,” he said.

    Mr. Musk also recently stepped into perhaps the world’s most delicate geopolitical hot spot: Taiwan.

    Tensions between China and Taiwan pose major risks to Mr. Musk’s business empire. Tesla operates a manufacturing facility in Shanghai that produces as much as 50 percent of the company’s new cars. The Beijing government tightly controls how Western companies operate in the country, and observers have long worried about how Tesla’s dependence on China could affect Mr. Musk’s political positions.

    This month, Mr. Musk confirmed that he faced pressure from Beijing, when he told the Financial Times that the Chinese government had made it clear that it disapproved of his offering Starlink internet service in Ukraine. Beijing sought assurances, he said, that he would not offer the service in China.

    Then he offered a way of easing the tensions: handing some control of Taiwan to China.

    The comment, which breaks sharply with the policy of the United States and its allies, drew swift rebukes from Taiwanese politicians.

    In a phone interview with The New York Times, Chao Tien-Lin, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwanese legislature’s foreign affairs and defense committee, called on Mr. Musk to retract his statement. “If he does not, I will sincerely advise not just Taiwan but all consumers in liberal democratic countries to boycott Tesla and its related products,” he said.

    Some have pointed out that if a military conflict breaks out between the two sides, the Taiwanese, like the Ukrainians, may call on Mr. Musk to provide an emergency means of communication with satellite internet. But given Mr. Musk’s public stance on the situation and links to China, Starlink may not be a viable option.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/technology/elon-musk-geopolitics-china-ukraine.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS
    IT goes back to the cake and eat it too. People want the USA to have technological dominance, but they also want individual fiscal possibility, but then they want all the rich to be champions of cohesion/peace/philanthropy. 
    You can't have your cake and eat it too. no one can. And some people as the metoo era proved are beyond being cancelled.

    1. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      now1.png

      What happened after Nate Parker’s film career imploded
      The ‘Birth of a Nation’ star and director has been mostly out of the public eye since 2016, when a rape charge from his college days resurfaced. He says he has grown and wants to do better. Will anyone believe him?
      Image without a caption
      By Ann Hornaday
      Updated November 11, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EST|Published November 11, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

      “All I see are the things I regret.”

      On a 99-degree day in August, the actor and filmmaker Nate Parker sits on a Kelly green velvet couch in the living room of the house he shares with his wife, Sarah, and their five daughters, recalling one of many disastrous moments in 2016.

      If Parker’s name rings a bell, it’s likely to be a distant one. In 2007, he was being called a young Denzel, having delivered a breakout performance in Washington’s “The Great Debaters.” In 2010, he was in the running to play the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma” (the role ultimately went to his friend David Oyelowo). In 2016, when he made his directorial debut with the period drama “The Birth of a Nation,” he embodied hope for a new, more-inclusive Hollywood.

      Then, everything changed.

      For the past six years, if Parker has been thought of at all, it’s been through the scrim of vaguely disturbing memories: an emerging director whose career was derailed when stories about a rape charge from his college days resurfaced, even though he’d been acquitted. A charismatic actor whose industry and public turned against him when his responses to those stories — rekindled more than a year before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement — fell lamentably short. An unwitting avatar for famous men who would face their own personal and professional reckonings: initially defensive, then forced — out of self-interest, sincerity or some combination thereof — to contemplate where he went wrong.

      And, now, a person who a cadre of friends and influential allies believes deserves a second chance. “I’ve watched him become someone I’m even more proud to call my friend now than six years ago,” Oyelowo says. “Even though I believe him when he says he didn’t do what he was accused of, I think it’s pretty clear he put himself in a situation that was very compromised, was not morally right, was not protective of [his accuser], and these are all things he can see clearly now.”

      Parker insists that his understanding of guilt and innocence has evolved. “In my 42-year-old understanding, I can say without hesitation that, while I’m innocent of any criminal charges or acts, I can’t say that I didn’t do anything morally wrong,” he says.

      But to some observers, his account of personal growth does not reflect the self-awareness necessary for true accountability. “I’m not sure Nate Parker deserves this platform,” says Sharon Loeffler, the older sister of Parker’s accuser. “This is nothing but a distraction, and it takes away from what we should really be talking about, which is overwhelming disdain for women being at an all-time high.”

      Oyelowo, who has made Parker’s public rehabilitation something of a personal cause in recent years, initiated this exclusive interview, an invitation that was accepted only after Parker agreed that no conditions would be imposed and nothing would be off-limits. This is not a comeback story. It’s not a story about resolution or redemption. This is a story about someone in the middle of a process that, even at its most imperfect and unfinished, illuminates crucial questions facing Hollywood — and society at large — as people accused of past harms have been identified, called out and marginalized. Among those questions is whether there can ever be a path back and whether there should be a path back. If so, who decides what it should look like and when it’s complete?

      And then there’s the most vexing question of all: When someone says they’ve changed, how can we know it’s genuine?

      Regret and embarrassment
      It’s difficult to overstate the initial rapturous reception of “The Birth of a Nation.” Parker’s film, about Nat Turner and the rebellion of enslaved people he led in 1831, had been a sensation at Sundance in January 2016, with Fox Searchlight paying a record $17.5 million for what the studio considered a surefire Oscar contender. The movie had electrified movie-industry insiders, who saw it as a much-needed corrective in the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign aimed at exposing Hollywood’s racist and exclusionary culture.

      The following summer, as the Oscar push for “The Birth of a Nation” was starting in earnest, stories began to circulate about an episode from Parker’s past.

      In 1999, when he was a sophomore at Pennsylvania State University, Parker was accused of raping an 18-year-old freshman while she was intoxicated and allegedly unconscious. His friend and wrestling teammate, Jean McGianni Celestin, who would go on to share a story credit on “The Birth of a Nation,” was accused of assaulting the young woman along with Parker. Parker, who had had consensual sex with the woman before the incident, was found not guilty by a jury after being represented by a public defender. Celestin was found guilty, but his conviction was overturned on appeal and he was not retried. Their accuser later sued Penn State, saying it did not adequately protect her from the harassment and intimidation she said she suffered at the hands of Parker and Celestin; the university settled for $17,500. (Celestin could not be reached for comment.)

      Parker responded to questions about the case during a Virginian-Pilot interview about “The Great Debaters.” As Washington Post reporter Elahe Izadi noted in 2016, the unsealed 1999 case was referred to on Parker’s Wikipedia page long before “The Birth of a Nation” made its debut. But, as the 2016 awards season got underway, more graphic and troubling details resurfaced, with a tragic postscript: Parker’s accuser had taken her own life in 2012, after a downward spiral that some of her family members have said started with her 1999 encounter with Parker and Celestin.

      Should Nate Parker‘s rape case make you rethink seeing ‘The Birth of a Nation‘?

      When Parker heard of his accuser’s death, he expressed condolences in a Facebook post; just days earlier, he had conducted interviews with the trade outlets Variety and Deadline in an effort to address his past. But rather than grappling with that past honestly and self-critically, Parker was seen by many as alternately evasive, egotistical and manipulative. (He took his then-6-year-old daughter to one interview.) “[E]verything he says and does troubles me,” Roxane Gay wrote in the New York Times, referring to Parker’s habit of referring to the 1999 episode as a “painful moment” in his life. “Most of what he has to say about that ‘painful moment’ involves how he felt, how he was affected. The solipsism is staggering.”

      Parker says he looks back at that period with “regret and embarrassment,” and adds, “So much of that environment was new, and unpredictable. I was struggling daily to understand what was happening.”

      He takes one of what will be several long pauses.

      “I thought in those moments, ‘Why can’t anyone empathize with me?’ Only to realize, as I’ve gone through this journey, that I had no empathy for those I had triggered, or survivors around the world that expected more, some of them my fans. Or my accuser.”

      The word “journey” will come up often over the course of a 2½-hour interview and a nearly one-hour follow-up. It’s Parker’s word for an experience that started in 2017 as a quest for answers, but one he claims has deepened into something more meaningful and transformative. “The first wave was personal introspection, and then the second wave … was how to be intentional about doing something about my wrong behavior,” he says. “If I believed the way I approached [that behavior] was wrong, then what was I going to do to try to fix it?”

      ‘He became radioactive’
      “The Birth of a Nation” limped through its theatrical release during the fall of 2016, earning mixed-to-positive reviews and a modest $15 million at the box office. Meanwhile, the debates surrounding Parker became a flash point for discussions of campus sexual assault, what constitutes agency and consent, separating art from the artist, and the complicated historical intersection of racism and sexism. The movie received no Oscar nominations. By the spring of 2017, Parker was at home, where, he says, “it got very quiet.”

      For Nate Parker and ‘Birth of a Nation,’ separating artist from the art may be impossible

      “He had become almost entirely isolated,” recalls Oyelowo, who has been close with Parker since they starred together in 2012’s “Red Tails.” “People who he had called friends or thought of as friends, desperate not to be caught on the wrong side of this, stopped calling. He became radioactive.”

      With the phone that had rung incessantly now silent, Parker had little choice but to set career concerns aside and ruminate on his mistakes. He called Oyelowo and asked, “What do I do now?” Oyelowo had one answer: “I said, ‘Let’s go sit down with some people who I know will take my call, and let’s just go and listen.’ ”

      The first person they contacted was Octavia Spencer, with whom they met for two hours at her home. The Oscar-winning actress “was very open and generous and forthright with her opinion,” Oyelowo says. “She expressed having been disappointed in some of what she saw [from Nate] but, as I anticipated … within those two hours, she saw Nate for who he actually is, as opposed to what had been projected into the world through sound bites and headlines.” (Spencer confirmed the meeting but did not respond to The Post’s requests for an interview.)

      All of those early conversations were with women, Parker recalls, many of whom felt betrayed and upset by his indignant and self-protective stance during the “Birth of a Nation” rollout. “I began to understand that some of that anger [in 2016] was rooted in my silencing of [women] and their trauma,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about who outside myself was being impacted by [my words], or feeling silenced.”

      As Parker continued to pursue conversations, he saw that “a great majority of the people I was speaking to were survivors themselves,” he says. “I realized this is much closer to me than I anticipated. And then I started talking to people in my family, and realizing that there are people … very close to me that had experienced sexual assault, rape, violence. And the more I learned, the more I felt responsible. The more I felt ashamed.”

      In 2018, Parker began consulting with an educator and activist who works in gender and racial justice and the prevention of violence against women. Through that individual, as well as his church, Parker contacted organizations in the Los Angeles area that work with victims of human trafficking, as well as domestic abuse and sexual violence.

      “You don’t just walk through the doors of these places and say, ‘Sit me down with survivors,’ ” he says. “What actually happens, or what happened with me, was there was a series of conversations, or visiting sites where there are no survivors — until you realize that the very people who are touring you around are survivors themselves.” As he listened to the women’s stories, Parker says, lessons sank in “about the importance of bodily autonomy and self-determination, and what happens to people when those things are taken away from them. You hear about the disconnection from the world and relationships, and in some instances the disconnection from themselves.”

