richardmurray
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@Troy
I like the fact that the bill realizes that the problem the descendent of enslaved have transcends the usa. One of the problems with reparations as an issue is many can't accept that reparations is beyond the usa, it is truly about the relationship between blacks and whites in the american continent. A relationship that is historically far worse than negative.My only issue with the bill is , it sadly isn't needed. I have thought about reparations for a while and it occurs to me that if you look at the DOS community from a what happened and what needs to be undone perspective, no study is needed.
What happened?
DOSers ancestors were ripped from their homes and forced to be part of another community and said ancestors descendents from the 13 colonies to today live absent a choice for the most part in the community, the usa or the 13 colonies that preceded it, that their forebears were forced to be a part of. That is the simple truth of DOS history. So, that is what happened.
How do you undo that?
Simple, DOSers need a new land all to themselves to replace the lands they were ripped from, and they need resources to build up that land reciprocating all the resources their forebears of themselves provided to make the 13 colonies and the usa what they were.
The problem is, no where on earth is uninhabited . so at least 15,000,000 people will cause chaos by default wherever they go. Exhibit a is israel. at the end of the day, the idea was tried out there and look at palestine, it is a never ending negative situation. Yes, israel has alliances but the palestineans have not forgotten and the situation is simply a blood feud, that will only end when the palestinean or the israeli are gone. DOSers will simply be another israeli group.
The only internal black problem with reparations is something the prior commentors allude to, correctly, but they don't say straightly. White European power forced Black African people to be part of the 13 colonies or the usa. But said power occurred for so long, many, not most , but many black people have accepted the usa side the whites in it. Sequentially, those blacks don't need reparations. Do you comprehend Troy?
It is historical fact that most free blacks and 99% of the enslaved blacks when the usa was founded didn't want the usa founded or wanted out of the usa. It is historical fact that it was true during the war of 1812 and up to the war between the states. It was during the war between the states that a significant percentage of black DOSers started claiming the usa as their home, and from said war between the states to 2023, the percentage of pro usa+ pro white blacks has grown.
The problem is, reparations at its heart has to be a big middle finger to the usa or the whites in it. But it offers a strong cultural question.
DOSers who have accepted the usa, the black immigrants in modernity who come from all over the world to be part of the usa. the non black immigrants who like the black immigrants come from all over the world to be part of the usa, the WASP enslavers descedants who made the usa,killed the native american and enslaved the black dosers for their usa all have a belief in the usa. A love for it. Reparations at its heart is a dislike/hatred of the usa being provided by the usa itself. And that is why the reparations issue has no traction. As an issue it spits in the face of so many in the usa who love the usa, feel its better, feel it warrants a chance, and again, reparations at its heart is DOSers saying, the usa isn't enough, it isn't wanted.
And again, I want it comprehended or said in this forum, the Black DOS communities modern relationship to the usa is modern. It really isn't historical in the 13 colonies or the usa itself. When black people talk about forebears fighting to vote, they seem to forget more of their forebears fought to simply kill whites or leave the usa and many of them dreamed more than anything. I paraphrase james baldwin: his father in the black church of his youth hated whites. Many black DOSers have similar stories but we rarely say it in white owned media as we are ashamed or we just don't want the hassle of talking about it.
So I conclude with a simple restatement.
Reparations involves Black people's relationship with whites from the 13 colonies to modern usa. But it doesn't need a study. It is an issue that needed to happen in the past, but modern usa wealth doesn't happen if reparations happened in the past. Sequentially, most in modern usa, can't accept the fundamental point of reparations, which garvey best comprehended, that many and I daresay most Black DOSers don't like the usa or the whites <wasp/white asians/white latinos/white arabs/white muslims white women or similar> in it. So, reparations is warranted or needed but is contrapose to various communities relationship to the usa, including a large percentage of Black DOSers themselves.
