richardmurray

MY THOUGHTS

At least, one problem in modern humanity isn't complicated. It is very simple. It is a question.

How do you get a humanity that has a tiered system of white christian male europeans on top by militaristic power to be a humanity that is tierless? 

The problem with said question is any answer or process requires a majority in humanity to want the goal. And there lay the true problem. Any action can be deemed to the goal or against.  Elements of the Nigerian government have made an action that can be deemed by some long overdue to Black empowerment, to African empowerment, to Nigerian empowerment. Others can deem this a part of the process to be tierless, a nonviolent action that is trying to bring empowerment to a region in humanity controlled by those outside itself to its detriment longer than anyone has been alive.

What is the truth of the Nigerian governments actions? The truth is , it is both. No one is wrong in however they assess it. But arguing between the assessors gives greater hope to maintaining tiers than being tierless. And, if tiers maintain the only question you need to know is which tier you will be in. If tierless, then all the minorities in every community in humanity wanting it lucked out.

Witchtember 2022 collection

Witchtember 2022 by simoneferriero on DeviantArt

My Witchtember gallery LINK

I will place my days for each prompt in the comments

forum post

https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9724-witchtember-2022/

Where do I begin, where do I begin... 
In fiscal capitalism, in the USA,  all industries lean toward fewer and fewer participants. 
Newspapers in the late 1800s early 1900s were in the thousands, now...
Automotive manufacturers in the early 1900s were hundreds, now...
Oil Producing firms were once a hundred, now...
Music Record labels were in the hundreds, now.... 
Movie Studioes in the hundreds, now...
Video Game producers were once a hundred, now...
No industry in the USA historically goes towards more participants, that is historical fact. 
Is an industry being dominated by one firm problematic? yes. 
WHy? If one firm controls an industry, then the external market can't influence the pricing or quality of goods. The key tenet of market fiscal capitalism is that the forces outside a firm, manipulate the firms actions thus a level of control is placed on any firm. 
But I will argue that a very modern or recent activity in the USA has made the monopoly fear impotent. 
That activity is, too big to fail? 
Too big to fail has one great evil in market fiscal capitalism. It denies the markets ability to kill a firm. When a firm is to big to fail, then a firm will be propped up against what the market led it to be. 
So when the banks or car companies in the USA mostly failed, I think ford was alright but all major banks or financial institutions had failed, denying the market's ability to kill those firms killed the fear of monopoly. 
By making a firm or set of firms too big to fail, you make said firm or set of firms a monopoly. 
enjoy the webinar hosted by Jane Friedman < https://www.linkedin.com/in/janefriedman >

Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y3uQlH_LSEuOlh-F67ei1g

Thanks Jane Friedman
From her
The US government is attempting to stop Penguin Random House (the biggest publisher in the US) from acquiring Simon & Schuster (the third biggest publisher in the US), on grounds that it would hurt authors by lowering advances due to reduced competition in the market.

Will authors indeed be hurt if the acquisition goes as planned? Is a super-sized Penguin Random House bad for other reasons? How strong is the government's case? What have we learned from trial testimony about how publishing operates?

Join me for a lively discussion with a panel of industry experts. If you can't make it live, the conversation will be recorded and available afterward on YouTube. Link to register in the comments (free).

End her quote

If you are interested in more of my thoughts
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?query=Richard Murray's Pulpit&fcsearchfield=Series&seriesId=e03984d8-b93f-58eb-807c-66847982c48e

Witchtember 2022 collection

Witchtember 2022 by simoneferriero on DeviantArt

My Witchtember gallery LINK

I will place my days for each prompt in the comments

forum post

https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9724-witchtember-2022/

CENTER FOR BLACK LITERATURE
A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Killens Review of Arts & Letters
Fall/Winter 2022
Jubilee: A Celebration of Voices throughout the African Diaspora
Founded in October 2002, the Center for Black Literature (CBL) has been committed to its mission 
to broaden and enrich the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of Black 
literature. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Center and as part of this commemorative 
milestone, the next issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters will focus on “times for celebration.”
Despite periods of despair during these past few years and the economic, social, political, and 
racially charged challenges we have faced, we will focus on life’s jubilant experiences. We will 
highlight moments of hopefulness and elevation for and of the global Black community.
For the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, we are seeking short stories, 
essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. We are looking for content that reflects
the ways Black creatives from all parts of the world celebrate our daily lives, our culture, and our 
history in a contemporary world. Unless otherwise selected by the editors, we cannot publish work 
that has previously appeared elsewhere in print or on the web. Prospective contributors are asked 
to submit work that is aligned with the current theme (the themes are announced in advance).
- SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES -
(DEADLINE: AUGUST 26, 2022, at 11:59 PM ET).
Please submit to only one category: short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, 
photography, and interviews. We will respond to your submission within one month.
Notes for Submitting for the Fiction, Nonfiction, Essay, or Interview Category
1. Please submit one piece at a time. We have no set or minimum length for prose 
submissions. Average word count: 2,000–3,000 words.
2. Please use Microsoft Word format, letter-sized page.
3. Use one-inch margins on all sides. Line spaces should be double-spaced.
4. Use a standard typeface (e.g., Times New Roman) and use the 12-point font size.
5. Make sure the pages are numbered.
6. Include your name, title of the work, and page numbers on your submission.
7. Please do NOT submit book manuscripts.
8. Please include a two- to three-sentence biography. If the submission is an academic essay 
with references, please include a bibliography.
2
Notes on Submitting for the Poetry, Art, or Photography Category
1. Poetry: Please send up to three poems only.
2. Art and Photography: We welcome all types of visual and image submissions. Please 
include a short note about the context of the visual or image and title and/or caption 
information. Please include no more than six hi-res JPGs (at 300 dpi).
3. Email material to writers@mec.cuny.edu and to Clarence V. Reynolds at 
reynolds@centerforblackliterature.org.
4. Please write “Killens Review Fall/Winter 2022” in the email message’s subject heading.
5. Please include a brief introduction of yourself and of the work being submitted. On the first 
page of your submission be sure to include:
 Your full name
 Telephone number
 Email address
6. The Killens Review of Arts & Letters cannot be held responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, 
photographs, or artwork that do not follow the guidelines.
The material in this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the CBL.
CONTACT US
Address: 1650 Bedford Avenue | Brooklyn, New York 11225
Email: writers@mec.cuny.edu
Phone: (718) 804-8883
Website: www.centerforblackliterature.org
ABOUT THE PUBLICATION AND ITS NAMESAKE
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, of the City 
University of New York, publishes the Killens Review of Arts & Letters. It is 
a peer-reviewed journal published twice a year that features short stories, 
essays, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, and interviews related to the 
various experiences lived by writers and artists of the African Diaspora, as 
well as the African continent. The aim is to provide accomplished and 
emerging Black creatives with opportunities to expand the canon of 
literature and art. The latest issue of the Killens Review is available for 
purchase today. Click HERE.
It is named for the late Georgia-born John Oliver Killens (pictured; 1916–1987). He was a renowned 
African American novelist and essayist and was a writer-in-residence and professor at Medgar Evers 
College from 1981 to 1987. Killens was also the founder of the National Black Writers Conference, a 
major program of the Center.
The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is supported by the am*zon Literary Partnership. For more 
information, visit www.centerforblackliterature.org/killens-review-of-arts-letters/
information 
https://centerforblackliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Killens_FallWinter2022_CALLfinal.pdf

great tweet stream from @Thistleandverse for those writers who may feel the Shuster/Penguin merger is the christian rapture for publishing
From #THistleandverse 
I know a few small or independent presses so (for others who might be interested) I thought I'd share their names, their publishing focus, and some books I've enjoyed from them or books I'm excited to read from them (1/23)
CLICK THE LINK TO VIEW MORE