      He began to make connections between his behavior as a 19-year-old and the stories he was hearing from survivors, he said. “When I think back to my 19-year-old self … I absolutely see how [the] rules around what is masculine, and what is acceptable and what is encouraged, create destructive environments,” he says. “When I think about what I would tell my 19-year-old self, I’d say, ‘Reject those rules.’ ”

      Gradually, Parker began to offer his services as a volunteer with the organizations he had visited. “It’s not like a soup line,” he explains. “You email or text and say, ‘Is there anything that I can come and support, or anything I can do?’ ” His work, he says, “almost always involves funding.” Last month, Parker hosted a dinner at his home to help raise funds and awareness for a nonprofit organization that provides support and housing for survivors of human trafficking. At other times, he has collected “clothing or furniture, whatever can be done to create safe spaces for people. A lot of survivors have had to deal with foster care, have had to deal with a family dynamic that has either been nonexistent or broken apart.”

      Social impact strategist Jotaka Eaddy, whose friendship with Parker started when they both volunteered for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and deepened when she worked for former NAACP president and CEO Ben Jealous, says she has seen “a lot of growth and evolution” in Parker in the past six years. “What I appreciate most about Nate has been his willingness to learn, his willingness to ask hard questions and, most importantly, be open to hard truths,” she says. “And he did it not for any gain but to be a better human.”

      Men have a role to play
      As compelling as Parker’s story is, certain aspects are impossible to corroborate: The educator/activist and organizations he says he’s been working with insist on remaining anonymous, to maintain privacy for their organizations, staff and the survivors with whom they work. Several times over the course of two interviews, Parker goes off the record, afraid that he’ll be seen as virtue signaling or sounding like a victim, but also concerned he’ll inadvertently destroy the trust he’s built. “One of the first things that was made clear to me with these organizations was that they were not interested in something that would be used to exploit them,” he says. “Until I’m asked publicly by one of these organizations, I will respect to the T their wishes. I will operate in such a way that I am invisible, outside of how I can be of service.”

      Told of Parker’s volunteer work, Shaunna Thomas, a founder and the executive director of the domestic abuse survivors advocacy group UltraViolet, notes that “it’s exceedingly rare that we see people who have engaged in harmful behavior [engage in that work] in a way that isn’t about repositioning themselves for power.” But, she adds, “[t]hat doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. … It’s good for men, especially, to see that they have a role to play, whether they’ve caused harm or not.”

      It gets trickier when the focus shifts to the question of accountability, especially as it pertains to the events that brought Parker to this point: the early hours of Aug. 21, 1999, when he and Celestin allegedly assaulted an 18-year-old woman who was too intoxicated to give consent. Parker says that although he was found not guilty, he does not consider himself blameless. “I think there were a number of moral failures when I was 19, [including] that environment that I created, that were wrong,” he says. “And I deeply regret those things.”

      Pressed about what “those things” were, Parker speaks of his accuser: “I failed her when it came to building her self-esteem, or recognizing in her insecurities that I could have supported her, rather than used those insecurities to … convince her to do things in the relationship that were solely beneficial to me. And I’m sorry for those things.”

      Parker declines to go into any more detail when it comes to affirmatively stating what he did wrong in 1999, he says out of respect for his accuser’s memory. Although he adds he would like to apologize to her relatives, including for not properly expressing his condolences when he heard she had died, he has not taken steps to contact them. “The last thing I want to do is enter into the lives of her family members and create more pain rather than healing,” he says.

      Loeffler is dubious. “My bar is high because of the aftermath I live in daily,” she says, referring to her sister’s experience at Penn State and the publicity surrounding her life and death. Loeffler believes the decades of stress have culminated in health issues that have left her unable to escape a toxic relationship and gain her independence, much like her sister. And she feels compelled to speak about the collective fallout. “My sister never would have hid,” she says. “She wanted justice and to be heard.”

      When the person Parker admits that he harmed isn’t here to speak for herself, can there be real accountability? Experts in restorative justice — wherein someone who has been harmed meets with the person who harmed them to receive acknowledgment, validation and an apology — insist that there are options.

      Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes expert and a professor of criminal justice at California State University at Fullerton — and a rape survivor herself — has often used a vicarious form of restorative justice when a perpetrator or victim is unable or unwilling to participate. In those sessions, someone who experienced a similar harm volunteers to be a proxy.

      “We help them name [the harm they caused]; we help them write an actual amends,” Ackerman says of working with perpetrators. Told of Parker’s situation, she says, “I would work for months before he ever sat down with a survivor, and make sure he really understands the work.”

      Asked whether he thinks a similar process might be useful in addressing the personal moral failings to which he has referred, Parker takes another long pause. “I’d have to think more about the question to give you an answer that’s helpful,” he says.

      A change in focus
      Parker has been mostly absent from Hollywood since 2016 — he fired his management and publicity team that year — but managed to direct two more movies. “American Skin,” in which he stars as the father of a victim of a police shooting, premiered in 2019 at the Venice Film Festival, where Spike Lee supported Parker at a news conference for the film. In 2020, Parker made “Solitary,” starring Oyelowo as a former convict reentering society after spending several years in solitary confinement. Parker insists that this interview is not timed to help the film, which has yet to find a distributor. “Who knows what’s going to happen with ‘Solitary’ ”? he says. “And to be honest with you, I only care because of David.”

      Indeed, Oyelowo seems to be the driving force behind what he clearly hopes will be Parker’s reentry: This year, he took Parker to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Governors Awards dinner and the Oscars ceremony. In July, Eaddy arranged a Zoom meeting between Oyelowo and Parker and a group of African American female leaders to gauge their receptivity to Parker’s story.

      The 18 women who wound up pledging their support include the experienced political hands and civic leaders Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Karen Finney, and the Revs. Leah Daughtry and Bernice King, part of a close-knit network of influential Black women in the worlds of civil rights advocacy, strategic communications and politics.

      When he met with the women by video link last summer, Parker read an unpublished op-ed in which he expressed regret for his “tone-deaf response and narrow perspective” in 2016. “The change in me over these past years has been in shifting my focus from myself to survivors,” he wrote, saying that as a 19-year-old college student, “I had relationships, particularly with my accuser, that were no doubt psychologically toxic, opportunistic, and self-serving. For this I am incredibly regretful and deeply sorry. You can be innocent of legal wrongdoing and still be wrong.” He also wrote that he has a new understanding of “the dearth of instruction given to college men about how to dignify their even casual relationships with women by unequivocally respecting the importance of fluid consent.”

      The group was impressed. “I found it very meaningful, and his authenticity made me want to help,” Finney says, adding that everyone on the call was similarly affected. “He’s talented, he’s someone who’s committed to using his art to shine a light on really important issues, and he’s someone who’s trying to be vulnerable and open.”

      Another woman, a sexual assault survivor who spoke with Parker after she read his op-ed, says she found it significant that Parker acknowledged that “while he may have been acquitted, there are still things he has regrets for. … I think it takes a lot of humility and self-reflection and a lot of personal accountability for someone to admit that they may have made a mistake. You don’t always get to hear that from people who are accused.”

      Oyelowo says his support of Parker is both professionally and personally motivated. He calls Parker “easily in my top five directors I’ve ever worked with,” and he wants him to be part of Hollywood again. But more important, he says, “I’ve hated to see how much he was struggling, not just financially but emotionally. He would hate me saying this, because he doesn’t want anyone to think he’s looking for sympathy. But it’s been tempestuous. And as a friend, when you see that, you just want it to stop. But the journey had to take the time it needed to take, and now I think he’s beyond ready to be edifying as opposed to erosive.”

      Few would doubt Oyelowo’s sincerity in coming to the aid of a friend who, he believes, deserves to be redeemed. But few can ignore the fact that Oyelowo happens to star in his friend’s film, which is in need of a distributor. Contradictions are rife in a story that changes with every lens one brings to it: Parker is engaged in a deeply private process of introspection that, once it becomes public, almost immediately becomes suspect as an attempt at career rehabilitation. There are moments, listening to Parker, when the line between good faith and outright credulity feels perilously thin. He is, after all, a good actor.

      And he has apologized before: in 2016 and, most recently, in Venice in 2019, when he expressed regret, using much of the same language he’s using now. What’s different this time? “Just more learning,” Parker says. “More listening and more hearing. I think that’s going to be the constant, real-time evolution.”

      Alexandra Brodsky, a civil rights lawyer, the author of “Sexual Justice” and a founder of Know Your IX, a nonprofit organization combating gender violence in schools, says that in some ways, celebrities “are the worst people to sort out these hard questions with” because the public dynamics at play are unique and inapplicable to most people’s lives. In many cases, she adds, repair is effective precisely because it happens quietly and in private.

      Scott Berkowitz, the founder and president of the anti-sexual-violence organization RAINN, says celebrities can be a valuable leaders, especially in educating college students about sexual misconduct and consent. But in Parker’s case, he says, “I don’t know how he becomes a credible spokesperson for others if he still won’t acknowledge and be specific about what he believes he did wrong.”

      Evaluating Parker’s words and deeds is even more complicated within the current context of public apology and comebacks. On a spectrum that includes Will Smith’s misfire of an apology video after his Oscars slap and Louis C.K. winning a Grammy and going back on tour after admitting to masturbating in front of female colleagues, is it possible to find a form of genuine penance that doesn’t feel performative? Or is a public life a reasonable sacrifice in the name of repair? It’s true that few deserve to be defined by their most grievous errors, especially if they were made at 19. It’s also true that nobody is entitled to money, fame or a green light from a studio. And no one can know the full impact of this country’s racial politics, from the historical use of rape accusations as a weapon of terror against Black men to who gets the benefit of the doubt in Hollywood.

      Debate around what constitutes authentic contrition “is a sign of how unclear we are as a society, about what it means to take responsibility for something, and what we’re looking for,” says David Karp, the director of the Center for Restorative Justice at the University of San Diego’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences. “What I need to see is just going to be different from what you need to see, and we should honor those differences. But it’s also just a mess, because we have no other references for what accountability means but the punitive model.”

      “No one said this is going to be easy,” says Brodsky, who agrees that restorative justice is a good model. But, she adds, “[t]his doesn’t end with you being a hero. This ends up with you maybe having repaired some of the harm that you caused, but maybe you don’t wind up having a career in Hollywood.”

      Wherever the path leads
      Loeffler is deeply skeptical that a story about Parker can be useful. “I’ve found that asking women what men need to do, like asking survivors and victims how to get it right so he can have forgiveness, is the ultimate example of feigning incompetence to deflect responsibility,” she says. “Answering any questions, or giving it any attention, is self-defeating because it is, again, making women responsible for a man’s behavior.”

      Loeffler adds: “What happened to my sister happened because of systems that benefit male athletes and program us to believe that men are more competent, honest and trustworthy. With the MeToo movement backlash, including the programming of young men through online content that they are inherently superior to women, we should be giving all our attention to the fact that we are standing at an inflection point that will determine the outcome of women, and humanity.”

      Parker sounds as if he knows that criticism is inevitable. “One of the things I’ve learned on this journey is that I can only control the things I can control,” he says. “Six years ago I was trying to control what people thought of me. I fought to stand in my truth, even when it meant ignoring the pains and hurts of others that had been impacted by my behaviors. Six years later, I’m clear that I’m not fighting for anything self-serving.”

      He rises from the couch to give a tour of the house, pointing out a bookcase he built, as well as the backyard treehouse he put up for his children when the phone stopped ringing. He talks about the Nate Parker Foundation, which he established in 2015 to mentor young people in visual storytelling, and he mentions that he wants to share what he’s learned with adolescents and teens so that they don’t internalize the same messages about masculinity he did as a boy — about entitlement and sexual conquest, impunity and strength. “I do think a digestible version of this work, introduced very early in the lives of young men, could really shape their value system,” he says. “And I don’t know of any systems that exist that do that. Does it have to take a tragedy to learn these things?”