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around 11:14 am the earth was as close to the sun as it will get, starting its elliptical turn to the aphelion , where the earth will be farthest away, in june
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@Troy I like the fact that the bill realizes that the problem the descendent of enslaved have transcends the usa. One of the problems with reparations as an issue is many can't accept that reparations is beyond the usa, it is truly about the relationship between blacks and whites in the american continent. A relationship that is historically far worse than negative. My only issue with the bill is , it sadly isn't needed. I have thought about reparations for a while and it occurs to me that if you look at the DOS community from a what happened and what needs to be undone perspective, no study is needed. What happened? DOSers ancestors were ripped from their homes and forced to be part of another community and said ancestors descendents from the 13 colonies to today live absent a choice for the most part in the community, the usa or the 13 colonies that preceded it, that their forebears were forced to be a part of. That is the simple truth of DOS history. So, that is what happened. How do you undo that? Simple, DOSers need a new land all to themselves to replace the lands they were ripped from, and they need resources to build up that land reciprocating all the resources their forebears of themselves provided to make the 13 colonies and the usa what they were. The problem is, no where on earth is uninhabited . so at least 15,000,000 people will cause chaos by default wherever they go. Exhibit a is israel. at the end of the day, the idea was tried out there and look at palestine, it is a never ending negative situation. Yes, israel has alliances but the palestineans have not forgotten and the situation is simply a blood feud, that will only end when the palestinean or the israeli are gone. DOSers will simply be another israeli group. The only internal black problem with reparations is something the prior commentors allude to, correctly, but they don't say straightly. White European power forced Black African people to be part of the 13 colonies or the usa. But said power occurred for so long, many, not most , but many black people have accepted the usa side the whites in it. Sequentially, those blacks don't need reparations. Do you comprehend Troy? It is historical fact that most free blacks and 99% of the enslaved blacks when the usa was founded didn't want the usa founded or wanted out of the usa. It is historical fact that it was true during the war of 1812 and up to the war between the states. It was during the war between the states that a significant percentage of black DOSers started claiming the usa as their home, and from said war between the states to 2023, the percentage of pro usa+ pro white blacks has grown. The problem is, reparations at its heart has to be a big middle finger to the usa or the whites in it. But it offers a strong cultural question. DOSers who have accepted the usa, the black immigrants in modernity who come from all over the world to be part of the usa. the non black immigrants who like the black immigrants come from all over the world to be part of the usa, the WASP enslavers descedants who made the usa,killed the native american and enslaved the black dosers for their usa all have a belief in the usa. A love for it. Reparations at its heart is a dislike/hatred of the usa being provided by the usa itself. And that is why the reparations issue has no traction. As an issue it spits in the face of so many in the usa who love the usa, feel its better, feel it warrants a chance, and again, reparations at its heart is DOSers saying, the usa isn't enough, it isn't wanted. And again, I want it comprehended or said in this forum, the Black DOS communities modern relationship to the usa is modern. It really isn't historical in the 13 colonies or the usa itself. When black people talk about forebears fighting to vote, they seem to forget more of their forebears fought to simply kill whites or leave the usa and many of them dreamed more than anything. I paraphrase james baldwin: his father in the black church of his youth hated whites. Many black DOSers have similar stories but we rarely say it in white owned media as we are ashamed or we just don't want the hassle of talking about it. So I conclude with a simple restatement. Reparations involves Black people's relationship with whites from the 13 colonies to modern usa. But it doesn't need a study. It is an issue that needed to happen in the past, but modern usa wealth doesn't happen if reparations happened in the past. Sequentially, most in modern usa, can't accept the fundamental point of reparations, which garvey best comprehended, that many and I daresay most Black DOSers don't like the usa or the whites <wasp/white asians/white latinos/white arabs/white muslims white women or similar> in it. So, reparations is warranted or needed but is contrapose to various communities relationship to the usa, including a large percentage of Black DOSers themselves. -
The perihelion is when the earth or any body about a star is nearest the star, in the earth's case when the earth is closest to our friend, the sun