CENTER FOR BLACK LITERATURE
A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Killens Review of Arts & Letters
Fall/Winter 2022
Jubilee: A Celebration of Voices throughout the African Diaspora
Founded in October 2002, the Center for Black Literature (CBL) has been committed to its mission 
to broaden and enrich the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of Black 
literature. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Center and as part of this commemorative 
milestone, the next issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters will focus on “times for celebration.”
Despite periods of despair during these past few years and the economic, social, political, and 
racially charged challenges we have faced, we will focus on life’s jubilant experiences. We will 
highlight moments of hopefulness and elevation for and of the global Black community.
For the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, we are seeking short stories, 
essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. We are looking for content that reflects
the ways Black creatives from all parts of the world celebrate our daily lives, our culture, and our 
history in a contemporary world. Unless otherwise selected by the editors, we cannot publish work 
that has previously appeared elsewhere in print or on the web. Prospective contributors are asked 
to submit work that is aligned with the current theme (the themes are announced in advance).
- SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES -
(DEADLINE: AUGUST 26, 2022, at 11:59 PM ET).
Please submit to only one category: short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, 
photography, and interviews. We will respond to your submission within one month.
Notes for Submitting for the Fiction, Nonfiction, Essay, or Interview Category
1. Please submit one piece at a time. We have no set or minimum length for prose 
submissions. Average word count: 2,000–3,000 words.
2. Please use Microsoft Word format, letter-sized page.
3. Use one-inch margins on all sides. Line spaces should be double-spaced.
4. Use a standard typeface (e.g., Times New Roman) and use the 12-point font size.
5. Make sure the pages are numbered.
6. Include your name, title of the work, and page numbers on your submission.
7. Please do NOT submit book manuscripts.
8. Please include a two- to three-sentence biography. If the submission is an academic essay 
with references, please include a bibliography.
2
Notes on Submitting for the Poetry, Art, or Photography Category
1. Poetry: Please send up to three poems only.
2. Art and Photography: We welcome all types of visual and image submissions. Please 
include a short note about the context of the visual or image and title and/or caption 
information. Please include no more than six hi-res JPGs (at 300 dpi).
3. Email material to writers@mec.cuny.edu and to Clarence V. Reynolds at 
reynolds@centerforblackliterature.org.
4. Please write “Killens Review Fall/Winter 2022” in the email message’s subject heading.
5. Please include a brief introduction of yourself and of the work being submitted. On the first 
page of your submission be sure to include:
 Your full name
 Telephone number
 Email address
6. The Killens Review of Arts & Letters cannot be held responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, 
photographs, or artwork that do not follow the guidelines.
The material in this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the CBL.
CONTACT US
Address: 1650 Bedford Avenue | Brooklyn, New York 11225
Email: writers@mec.cuny.edu
Phone: (718) 804-8883
Website: www.centerforblackliterature.org
ABOUT THE PUBLICATION AND ITS NAMESAKE
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, of the City 
University of New York, publishes the Killens Review of Arts & Letters. It is 
a peer-reviewed journal published twice a year that features short stories, 
essays, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, and interviews related to the 
various experiences lived by writers and artists of the African Diaspora, as 
well as the African continent. The aim is to provide accomplished and 
emerging Black creatives with opportunities to expand the canon of 
literature and art. The latest issue of the Killens Review is available for 
purchase today. Click HERE.
It is named for the late Georgia-born John Oliver Killens (pictured; 1916–1987). He was a renowned 
African American novelist and essayist and was a writer-in-residence and professor at Medgar Evers 
College from 1981 to 1987. Killens was also the founder of the National Black Writers Conference, a 
major program of the Center.
The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is supported by the am*zon Literary Partnership. For more 
information, visit www.centerforblackliterature.org/killens-review-of-arts-letters/
information 
https://centerforblackliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Killens_FallWinter2022_CALLfinal.pdf

As a writer in a fiscal capitalistic environment, I am, like all other writers, two thing. I am a literary artist plus a commercial artist. 

As a literary artist, I am complete. I create literature that I love, that comes from my soul. I make public or keep private what I choose from my creations. 

As a commercial artist, I am learning. The selling or buying of art involves factors outside creativity or art. Some of said factors are heritage or culture or financial quality. 

In the modern, meaning current, United States of America a culture made in response to historic heritages in said community has become potent in the media industry. In common history of the USA, the historic heritage, media was over ninety nine percent populated by humans who are male-person born with a penis+heterosexual-fornicate with someone who is born with the opposite sexual organ no hermaphrodites+christian-various denominations+white-phenotypical range+european ancestry. Humans who are not in the stated racial group , composed of additives, were less than one percent present in media across all activities. OVer time for various reasons, the cold war desire of the white power of the USA to be accepted by the larger human populace outside the usa over the ussr being the largest one, media in the USA changed at the impetus from its white owners. But , as ever larger money in the USA started being earned by more than just white christian male heterosexuals of european descent, the desire to impose a new media paradigm grew and grew. Said paradigm was and is aided by the growing financial clout of countries outside the USA that are mostly populated by non european or non white or non christian or maybe even mostly female humans. 

But what is the culture? 

The culture brewed state two position. Panracial integration is mandatory. Those in the stated group <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry> are blockaded from depicting those who are not while those who are not can depict those who are <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry>. 

Why did I make this post?

Not for anything I said prior. Everything I said prior was or is common knowledge or should or shall be common knowledge.

I made this post to state a dysfunction in said culture.

It mirrors the same dysfunction in Brown vs Board of Education. 

Can human beings of different races, any racial category, coexist peacefully or functionally? the answer is a simple, historically proven, yes. Multiracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity.

But, history proves something else. Humans beings can also thrive segregated from each other. Peaceful/functional/positive monoracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity. 

The question in media is? If Valinor doesn't have any Black people , are Black people harmed/injured/insulted? The answer is a simple no. 

The tales of Anansi don't include any whites or europeans. Grimms fairy tales don't include any blacks or africans. Neither story collection is lessened by their reality. Neither story requires unrepresented races to be forced through new characters or stories. 

The answer isn't how to push black students into a white students only school to get the resources of the white school to be accessed by black students. The answer is to increase the resources of the black students only school to be at least equal to the white students only school. 

Was media in the USA an industry that blockaded those who were not male+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual? yes. 

But, is the wisest response to that past a modernity where said media is forced by external powers to share its resources OR where media that is not owned by male/+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual people have greater resources? 

As I said in years past, why do Black people not have their own film awards? or moreover, why do Black people not emphasize their own film awards? Miss Juneteenth has began decades ago, but Black women in miss america is still a symbol. Is the goal to have white side black women or is the goal that black women have their own pageants just like white women? 

A thought experiment, if every Black college student in the USA never went to any college but a historical black college or university <HBCU>, what will today's collegiate landscape look like? will it be bad in your mind?  I argue that Harvard+ Yale +MIT+ Stanford will not be lessened or destroyed or evil if they didn't have black students. In parallel I argue that HBCU's lost their momentum or positive possibility having to compete with the resources of more fiscally potent schools. 

Is segregation evil? Is integration good? I argue, the USA or the british colonies preceding it has always been integrated while never segregated. From the first whites of Europe appearing before Native Americans who sadly didn't know what horrors these immigrants will bring to them through white slavemasters houses built on black families bodies or reservations the native americans left alive are forced to live in to NYC today in all of its christian babel likeness, integration has always been in the USA. Segregation has never been now at any time in the USA. 

The key is how are the people integrating. Usually it is one master while the others slave or one alive with the others dead. In modernity, one is in power, while the others are not as powerful. 

But, the image of power is always most dangerous, when it is a lie. The NAzi's saying they hate everyone else wasn't a lie. It was negative but not a lie. And the USA media lives with lies. We are all equal, we are all a family, a set of loving ones, in the USA... but then we are not. Your white cousin can't portray you, but you can portray them ala Hamilton stage play by mirande side Angelina Jolie playing Mariane van Neyenhoff. Black people of fiscal wealth say they want black unity against white oppression in the usa but  most of them finance relatives or friends to go to non Historical black colleges or universities. Lies are dangerous. And media promoting lies leads to greater problems. 

In the art world, this means we artists have financial limitations on our craft based on the messages in our work. We artists always have, and always will I think. But, in the USA it is more narrow than in the past, even with a globally connected media. 

Discussions of the Blackwood LINK

Post SCript: I will love to write a story about Harad in the lord of the rings universe or Sothoryos in the Song of Ice and Fire universe. The writers to either of the mentioned worlds did include black people, asian people, all people in truth, but they only focused on writing about one part. They didn't have to create a USA in their story. 

As a writer in a fiscal capitalistic environment, I am, like all other writers, two thing. I am a literary artist plus a commercial artist. 

As a literary artist, I am complete. I create literature that I love, that comes from my soul. I make public or keep private what I choose from my creations. 

As a commercial artist, I am learning. The selling or buying of art involves factors outside creativity or art. Some of said factors are heritage or culture or financial quality. 