      Parker rests his eyes on the San Gabriel Mountains baking in the distance. It’s as if he’s contemplating his own path — one on which he insists he’ll stay, wherever it leads. Whether it will be a path back is not for him to decide.

      Alice Crites and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

      ARTICLE
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/11/11/nate-parker-film-career-david-oyelowo/

       

      I said it years ago when metoo started and I say again, if you are famous and been caught doing negative things and now find yourself excommunicado in hollywood, you need to go to another wood outside the usa, case closed in terms of paid labor. As for healing or becoming better personally, the woman Alexandra Brodsky in the article said it best, the reconciliation/repairing/healing is a private thing. It isn't for cinema verite 
       

  6. now7.png
    Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction


    By Jamelle Bouie

    Opinion Columnist

    I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.

    The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research that was often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.

    I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.

    The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.

    “What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”

    On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”

    The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.

    Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”

    It was also clear to some within abolition-democracy that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.

    Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “re-establish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”

    Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.

    It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”

    This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”

    In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.

    Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: Democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.

    In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.

     

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/reconstruction-civil-war-du-bois.html

     

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    The question is simple. If all humans are equal in a space then how do the poor not rip from the rich or how do the rich not enslave the poor? The USA has no answer. Never had one.  In Haiti or France or Russia the poor ripped from the rich. In the USA... the lower rich ripped from the upper rich, but the poor of the usa still had needs and from the war between the states to the gregorian year two thousand and twenty two, the poor have tried to merit to satisfaction while not taking from the rich. But, patience is a thing rarely stated when people talk of peace. and absent patience, the poor can't wait to take, the rich can't wait to enslave. 


    Biden and Trump Share One Thing
    Oct. 24, 2022


    By Yuval Levin

    Mr. Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing Opinion writer.

    Back in January, looking ahead to the midterm election year, President Biden said that he expected to be featured prominently by Democrats running for Congress. “I’m going to be out on the road a lot, making the case around the country, with my colleagues who are up for re-election,” he predicted.

    It has not turned out that way. Instead, many Democratic candidates have practiced the delicate dance that politicians of both parties have had to master over the past two decades — keeping their distance from a president of their own party while not openly repudiating him.

    The four presidents we have had so far in this century have been peculiarly unpopular. George W. Bush had a stretch of high approval after the Sept. 11 attacks but spent much of his second term underwater (often deeply). A chart of Barack Obama’s public approval looks faintly like a W — briefly rising above 50 percent around the two elections he won and at the very end of his term, but he otherwise spent much of his eight years in the 40s. Donald Trump is the only president during the seven decades that Gallup has been regularly tracking approval ratings who never once topped the 50 percent mark. Joe Biden floated above that mark early in his term but hasn’t seen it since.

    It’s not just in terms of public support that recent presidents have been weak. This can be hard to grasp because we still live with the bromides of “the imperial presidency” — a term made famous by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1970s to describe an office drunk with power and towering over American government. We implicitly think this is still the case.

    But this persistent cliché keeps us from seeing the real contours of our strange constitutional moment. Joe Biden and Donald Trump may well be the two weakest presidents since before the progressive era.

    They have been weak presidents of different sorts. Mr. Biden has largely declined to set priorities for his administration and has been so desperate not to divide his party that he has been nearly paralyzed. Think of any other modern president, including Mr. Trump, and you can probably list two or three issues he particularly cared about. Can you come up with such a list for Mr. Biden? Other than the withdrawal from Afghanistan, is there any major initiative his administration has pursued because it was singularly what the president wanted to do?

    Even when he has overreached in his use of administrative power — as with the legally dubious forgiveness of student loans — Mr. Biden has often acted under pressure from party activists. On many important measures in Congress, Mr. Biden’s views do not appear to have been decisive, and he has not been essential to the negotiations that led to any of the bipartisan deals he has signed.

    Mr. Trump exhibited another kind of weakness. During his presidency, he dominated most news cycles and sought to operate outside the formal framework of presidential power in ways that ultimately posed real threats to the constitutional system. But within that system, where our government actually governs, he was feckless and chaotic, and largely failed to exert meaningful control even over his subordinates. His most significant achievement was in the realm of presidential power that requires the least persistent follow-through: the appointment of judges, including three Supreme Court justices, where the president’s role ends almost as soon as it begins. In other arenas, he generally couldn’t steer any one course long enough to get very far.

    Astonishingly blatant insubordination was routine in Mr. Trump’s White House, and it was matched by a bipartisan tendency in Congress to regard the president’s words as devoid of meaning and his actions as always open to reversal. No one took him seriously as an executive.

    The administrative state — that tangle of agencies that compose the executive branch, some formally independent and others more answerable to the White House — remains a formidable force in this era. But its growth has not always strengthened our presidents. This is most obvious in Republican administrations, as the chief executive strains to wrangle career officials and independent regulators who often want to steer a course different from his. But those same agencies operate in Democratic administrations, and even if the course they steer better suits a left-leaning president, their autonomous strength can render him institutionally weaker.

    The same might be said of presidential appointees. One measure of a president’s administrative prowess is whether his midlevel political appointees can readily imagine what the president would do if he were in their jobs and act accordingly. This has been fairly easy to do under most modern presidents. But under both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, many appointees could be forgiven for having no idea how the president would want them to make key decisions — Mr. Trump because he was so unpredictable, and Mr. Biden because he so rarely has set clear goals.

    These distinct but related forms of presidential weakness gesture toward two key elements of the job. Alexander Hamilton argued that a strong chief executive exhibits energetic decision-making and “steady administration.” Both elements are necessary, and the absence of either, Hamilton suggested, “implies a feeble execution of the government.”

    Those of us who would like to see Congress reassert itself might hope for a silver lining in such presidential feebleness. But the evidence of recent Congresses suggests those hopes are misguided. The past couple of years have seen the passage of some meaningful bipartisan measures — on public health, infrastructure, gun control, manufacturing and more. But they have often revealed the contemporary Congress’s own weaknesses — the gangs of senators have often worked around rather than through the committee system and regular order — more than they have remedied them.

    This should not surprise us. The president and Congress don’t have the same job, and the weakness of one does not make the other stronger. On the contrary, it often distorts the work of the other and invites more weakness in return.

    When that happens, partisanship rushes in to fill the void and soon makes for a vicious cycle: Congress and the presidency increasingly incline to the same sort of work — neither legislative nor executive but more like partisan performance art — and both grow more forgetful of their core responsibilities.

    This is a particular problem for our presidents because, unlike Congress’s job, the president’s role is defined by obligations he must meet. As the political scientists Joseph Bessette and Gary Schmitt have argued, the presidency is better understood as a collection of duties than an arrangement of powers, and presidential strength is often a function of living up to those responsibilities.

    It is by doing the chief executive’s core work — faithful, predictable execution of statutes; steady administrative rule-making that can last beyond the next election; cleareyed prioritization and prudential action within the law in response to pressing national challenges — that a president can wield and therefore fortify the strengths of the office. Playing chief pundit and willfully blurring the line between rhetoric and action is a recipe not for influence but for haplessness.

    Until our chief executives grasp that the burdens of their office are its strengths, they will remain baffled by their own debility and unable to marshal the public to their side.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/opinion/biden-trump-weak-presidents.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS
    I think of presidents in the USA in era's based on a president that defined the era. In my view we are in the Ronald Reagan presidents era. 
    Ronald Reagan like all presidents after him has a few things in common. 
    All are huge militarists, increasing military power in hundreds of percent in various forms.
    All are domestic incapables, varying plans of domestic agenda that are bound to create more problems or fail in terms of leading to multiracial comradery and are not comprehensive enough for a multiracial populace that is differed not only in appearance/phenotype but differ in financial qualities/financial potencies/heritage concerning the usa and with a general negativity in inter racial relationships between themselves or in themselves.
    All are media barons, they each were very successful in the presentation of potential greatness.
    All are legislative obsolescences, each have dysfunctional legislative history <from woeful to nonexistent> before they became president. 

    That explains why under the reagan presidencies the military has grown so vast.  The populace of the usa has displayed ever growing dysfunction between its races. The role of media has become more important than any legislative or governing quality. Legislative quality is so low.

     

    Putin Is Onto Us
    Oct. 25, 2022


    By Thomas L. Friedman
    Opinion Columnist

    As the Russian Army continues to falter in Ukraine, the world is worrying that Vladimir Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon. Maybe — but for now, I think Putin is assembling a different weapon. It’s an oil and gas bomb that he’s fusing right before our eyes and with our inadvertent help — and he could easily detonate it this winter.

    If he does, it could send prices of home heating oil and gasoline into the stratosphere. The political fallout, Putin surely hopes, will divide the Western alliance and prompt many countries — including ours, where both MAGA Republicans and progressives are expressing concerns about the spiraling cost of the Ukraine conflict — to seek a dirty deal with the man in the Kremlin, pronto.

    In short: Putin is now fighting a ground war to break through Ukraine’s lines and a two-front energy war to break Ukraine’s will and that of its allies. He’s trying to smash Ukraine’s electricity system to ensure a long, cold winter there while putting himself in position (in ways that I’ll explain) to drive up energy costs for all of Ukraine’s allies. And because we — America and the West — do not have an energy strategy in place to dampen the impact of Putin’s energy bomb, this is a frightening prospect.

    When it comes to energy, we want five things at once that are incompatible — and Putin is onto us:

    1. We want to decarbonize our economy as fast as we can to mitigate the very real dangers of climate change.

    2. We want the cheapest possible gasoline and heating oil prices so we can drive our cars as fast and as much as we want — and never have to put on a sweater indoors or do anything to conserve energy.

    3. We want to tell the petrodictators in Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take a hike.

    4. We want to be able to treat U.S. oil and gas companies as pariahs and dinosaurs that should pump us out of this current oil crisis and then go off in the woods and die and let solar and wind take over.

    5. Oh, and we don’t want any new oil and gas pipelines or wind and solar transmission lines to spoil our backyards.

    I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.

    If we persist in that, we are going to be in for a world of hurt if Putin drops the energy bomb that I think he’s assembling for Christmas. Here’s what I think is his strategy: It starts with getting the United States to draw down its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is a huge stock of crude oil stored in giant caverns that we can draw on in an emergency to offset any cutoff in our domestic production or imports. Last Wednesday, President Biden announced the release of 15 million more barrels from the reserve in December, completing a plan he laid out earlier to release a total of 180 million barrels in an effort to keep gasoline prices at the pump as low as possible — in advance of the midterm elections. (He didn’t say the last part. He didn’t need to.)

    According to a report in The Washington Post, the reserve contained “405.1 million barrels as of Oct. 14. That’s about 57 percent of its maximum authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels.”

    I sympathize with the president. People were really hurting from $5- and $6-a-gallon gasoline. But using the reserve — which was designed to cushion us in the face of a sudden shut-off in domestic or global production — to shave a dime or a quarter off a gallon of gasoline before elections is a dicey business, even if the president has a plan for refilling it in the coming months.

    Putin wants America to use up as much of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve cushion now — just like the way the Germans gave up on nuclear energy and he got them addicted to Russia’s cheap natural gas. Then, when Russian gas was cut off because of the Ukraine war, German homes and factories had to frantically cut back and scramble for more expensive alternatives.

    Next, Putin is watching the European Union gear up for a ban on seaborne imports of crude oil from Russia, starting Dec. 5. This embargo — along with Germany and Poland’s move to stop pipeline imports — should cover roughly 90 percent of the European Union’s current oil imports from Russia.