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By the end of the fifth paragraph I thought to myself what the ceo of paramount said about getting rid of simon and schuster. Paramount/viacom/cbs/the redstone empire is a video company. I never forgot years ago I read Ivanhoe from walter scott and I recall years after someone saying, that book is too slow at times. I see a connection between video as the modern communication format and the impetus from crude criminals. In the third paragraph Thanos of the marvel movies is mentioned and he encapsulates my reasoning to using the term crude criminals over antagonist. A crude criminal is an antagonist, as some one who injures another rawly. But the crude criminal tends to have an absolutism in their pursuit based on their crudeness. And video includes video games. Again, video games have a narrative form. In many of the most popular video games, the constancy of criminality is their, usually crude. How many alien or ghost creature games is just a constant run or battle through said criminals, whose intentions are crude. When you combine the fact that video is the storyteller most are raised with today, over books/music/or storytelling itself. It explains how the modern audience is reared to accept as natural the constancy of potential crime. Freddie Kruger/Jason/ Michael Myers/ Jeepers creepers/ even in animation with the never ending enemies of goku of dragonball z/ the megalomanic bond villians. Media has preached the constancy of troubles as a standard. And when it comes to being a commercially potent writer, not an artistically potent writer, the audience's nature matters. I concur to Brosky, a writer can show some artistic craft by not creating the all encompasing enemy to run from: thanos or one of my personal favorites: Fender Tremolo <I wonder how many internet searches did I just engender?> But by creating a gantlope that allows for various opposers. Though the question remains, why doesn't the audience respond to people having a conversation with tea after finding a safe haven? And the answer is the audience has been reared through video to enjoy constancy of crude criminality. The river has to be treacherous, it can't simply be a calm river. The viewership has been taught to like not being given a breather. From the video games they play to the binge watching videos they do, to the films that have built modern perception. So commercially, a writer must cater, but artistically... it has problems. https://www.janefriedman.com/the-biggest-mistake-even-expert-writers-make/
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@Chevdove @Troy @ProfD great comment all to Troy ... yes, I will not go on a rant about how the usa internet was designed poorly in the first place. I really think people don't see how the internet's design and buildup over the years including the commonly called cloud infrastructure, is the problem to many issues like this. but, again, yes, it is up to the individual today. That is the simple truth and individual accountability is the term of the times. IT saves big firms lawsuits or liabilities and it allows individuals to lose all or be judged as the cause to all that is negative. I do think the internet of the future that will break away from the usa modeled one will have as one of its pillars a far more efficient design structure ,alongside a simple communal push by people to exist on the internet with less robustness.
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Do You Know Where Your Memories Are? Kashmir Hill Sat, December 31, 2022 at 10:14 AM EST I have many fears as a mother. My kindergarten-age daughter recently learned a game on the school bus called “Truth or Force.” My youngest refuses to eat almost anything but Kraft Mac & Cheese. Added to the list this year, alongside outside influences and health concerns, is the possibility that my daughters could inadvertently lock me out of my digital life. That’s what happened to a mother in Colorado whose 9-year-old son used her old smartphone to stream himself naked on YouTube, and a father in San Francisco whose Google account was disabled and deleted because he took naked photos of his toddler for the doctor. I reported on their experiences for The New York Times, and as I talked to these parents, who were stunned and bereft at the loss of their emails, photos, videos, contacts and important documents spanning decades, I realized I was similarly at risk. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times I am “cloud-complacent,” keeping my most important digital information not on a hard drive at home but in the huge digital basement provided via technology companies’ servers. Google gives all users 15 gigabytes free, one-quarter of what comes standard on an Android phone, and I have not managed to max it out in 18 years of using the company’s many services. I did fill up Apple’s free 5 GB, so I now pay $9.99 a month for additional iCloud storage space. Meta has no max; like scrolling on Instagram, the allowed space is infinite. If I were suddenly cut off from any of these services, the data loss would be professionally and personally devastating. As a child of the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on how many photos, journals, VHS tapes and notes passed in seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the immense expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud has made me a data hoarder. Heading into 2023, I set out to excavate everything I was storing on every service, and find somewhere to save it that I had control over. As I grappled with all the gigabytes, my concern morphed from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving. Data Harvesting I find nearly 100 photos from one November night 15 years ago, out with my family at a Tampa Bay Lightning game when my sisters and I were home for the holidays. We’re tailgating with a mini-keg of Heineken. My dad is posing by the car, making a funny face at the ridiculousness of a parking garage party. Then, we’re posing in the stadium with the hockey rink in the background, toasting with a stranger we sat next to. Had we bonded with him during an especially close third period? The metadata in the Google Photos JPG file didn’t say. The photos