In the modern, meaning current, United States of America a culture made in response to historic heritages in said community has become potent in the media industry. In common history of the USA, the historic heritage, media was over ninety nine percent populated by humans who are male-person born with a penis+heterosexual-fornicate with someone who is born with the opposite sexual organ no hermaphrodites+christian-various denominations+white-phenotypical range+european ancestry. Humans who are not in the stated racial group , composed of additives, were less than one percent present in media across all activities. OVer time for various reasons, the cold war desire of the white power of the USA to be accepted by the larger human populace outside the usa over the ussr being the largest one, media in the USA changed at the impetus from its white owners. But , as ever larger money in the USA started being earned by more than just white christian male heterosexuals of european descent, the desire to impose a new media paradigm grew and grew. Said paradigm was and is aided by the growing financial clout of countries outside the USA that are mostly populated by non european or non white or non christian or maybe even mostly female humans. 

But what is the culture? 

The culture brewed state two position. Panracial integration is mandatory. Those in the stated group <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry> are blockaded from depicting those who are not while those who are not can depict those who are <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry>. 

Why did I make this post?

Not for anything I said prior. Everything I said prior was or is common knowledge or should or shall be common knowledge.

I made this post to state a dysfunction in said culture.

It mirrors the same dysfunction in Brown vs Board of Education. 

Can human beings of different races, any racial category, coexist peacefully or functionally? the answer is a simple, historically proven, yes. Multiracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity.

But, history proves something else. Humans beings can also thrive segregated from each other. Peaceful/functional/positive monoracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity. 

The question in media is? If Valinor doesn't have any Black people , are Black people harmed/injured/insulted? The answer is a simple no. 

The tales of Anansi don't include any whites or europeans. Grimms fairy tales don't include any blacks or africans. Neither story collection is lessened by their reality. Neither story requires unrepresented races to be forced through new characters or stories. 

The answer isn't how to push black students into a white students only school to get the resources of the white school to be accessed by black students. The answer is to increase the resources of the black students only school to be at least equal to the white students only school. 

Was media in the USA an industry that blockaded those who were not male+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual? yes. 

But, is the wisest response to that past a modernity where said media is forced by external powers to share its resources OR where media that is not owned by male/+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual people have greater resources? 

As I said in years past, why do Black people not have their own film awards? or moreover, why do Black people not emphasize their own film awards? Miss Juneteenth has began decades ago, but Black women in miss america is still a symbol. Is the goal to have white side black women or is the goal that black women have their own pageants just like white women? 

A thought experiment, if every Black college student in the USA never went to any college but a historical black college or university <HBCU>, what will today's collegiate landscape look like? will it be bad in your mind?  I argue that Harvard+ Yale +MIT+ Stanford will not be lessened or destroyed or evil if they didn't have black students. In parallel I argue that HBCU's lost their momentum or positive possibility having to compete with the resources of more fiscally potent schools. 

Is segregation evil? Is integration good? I argue, the USA or the british colonies preceding it has always been integrated while never segregated. From the first whites of Europe appearing before Native Americans who sadly didn't know what horrors these immigrants will bring to them through white slavemasters houses built on black families bodies or reservations the native americans left alive are forced to live in to NYC today in all of its christian babel likeness, integration has always been in the USA. Segregation has never been now at any time in the USA. 

The key is how are the people integrating. Usually it is one master while the others slave or one alive with the others dead. In modernity, one is in power, while the others are not as powerful. 

But, the image of power is always most dangerous, when it is a lie. The NAzi's saying they hate everyone else wasn't a lie. It was negative but not a lie. And the USA media lives with lies. We are all equal, we are all a family, a set of loving ones, in the USA... but then we are not. Your white cousin can't portray you, but you can portray them ala Hamilton stage play by mirande side Angelina Jolie playing Mariane van Neyenhoff. Black people of fiscal wealth say they want black unity against white oppression in the usa but  most of them finance relatives or friends to go to non Historical black colleges or universities. Lies are dangerous. And media promoting lies leads to greater problems. 

In the art world, this means we artists have financial limitations on our craft based on the messages in our work. We artists always have, and always will I think. But, in the USA it is more narrow than in the past, even with a globally connected media. 

Discussions of the Blackwood LINK

Post SCript: I will love to write a story about Harad in the lord of the rings universe or Sothoryos in the Song of Ice and Fire universe. The writers to either of the mentioned worlds did include black people, asian people, all people in truth, but they only focused on writing about one part. They didn't have to create a USA in their story. 

As a writer in a fiscal capitalistic environment, I am, like all other writers, two thing. I am a literary artist plus a commercial artist. 

As a literary artist, I am complete. I create literature that I love, that comes from my soul. I make public or keep private what I choose from my creations. 

As a commercial artist, I am learning. The selling or buying of art involves factors outside creativity or art. Some of said factors are heritage or culture or financial quality. 

In the modern, meaning current, United States of America a culture made in response to historic heritages in said community has become potent in the media industry. In common history of the USA, the historic heritage, media was over ninety nine percent populated by humans who are male-person born with a penis+heterosexual-fornicate with someone who is born with the opposite sexual organ no hermaphrodites+christian-various denominations+white-phenotypical range+european ancestry. Humans who are not in the stated racial group , composed of additives, were less than one percent present in media across all activities. OVer time for various reasons, the cold war desire of the white power of the USA to be accepted by the larger human populace outside the usa over the ussr being the largest one, media in the USA changed at the impetus from its white owners. But , as ever larger money in the USA started being earned by more than just white christian male heterosexuals of european descent, the desire to impose a new media paradigm grew and grew. Said paradigm was and is aided by the growing financial clout of countries outside the USA that are mostly populated by non european or non white or non christian or maybe even mostly female humans. 

But what is the culture? 

The culture brewed state two position. Panracial integration is mandatory. Those in the stated group <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry> are blockaded from depicting those who are not while those who are not can depict those who are <white/male/christian/hetero/european ancestry>. 

Why did I make this post?

Not for anything I said prior. Everything I said prior was or is common knowledge or should or shall be common knowledge.

I made this post to state a dysfunction in said culture.

It mirrors the same dysfunction in Brown vs Board of Education. 

Can human beings of different races, any racial category, coexist peacefully or functionally? the answer is a simple, historically proven, yes. Multiracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity.

But, history proves something else. Humans beings can also thrive segregated from each other. Peaceful/functional/positive monoracial bodies, any racial category, are common throughout humanity. 

The question in media is? If Valinor doesn't have any Black people , are Black people harmed/injured/insulted? The answer is a simple no. 

The tales of Anansi don't include any whites or europeans. Grimms fairy tales don't include any blacks or africans. Neither story collection is lessened by their reality. Neither story requires unrepresented races to be forced through new characters or stories. 

The answer isn't how to push black students into a white students only school to get the resources of the white school to be accessed by black students. The answer is to increase the resources of the black students only school to be at least equal to the white students only school. 

Was media in the USA an industry that blockaded those who were not male+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual? yes. 

But, is the wisest response to that past a modernity where said media is forced by external powers to share its resources OR where media that is not owned by male/+white+european ancestry+christian+heterosexual people have greater resources? 

As I said in years past, why do Black people not have their own film awards? or moreover, why do Black people not emphasize their own film awards? Miss Juneteenth has began decades ago, but Black women in miss america is still a symbol. Is the goal to have white side black women or is the goal that black women have their own pageants just like white women? 

A thought experiment, if every Black college student in the USA never went to any college but a historical black college or university <HBCU>, what will today's collegiate landscape look like? will it be bad in your mind?  I argue that Harvard+ Yale +MIT+ Stanford will not be lessened or destroyed or evil if they didn't have black students. In parallel I argue that HBCU's lost their momentum or positive possibility having to compete with the resources of more fiscally potent schools. 

Is segregation evil? Is integration good? I argue, the USA or the british colonies preceding it has always been integrated while never segregated. From the first whites of Europe appearing before Native Americans who sadly didn't know what horrors these immigrants will bring to them through white slavemasters houses built on black families bodies or reservations the native americans left alive are forced to live in to NYC today in all of its christian babel likeness, integration has always been in the USA. Segregation has never been now at any time in the USA. 

The key is how are the people integrating. Usually it is one master while the others slave or one alive with the others dead. In modernity, one is in power, while the others are not as powerful. 

But, the image of power is always most dangerous, when it is a lie. The NAzi's saying they hate everyone else wasn't a lie. It was negative but not a lie. And the USA media lives with lies. We are all equal, we are all a family, a set of loving ones, in the USA... but then we are not. Your white cousin can't portray you, but you can portray them ala Hamilton stage play by mirande side Angelina Jolie playing Mariane van Neyenhoff. Black people of fiscal wealth say they want black unity against white oppression in the usa but  most of them finance relatives or friends to go to non Historical black colleges or universities. Lies are dangerous. And media promoting lies leads to greater problems. 