    As a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., noted, “Crucially, the sanctions also ban E.U. companies from providing shipping insurance, brokering services or financing for oil exports from Russia to third countries.”

    The U.S. Treasury and European Union believe that without that insurance, the number of customers for Russian oil will shrink dramatically, so they are telling the Russians that they can get the insurance for their oil tankers from the few Western insurance companies that dominate the industry only if they lower the price of their crude oil exports to a level set by the Europeans and the United States.

    My sources in the oil industry tell me they seriously doubt this Western price fixing will work. Russia’s OPEC Plus partner Saudi Arabia is certainly not interested in seeing such a buyers’ price-fixing precedent set. Moreover, international oil trading is full of shady characters — does the name Marc Rich ring a bell? — who thrive on market distortions. Oil tankers carry transponders that track their locations. But tankers engaged in shady activities will turn their transponders off and reappear days after they’ve made a ship-to-ship transfer or will transfer their cargo into storage tanks somewhere in Asia for re-export, in effect laundering their Russian oil. Oil in just one very large tanker can be worth roughly $250 million, so the incentives are enormous.

    Now add one more dodgy player to the mix: China. It has all kinds of long-term, fixed-price contracts to import liquefied natural gas from the Middle East at roughly $100 a barrel of oil equivalent. But because of President Xi Jinping’s crazy approach to containing Covid — in recent months some 300 million citizens have been under full or partial lockdown — China’s economy has slowed considerably, as has its gas consumption. As a result, an oil industry source tells me, China has been taking some of the L.N.G. sold to it on those fixed-price contracts for domestic use and reselling it to Europe and other gas-starved countries for $300 a barrel of oil equivalent.

    Now that Xi has locked in his third term as general secretary of the Communist Party, many expect that he will ease up on his lockdowns. If China goes back to anything near its normal gas consumption and stops re-exporting its excess, the global gas market will become even more scarily tight.

    Last, as I noted, Putin is trying to destroy Ukraine’s ability to generate electricity. Today more than one million Ukrainians are without power, and as one Ukrainian lawmaker tweeted last week, “Total darkness and cold are coming.”

    So add all of this up and then suppose, come December, Putin announces he is halting all Russian oil and gas exports for 30 or 60 days to countries supporting Ukraine, rather than submit to the European Union’s fixing of his oil price. He could afford that for a short while. That would be Putin’s energy bomb and Christmas present to the West. In this tight market, oil could go to $200 a barrel, with a commensurate rise in the price of natural gas. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon at the pump in the United States.

    The beauty for Putin of an energy bomb is that unlike setting off a nuclear bomb — which would unite the whole world against him — setting off an oil price bomb would divide the West from Ukraine.

    Obviously, I am just guessing that this is what Putin is up to, and if the world goes into recession, it could take energy prices down with it. But we would be wise to have a real counterstrategy in place, especially because, while some in Europe have managed to stock up on natural gas for this winter, rebuilding those stocks for 2023 without Russian gas and with China returning to normal could be very costly.

    If Biden wants America to be the arsenal of democracy to protect us and our democratic allies — and not leave us begging Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela or Iran to produce more oil and gas — we need a robust energy arsenal as much as a military one. Because we are in an energy war! Biden needs to make a major speech, making clear that for the foreseeable future, we need more of every kind of energy we have. American oil and gas investors need to know that as long as they produce in the cleanest way possible, invest in carbon capture and ensure that any new pipelines they build will be compatible with transporting hydrogen — probably the best clean fuel coming down the road in the next decade — they have a welcome place in America’s energy future, alongside the solar, wind, hydro and other clean energy producers that Biden has heroically boosted through his climate legislation.

    I know. This is not ideal. This is not where I hoped we would be in 2022. But this is where we are, and anything else really is magical thinking — and the one person who will not be fooled by it is Vladimir Putin.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/opinion/putin-energy-gas-prices.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    The problem with Biden is he became president on his not being Schrumptf. The problem is, not being like Scrumpft means , not having your own initiative, not doing things your way against others input, not caring about opinion, not focusing on your base. 
    And that is a problem cause, the voting group to Biden want green energy regardless of the financial costs. They want to kill the domestic oil industry with no retort from said industry. They want countries that benefit from oil that are far more potent than the countries with faux elected officials to do as they are told when it comes to energy.
    And Biden in trying to satisfy the usa populace aside his voting base can't approach the foreign lands as a bully, but can't cut them off. 
    In the end, Biden wanted to be president... Kamala Harris wanted to be vice president
     

    IN AMENDMENT

    An unverified image

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    Danielle Deadwyler had trepidations about playing Emmett Till’s mother “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

    Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’
    After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.

    By Sarah Bahr
    Oct. 24, 2022
    Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.

    In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.

    And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.

    “I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”

    Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”

    DEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.

    “My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”

    As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.

    But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.

    “It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”

    She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)

    When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”

    But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.

    Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”

    The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.

    “Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”

    He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”

    HER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.

    Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”

    In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.

    For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)

    Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.

    “When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”

    Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.

    “I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”

    Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.

    Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.

    “It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”

    Yet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”

    Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.

    “People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)

    “It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”

    AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”

    “I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”

    In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.

    Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”

    I ask what else people get wrong about her.

    There’s that laugh again.

    “Everything.”

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/movies/danielle-deadwyler-till.html

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    The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Credit...Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York Times

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    She is just so sexy:)
     

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    Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall
    Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.

    By Sarah Fritz and A. Kori Hill
    Oct. 27, 2022
    Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.

    On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.

    Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”

    As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.

    Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor

    In 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.

    The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.

    Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.

    “It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”

    In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.

    The concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.

    Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.

    “You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.

    At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”

    Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minor

    Price’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”

    Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”

    Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.

    Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.

    Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.

    The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.

    UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.

    “We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”

    Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.

    “The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”

    Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.

    A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/arts/music/clara-schumann-florence-price-philadelphia-orchestra.html
     

    My Thoughts

    Enjoy

     

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  9. Black Democrats say party isn't helping enough
    BY JONATHAN WEISMAN
    NEW YORK TIMES Oct 28, 2022  

    As prominent Black women struggle for campaign cash in the final legs of their Democratic bids for the Senate, Black female politicians in the party say its leadership is leaving viable, path breaking candidates to fend for themselves in winnable races throughout the Southeast.

    Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina, and Rep. Val Demings, Sen. Marco Rubio's challenger in Florida, have both won praise as excellent candidates who are hanging tough in difficult states. But supporters say they have received far too little backing from Washington Democrats for their efforts.

    The Democrats' Senate Majority PAC, a group affiliated with the party's leadership, and its partners spent $10million since May against Beasley's Republican opponent, Rep. Ted Budd, as of Thursday, ranking him sixth on the group's target list. The top target, MehmetOz in Pennsylvania, had more than $25 million spent against him.

    At the same time, Republicans' counterpart group, the Senate Leadership Fund, had blitzed Beasley with $33.8million in spending, second only to spending in Pennsylvania against John Fetterman, the Democrat.

    For Demings, neither Senate Democrats' super PAC nor their official campaign arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, had spent much of anything in the last reports to the Federal Election Commission.

    "The Black women, here and in Florida, the emphasis hasn't been on them," Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., said of Beasley and Demings. "We shouldn't be forgotten in this process."

    Democrats say the figures undercount their support, at least for Beasley, a former state Supreme Court justice, and they pushed back on the criticism.

    "Senate Democrats are backing one of the most diverse classes of candidates in history, and we are supporting them through robust investments in organizing, advertising, campaign infrastructure and direct financial contributions," said Jessica Knight Henry, deputy executive director and chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We know that candidates of color and especially Black women are competitive at the highest level."

    For Senate Democrats' official arms, stretched thin by the huge spending of their Republican counterparts, this year's campaign has been defined by tough choices.

    The first priority has been to save the party's incumbents: Sens. Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Mark Kelly in Arizona and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire. The next priority was what Democrats in Washington saw as the Republican seat most likely to flip, that of the retiring Sen. Patrick Toomey in Pennsylvania. Next was the Senate race in Wisconsin, a state that President Joe Biden won two years ago.

    run what Washington Democrats acknowledge to be remarkably effective campaigns, they have been left largely to their own devices.

    Democrats have spent big to save one deeply endangered Black female incumbent, Rep. JahanaHayes of Connecticut, and to help one Black female candidate contending for an open seat in Ohio, Emilia Sykes.

    It is in Democratic races for the Senate – where only two Black women have served in the nation's history – that discontent is most prevalent, especially among Black female House members who serve alongside Demings and saw her prove herself in the impeachments of Trump.

    To be sure, Demings, Beasley and Abrams have done a lot to support themselves. As of Sept. 30, Demings had raised $65.5 million, well more than Rubio's $44.5 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. Beasley's $29.4 million was nearly triple Budd's $11.1 million.

    But in states like Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, that might not be enough.

    ARTICLE
    https://buffalonews.com/black-democrats-say-party-isnt-helping-enough/article_28a84fab-e317-5daf-8926-0b1a7850561d.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    The history of Black women and positive involvement in the USA has a long history. I believe in most of my maturity that Black women , not black men, have a huge role in the creation of the modern usa. 
    A female group, disempowered as women, disempowered as Black, desperate as mothers to find peace, made cornerstones of the black community by white peoples abuses toward black men in the usa. 
    The Black Church in the USA/Black Colleges in the USA/Black communal organizations from the black panthers to self defense to the nation of islam to black participants in white parties of governance, Black women have always been greater participants than black men. 
    But in all the said organizations Black men or non Black women tended to be the chiefs/head honchoes, the ones in greatest control and that impotency of Black women in all the organizations of the past is reflected now. 
     

     

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    An extinct volcano in Virunga National Park, parts of which are inside an oil block on auction by the Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit...Juergen Baetz/DPA, via Associated Press

    A Power Balance Shifts as Europe, Facing a Gas Crisis, Turns to Africa for Help
    Officials from Algeria to Mozambique say they hope to take advantage of an abrupt change in a long-unequal relationship.

    By Max Bearak, Melissa Eddy and Dionne Searcey
    Published Oct. 27, 2022
    Updated Oct. 28, 2022

    European leaders have been converging on Africa’s capital cities, eager to find alternatives to Russian natural gas — sparking hope among their counterparts in Africa that the invasion of Ukraine may tilt the scales in the continent’s unequal relationship with Europe, attracting a new wave of gas investments despite pressure to pivot to renewables.

    In September, Poland’s president arrived in Senegal in pursuit of gas deals. In May, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, came seeking the same thing and in recent weeks told the German Parliament that Europe’s energy crisis necessitated working “together with countries where there is the possibility of developing new gas fields,” while keeping pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    “With the war, it’s a U-turn,” said Mamadou Fall Kane, energy adviser to the president of Senegal. “The narrative has changed.”

    The flurry of European overtures has led to new or fast-tracked energy projects, with talk of more to come. The hope in African capitals is that Europe’s appetite will mean the financing of gas facilities not just for export but for use at home. In parts of the continent, the economic stakes are enormous.

    Italian government ministers have accompanied executives from Eni, one of the largest energy companies in the world, to Algeria, Angola and the Republic of Congo as well as to Mozambique, where a natural-gas terminal operated by Eni is expected to begin supplying gas to Europe in a matter of days. Eni is now discussing an additional terminal with the Mozambican government.