transported me back to a tremendously fun evening that I had all but forgotten. Yet I wondered how there could be so many photos from just one night. How do I decide which to keep and which to get rid of? This kind of data explosion is a result of economics, said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco that saves copies of websites and digitizes books and television shows. Taking a photo used to be expensive because it involved film that needed to be developed. “It cost a dollar every time you hit a shutter,” Kahle said. “That’s no longer the case so we hit the shutter all the time and keep way, way too much.” I had captured the 2007 evening in Tampa, Florida, pre-smartphone on a digital Canon camera that had a relatively small memory card that I regularly emptied into Google Photos. I found more than 4,000 other photos there, along with 10 gigabytes of data from Blogger, Gmail, Google Chat and Google Search, when I requested a copy of the data in my account using a Google tool called Takeout. I just pressed a button and a couple of days later got my data in a three-file chunk, which was great, although some of it, including all my emails, was not human-readable. Instead, it came in a form that needed to be uploaded to another service or Google account. According to a company spokesperson, 50 million people a year use Takeout to download their data from 80 Google products, with 400 billion files exported in 2021. These people may have had plans to move to a different service, simply wanted their own copy or were preserving what they had on Google before deleting it from the company’s servers. Takeout was created in 2011 by a group of Google engineers who called themselves the Data Liberation Front. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former Google employee in Chicago who led the team, said he thought it was important that the company’s users had an easy “off ramp” to leave Google and take their data elsewhere. But Fitzpatrick said he worried that when people stored their digital belongings on a company’s server, they “don’t think about it or care about it.” Some of my data landlords were more accommodating than others. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram offered Takeout-like tools, while Apple had a more complicated data transfer process that involved voluminous instructions and a USB cable. The amount of data I eventually pulled down was staggering, including more than 30,000 photos, 2,000 videos, 22,000 Twitter posts, 57,000 emails, 15,000 pages of old Google chats and 16,000 pages of Google searches going back to 2011. It was such an overwhelming amount of digital stuff that I wasn’t surprised to see that Google had hired Marie Kondo as a spokesperson for the paid version of its storage service — starting at $1.99 per month for 100 gigabytes. Kondo suggested better labeling and organization of emails, photos and documents to make it “easy to find the memories that spark joy.” The Missing The trove of data brought forgotten episodes of my life back in vivid color. A blurry photo of my best friend’s husband with a tiny baby strapped to his chest, standing in front of a wall-size Beetlejuician face, made me recall a long-ago outing to a Tim Burton exhibit at a museum in Los Angeles. I don’t remember what I learned about the gothic filmmaker, but I do remember my friends’ horror when their weeks-old son, now 11, had a blowout and they had to beg a comically oversize diaper from a stranger. The granularity of what was in my digital archive accentuated the parts of my life that were missing entirely: emails from college in a university-provided account that I hadn’t thought to migrate; photos and videos I took on an Android phone that I backed up to an external hard drive that has since disappeared; and stories I’d written in journalism school for publications that no longer exist. They were as lost to me as the confessional journal I once left in the seatback of a plane. The idea that information, once digitized, will stick around forever is flawed. “We often say the internet never forgets, but it does,” said web historian Ian Milligan. Companies shut down, as happened to GeoCities, an early, popular place for hosting personal websites, or a service cuts back on the amount of free storage it’s offering, as when the new owner of Flickr announced in 2019 that free accounts had a limit of 1,000 photos and anything more would be deleted. Margot Note, an archivist, said members of her profession thought a lot about the accessibility of the medium on which data was stored, given the challenge of recovering videos from older formats such as DVDs, VHS tapes and reel film. Note asks the kinds of questions most of us don’t: Will there be the right software or hardware to open all our digital files many years from now? With something called “bit rot” — the degradation of a digital file overtime — the files may not be in good shape. Individuals and institutions think that when they digitize material it will be safe, she said. “But digital files can be more fragile than physical ones.” Where to Put It Once I assembled my data Frankenstein, I had to decide where to put it. More than a decade ago, pre-cloud complacency, I would regularly back my stuff up to a hard drive that I probably bought at Best Buy. Digital self-storage has gotten more complex as I discovered when I visited the DataHoarder subreddit. Posts there with technical advice for the best home setup were jargon-filled to the point of incomprehension for a newbie. A sample post: “Started with single bay Synology Nas and recently built a 16TB unRAID server on a xeon 1230. Very happy with result.” I felt as if I’d landed on an alien planet, so I turned instead to professional archivists and tech-savvy friends. They