In the art world, this means we artists have financial limitations on our craft based on the messages in our work. We artists always have, and always will I think. But, in the USA it is more narrow than in the past, even with a globally connected media. 

Discussions of the Blackwood LINK

Post SCript: I will love to write a story about Harad in the lord of the rings universe or Sothoryos in the Song of Ice and Fire universe. The writers to either of the mentioned worlds did include black people, asian people, all people in truth, but they only focused on writing about one part. They didn't have to create a USA in their story. 

Happy 22nd birthday Deviantart

The article linked below said a lot. What are the points: 

pay to view streaming platforms is what big media in the USA <big media meaning the largest media concerns by fiscal revenue or scale of viewership> is enforcing. I still agree with BEinsports ceo, streaming needs to be free like broadcasting. I think having people pay for streaming is the financial error. I Think streaming is better free, especially in the USA as the usa market is used to it. 

The relationship to media in the USA from someone who is five years old today to someone ninety five today is such a vast swing that media in the USA is literally organizing or planning for the five year old who will be ninety five one day. The article misses the role of immigration. Outside the USA broadcast media is usually absent or negligent. PEople forget, most countries never had a PBS. Most countries never had cable stations. Most countries populace has always had to pay for USA media content. So , the immigration populace in the USA culturally supports buying media, cause they are used to it. 

It isn't mentioned in the article, but one of the realities of the business community/private industry/free market capitalist culture in the USA is the heritage of following, especially in media. USA media has rarely had a set of individual daring firms. MEdia firms in the USA copy each other/follow each other to their dooms, historically. The idea of changing the soap operas, or making them more interesting was too daring for media firms in the usa. The problem with statistics side art is statistics can tell you what people are doing relating to art, but it usually guides you away from what you need to do to reimagine successfully. 

I concur to the student of media in the article. The mid 1990s and the reality television era coincided to the facebook/twitter era coincided to the death of non special effects films being made mostly. Audiences in the USA during the 1990s were being given a few key things: 1)the ability to make fun of people , whether famous or not, in the public eye in a daily way 2)special effects laden films whose visual stimulus overcame plot or story in ticket sales 3) the role of social media posts over letters or phone calls which meant brevity/publicity/high speed in communication became natural for many people in the USA. Sequentially, soap operas which have moments of laughter but are not meant for self deprication, have no high production value special effects, are slower paced, long form tales, which use a private storytelling to be displayed only on the privy of the show , are against alot of the momentums by user experience. 

I disagree with the notion that a lack of stay at home parents exists in the USA. Too many people are financially poor in the USA. I argue more parents are stay at home than in the 1960s as a percentage of the whole. but those parents aren't interested in a soap opera and moreover, is financially negative. PEople forget, that the main audience for broadcast media in the USA was the immediate post world war II white community in the USA which was very opulent. We forget that many blacks in the USA in the 1950s 1960s didn't have televisions. so, the financial positivity of the viewership of broadcast media in the USA of the 1950s 1960s where the soap operas come from was racially, monophenotypical/ had a larger percentage of financial positives. 

The tragedy of this article is it shows how cable is clearly still alive as a medium while many in media have suggested the usa has moved on from cable. it shows how the reality is rarely spoken in modern media in the usa. I repeat, at some point the cable services will figure out how to integrate the streaming services. The streaming services don't want it cause it undercuts their competition with each other. The problem for paid to view streaming is it can only make money by growing subscribers. The whole point of commercials is the commercials pay for the show to be viewed freely, with breaks. Before commercials , firms financed shows whole but that is expensive and too much for most firms. PRoctor and Gamble is a pharmaceutical firm that makes a lot of money.

I conclude with the strength of telenovelas in latin america. As well as the fantasy shows, game of thrones, as fantasy soap operas. It isn't that soap operas are dead in the USA but they are modulated now. Whereas in the past, humans in a modern setting, with conventional drama was adequate. But in modern USA you need dragons/elves/scenes of mythical war/fantastical extravagance/characters that have insane obsessions that mirror the engineered reality tv chaos to have a  soap opera. 

https://www.tvinsider.com/1055354/soap-opera-daytime-tv-decline-cancellations/

Tracy Christian via Michelby & Co.

THOUGHTS TO ARTICLE

lovely article in some ways. I like her points about what it means a business. A business owner especially for Black people in the USA is not always with the wrappings of white owned business, which is usually better financed. I like what she said about labor populaces. How many are not still multiracial in makeup. I am a peter mensah fan. If they do a shazam <hanna barbera> film, they need to get him 100% if you see him in Hidalgo+ his versatility in other work, you will comprehend. ... I disagree that Black forebears reared us to invade spaces. My parents taught me to be free, not to be an agent for making the monoracial multiracial. I also disagree with sadness that multiraciality is absent in many places. Unfortunately, too many non white europeans don't comprehend that merit and labor opportunities are not connected. You have the right as a president to hire your children. It doesn't make you bad. When one controls who gets opportunity they are not forced to give said opportunities based on certifications or matriculations.

ARTICLE URL

https://www.blackenterprise.com/meet-tracy-christian-hollywoods-only-black-talent-agency-owner-expands-while-other-agencies-cease-to-exist/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&fbclid=IwAR0nY7wITdR--VWTz0CjVl36HtnGl2YzWYqH0AN9iqcIMGBtniwKbJt54WY

National Association of Black Journalist

In one article, the author suggest Hollywood is broken up into parts, a white hollywood side unspoken hollywoods, while also suggesting hollywood is aracial, which means the owners are blocking an inherent universality in hollywood. He suggest Mary Alice isn't a household name, but then states she was a household name in black households... what are the points I am getting at? First, this article doesn't honor Mary Alice enough. It focuses on her work in one show, but doesn't refer to her work in los angeles for an august wilson play. I think fences. Honor artist by referring to their work. Second, for someone who loves to learn about race teaching, the opinion author forgets that opportunity in fiscal capitalism has one source, owner. Opportunity in fiscal capitalism is never about merit. It is about the owner. Who the owner wants to help. I repeat, who the owner wants to help. ... the author's point is Mary Alice was denied the career she should had by the mismanagement of fiscal capitalism in the film /television industry in the USA. Meaning what? The owners of film studios side tv stations <and later streaming/cable or other> should give opportunity based on the content of character, not the color of skin. But, If I own a film studio and I have all the films I want to produce in the fiscal year in preproduction except one. Do I give the one slot, the directors chair, to my son who didn't graduate high school, has no experience in the industry or do I give it to a graduate of howard who won awards from spike lee+ oprah winfrey + robert townsend+ in Nollywood? I will give it to my son. why? I am a racist. My bloodline is important to me over those who are not. Sequentially, i Have a negative bias towards my clan. Penultimate from the conclusion, I use the third point, ownership is the key to opportunity in fiscal capitalism. The owner can choose to give opportunity on some scale of merit. But the owner is not obliged to. You own so that you control what you do, and you can never be wrong. You may lose money. You may be cruel or mean spirited. But you are not wrong because you are the owner. Mary Alice was failed by impotency in Black Hollywood not White Hollywoods opportunity to white thespians OR impotency of Black producers in Hollywood to provide support to Black thespians, not White producers in Hollywoods support of White thespians. I can say more but I will agress

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mary-alice-career-black-hollywood_n_62e810f7e4b0d0ea9b79a233

Nichelle Nichols side Bill Russell

https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2004&type=status

BlackWood

https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1981&type=status

P.S.

The NBA is white owned. The NBA didn't accept the HArlem Rens , who played in the now destroyed Renaissance Ballroom. They had a black owner. The Negro Leagues didn't have all black owners, but had many. The American + National leagues , all with white owners could join but couldn't join with Black owners. 

Ownership matters. Black people keep suggesting a white man has to look out for non white people in the ownership position. No a white man doesnn't

Deep Dive Into Building Inclusive Worlds
Steven Barnes < https://www.facebook.com/groups/1432951630350251/user/604520909/ > of Lifewriting will be teaching  

When: September 9 – October 9, 2022
Where: Online — Available everywhere and at your own pace
Price: $500

Worldbuilding for speculative fiction and games can be a daunting task; even moreso for writers who want to create inclusive cultures filled with diverse characters without unconsciously replicating colonialist structures and viewpoints. This class offers writers a deep dive into key aspects of building inclusive worlds — Creating Cultures, Ideology, Religion, Cosmology, Sociobiology, Language, Research, and more — with a dream team of outstanding builders of speculative worlds: Steven Barnes, K. Tempest Bradford, Kate Elliott, Max Gladstone, Jaymee Goh, Lauren Jankowski, Pam Punzalan, Nisi Shawl, and Juliette Wade.