    And in recent weeks, officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo have embarked on an international marketing tour to draw the attention of U.S. and European companies to new oil and gas blocks they have put up for auction. Climate activists have denounced the auction because it includes oil blocks that overlap a gorilla sanctuary as well as fragile peatlands that store immense amounts of carbon dioxide, a planet-warming greenhouse gas.

    In interviews, African leaders lamented that it had taken a war, thousands of miles away in Ukraine, to give them bargaining power on energy deals, and they described what they saw as a double standard. Europe, after all, used not just natural gas, but far dirtier fuels like coal, for hundreds of years to drive an age of empire-building and industrialization.

    Their main complaint: Less developed nations should be free to burn more gas in coming years, despite the climate crisis and the need for the world cut back on fossil fuels, because their citizens deserve higher standards of living and greater access to reliable electricity and other basics. But European and international lenders have made it far too costly, Africa’s leaders say.

    Instead, European leaders have often seemed to preach to Africans about reducing carbon dioxide emissions while providing little of the necessary financing to help build green energy alternatives, all while continuing to emit far more than Africa.

    “Just two to three months ago, those same Europeans who were lecturing us on ‘no gas’ say they’ll make a compromise,” said Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union’s commissioner for energy and infrastructure. “We are trying to survive. But instead we are being infantilized.”

    A recent political cartoon < https://twitter.com/fatenaggad/status/1573599884053192704 > by the Tanzanian artist Gado, widely shared on social media, captured that frustration after John Kerry, the United States climate envoy, spoke last month at an environmental conference in Senegal.

    In the cartoon, which paraphrases his speech, Mr. Kerry stands at a podium and delivers a remark that reflects the lecture many African leaders feel they’ve been receiving from Western counterparts. “Well guess what, folks?” he says while smiling next to billowing American flags. “Mother Nature does not measure where the emissions come from. We are all responsible for this.”

    As he speaks, clouds of pollution puff out of his mouth.

    Mr. Kerry did, in fact, note Africa’s relatively tiny contribution to emissions in the speech and the world’s shared interest in addressing climate change. And, in past comments, he has said African countries have a right to use fossil fuels to develop their economies.

    The argument by some African officials is that natural gas, more affordable and cleaner than oil and coal, should serve as a transitional fuel for the continent to bridge the gap to renewables like wind or solar, just as it has in Europe.

    In an interview shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Kerry said the atmosphere could handle some new fossil fuel plants in developing nations as long as the world’s 20 largest economies, which produce 80 percent of global emissions, were transitioning away from dirty energy.

    Western governments have aimed to promote growth in renewable energy in less-developed countries through a so-called just transition in which they partly underwrite new projects. Last year, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union pledged $8.5 billion in grants and loans to help South Africa transition away from coal, a major influx of money for renewables on the continent.

    Yet, it was a rare one. In general, Western investment in renewables in African countries has been even more paltry than in fossil-fuel projects.

    Energy poverty on the continent has suffocated the growth of industries that create jobs and undergird economies. More than 600 million Africans do not have access to power and nearly a billion use firewood and charcoal, fuels that are causing significant respiratory problems and death, to heat their homes and cook.

    Electrifying every African home could be done by 2030 with investments of just $25 billion a year, according to the International Energy Agency, a fraction of what’s invested in global energy today.

    Experts say that Western concern over African countries’ desire to burn more gas at home in coming years is misplaced from a climate-change perspective. The International Energy Agency projected this year that if African countries developed all their known gas reserves, Africa’s contribution to global emissions would only rise to an estimated 3.5 percent from 3 percent.

    Outside of the continent’s biggest emitters (coal-dependent South Africa, as well as the established oil and gas producers of North Africa) the 47 other African countries combined emit less than even some of Europe’s smaller economies, like Greece. With Western investments in gas suddenly growing again, those disparities are likely to remain.

    Just this month, Britain announced as many as 100 new domestic gas drilling licenses despite studies from its own government indicating the best way to lower energy costs in the long term would be to shift away from fossil fuels. In August, President Biden said he would resume selling leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land. And in July, the Group of 7, the international club of major industrialized democracies, watered down a pledge to stop funding fossil fuel projects abroad, saying the war presented “exceptional circumstances.”

    Acknowledging the double standard is just the beginning, African leaders said in interviews. More important, Europe needs to come around to financing African gas projects quickly, and not just with an eye toward exports to Europe.

    “We must move urgently beyond grandstanding,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank. “Even Europe’s energy transition was not possible without gas. Reality is reality.”

    Lenders like the African Development Bank have been putting money into gas for years, but without an influx of finance from Europe, projects could take decades to get started.

    Gas prices in Europe have been falling because the continent’s major economies have managed to replace most of their Russian gas supply with imports from Norway, North Africa and the United States. Experts predict much of Europe’s gas needs in coming years to be fulfilled by those countries as well as Qatar, which is expected to open the world’s largest gas facility in 2025.

    Even with the flurry of visits to Africa from European leaders, some of the projects and proposals there come with significant hurdles.

    Italy’s Eni, which is partially state-owned, bought a floating natural gas platform off the coast of the Republic of Congo for more than half a billion dollars. Company executives and government officials, who visited after the outbreak of war, began to fast track the project so that it could deliver gas by next year. By 2024, the company also expects to double its imports from Algeria, which is already connected to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea by a pipeline.

    Eni executives are discussing a second floating terminal in Mozambique even as an Islamist insurgency in the country’s north continues to threaten a sprawling onshore energy project there. Offshore platforms typically yield less gas but are quicker to set up.

    “With the war, suddenly there was new urgency,” said an Eni spokeswoman who declined to be identified, citing company policy. “It accelerated a shift to new gas sources that was years in the making.”

    The visit to Senegal by the German chancellor has not yet yielded a deal, Senegal’s energy adviser said. The Senegalese government has been working with B.P. and Kosmos Energy, a U.S. company, to develop a gas field off its coast that is expected to start production next year, according to Kosmos.

    The war’s ripple effects have also resurrected talks on a long-dormant trans-Saharan pipeline project that would supply Europe with Nigerian gas via Niger, another country on the German chancellor’s itinerary — and another one battling a metastasizing Islamist insurgency.

    Last month, Mr. Kerry traveled to Congo, one of the most populous and least-electrified countries in Africa, for a climate conference and asked President Félix Tshisekedi to remove the blocks from auction that are in environmentally sensitive areas.

    An aide to Mr. Tshisekedi said the blocks remain on auction.

    In an interview in September, the Congolese president said his country had no plans to endanger important environmental areas but had every right to exploit its gas and oil, just as the United States has done. “Requesting us to change our behavior and protect our forest, and not provide the resources and the know-how — it’s delusional,” Mr. Tshisekedi said.

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/climate/europe-africa-natural-gas.html#:~:text=A Power Balance Shifts as Europe%2C Facing a,German chancellor%2C Olaf Scholz%2C in May. Andreas Rinke%2FReuters

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    People talk about post industrial but the reality is humanity has never been post industrial and growing industry requires more energy. The whole green movement is based on the idea that the white european imperial powers which include the usa side western european governments can shift their energy concerns while telling the countries they dominated to do with less energy and become beholden to white european energy needs to maintain supremacy of white european communities. 
    The goal in green energy is utilizing the earth's physical condition to allow powerful countries to change their fiscal output while chaining poorer countries to it. and it all relates to china. China is first among non white european countries and it earned that through heavy energy consumption.
     

     

  11. now1.png

    A bust of Nefertiti on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin in December 2012, during an exhibition marking the 100-year anniversary of the item’s discovery.Credit...Michael Sohn/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty Images


    King Tut Died Long Ago, but the Debate About His Tomb Rages On

    By Franz Lidz
    Published Oct. 30, 2022
    Updated Oct. 31, 2022

    More than three millenniums after Tutankhamun was buried in southern Egypt, and a century after his tomb was discovered, Egyptologists are still squabbling over whom the chamber was built for and what, if anything, lies beyond its walls. The debate has become a global pastime.

    At the center of the rumpus is the confrontational enthusiast Nicholas Reeves, 66, who shares a home near Oxford, England, with a nameless house cat. In July 2015, Dr. Reeves, a former curator at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, posited the tantalizing theory that there were rooms hidden behind the northern and western walls in the treasure-packed burial vault of Tutankhamun, otherwise known as King Tut.

    It was long presumed that the small burial chamber, constructed 3,300 years ago and known to specialists as KV62, was originally intended as a private tomb for Tutankhamun’s successor, Ay, until Tutankhamun died prematurely at 19. Dr. Reeves proposed that the tomb was, in fact, merely an antechamber to a grander sepulcher for Tutankhamun’s stepmother and predecessor, Nefertiti. What’s more, Dr. Reeves argued, behind the north wall was a corridor that might well lead to Nefertiti’s unexplored funerary apartments, and perhaps to Nefertiti herself.

    The Egyptian government authorized radar surveys using ground-penetrating radar that could detect and scan cavities underground. At a news conference in Cairo in March 2016, Mamdouh Eldamaty, then Egypt’s antiquities minister, showed the preliminary results of radar scans that revealed anomalies beyond the decorated north and west walls of the tomb, suggesting the presence of two empty spaces and organic or metal objects.

    To much fanfare, he announced that there was an “approximately 90 percent” chance that something — “another chamber, another tomb” — was waiting beyond KV62. (Dr. Reeves said: “There was constant pressure from the press for odds. My own response was 50-50 — radar will either reveal there’s more to Tutankhamun’s tomb than we currently see, or it won’t.”)

    Yet, two years and two separate radar surveys later, a new antiquities minister declared that there were neither blocked doorways nor hidden rooms inside the tomb. Detailed results of the final scan were not released for independent scrutiny. Nonetheless, the announcement prompted National Geographic magazine to withdraw funding for Dr. Reeves’s project and a prominent Egyptologist to say, “We should not pursue hallucinations.”

    Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s onetime chief antiquities official and author of “King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb,” said: “I completely disagree with this theory. There is no way in ancient Egypt that any king would block the tomb of someone else. This would be completely against all their beliefs. It is impossible!” (Dr. Reeves countered by pointing out that every successor king was responsible for closing the tomb of his predecessor, as the mythical Horus buried his father, Osiris. “This is even demonstrated in what we currently see on the burial chamber’s north wall — as labeled, Ay burying Tutankhamun,” Dr. Reeves said.)

    Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted the fraught scholarly terrain. “Nick’s work is evidence-based and carefully researched,” she said. “But few Egyptologists will say it on record because they are all afraid of losing their access to tombs and excavation concessions. Or they are just plain jerks.”

    Despite the setback, Dr. Reeves soldiered on. In “The Complete Tutankhamun: 100 Years of Discovery,” a freshly revised edition of his 1990 book to be published in January, he draws on data provided by thermal imaging, laser-scanning, mold-growth mapping and inscriptional analysis to support his fiercely debated scholarship. The provocative new evidence has bolstered his belief that Tutankhamun was given a hasty burial in the front hallway of the tomb of Nefertiti.

    “Much of what Tutankhamun took to the grave had nothing to do with him,” said Dr. Reeves, who spoke by video from his home office. He maintained that King Tut had inherited a suite of lavish burial equipment that had then been repurposed to accompany him into the afterlife, including his famous gold death mask.

    The father of Tutankhamun was Akhenaten, the so-called heretic king whose reign was characterized by social, political and religious upheaval. The 18th-dynasty pharaoh rejected Amun, Osiris and Egypt’s traditional gods in favor of a single disembodied creator-essence, Aten, or the sun disk. In the space of a generation, Akhenaten had created a city from scratch at el-Amarna for his new god, and prepared royal tombs for himself, his children and his wives, including Nefertiti.