recommended two $299 12-terabyte hard drives, one of which should have ample room for what I have now and what I will create in the future, and another to mirror the first, as well as a $249 NAS, or network-attached storage system, to connect to my home router, so I could access the files remotely and monitor the health of the drives. Archivists regularly cited the “3-2-1 rule”: three copies of everything, two copies on different cloud services and one at home. Some also said to keep yet another copy “offsite,” that is, at a relative’s house or in a bank lockbox, depending on your level of paranoia. History is awash in tales of lost data, including the burning of invaluable master recordings of famous musicians in a Universal Studios fire. John Markoff, a technology journalist who writes for the Times, mined the extensive personal archives of internet pioneer Stewart Brand for a biography. He found that even Brand, who meticulously preserved his communications, was missing several years of early emails because of the loss of backup tapes and had hundreds of thousands of others on an old Macintosh that were a jumble of data that was largely impossible to read. Getting all your data and figuring out how to securely store it is cumbersome, complicated and costly. There’s a reason most people ignore all their stuff in the cloud. What to Keep I noticed a philosophical divide among the archivists I spoke with. Digital archivists were committed to keeping everything with the mentality that you never know what you might want one day, while professional archivists who worked with family and institutional collections said it was important to pare down to make an archive manageable for people who look at it in the future. “It’s often very surprising what turns out to matter,” said Jeff Ubois, who is in the first camp and has organized conferences dedicated to personal archiving. He brought up a historical example. During World War II, the British War Office asked people who had taken coastal vacations to send in their postcards and photographs, an intelligence-gathering exercise to map the coastline that led to the selection of Normandy as the best place to land troops. Ubois said it was hard to predict the future uses of what we save. Am I socking this away just for me, to reflect on my life as I age? Is it for my descendants? Is it for an artificial intelligence that will act as a memory prosthetic when I’m 90? And if so, does that AI really need to remember that I Googled “starbucks ice cream calorie count” one morning in January 2011? Pre-internet, we pared down our collections to make them manageable. But now, we have metadata and advanced search techniques to sort through our lives: timestamps, geotags, object recognition. When I recently lost a close relative, I used the facial recognition feature in Apple Photos to unearth photos of him I’d forgotten. I was glad to have them, but should I keep all the photos, even the unflattering ones? Bob Clark, the director of archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center, said that the general rule of thumb in his profession was that less than 5% of the material in a collection was worth saving. He faulted the technology companies for offering too much storage space, eliminating the need for deliberating over what we keep. “They’ve made it so easy that they have turned us into unintentional data hoarders,” he said. The companies try, occasionally, to play the role of memory miner, surfacing moments that they think should be meaningful, probably aiming to increase my engagement with their platform or inspire brand loyalty. But their algorithmic archivists inadvertently highlight the value of human curation. Recently, my iPhone served me “Waterfalls over the years,” which, as promised, featured a slide show with instrumental music and photos of myself and others in front of a random assortment of waterfalls. Like the British War Office during World War II, the technology saw the backdrop as the star of the show. “I don’t think we can simply rely on the algorithms to help you decide what’s important or not,” Clark said. “There need to be points of human intervention and judgment involved.” Paring It Down Rather than just keeping a full digital copy of everything, I decided to take the archivists’ advice and pare it down somewhat, a process the professionals call appraisal. An easy place to start was the screenshots: the QR codes for flights long ago boarded, privacy agreements I had to click to use an app, emails that were best forwarded to my husband via text and a message from Words With Friends that “nutjob” was not an acceptable word. There were some clear keepers: a selfie I took in Beijing with artist Ai Weiwei in April 2015; a video of my eldest daughter’s first steps in December 2017; and a shot of me on a camel in front of the Giza Pyramids in 2007, a photo I had purposely staged to recreate one we had on my childhood refrigerator of my great-grandmother in the same place doing the same thing, but with a disgruntled expression on her face. Then there’s the stuff I’m ambivalent about, like the many photos with long-ago exes, which for now I’ll continue to hoard given that I’m still on good terms with them and I’m not going to fill up 12 terabytes any time soon. There was also a lot of “data exhaust,” as security technologist Matt Mitchell calls it, a polite term for the record of my life rendered in Google searches, from a 2011 query for karaoke bars in Washington to a more recent search for the closest Chuck E. Cheese. I will not keep those on my personal hard drive, and I may take the step of deleting them from Google’s servers, which the company makes possible, because their embarrassment potential is higher than their archival value.Mitchell said super