This four-week class includes video lectures and interviews plus extensive discussion and Q&A. Students will leave the class with a deep worldbuilding toolset and resources for further study.

MORE INFORMATION FOR THE FOLLOWING AT THE URL AT THE END OF THIS POST
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https://writingtheother.com/building-inclusive-worlds-2022/
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The tweet in question mentioned 6 things: Keke palmer's career/Zendaya's career/Colorism/Hollywood/Comparing two thespians careers/former child stars careers... The suggestion made in the tweet is that the two child stars have different careers at the moment with zendaya being more and Palmer less, and that contrast is an example of colorism in hollywood. And lastly, that said point warrants a deep inspection to their careers. ... I will start with the point. No two thespians ever have the same careers. Hollywood has never provided two thespians with the same careers. Boris karloff didn't have the same career as bela legosi. Billie D Williams didn't have the same career as James Earl Jones. No two thespians ever have the same career in the film industry anywhere. Jackie Chan didn't have the same Career as samo hung, and that is hong kong cinema. Alec Baldwin doesn't have the same career as Harrison Ford. What is my point? Suggesting that two thespians careers can be defined as different based on a negative bias is a simplicity of how the film industry works. Sharon stone didn't have the same career as Meryl Streep who didn't have the same career as Michelle Pfeiffer. The film industry never is the same for any two thespians. Now, is colorism real. I will define colorism as biases based on skin tone. To the issue in question. The skin tone closer to the average of white europeans is given a positive bias while the skin tone closer to the average of black africans is given a negative bias. Based on my definition of colorism, it is real. But, are the careers of Palmer side Zendaya an issue of said bias or hollywood reality? Based on that logic, Angela Bassett overcame colorism and Vanessa Williams didn't gain enough from it. But is that true? If you look into any two thespians careers the reality is simple. A thespian is lucky if they are involved in fiscally profitable work at a higher rate. Why did Val Kilmer's career, before his illness, not be greater than Tom Cruise? Colorism is real. All biases are real. But are biases the key to success or perceived success in a given space? Not always. The main point of the original tweet, which is a reply, is an assumption, absent any way to be proven. As Palmer correctly stated, Keke palmer's career is keke palmer's. I add, Zendaya's career is Zendaya's. Comparing artist careers based on negative biases in any industry isn't acceptable unless it is an industry normal. For example, Judy Garland was born the same year as Dorothy Dandridge. Both are well known singers. Both played in well-known roles. Was dorothy dandridge blockaded from roles as a black person in hollywood that Judy Garland wasn't as a white person in hollywood? yes. But that was an industry standard at that time, in all areas. Black characters were intentionally not written. Black writers were intentionally not hired. Black producers only existed in the independent system, not hollywood. Colorism like all biases is real and still exists, throughout all aspects of humanity. But, a bias must be universally applied in an arena to claim its potency, not existence but potency, absent strict proof. Lastly... the tweet that is the source of the article's debate is a reply. In the original tweet, linked below, Keke PAlmer is praised. Zendaya isn't mentioned. And, the viewpoint that Keke Palmer is a recent star is challenged as historically inaccurate using the posters life. 

Why do I say this? I argue the BET article is dysfunctional. If you simply go to the original post. You will see the source post. They are not even connected in theme. And, I argue that Keke Palmer in replying to the colorism point has either bad media management, cause many stars do not make their own tweets, or enough people she cars about mentioned this that she felt she needed to speak. I will also add, in modern times, sometimes making negative issues loud is a way to become more popular. 

THE ARTICLE

https://www.bet.com/article/mkptst/keke-palmer-zendaya-colorism-twitter

the tweet in question, THE REPLY

https://twitter.com/NBAgladiator/status/1550912209668153348

the original tweet, THE SOURCE

https://twitter.com/aiyanaish/status/1550873544850014209

Someone in the internet asked

IS SUPERMAN OUTDATED?!? Thoughts? and what would you do differently?

My reply
Related to what? no I am joking... Outdated suggest a character no longer reflects a present culture. The blunt truth is, no character is ever outdated. Right now many white women in the usa still have a dream of the south that is reflected in "Gone With The Wind"... Now if Outdated suggest a character no longer reflect a majority culture in the present. Then superman is up for debate. In the USA, many black people whose forebears were enslaved by whites will vehemently oppose a black person who only negative action to whites is speaking prejudicely to whites. In the USA, many whites dream for the usa to return to a place where the law supports advantages by being white in all communal quarters or legal levels. In South Africa, many Black people resent with hatred nelson mandela for they see him as a traitor to black freedom. In South Africa, many white people intentionally integrate in their personal or work life all phenotypical groups  in south africa , within their power, to fight against the historical legacy that made south africa.  why do I say all this? Superman is a nonhuman, not a child of earth, who is phenotypically a white european. Anyone can research superman's comic book history and find an example of him supporting a negative view whites have to non whites or men to women, through some action or involvement to another character. Is Superman outdated to a majority in the USA or the greater humanity? I will say superman always was.   Do many people like the idea of a powerful being beyond the control of humanity helping humans? yes. But do most in humanity want all people in humanity to be happy or healthy or just themselves and those in their clan? History in the past or modernity proves most in humanity, are not willing to kill another human, but if those willing to kill in their clan keep their clan empowered over others, they may speak against it but they will aid or abet that empowerment.  Superman was or is outdated. Now what will I do? Yes, I wrote stories of children from outside earth to earh. But if someone asked me what Superman needs most after near one hundred years of publication or media history. I think superman needs to be set on a plot path and stay on that plot path regardless of fan reception or anything else for one hundred years. No character is beloved by all. but, superman like most comic book characters of the usa's great flaw is all the reboots of their storylines. Imagine if superman would had remained a consistent story from his original self.  So I will return superman to his original power levels: super lifting<a skyscraper not a continent>, super running<a high speed train not the speed of light>, super leaping<over a skyscraper not to the upper atmosphere>,super tough skin<a bullet, not a high powered or nuclear missle>, super eyesight/hearing/smelling/tasting. No flying, no eyelasers, no ice breath, no ability to not breath and function,no immortality.   And from origin story just one hundred years from that period, no power changes and all characters stay true to themselves, and age appropriately including superman. If Discovery channel gave superman me to handle, that is what I will do. And yes, I think the whole kryptonian destruction plot is silly, and a character I made from another planet will never have such an origin story but... there you have it. what say you? 
 

Miss Juneteenth - film review by Movies That Move We

facebook group link
https://www.facebook.com/groups/162792258578547/permalink/437616257762811/

Prior Moviess That Move We Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1983&type=status

List of Movies That Move We Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q="movies that move we"&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status

juneteenth art

Title: Black YEar Round
Artist: RoseberriiDotart
https://www.deviantart.com/roseberriidotart/art/Black-Year-Round-888032233
ARTICLE
https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/Celebrate-Juneteenth-2022-918659475

I wonder how many Black women have reached orgasm before 30 while interacting with a black man. The only way is to ask all black women and no one has done that for any question. all polls are merely averages. But I bet most black women have never reached an orgasm in their entire life time side any man and that includes sadly, my fellow Black men. 
The article below deals with a film that is a fiction about a woman on a quest to have an orgasm who never did before and is a mother of adult children and the wife of a deceased man.
But I think the topic is true. Many of my fellow males, including me, can be insensitive to women in intimate scenarios and that leads to women not being pleased. I know for sure, through offline talks that many men, not all but many, believe all every woman needs is a thick penis in them to be aroused and that simply is a lie. 
But it is a lie that many men have been taught to be truth by other men, especially their elders in their homes. 
But I wonder, I think if every black woman can say by her third intimate experience with a black man she had an orgams, regardless of when that will be a nice communal achievement of change.

Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63
The actress made the choice to disrobe. Still, she says, it was the most difficult thing she’s ever done in her four-decade career.

By Nicole Sperling
June 15, 2022
It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.

And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”

We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.

Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.

“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”

Thompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.

Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.

She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”

“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”

For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.

“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”

She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”

There is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.

To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.

“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”

Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”

The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).

To the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.

“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”

Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”

The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.

Thompson doesn’t mind. “It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.

That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.

“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”

Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.”