    After Akhenaten came an obscure pharaoh named Smenkhkare, whom Tutankhamun succeeded directly. Dr. Reeves has long held that Smenkhkare and Nefertiti were the same person, and that Akhenaten’s queen simply changed her name, first to Neferneferuaten, during a period of co-rule with her husband, and then to Smenkhkare following his death, navigating a period of sole, independent rule. To the boy-king would fall the burial of this rare woman pharaoh.

    During King Tut’s decade-long reign, he appeared to have been largely occupied with rectifying the chaos bequeathed to him by his old man. But it would not be enough: Shortly after his death in 1,323 B.C., a new dynasty chiseled his tarnished name into dust.

    Pyramid scheme
    Dr. Reeves has conducted research directly in the tomb on several occasions over the years. He came to his theory about Tutankhamun in 2014 after examining high-resolution color photographs of the tomb, which were published online by Factum Arte, a company based in Madrid and Bologna, Italy, that specializes in art recording and replication. The images showed lines beneath the plastered surfaces of painted walls, suggesting uncharted doorways. He speculated that one doorway — in the west — opened into a Tutankhamun-era storeroom, and that another, which aligns with both sides of the entrance chamber, opened to a hallway continuing along the same axis in form and orientation reminiscent of a more extensive queen’s corridor tomb.

    “I saw early on, from the face of the north wall subject, that the larger tomb could only belong to Nefertiti,” Dr. Reeves said. “I also suggested, based on evidence from elsewhere, that the perceived storage chamber to the west of the burial chamber might have been adapted into a funerary suite for other missing members of the Amarna royal family.”

    To support his radical reassessment, Dr. Reeves pointed to a pair of cartouches — ovals or oblongs enclosing a group of hieroglyphs — and a curious misspelling painted on the tomb’s north wall. The figure beneath the first cartouche is named as Tutankhamun’s Pharaonic successor, Ay, and is shown officiating at the young king’s burial carrying out the “opening the mouth” ceremony, a funerary ritual to restore the deceased’s senses — the ability to speak, touch, see, smell and hear. The key, Dr. Reeves said, is that both of the Ay cartouches show clear evidence of having been changed from their originals — the birth and throne names of Tutankhamun.

    Dr. Reeves suggested that the cartouches had originally showed Tut burying his predecessor, and that the cartouches — and hence the tomb — were put to new use. “If you inspect the birth-name cartouche closely, you see clear, underlying traces of a reed leaf,” he said in an email. “Not by chance, this hieroglyph is the first character of the divine component of Tutankhamun’s name, ‘-amun,’ in all standard writings.”

    Beneath Ay’s throne name may be discerned a rare, variant writing of Tutankhamun’s throne name, “Nebkheperure,” employing three scarab beetles. This is a variant whose lazy adaptation provides the only feasible explanation for the strangely misspelled three-scarab version of the Ay throne name “Kheperkheperure” that now stands there, Dr. Reeves said.

    He deduced that the scene had originally depicted not Ay presiding over the interment of Tutankhamun, but Tutankhamun presiding over the burial of Nefertiti. There are two visual clinchers, he said. The first is the “rounded, childlike, double underchin” of the Ay figure, a feature not present in any image currently recognizable as him, implying that the original painting of the king must have been of the chubby, young Tutankhamun. The second is the facial contours of the mummified recipient — until now presumed to be Tutankhamun — whose lips, narrow neck and distinctive nasal bridge are a “perfect match” for the profile of the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

    “There would have been no reason to include a depiction of this predecessor’s burial in Tutankhamun’s own tomb,” Dr. Reeves said. “In fact, the presence of this scene identifies Tutankhamun’s tomb as the burial place of that predecessor, and that it was within her outer chambers that the young king had, in extremis, been buried.”

    Rita Lucarelli, an Egyptologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said she had been following Dr. Reeves’s old and new claims with interest. “If he is right, it would be an amazing discovery because the tomb of Nefertiti would be intact, too,” she said. “But maybe even if there is a tomb there, it’s not that of Nefertiti, rather of another individual related to Tut. We simply cannot know it unless we dig through the bedrock.”

    The problem, Dr. Lucarelli said, is finding a way to drill through the decorated north wall without destroying it. “This is also why other archaeologists do not sympathize with this theory,” she said.

    Dr. Reeves’s unsympathetic colleagues are legion.

    “Nick is flogging a dead horse in his theories,” Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, said. “He has provided no clear proof that the cartouches have been altered, and his iconographic arguments as to the faces on the wall have been rejected by pretty well every other Egyptologist I know of who is qualified to take a view.”

    The politics of heritage
    Dr. Cooney, whose book “When Women Ruled The World” argues that Nefertiti may have been Tut’s grandmother, is one of Dr. Reeves’s few champions. “I am not one of the many scholars laughing behind their hands,” she said. “Nick’s theory is brilliant but easily discounted in a very political and nationalistic Egypt that has refused to give permits to Western scholars who disagree with the party line. Maybe there’s nothing beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Maybe it’s Al Capone’s safe. But if there is something there, this could potentially be the discovery of the millennium.”

    At least part of the backlash against Dr. Reeves’s ideas can be traced to the politics of heritage. The narrative that Tutankhamun’s tomb was unearthed by the heroic English archaeologist Howard Carter has long been openly challenged by Egyptians, who took the discovery as a rallying cry to end 1920s British rule and establish a modern Egyptian identity. Among Egyptologists today, the hot topics include the decolonization of the field and more inclusive and equitable accounts of Egyptian team members involved in archaeological excavations.

    “Sure, some in Egypt take a different view from me, which is easy enough to understand,” Dr. Reeves said. A weary expression spread over his face. “Archaeologists in the U.K. would, I am sure, look askance at some foreigner sounding off on who might be buried in Westminster Abbey. But my sole interest as an academic Egyptologist, my intellectual responsibility, is to seek out the evidence and report honestly and as objectively as possible on what I find.”

    Nefertiti’s burial is what the raft of new facts points toward when considered altogether, he said, and inevitably Nefertiti plus Tutankhamun is a big ask. “I can understand the skepticism with which my proposals have been greeted in some quarters,” he said. “And I initially shared it; I would spend a year testing and retesting my conclusions before feeling comfortable enough to publish.”

    That was back in 2015, and Dr. Reeves believes the evidence now is stronger than ever. “Indeed, with the discovery that both cartouches of Ay overlie original cartouches of Tutankhamun, we have the veritable smoking gun,” he said. “To simply deny the evidence is not going to make it go away.”

    ARTICLE
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/science/tutankhamen-nefertiti-archaeology.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    I am a Nefertiti fan. Considering Akenaton is known as a radical leader of the nile, in that he went against the heritage and formed a new culture, i imagine his wife is radical in thinking as well. I can see her preparing for her son's time. The white man miscomprehends. He doesn't realize that the damage of his community, that being white scientist in africa is so vast that he is not trusted he is not wanted. He wants to be viewed as content of character but that is something anyone native in egypt must have a hard time doing based on an extensive negative past. It is that simple, the individualism some in the scholarly community want demands ignoring human history or specifically, interracial history, which is mostly or overwhelmingly negative in humanity.
     

     

    1. Chevdove

      Chevdove

      MY THOUGHTS

      I am a Nefertiti fan. Considering Akenaton is known as a radical leader of the nile, in that he went against the heritage and formed a new culture, i imagine his wife is radical in thinking as well. 

       

      @richardmurray MY THOUGHTS about the whole 18th Dynasty is that it is extremely intriguing and also, there is a big cover up. I also believe that Mr. Reeves needs to listen to Dr. Hawass. 

       

      I am surprise this article was posted on October 31, 2022 because it continues to report the same angle in that a lot of scientific facts are not even considered of which seems to me that some historians just want to keep the same old confusion going. 

       

       

       

    2. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      yeah @Chevdove this story is one I hope I can keep watch on

  12. Prince Menelik ALbum Yourself- does his form remind you of anything?
    artist: richard murray
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Album-Yourself-Submit-935178300

    now8.jpg

  13. Promptpot Gallery - the full gallery. Tell me which ones you like the most, inspire you to create. 
    artist: richard murray
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/PromptPot-the-first-one-935158890

    now6.jpg

  14. My works- Your Fired + Ila IZni + some drawing works are in the latest edition of Dreadful Tales
    https://www.deviantart.com/leothefox/journal/Dreadful-Tales-no-41-935014984

    now5.jpg

  15. now0.png

    This year's  Lena Baker Women's Health & Domestic Violence Summit will explore the mental health effects of continuous physical and psychological traumas that  plagues American of the slavocracy system (ADOSS) through the music of Curtis Mayfield (Jun 03, 1942 - Dec 26, 1999).   Mayfield was a prolific songwriter that wrote about  being Black in America and  black consciousness.   We will explore Mayfield's most iconic songs that  address internal colonization "We the People Are Darker Than Blue",    Identity production "This Is My Country", and "People Get Ready".   We will also explore the question,  "Is there a time to heal?" with Mayfield's  "Choice of Colors".

    Min. Loretta Green-Williams
    Summit Moderator
    Postcolonial  Theorist  | Fd, CEO WOCPSCN

    Special Guest Speaker

    Denise Jackson

    COVID: Mental Health of Domestic Violence 

    Thursday, October, 27, 2022, 11 am est


    Series One:  "We Are People  Darker Than Blue" When Colorism Destroys the Heart

    Based on the lyrics of Curtis Mayfield,  this conversation will consider the difficulties of misogynoir, and colorism, among women of color. 

    THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2022 12-noon pm est 


    Dr. Tamu Petra Browne
    Growth & Innovation Coach for Women Entrepreneurs 
    Thursday, October 27, 2022

    Dr. LaTarsha Holden, MBA
      Leadership Consultant  | Author

     

     


    Series Two:  "This Is My Country":  When They Share Their Care
    This conversation will consider the physical and physiological trauma of racism and what it currently feels and looks like.

    FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2022 12-noon est


    Vaneese Johnson
    Global Speaker | Author
    Friday, October 28, 2022

    Desheen-in-the-chair-683x1024_edited.jpg

    D'Sheene L. Evans
     Visionarypreneur| Trauma Recovery Coach
    The Trauma of Community
    Friday, October 28, 2022
     

     

    Series Three: "People Get Ready":  When Being Sick Is When You Are Sick-n-Tired

    "People Get Ready" was released the year of the voting rights act (1965), Americans that were descendants of the slavocratic system were given reason for optimism. However, with the reversal of recent American rights, and new traumatic occurrences, how do the people get ready when the train is derailed? 

    SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2022  4:30 PM EST
     

    Special Guest Speaker
    Lola Russell, Ph.D.
    Health Communications at CDC and Prevention
    The Intersectionality of Trauma:  Exploring the Patchwork of Being

    Dr. Mustafa Ansari
    Dean Afro-Descendant Institute of Human Rights  Chief Facilitator African Descendant Nation

     

     

     

    Series Four:  "Choice of Colors":  When the Horrors of History Claim We Are Still Americans

    The US big city hate crimes spiked by 39% in 2021*, and with one of the more horrific racial crimes, the Buffalo shooting, the conversation will center around healing processes.   Mayfield's "Choice of Colors" will be the foundation of discussion. We will consider the historic formations that has created the American construct of racism.  We will discuss what components towards racial healing can be considered. We will also consider how we can move forward, "...in order to form a more perfect union,..(Preamble of the United. States of America  Constitution, 1787)". 