hoarders should pare down, not to make memories easier to find, but to eliminate data that could come back to bite them. “You need to let go because you can’t get hacked if there’s nothing to hack,” said Mitchell, the founder of CryptoHarlem, a cybersecurity education nonprofit. “It’s only when you’re storing too much that you run into the worst of these problems.” Inactive Accounts Right now, it’s cheap to hoard all this data in the cloud. “The cost of storage long term continues to fall,” said George Blood, who runs a business outside Philadelphia digitizing information from obsolete media, creating 10 terabytes of data per day, on average. “They may charge you more for the cost of the electricity — spinning the disk your data is on — than the storage itself.” Big technology companies don’t often prompt people to minimize their data footprints, until, that is, they near the end of their free storage space. That’s when companies force them to decide whether to move to the paid plans. There are signs, though, that the companies don’t want to hold on to our data forever: Most have policies allowing them to delete accounts that are inactive for a year or more. Aware of the potential value of data left behind by those who euphemistically go “inactive,” Apple recently introduced a legacy contact feature, to designate a person who can access an Apple account after the owner’s death. Google has long had a similar tool, prosaically called inactive account manager. Facebook created legacy contacts in 2015 to look after accounts that have been memorialized. And that really is the ultimate question around personal archives: What becomes of them after we die? By keeping so much, more than we want to sort through, which is almost certainly more than anyone else wants to sort through on our behalf, we may leave behind less than previous generations because our accounts will go inactive and be deleted. Our personal clouds may grow so vast that no one will ever go through them, and all the bits and bytes could end up just blowing away. © 2022 The New York Times Company
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@Stefan stated the following A Lie Now, I checked my private messages and found the following in which Stefan messaged me, The following is the set of replies from me the next is his reply and our private dialog ended with the following, from me IN CONCLUSION Note, in no time did I say anything that he suggested in the initial quote, which means he lied. Again, I repeat, I don't mind anyone judging or critiquing me or my art, but don't lie about me. I have never lied about anyone in here and I do find it offensive. And the lesson on me is to not reply to private messages on aalbc unless they are from those I can trust have a general quality of decorum on here. I am not on aalbc to knock anybody. nor am I on aalbc to be negative. I want positivity and a number of people in these forums thrive on negativity and spew it constantly. I want nothing to do with all that.
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@Stefan many things I tolerate, but I despise liars I quote you I have never private messaged you , so please don't lie. You can judge me however you want, but don't lie about me please.
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ART SUMMARY 2022
a selection for each month
January
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Holiday-Rex-DTIYS-B-W-905513401
February
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Valentine-s-Day-2022-Color-gif-906988319
March
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Ship-of-Fools-Legend-to-be-909901566
April
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-King-Of-Paradise-913395528
May
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Nanedud-feetorfins-917368124
June
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/AmpraehDTIYScolor-917892345
July
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Dreamdisappointvacation-coloringpage-923869468
August
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Invitation-A-Moment-In-the-LEgendary-Bloody-Melee-927346127
September
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/crystals-21-Witchtember-2022-930362174
October
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Chrissabugdtiys10k2022-Invitation-932158374
November
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Album-Yourself-Submit-935178300
December
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Suriel-of-Sylessae-BW-939310620
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Enjoy various works made throughout 2022 , if you want updates to future work, you can join the newsletter for free
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a selection for each month January https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Holiday-Rex-DTIYS-B-W-905513401 February https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Valentine-s-Day-2022-Color-gif-906988319 March https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Ship-of-Fools-Legend-to-be-909901566 April https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-King-Of-Paradise-913395528 May https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Nanedud-feetorfins-917368124 June https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/AmpraehDTIYScolor-917892345 July https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Dreamdisappointvacation-coloringpage-923869468 August https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Invitation-A-Moment-In-the-LEgendary-Bloody-Melee-927346127 September https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/crystals-21-Witchtember-2022-930362174 October https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Chrissabugdtiys10k2022-Invitation-932158374 November https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Album-Yourself-Submit-935178300 December https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Suriel-of-Sylessae-BW-939310620 If you want to support my work financially consider the following Poetry or more ebook https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/poetry-or-more-1 Ship of fools audiobook https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/ship-of-fools-legend-to-be if you want to keep abreast to my work in the future, join my newsletter https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/