Nicole Sperling is a media and entertainment reporter, covering Hollywood and the burgeoning streaming business. She joined The New York Times in 2019. She previously worked for Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angeles Times. @nicsperling

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/movies/emma-thompson-good-luck-to-you-leo-grande.html

IN AMENDMENT

Again, the problem with Black people is we talk about finance in such a legal way, White people make money based on whatever it takes, not within a system. and the reality is, black people's leaders in the usa have chosen to lead the legal way for their own agenda , which doesn't help black people en large.

Lavish Money Laundering Schemes Exposed in Canada
Government officials in the province of British Columbia were aware that suspicious money was entering their revenue stream, but took insufficient steps to stop it.

By Catherine Porter, Vjosa Isai and Tracy Sherlock
Published June 15, 2022
Updated June 17, 2022
VANCOUVER — Self-professed students were buying multimillion-dollar homes in the Vancouver area, with dubious sources of income, or none at all.

A family of modest means transferred at least 114 million Canadian dollars to British Columbia.

Loan sharks cleaned their dirty money by giving garbage bags and hockey bags full of illicit Canadian 20 dollar bills to gamblers who took it onto casino floors.

Those were just some of the findings from a long-awaited report into money laundering in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, which after two years of testimony was finally released by a special commission on Wednesday.

Canada is a “major money laundering country,” with weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, that put it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia, according to a 2019 report by the State Department.

Few places in Canada launder as much money as the province of British Columbia, specifically the region around Vancouver, which has one of the country’s biggest underground economies. The province has earned an international reputation as a haven for “snow washing” — a term for money laundering in Canada, according to government officials.

Billions of dollars a year have been laundered there by criminals, using tactics such as gambling in casinos, buying and selling luxury goods and taking out residential mortgages that are paid off in cash installments small enough not to trigger any alarm bells.

British Columbia’s gambling industry is a cash cow for the provincial government. At its height in 2015-2016, gambling generated a record 3.1 billion Canadian dollars in revenue, about one-third of which went to the government and was used to finance hospitals and health care, community organizations and other projects.

The commission was tasked to delve deeply into how bad money laundering in the province had gotten, and whether regulatory organizations, as well as the government itself, had failed to stem it, or even worse, turned a blind eye to it. While the report found no evidence of corruption, some elected officials were aware that suspicious funds from the gambling industry were entering the provincial revenue stream, but took insufficient action to stop it. One official, the minister then responsible for gaming, took no action.

The report, more than 1,800 pages long, lays out the staggering scope of money laundering in the province and sets out more than 100 recommendations for addressing it.

The province should create an anti-money laundering commissioner and a dedicated money laundering investigation and intelligence police unit to address this “corrosive form of criminality,” the report says.

“Money laundering is fundamentally destabilizing to the society and the economy that we all want for the province,” Austin Cullen, the head of the commission and a former British Columbia Supreme Court Justice, told reporters on Wednesday. “Sophisticated money launderers have used British Columbia as a clearing house or a terminus for laundering an astounding amount of dirty money.”

The provincial government announced the inquiry in May 2019 after a series of government-sponsored reports found what the commission called “extraordinary” levels of money laundering in the real estate, casino, horse racing and luxury car sectors, fueled in part by the illegal drug trade.

Books, podcasts and news reports had raised the alarm across the country, accusing gangs in China of importing fentanyl to the Western province, and then laundering the proceeds through casinos and high end real estate, helping to further inflate housing prices in a city already deemed the most expensive for housing in the country.

A 2019 report to the province estimated that in the prior year, up to 5.3 billion Canadian dollars in laundered money flowed through real estate investments in British Columbia, inflating housing prices by as high as 7.5 percent because they were purchased with the proceeds of crime as a way to clean — or legitimize — that money.

The commission, headed by Mr. Cullen, a well-respected judge, has been a constant drum beat across the country throughout the pandemic, hearing from almost 200 witnesses, including a former premier, a government minister accused of ignoring warnings about money laundering in casinos because they offered huge revenue for the government, and police officers alleging their investigations into illicit gambling were shut down for similar political reasons.

Witnesses told the commission how one scheme worked. Rich gamblers from China flew in, wheeling hockey bags stuffed with tens of thousands of Canadian 20 dollar bills to play baccarat at private salons inside Vancouver-area casinos. The money was suspected to come from loan sharks connected to Chinese criminal gangs and drug traffickers. The loan sharks laundered their drug money by lending it to the gamblers, who would in turn repay them with clean money deposited to bank accounts in China or Hong Kong. This became known as the “Vancouver Model.”

Specialized gambling police and lottery investigators raised an alarm but found their investigations shut down or blocked, or even worse, they were fired, the commission heard. The betting limits in casinos were hiked to 100,000 Canadian dollars per hand, allowing even more money to be laundered.

British Columbia’s Attorney General David Eby, who has been campaigning against money laundering for many years, told reporters earlier this month he hoped the report would offer his government a road map for turning the province and Vancouver, “into a model for fighting money laundering instead of a center where it takes place.”

Already, the British Columbia government has taken some steps to combat the problem. It has tightened the rules at casinos, requiring gamblers to declare their source of funds and in 2019, launched a public land ownership registry, requiring certain real estate holders in the province to disclose their owners, particularly those hidden behind shell companies, trusts, partnerships and other “beneficial owners.”

Correction: June 16, 2022
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the actions that the Cullen commission report said provincial government officials in British Columbia took to address money laundering in the gaming industry. The report said that some officials took actions that were insufficient and that one official took no action, not that all officials took no action.

Catherine Porter, a foreign correspondent based in Toronto, has reported from Haiti more than two dozen times. She is the author of a book about the country, “A Girl Named Lovely.” @porterthereport

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/world/canada/canada-money-laundering.html
 

It is a video

MY THOUGHTS AS I WATCHED

everyone knows that the civil rights act was initially for the black community and became extended to all non white males, and with the immigration act the "flooding" was applied. It shouldn't be a secret.

But the sister's , the immigration lawyers, point is true. The south carolina guy was rude to her. Yes, illegal immigrants are used to do two jobs: block blacks , descended of enslaved, from a job plus also have a person willing to get a lower wage, who is most illegal immigrants. 

The lazy narrative is from white media. But, the USA is why countries around humanity are poor, or dysfunctional. From eastern europe to south east asia to west africa to the entirety of south america, the hand of the USA brews dysfunctional poor countries all throughout humanity. Thus drives their populaces desire to immigrate and no country accepts immigration like the usa. It is a perfect circle. 

The problem I have with the narrator is she is missing the point. She is focusing on the battle for jobs when the true issue is ownership. if Black people owned more then they will not have a problem with wages, cause more blacks are employed by... blacks.  If I own a movie studio , the scale of Disney, and I mostly hire black people throughout the labor sectors then that actually helps black people. 

Kinda Velloza is correct. Immigrants still pay taxes. 

The south carolina guy really doesn't like kinda velloza... it stings, I wonder if they know each other or met each other on the talk circuit before cause wow! 

She is black from guyana, you are black from south carolina, please find a room and have hot sex. 

To guyana, guyana recently found oil! but the government of guyana isn't some socialist, egalitarian government. It is like Gabon, or Angola, two other recent oil states that , yeah, black oil barons, but these countries don't have governments built on communalization. These governments are tribal in nature. full of clans who place themselves in halls of power. 

Of course, I have travelled to various places. I know for certain that many tribes in the village exist. 

I love how Tammi Mac doesn't use the word whites. I know this is fox. I am glad Tariq used that word whites. 

One point is, this show need to be on TVOne. I am not saying that I want the sister to lose her show, but part of the problem with black people is we have to use black owned media entities more. Even though the scaling of black media is too small. 

The issue of how Black immigrants from the caribbean or africa view the usa is complex. As people from fiscal poor countries, they adore the possibility in the usa. As black people, they respect the Black populace in the USA. As black people in a country controlled by white power, they know of the phenotypical bias but it is set in stone and has gone on for so long it isn't viewed as challengeable. 

Gregg Dixon is historically short. Black leaders circa 1860s , in particular the Black church, supported integration. They didn't fight for ownership. They didn't fight for all the things Tariq or Marcel suggested. 

The problem is complicated for the Black populace in the USA.  

I love how Tammi Mac admitted Black americans seperate themselves when they get those PHd's and all the panelist laughed:) which is telling.

I love how the freddi guy wasn't listening and blamed the biden administration for the trump, amazing.

Kinda Velloza's point is correct about immigration law. The rule of law is supposed to be a factor of peace. if the rule of law doesn't matter to those who are being influenced by the USA, which is illegal immigrants being detained then, it is a slippery slop. 