    Sunday, October 30, 2022 4:30 PM EST


    Joan Babiak
    Moderator
    Attorney |Board of Trustees Member
    Sunday, October 30, 2022
    Dr. Camelia Straughn
    Transformational Coach | Author | International Speaker 
    Sunday, October 30, 2022


    Lorlett Hudson FRSA
    Leadership Coach | Working with African and Caribbean Leaders and Entrepreneurs 

    1. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      MY COMMENTS

      It is not always fear, sometimes it is desire. If a white man owns a business and has a sign,  no black people, is it fear? A person has the right to want to only serve a certain people. But , the problem is, in a country that invites or publicly states it is for all people, how do you have people who don't want to be around all types side people who do want to be around all types ?

      circa 10:00 It is not always fear, sometimes it is desire. If a white man owns a business and has a sign,  no black people, is it fear? A person has the right to want to only serve a certain people. But , the problem is, in a country that invites or publicly states it is for all people, how do you have people who don't want to be around all types side people who do want to be around all types ? 
      circa 18:00 I oppose the idea of focusing on the youth. I concur to Dr. Camelia Straughn that people do not change , I amend, specifically to being bullied or pushed or canceled. But, history proves negative bias is emitted by youth when people think the youth are enlightened from the elders. I think all need to be focused on. The problem is, and you see this with the cancel culture, the youth in the usa who are supposedly liberal are very constrictive or restrictive in what they can accept being said, which means they are replacing a rigid culture to another.
      circa 21:00 I concur to Loretta Green that people in the usa do not acknowledge problems. The biggest is the native american. Most liberals in the usa  don't acknowledge the inability of liberalism to empower the most oppressed people in the USA or before it. Those people being the native american. But why? Like those who ancestors were enslaved, the scope of the problem is massive. So it is financially or organizationally easier to evade admitting a problem, then to admit a problem and then have to deal with healing from it. It is easier to say, all is good now.
      circa 28:00 great point from Loretta, I add to her point that Black people in the USA itself are unwilling to accept the structural problem with descendents of enslaved people's having to wait later to get what other people of color: non european whites, have been able to have with an existence in the usa after 1965 
      circa 31:00 yes, Curtis Mayfield comprehended the complexity of a country where the peoples in it are not on the same page. James Baldwin said it simply. The world is not white, and the world is not black either. I admit, I have never felt fear walking in harlem. ... I add that Baldwin suggested the key is flexibility. His father wasn't flexible. His father was a black man who hated whites, to the bone. But couldn't retaliate or injure whites, so the hate is deep inside, and anything that has involvement from whites which means the entire government of the usa, is hated by such a black person. 
      circa 35:00 Maybe one day, the day a Black woman doesn't have to be strong no matter what in the USA, will be a great day
      circa 41:00 great point about Loretta about the problem with speaking to doctors who are not as delicate to their role as guide. The scene in a film, as good as it gets, says it all. The female lead in the film is a mother with a child who is going to doctors constantly, but only when the male lead provides a private doctor is her son properly diagnosed. The point, doctors are business people, and if you don't have money, most will treat you as the lawyers do to the fiscal poor in a court room. 
      circa 44:00 Important point by Bablak, the quality of advocacy , which doesn't mean from elected officials but from community agents, has changed since the legendary 1960s. It can be argued it is less than, fro a larger perspective. But her point that it needs to be stronger from the individual is functional. I think the affordable care act, never spoke to quality of care, and focused on accesible care. So everyone can afford healthcare theoretically but the quality of healthcare that most can afford is very low quality.But quality is expensive.
      Circa 48:00 Straughn speaks that people carry trauma's in them but I argue that all children reflect the negativty from their parents. If your parents in a white town in appalachia or a black town in mississippi or a native american reservation in a western state are unhappy and full of negativity or doubts then the children will reflect that in various negative ways.
      circa 51:00 I concur to loretta 100% , I feel black elders in the past were done a disservice by their children or grandchildren who could write, by not getting them to tell their stories. Zora Neale Hurston was right. 
      IN CONCLUSION
      The theme of the multiracial populace having problems handling itself in the USA is common as it was how the usa started. 
      I think the youth may not be the answer some suggest. But I will say that all peoples in the usa need guidance to what the usa has never been, a country where all groups or individuals are empowered.
       

    2. Chevdove

      Chevdove

      My gosh, this was an awesome article.

       

      I will try to locate the video.

       

      It strikes a nerve to read about the purpose that the affordable Care Act serves. It really hurts, because I feel this reality all of the time now, when I go to the doctor. Before this act, my insurance was paid for and reasonable and I feel I had better care, a little better. But now, I have this low paying insurance because othe REGULAR INSURANCE is very expensive now that this affordable care act is law, and well, the medical attention I receive is awful, just awful. I now try to find other ways to get healthy and stay healthy if possible, and going to the clinic is a last resort... again, that is pathetic. 

      Anyway, again, love this article. 

    3. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      @Chevdoveyes, it was shared to me by a connection elsewhere. 

       

      just click on the links, I saw the videos I think it sad that the subject matter of rape demands these videos be viewed only on youtube, i think that is very silly but...

       

      Well, in defense to the affordable care act, obama wanted to kill it, it was nancy pelosi who pushed it through. Like the student loan debt, the goal of these laws in the obama or biden era isn't betterment for all, it is betterment for minorities while majorities adjust.... whether it is people who couldn't get healthcare before the affordable care act or people who have massive student debt before debt relief. Both of those groups are minorites, not 50$ or 70% or 40% of the people in the usa. but the concept is majority make way for minority. that is the larger policy structure. 

      In parallel, biden or the party of andrew jackson was opposed to the another round of emergency checks which covered most people in the usa while the party of abraham lincoln supported continuing the checks.

       

      yeah, good article,glad you liked it

  16. Base Cover.png

     

    I worked on this story for months. After a number of offline readings, I recognized the story I wanted was structurally too variant. 
    So I made versions of the story in text. Remember this story is dreadful , but it isn't obvious what the dread you should feel. 

     

    Audio series
    Pre Race - we learn of Ila Izni and E28el's relationship and the world they are in
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/pre-race
    The Race Short - if you want to know what happens in the race, but don't want the whole race
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-race-short
    The Race Full - for horse racing fans
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-race-full
    Post Race - the results of the race 
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/post-race

     

    Literature

     

    The Love To A Steed - Of E28el's love for Ila Izni 
    Text
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Love-To-a-Steed-934826484
    Audio
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/pre-race
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/post-race

     

     

    The Career End - The End of Ila Izni's career in all its glory
    Text
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Career-End-934827937
    Audio
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/pre-race
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-race-short
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/post-race

     

     

    The Penretirement - the complete version- longest
    Text
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Penretirement-934828992
    Audio
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/pre-race
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-race-full
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/post-race

     

     

    The Last Race - For racing fans, the last race of Ila Izni by itself
    Text
    https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Last-Race-934829492
    Audio
    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-race-full

     

  17. MILTON S. J. WRIGHT (1903-1972)
    POSTED ONSEPTEMBER 14, 2020BY CONTRIBUTED BY: ROBERT FIKES

    now10.jpg
    The only person of African descent known to have had a face-to-face conversation with the infamous Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler was the economist Milton Samuel J. Wright. Born in Savannah, Georgia, on June 28, 1903, the son of William Wright and Edith Burnside Wright, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1926, then earned his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1928.

    Like a handful of other black Americans who found graduate study in pre-World War II Europe intellectually challenging and noticeably less hostile to their presence (W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Mary Church Terrell, Anna J. Cooper, and Mercer Cook among them), Wright pursued his doctorate in economics at the prestigious University of Heidelberg, founded in 1386. As a student leader he had earlier been invited to attend international student conferences at the University of Cologne in Germany and Oxford University in England. In 1931 he published an article in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, detailing his private efforts to launch student exchange programs between historically black institutions in the United States like his alma mater Wilberforce and German universities.

    In Heidelberg in the summer of 1932, after viewing a regional political rally with some German friends and hearing a typically demagogic speech by Adolf Hitler, Wright had the misfortune of being overheard joking to his friends that he would be willing to assassinate the future dictator. He was accosted by SS guards as he approached a restaurant in the Europäischer hof Hotel in Heidelberg where, coincidentally, Hitler was staying and had ordered Wright to be brought to him.

    Wright, fluent in German and well aware of Nazi ideology, entered Hitler’s room with extreme trepidation and feared he might not leave alive. As recounted years later in the Pittsburgh Courier and Ebony magazine, their “conversation” was pretty much a one-way affair with Hitler asking then answering his own questions to Wright in a calm but rather loud voice. Though indicating to some extent he was aware of the history of blacks and that he respected Booker T. Washington and Paul Robeson, Hitler, less than six months away from becoming Chancellor of Germany, nonetheless asserted educated blacks like Wright were certain to be “miserable” because they were forever destined to be “a third-class people, cowardly slaves, and mere imitators of superior races.” “Your people are a hopeless lot. I don’t hate them,” he said, “I pity the poor devils.”

    Wright’s ordeal lasted four hours but Hitler had been surprisingly courteous, had complimented Wright’s excellent German, suggested they meet for another session in Munich, and gave Wright an autographed photo of himself as a memento. Having survived this bizarre, improbable encounter with Hitler, Wright, who had recently finished his dissertation, titled “The Economic Development and the Natives Policy in the Former African Protected Areas of Germany from 1884 to 1918,” returned to the United States and resumed employment at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas. In 1934 he married the former Sue H. Hurt. For nearly four decades Wright taught and was an administrator at Wilberforce where retired in 1969 as Professor of Economics and Political Science and Vice President for Research.

    Milton S. J. Wright died March 11, 1972 in Xenia, Ohio, survived by his daughter, Francine. He was 68 at the time of his death.

    Article
    https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/milton-s-j-wright-1903-1972/

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    Hitler mentioned Booker T Washington and Paul Robeson by name as he was aware of them. What does this prove? Hitler isn't satan. Hitler isn't the devil. Did hitler do many negative things to some people. Yes, without question. But, no human is satan, no human is the devil. My proudest moment of Nelson Mandela's life outside prison is when he honored Khadafi, when the USA side Europe felt he should not. Mandela responded, Khadafi helped my people. No one is satan. Hitler pitied Black people in the USA. The sad truth is his pity was well placed. if you consider the existence of the Black community in the USA from between the two phases of the world war to 10-25-2022 , it warrant pity, pitiful to be honest. The black community in the USA has sacrificed its own self, to aid reaching a goal its leaders nor its people originally wanted. At the end of the day, all the Black people chastised in the Black people for wanting to harm the non blacks who harmed blacks by other black people have nothing to weigh how they were treated except a bunch of disparate distant individual examples in a community bereft of any symbol of collective or communal strength in the usa, while surrounded by various communities seemingly disinterested in reaching the goal they were chastised by their own phenotypical kin for. quite sad. 

     

    IN AMENDMENT

    They Translated ‘Hamilton’ Into German. Was It Easy? Nein.

    For the musical’s Hamburg premiere, a team wrestled with language and cultural differences to bring the story alive for a new audience.
    https://twitter.com/BGCSinc/status/1579104699617538054

     

     

  18. FROM

    Olayemi Olurin (@msolurin)

    2022 just became one of the deadliest year in Rikers history—a 17th man was just found hanging in his cell. We know Rikers is a human rights crisis, we know Rikers needs to close, but what can we do in the interim to stop the deaths? RECEIVERSHIP. What’s that? I’ve explained here
    VIEW VIDEO

    source
    https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1583885501374771201

    now9.png

  19. now8.jpg

    Come smell my stank. I will be uploading many different aromas, including random smutt sketches, 30sec videos, and much more random adult tings.