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Moments in a day of Mumu
A rohonamo story
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Moments-In-a-Day-Of-Mumu-943146717
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Two much-touted portions of the bill concerning health care start on Jan. 1. The soon-to-be implemented changes include a new inflation cap that limits how much drug manufacturers can change the price of prescription drugs and new rules that insure that people enrolled in a Medicare prescription drug plan don’t pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin. The law also will allow many Medicare Part D beneficiaries to receive vaccines for $0 in the new year. Another key provision of the bill allows Medicare to negotiate for prescription drug prices beginning in 2023. The previous law prohibited Medicare from intervening in the talks between drug makers and health plan sponsors. While these changes are projected to save Medicare nearly $100 billion over the coming decade, the effects of the renegotiated prices aren’t expected to be felt by seniors until 2026. The law also institutes a cap on out-of-pocket expenses for many Medicare recipients, but those won’t begin until 2024. In 2025, it will fully kick in with a hard cap on out-of-pocket expenses of $2,000 per year that will be indexed to inflation afterward. The law also has two big changes to the tax code that will affect businesses in 2023. First, a new 15% corporate minimum tax on corporations with book income above $1 billion takes effect and will set a new floor for many of America’s biggest businesses when it comes to tax time. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation reported in early August that about 150 companies could see their tax situation change as a result of the new rules. But the final tally may be less after last-minute changes were made to the bill to include some exceptions for manufacturers. A another analysis by University of North Carolina Business Professor Jeffrey Hoopes found that the revised law is likely to hit companies like am*zon (AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A), Ford (F), AT&T (T), and eBay (EBAY) the hardest based on what they paid in 2021. “It's going to target companies who have a lot of financial accounting income, but pay relatively little in tax,” he said. am*zon infamously paid $0 in taxes in both 2017 and 2018 even while making billions in profits thanks to a host of tax credits, loopholes, and exemptions. Also going into effect for 2023 is a new 1% excise tax on stock buybacks. The non-deductible tax will cover stock that is repurchased by a corporation or by certain corporate affiliates and will cover transactions from Jan. 1 onwards. The IRS released new guidance this week around both the alternative minimum tax and the excise tax outlining more details about how it works and — in the case of the minimum tax — how companies can know if they are included. The two new taxes are projected to raise about $296 billion over the coming decade to pay for other parts of the massive new law. A new credit for 2023 offers households up to 30% to cover the costs of certain energy-efficient improvements like upgrading a home’s weatherization or buying new appliances like a heat pump. There are also changes coming around the tax credits available for clean vehicles. Many households will be able to receive a $7,500 tax credit in 2023 when they purchase a new electric vehicle and $4,000 when purchasing a used EV. But there remains some confusion over how the credit will be applied in 2023 because of rules around if the vehicle was assembled in North America and where the materials for the battery came from. The IRS released new guidance this week, including a list of vehicles that are expected to qualify for the credit on Jan. 1. Details https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2040&type=status older forum post
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@ProfD your right, it isn't. And I don't know you personally. I don't have a criteria for anyone's answers, but I always dislike black people in the usa referring to the "american people" when I have a question specifically about black people in the usa . whether offline or online, whether historical as frederick douglass or modernly like yourself. i always react negatively. And to your point, we're not in class, and I am not trying to change you but I will also be myself, thus this reaction will happen again and again in the future. no problem.
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thank you @Troy
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@ProfD why couldn't you provide your views on black elected officials to black districts? I don't want to know your answers to the questions i posed, but I want to know why you couldn't give it? for 2023 I am going to be more focused on black talk and I am going to heckle if i have to people on here when they evade talking about black folk. In my prose I spoke of shelby but the submit matter is clear that I posed. I do find it disturbing how many black people throughout the internet seem troubled to talk about black affairs.