Yes, immigrants in latin america, can not walk to spain. And brasil... the flavelas in brasil isn't an upgrade to some one from central america.

The host forgot the lawyer came from guyana , not ghana. 

People come to the USA because most governments in humanity are controlled by clans. If you take out, China/Russia/USA/some western european governments, most other governments are run by clans.

The blood of the murdered native american by whites is actually the foundation of the USA, not the labor of blacks or the domination of whites or the dreams of other immigrants whether unwilling or willing. 

The problem in this show, like many of these talk shows,  is the points don't lead to solutions.

Gregg Dixon , who wants to be an elected official, but is part of a party of governance that he himself says is opposed to his position.  So what is the solution. Run independent or start your own party. He loves history. History proves the usa at one time had only one party, then became two and throughout its history has added more and more with varying success.  

Tariq Nasheed is clearly a DOSer, or I will use his term Foundational Black. But he is an artist, like myself. I am not knocking down being an artists. But, the artists with the most money in modernity, don't control the water, energy, food, construction. Foundational Black Americans need infrastructure support. As an artists, he can only get money for his work. Unless he is going to spend all the money he makes on infrastrcture needs, at best he is like myself at this moment, a charlatan. A pulpiter, which I can't stand, but is the truth. 

Kinda Velloza says the non immigrant Black populace has to engage more functionally to the USA. And let the immigrant community be. In her mind, Black unity is lose. She accepts the tribes in the village motif I usually use. All she wants is for the various Black tribes to stop attacking each other. 

Samuel Q Elira is a candidate as well, he wants to make things better. He doesn't have any answers. But he thinks Black people need to unite cross tribes in the village. As an elected official to prince george's , a majority black county I think. Maybe he can usher great inter black communication and effort in that county. 

I wish the host would had focused on what these people wanted and how to get there. I find most of these shows, not merely black social commentary but white or women or asian or latino or anybody, social commentary shows are focused on cross arguments, when I think statin solutions is a better use of time. 

I love how Kinda got the last word on the south carolina guy:) hilarious:) 

I laughed a lot, lovely. I love banter. 

It is a video

MY THOUGHTS AS I WATCHED

everyone knows that the civil rights act was initially for the black community and became extended to all non white males, and with the immigration act the "flooding" was applied. It shouldn't be a secret.

But the sister's , the immigration lawyers, point is true. The south carolina guy was rude to her. Yes, illegal immigrants are used to do two jobs: block blacks , descended of enslaved, from a job plus also have a person willing to get a lower wage, who is most illegal immigrants. 

The lazy narrative is from white media. But, the USA is why countries around humanity are poor, or dysfunctional. From eastern europe to south east asia to west africa to the entirety of south america, the hand of the USA brews dysfunctional poor countries all throughout humanity. Thus drives their populaces desire to immigrate and no country accepts immigration like the usa. It is a perfect circle. 

The problem I have with the narrator is she is missing the point. She is focusing on the battle for jobs when the true issue is ownership. if Black people owned more then they will not have a problem with wages, cause more blacks are employed by... blacks.  If I own a movie studio , the scale of Disney, and I mostly hire black people throughout the labor sectors then that actually helps black people. 

Kinda Velloza is correct. Immigrants still pay taxes. 

The south carolina guy really doesn't like kinda velloza... it stings, I wonder if they know each other or met each other on the talk circuit before cause wow! 

She is black from guyana, you are black from south carolina, please find a room and have hot sex. 

To guyana, guyana recently found oil! but the government of guyana isn't some socialist, egalitarian government. It is like Gabon, or Angola, two other recent oil states that , yeah, black oil barons, but these countries don't have governments built on communalization. These governments are tribal in nature. full of clans who place themselves in halls of power. 

Of course, I have travelled to various places. I know for certain that many tribes in the village exist. 

I love how Tammi Mac doesn't use the word whites. I know this is fox. I am glad Tariq used that word whites. 

One point is, this show need to be on TVOne. I am not saying that I want the sister to lose her show, but part of the problem with black people is we have to use black owned media entities more. Even though the scaling of black media is too small. 

The issue of how Black immigrants from the caribbean or africa view the usa is complex. As people from fiscal poor countries, they adore the possibility in the usa. As black people, they respect the Black populace in the USA. As black people in a country controlled by white power, they know of the phenotypical bias but it is set in stone and has gone on for so long it isn't viewed as challengeable. 

Gregg Dixon is historically short. Black leaders circa 1860s , in particular the Black church, supported integration. They didn't fight for ownership. They didn't fight for all the things Tariq or Marcel suggested. 

The problem is complicated for the Black populace in the USA.  

I love how Tammi Mac admitted Black americans seperate themselves when they get those PHd's and all the panelist laughed:) which is telling.

I love how the freddi guy wasn't listening and blamed the biden administration for the trump, amazing.

Kinda Velloza's point is correct about immigration law. The rule of law is supposed to be a factor of peace. if the rule of law doesn't matter to those who are being influenced by the USA, which is illegal immigrants being detained then, it is a slippery slop. 

Yes, immigrants in latin america, can not walk to spain. And brasil... the flavelas in brasil isn't an upgrade to some one from central america.

The host forgot the lawyer came from guyana , not ghana. 

People come to the USA because most governments in humanity are controlled by clans. If you take out, China/Russia/USA/some western european governments, most other governments are run by clans.

The blood of the murdered native american by whites is actually the foundation of the USA, not the labor of blacks or the domination of whites or the dreams of other immigrants whether unwilling or willing. 

The problem in this show, like many of these talk shows,  is the points don't lead to solutions.

Gregg Dixon , who wants to be an elected official, but is part of a party of governance that he himself says is opposed to his position.  So what is the solution. Run independent or start your own party. He loves history. History proves the usa at one time had only one party, then became two and throughout its history has added more and more with varying success.  

Tariq Nasheed is clearly a DOSer, or I will use his term Foundational Black. But he is an artist, like myself. I am not knocking down being an artists. But, the artists with the most money in modernity, don't control the water, energy, food, construction. Foundational Black Americans need infrastructure support. As an artists, he can only get money for his work. Unless he is going to spend all the money he makes on infrastrcture needs, at best he is like myself at this moment, a charlatan. A pulpiter, which I can't stand, but is the truth. 

Kinda Velloza says the non immigrant Black populace has to engage more functionally to the USA. And let the immigrant community be. In her mind, Black unity is lose. She accepts the tribes in the village motif I usually use. All she wants is for the various Black tribes to stop attacking each other. 

Samuel Q Elira is a candidate as well, he wants to make things better. He doesn't have any answers. But he thinks Black people need to unite cross tribes in the village. As an elected official to prince george's , a majority black county I think. Maybe he can usher great inter black communication and effort in that county. 

I wish the host would had focused on what these people wanted and how to get there. I find most of these shows, not merely black social commentary but white or women or asian or latino or anybody, social commentary shows are focused on cross arguments, when I think statin solutions is a better use of time. 

I love how Kinda got the last word on the south carolina guy:) hilarious:) 

I laughed a lot, lovely. I love banter. 

ProfD  < ProfD - AALBC.com’s Discussion Forums > truth...

truth...

partial , before the secession in the french-british war <called french - indian usually> and after in the war of 1812  you can see the british were willing to use natives or blacks to counter whites in the usa. Which to be blunt, ProfD is strategically a different situation. The british are not good, they were an empire, all empires are based on power, not goodness. but, all empires are willing to make arrangement in their fringes, ala the roman empire which in germania created the seeds for the vandals later. The roman empire didn't love the vandals, but the vandals served a function.  To me , your making too light of the strategic need of the british empire to have a minority in its favor , in the same way the usa supports israel in the arab world. Israel is given constant support, this is not cause most whites in the usa, are in love with white jews, this is cause they serve a function. 

fair enough.. let goodness be where it is

fair enough... I think leaders have levels of quality

and same

I think desire is the most important factor. I have never believed anyone is as ignorant as they seem

Good point, I want to add, dispirited people are the farthest, beyond the mind is the heart. When the heart quits that is stronger than the mind's distance.

I think racism is human and thus as long as humans exists racism will, the question is how we humans manage it. It doesn't have to be managed to obsolescence or cruelty

Cynique < Cynique - AALBC.com’s Discussion Forums >  your right, add the native american. And beyond american, racism is as human as love or hate or selflessness, all are human. Nothing to dispute. Those who complain the most want something in their favor. Black people, native americans, women... have a lot of complaints. Nothing to dispute. The only thing is certain, is sooner or later, everybody gets their time at the top of the pyramid. The question is, will your group be at the top when you are alive:) 

Yeah, justice is abstract because most think justice is about a universal truth or a universal balance, but it itsn't. Justice is determined by that which is in power at the time. Those in power changes and everyone can't be in power at the same time. 