    See what a deranged middle age black woman likes to draw whenever she can. Please become a Stanky fan.
    With Love,
    DjDontTouchTheTrim aka DjDt3
    $2 a month
    https://www.deviantart.com/djdonttouchthetrim/tier/Stanky-smutty-sketches-and-stuff-896496956
     

     

  20. now6.jpg

     

    ARTICLE

    https://marvelstudios.tumblr.com/post/698651825635737600/join-the-cast-of-black-panther-wakanda-forever
    Join the cast of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and director Ryan Coogler, for an Answer Time on November 9th at 12pm PT / 3pm ET. Submit your questions here.
    http://marvelstudios.tumblr.com/ask


     

    1. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      now0.jpg

      The Talokanil

      Artist: Lunares <  https://godgolden.tumblr.com/ > 

       

  21. In Detroit, Why There's No Black Democrat on the Ballot for Congress
    Clyde McGrady
    Mon, October 24, 2022 at 2:25 PM·9 min read

    now2.png
    State Rep. Shri Thanedar, a 67-year-old Indian American multimillionaire and political newcomber, in Detroit, Aug. 27, 2022. (Sylvia Jarrus/The New York Times)

    DETROIT — On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon in a neighborhood park in the middle of this sprawling city, residents were distributing free backpacks for students heading back to school. Girls sat patiently under a pop-up tent to get their hair braided, while other children gleefully leaped and collided in an inflated bounce castle.

    One person stood out in the mostly African American crowd: a slim, 67-year-old Indian immigrant in a white T-shirt and dark pants, hopping from tent to tent and chatting with parents and neighbors, who seemed excited to see him.

    The man, state Rep. Shri Thanedar, had beaten eight Black candidates in a primary to become the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District — meaning that for the first time in almost 70 years, the nation’s largest majority Black city is unlikely to have a Black representative in Congress.

    Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

    His victory set off waves of anxiety among Detroit’s Black political leaders, who tried desperately to prevent Thanedar from winning. (A primary win in such a heavily Democratic district is tantamount to being elected.) Black leaders describe it as “embarrassing” and “disappointing,” and argue that Detroit should have representation that reflects its population, which is 77% Black. Three-quarters of Detroit voters supported a Black candidate.

    The outcome is also testing the limits of racial representation in a city with a long tradition of Black political power — at a time when that power is being challenged and drained on other fronts. In Los Angeles, the City Council was recently shaken by the release of secret recordings of racist remarks and efforts by Latino leaders to shrink Black influence in the city.

    Detroit began sending two Black delegates to Congress in the 1960s, and elected its first Black mayor in 1973. By the 1980s, Black membership and status in the state legislature was rising, and half the City Council was Black.

    Now, the challenge to Black political power in Detroit comes from divisions within its own leadership and from constituents. Reapportionment cost Michigan a House seat last year, and the newly redrawn district maps reduced the number of Black voters in the 13th District. After years of severe economic insecurity and a string of political scandals, some residents are showing a willingness to try something new.

    In 2013, Detroit elected Mike Duggan, its first white mayor since the 1970s — the same year that a former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was convicted of charges including racketeering and extortion. Five years later, Rashida Tlaib became the first woman of Palestinian descent to be elected to Congress, when she won the seat once occupied by John Conyers Jr. — a towering figure in Detroit politics who resigned over sexual harassment allegations.

    Those victories and Thanedar’s point to an emerging sense among some Black constituents that the psychic, emotional and symbolic benefits of racial representation may not have materially improved their lives.

    “Well, let’s go back years and years and years, and see that when we had those people in office, they all didn’t meet up to what they said they met up to,” said Kimball Gaskinsel, a 58-year-old Black man who helped organize the backpack giveaway in the park. He said of Thanedar, “Let’s give the man a chance.”

    Detroit’s population has fallen by more than 1 million since 1950, and for decades, its leaders have been promising a renaissance. Since emerging from bankruptcy in 2014, the city’s core has managed an impressive revival: Its downtown sparkles with new restaurants, shops and hotels. But Detroit’s comeback is limited and uneven, highlighting racial and economic disparities that have long frustrated residents.

    Between 2010 and 2020 the city lost about 93,000 Black residents, many of whom departed for metro area suburbs, while gaining slightly more Asian and white residents, and people who identify by more than one race.

    In 2021, the unemployment rate among Black residents of Detroit was 20%, compared with 11% among white residents, according to research based on census data. The median Black household earned a little less than $35,000, when rising rents and inflation began to eat into family budgets.

    “It kind of irritates me to see downtown being built up and the neighborhoods being neglected,” said M. Lewis Bass, a 71-year old tenant organizer.

    Bass, who is Black, voted for Thanedar in the primary. He said he liked Thanedar’s tendency to pop up at community events. “It shows a genuine interest in the citizen,” he said. Bass expressed hope that Thanedar would work to curb landlord power and address rising rents and evictions.

    Other Detroiters say that residents will be worse off. “It’s disgusting” for the city to be without a Black representative, said Stevetta Johnson, 73. A retired social worker who leads the Trade Union Leadership Council, Johnson said she was concerned that a representative of another race wouldn’t look out for Black Detroiters when it comes to bringing money and resources into the city.

    On the surface, Thanedar, who arrived in the United States in 1979 and later started a successful chemical business, might seem to be an unlikely politician to represent the newly redrawn 13th District, whose population is now 45% Black.

    He is a wealthy man who lived in Ann Arbor before moving to Detroit three years ago. He spent $10.6 million of his own money on an unsuccessful run for governor in 2018, and he has so far spent around $6 million from his own pocket on his congressional campaign.

    Activists and voters in the district’s poor and working-class neighborhoods point to how Thanedar seems to show up everywhere — at jazz concerts, at tenant meetings — repeatedly, and sometimes unannounced.

    At the backpack giveaway, Thanedar told a mostly Black audience that students deserve a quality education “no matter what ZIP code they live in,” because “we are all children of the same God.” He encouraged voters to hold him to his promises. “You can have my cellphone number,” he said. “Call me.”

    He ended his talk with, “I love you all.” The small crowd erupted in applause.

    Thanedar often reminds Detroit voters of his humble beginnings. He said he wants to increase Black entrepreneurship, close the racial wealth gap and improve the quality of education.

    For Leslie Ford, 50, a born and raised Black Detroiter who runs a nonprofit group, racial representation isn’t much of a concern. “It’s all about the person that’s showing that they care for real,” she said.

    Thanedar’s supporters say that financing his campaign himself shows how much he cares, and that he isn’t beholden to special interests. “He did everything with his own money,” Ford said.

    Thanedar says he is not naive about the challenges he would face in representing such a diverse district. It includes part of Detroit, several white, working-class “Downriver” communities, and the wealthier suburbs of the Grosse Pointes, with tree-lined streets of brick houses with lawns as manicured as Centre Court on the first day of Wimbledon.

    He said he contacted the Congressional Black Caucus about joining once he is elected, but he learned that the caucus’ bylaws allow only Black members to join, a restriction that he says he understands.

    Political observers say that many factors contributed to Thanedar’s victory. The district’s newly drawn boundaries take in some whiter, more conservative communities outside Detroit. Low voter turnout and a crowded primary allowed Thanedar to squeak through with just 28% of the ballots cast. Even so, political leaders say ignoring Thanedar’s ability to appeal to Black voters would be a mistake.

    “I don’t think we can say, ‘Next time, if it’s just one Black person and Shri, it’ll be different,’ said Portia Roberson, a former Obama administration Justice Department official who lost to Thanedar in the primary. “I think that’s naive on our part.”

    Detroit elected Charles Diggs to be Michigan’s first Black member of Congress in 1954, and stood by him even after he was charged with taking kickbacks from employees. Since then, the city has elected Black leaders who became major figures in national and state politics, like Conyers, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and Brenda Lawrence, all of whom represented parts of Detroit. In Washington, Black leaders from Detroit became prominent in the Civil Rights movement. At home, Conyers led the political establishment, selecting candidates and wielding influence over party loyalists and voters.

    But corruption scandals and years of economic stagnation left many voters disappointed with machine politics and open to letting pragmatism rather than loyalty sway their choices.

    Much of that sentiment came from the downfall of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was first elected in 2001 and resigned in 2008 following a bribery scandal.

    “Kwame Kilpatrick broke my heart. I can’t take another chance,” state Sen. Adam Hollier recalled a voter telling him. Hollier, who came in second to Thanedar in the primary, said he tried to position himself as someone other young Black men could look up to.

    The lack of a clear succession plan when Brenda Lawrence decided to retire from her seat in Congress led to some disarray among the city’s political establishment.

    As candidates leaped into the race, competing camps backed two different contenders, in an effort to whittle the field. Only one candidate dropped out, and the endorsement process inflamed tensions over gender dynamics.

    The Legacy Committee for United Leadership, a coalition of religious, business and political leaders, endorsed Hollier. But Lawrence and the local Democratic Party organization threw their support behind Roberson, the former Obama administration official.

    The fracture helped Thanedar win the primary. It left the Republican nominee, Martell Bivings, as the only Black candidate for the seat in the general election.

    Bivings, 35, has been making the case that Black representation matters, in ways both subtle and explicit. He poses questions on his Facebook page like “Do you play spades?” and has tweeted that he’s the only candidate who “knows what it feels like to be Black in America.”

    Bivings said in an interview that his message is being well-received by Black voters, and centers on “family values, praying in schools” as well as gun rights and lower taxes. “Your auntie supports all of those,” Bivings said. He said he supports reparations for slavery (as does Thanedar) and school choice.

    The odds are heavily stacked against Bivings. In 2020, both Tlaib and Lawrence beat their Republican challengers in Detroit with more than 90% of the vote.

    Do any of Detroit’s Black leaders plan to back Bivings? The Rev. Wendell Anthony, a member of the committee that backed Hollier, laughed heartily at the question, before revealing that Bivings had reached out about a meeting. “I’ll talk to anybody,” Anthony said.

    This month, the conservative editorial page of The Detroit News endorsed Bivings, writing: “African Americans argue that this predominately Detroit seat should be held by someone most familiar with Detroit’s challenges. We agree.”

    © 2022 The New York Times Company

    Article
    https://news.yahoo.com/detroit-why-theres-no-black-182550365.html
     

    MY THOUGHTS

     

    ... MLK jr would say, judge him by the content of his character

    Marcus Garvey would say, leave the USA to him, and take everybody you can with you to a different place, even if it isn't better on day one. 

    The Free Blacks who fought for the United Kingdom against creating the USA would say, attack the USA federal government and Michigan and detroit with him in it.

    My point is, depending on yourself, your relationship to the usa government, to white people, to various factors you will relate to this story, no position is wrong. 

    I will add one thing, It's funny how a city that the article deems is seventy seven percent Black who feels black elected officials of the party of andrew jackson or abraham lincoln has failed, don't seem to have anyone suggesting a black party in detroit.

     

    IN AMENDMENT

     

    What do you think of a Black party of governance LINK

     

  22. SAMBAFUNK

    presented by Ronald Reed

     

    SambaFunk

     

    enjoy

    URL

    https://flic.kr/p/2ncd4XN

    now4.png

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