Yeah , it is boring isn't it. But as I have opined alot recently in this forum. If you are bored, try different things. The black populace in the usa has done nearly everything peacefully possible to live integrated with whites.  Very few things black people haven't done to make it better without violence. so... 

thank you for coming out your corner:) 

In this very community I stated and state that one of the problems the Black populace in the USA has is the lack of one attempted idea in its history? 
Do you know what that is? 
No it isn't starting businesses. It isn't going to ivy league schools or historical black colleges. It isn't becoming elected officials. It isn't joining the USA military or a local law enforcement. It isn't having many lawyers or doctors or business owners. 
The Black populace in the USA  has financially tried everything, as individuals or groups. 
The Black populace in the USA has governmentally not tried everything, as individuals or groups. 
Yes, Black populace has many independent voters, people who vote based on candidate agenda, in the voting stream. 
The one major absence in the Black populace historically or modernly is a Black Party to Governance. I rephrase, the Black populace in the USA has never had a rival to the Republicans or Democrats solely for the Black populaces benefit.

Now, why is that? The answer is long winded , a long history, but simple in function. From the Black minority that fought with the colonists against the British <the Black majority were enslaved> to Frederick Douglass who publicly opposed Haiti, leaving the usa, or Black segregation from whites to former president Barack Obama. Many, usually most in history, Black leaders in the USA support a positive phenotypical integration to Whites. 
A Black party of governance by default is segregatory in nature. Sequentially, that is why it has not been attempted with the vigor of Black business communities in white cities or Black membership in the US military or other ventures, all of which demand positive integration with whites at their heart to work 
But, a white man in the article given in total below, states a simple truth. 
The USA government has a need to be restructured that goes beyond a law being passed. He doesn't suggest a new party of governance is the answer. He suggest the answer is a change in the membership of the donkeys or the elephants. A membership change with those willing to be effective over alliances in public or private or to institutional structures.
But I argue, from the NAtive American populace to the Black populace < descended of enslaved plus not descended from enslaved> each peoples of color in the USA <non white europeans>  have specific needs that can not be handled by one party of governance. 
I restate, in the USA no one party can help everybody. Every party of governance has to fail somebody. 
Thus, Black people in the USA don't need to be an option, they need to be the purpose. 

ARTICLE

EZRA KLEIN

What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds
May 29, 2022

Early in Joe Biden’s presidency, Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-felicia-wong.html >  that Biden was badly misunderstood. He’s been in national politics for decades, and so people look at him and “default to a kind of old understanding of what Democrats stand for, this idea that Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals.” Wong thought he wanted more: “What Biden is trying to push is much more about actually remaking our economy, so that it does different things and it actually regularly produces different outcomes.”

I think Wong was right about what Biden, or at least the Biden administration, wanted. But its execution has lagged its vision. And the reason for this is uncomfortable for Democrats. You can’t transform the economy without first transforming the government.

In April, Brian Deese, the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, gave an important speech on the need for “a modern American industrial strategy.” This was a salvo in a debate most Americans would probably be puzzled to know Democrats are having. Industrial strategy is the idea that a country should chart a path to productive capacity beyond what the market would, on its own, support. It is the belief that there should be some politics in our economics, some vision of what we are trying to make beyond what financial markets reward.

Trying to build clean energy infrastructure is a form of industrial strategy. So is investing in domestic supply chains for vaccines and masks and microchips. For decades, the idea has been disreputable, even among Democrats. You don’t want government picking winners and losers, as the adage goes.

The argument, basically, is this: When governments bet on technologies or companies, they typically bet wrong. Markets are more efficient, more adaptable, less corrupt. And so governments should, where possible, get out of the market’s way. The government’s proper role is after the market has done its work, shifting money from those who have it to those who need it. Put simply, markets create, governments tax, and politicians spend.

It’s remarkable, the assumptions that lurk beneath what’s taken for common sense in Washington. Consider the phrase “winners and losers.” Winners at what? Losers how? Markets manage such questions through profits and losses, valuations and bankruptcies. But societies have richer, more complex goals. To criticize markets for failing to achieve them is like berating a toaster because it never produces an oil painting. That’s not its job.

So I won’t say markets failed. We failed. Growth slowed, inequality widened, the climate crisis kept getting worse, deindustrialization wrecked communities, the pandemic proved America’s supply chains fragile, China became more authoritarian rather than more democratic, and then Vladimir Putin’s war revealed the folly of relying on countries we cannot trust for goods we desperately need.

No one considers this success. Deese, in his speech to the Economic Club of New York., declared the debate over: “The question should move from ‘Why should we pursue an industrial strategy?’ to ‘How do we pursue one successfully?’”

I am unabashedly sympathetic to this vision. In a series of columns over the past year < https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progressivism.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opinion/yellen-supply-side-liberalism.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollment-climate-crisis.html , https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/opinion/biden-obama-economy.html > , I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds. Scratch the failures of modern Democratic governance, particularly in blue states, and you’ll typically find that the market didn’t provide what we needed and government either didn’t step in or made the problem worse through neglect or overregulation.

We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.

This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.

The first step is admitting you have a problem, and Deese, to his credit, did exactly that. “A modern American industrial strategy needs to demonstrate that America can build — fast, as we’ve done before, and fairly, as we’ve sometimes failed to do,” he said.

He noted that the Empire State Building was constructed in just over a year. We are richer than we were then, and our technology far outpaces what was available in 1930. And yet does anyone seriously believe such a project would take a year today?

“We need to unpack the many constraints that cause America to lag other major countries — including those with strong labor, environmental and historical protections — in delivering infrastructure on budget and on time,” Deese continued.

One answer — the typical Republican answer — is that government can’t do the job and shouldn’t try. But the data doesn’t bear that out. The Transit Costs Project tracks < https://transitcosts.com/what-does-the-data-say/ >  the price tags on rail projects in different countries. It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison here, because different projects are, well, different, and it matters whether they include, say, a tunnel, which is expensive for all the obvious reasons.

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The problem isn’t government. It’s our government. Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?

One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, the director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper < https://www.niskanencenter.org/state-capacity-what-is-it-how-we-lost-it-and-how-to-get-it-back/ >  titled “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back.” His definition is admirably terse. “State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively,” he told me. When a government can’t collect the taxes it’s owed or build the sign-up portal for its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail it’s already spent billions of dollars on, that’s a failure of state capacity.

But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:

Highlight : What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades; embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state; and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s; reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts; and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

The Biden administration can’t do much about the right’s hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.

A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In “The Procedure Fetish” < https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/ >  he argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that’s because American politics in general and the Democratic Party, in particular, are dominated by lawyers. Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. “Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States,” Bagley writes. “And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”

The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate and, in my view, wisest point. “Legitimacy is not solely, not even primarily, a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.

Rebuilding that kind of government isn’t a question of regulatory tweaks and interagency coordination. It’s difficult, coalition-splitting work. It pits Democratic leaders against their own allies, against organizations and institutions they’ve admired or joined against processes whose justifications they’ve long ago accepted and laws they consider jewels of their past.

The environmental movement cheers when Biden says he wants to decarbonize and fast. But if he said that in order to achieve that goal, he wanted to reform or waive large sections of the National Environmental Policy Act to speed the construction of clean energy infrastructure, he’d find himself at war. What if he decided to argue not just that government workers should be paid more but also that they should be easier to both hire and fire?

I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems. When I go looking for ideas on how to build state capacity on the left, I don’t find much. There’s nothing like the depth of research, thought and energy that goes into imagining health and climate and education policy. But those health, climate and education plans depend, crucially, on a state capable of designing and executing policy effectively. This is true at the federal level, and it is even truer, and harder, at the state and local levels.

So this is what I have become certain of: Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/biden-liberalism-infrastructure-building.html

Title: Solitude

Artist: Didier Audrat.

Photographer: Entrée to Black Paris

“ Sculpture of Solitude Unveiled
Yesterday, a bronze sculpture of Solitude - the Guadelopean woman who was hanged for her part in resisting the reinstatement of slavery in Guadeloupe the day after giving birth - was unveiled in a moving ceremony at Place du Général Catroux in the 17th arrondissement.  The sculpture can be found in the Solitude garden at the northernmost lawn of the square.”
Solitude unveiled
Image by Entrée to Black Paris