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The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation in Online Communities
richardmurray replied to Troy's topic in Culture, Race & Economy
@Troy well, why not find the simplest song and try to play it, yoyo ma said something I heard that really made me realize how so many people blockade themselves from artistic expression. as I said with deviantart, many people on deviantart submit drawings that many will say are low quality or immature or something akin to not appropriate for submission and I love that. if all in the arts just started to submit it will improve the culture of artistic expression. -
@Chevdove yeah, media in the usa has been touting negativity for longer than anyone in this site has been alive, that has created the environment today. we all may laugh, but positivity isn't unimportant in media and when negativity is the norm is has consequence down the road
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Octavia E. Butler's KINDRED Adapted to a TV Series
richardmurray replied to Troy's topic in Black Literature
Do you ever worry that audiences will grow weary of stories on slavery? There is this interesting quota that we all want to put on stories about slavery, and I think that question is often asked only of Black creatives. There are a thousand shows on the air about rich white families doing evil sympathetically, and no one puts a quota on that. I think it’s interesting that there’s this desire to police any storytelling about a creative’s history. I mean, this is my history and my family history. I also think people are worried, afraid of, or sick of the tropes and stereotypes that come with this work and are waiting for the familiar scene in which some female enslaved person is raped or someone is tied to a pole or a tree and whipped. But in honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about. We should never stop telling these stories, especially when people try to erase them from history books. read the complete article https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2188&type=status octavia tried to tell us episode https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2182&type=status -
Both directors provide answers in a question and answer, your thoughts? https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2188&type=status
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Richard Shelby is a white elected official but I think his style is missing with black elected officials to black municipal districts, so not people like eric adams or former president barack obama but the city council/state assembly/house of representative members in the usa who are black and cover municipalities with over 90% black population. The question is simple, if you are in a black district <over80% black populace> shouldn't your black elected representative look to provide as much money as possible to the district you live in? Agree or disagree, please state your why? read the full article https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2187&type=status
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The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation in Online Communities
richardmurray replied to Troy's topic in Culture, Race & Economy
So @ProfD before recording artist, instrumentalist would play music to share the joy of playing music -
The director Ryan Coogler on the set of “Wakanda Forever.” Does he want to direct more “Black Panther” movies? “I’ll do it as long as folks will have me.”Credit...Annette Brown/Marvel
The ‘Black Panther’ Sequel That Never Was
Writer-director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole reveal the original plot for “Wakanda Forever” and discuss working in the Marvel universe.
By Reggie Ugwu
The “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole are just coming up for air. A month after release, the much anticipated follow-up to the original “Black Panther” (2018) is well situated, still screening at more than 3,000 theaters heading into the holiday weekend. The film has received mostly positive reviews from critics and holds the year’s second-highest performance at the box office, after “Top Gun: Maverick.” To date, it has grossed more than $420 million domestically and nearly $800 million overall.
Things could have gone much differently.
“This film was difficult in ways that only the people who made it would know,” Coogler said in a recent interview. “There are things we put in there that felt revolutionary, that challenged the definition of having ‘a good time’ in a movie like this.”
The death of Chadwick Boseman, who played the title role in the original film — a noble but untested leader of the fictional African promised land Wakanda — forced a radical reimagining of the franchise. Coogler and Cole had recently sent Boseman a completed first draft of the script when the actor succumbed to a secret bout with colon cancer.
Their eventual rewrite opened with the death of Boseman’s character, T’Challa, turning the $250 million superhero film that followed into what can be fairly described as an extended meditation on grief and recovery.
In a recent joint conversation over video, the screenwriters discussed their original vision for a “Black Panther” sequel, how they addressed the loss of Boseman, and balancing the demands of their story with those of the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe.
These are edited — and spoiler-filled — excerpts from the conversation.
What was it like collaborating this time?
RYAN COOGLER Last time we went back and forth. Joe had already started when I came on. I think I tried to go for a draft, but I was taking too long and so he jumped in. Then we would get notes from the studio, and we would just kind of divide and conquer. On the second one, we were doing it over the pandemic, so we couldn’t meet up. But Final Draft [the screenwriting software] came out with this update where we could both work in the script at the same time. It was an amazing feature. Very productive, very fun.
JOE ROBERT COLE It allowed us to bridge that feeling of being in a room and just spitballing ideas.
COOGLER Then we took that hit, bro, when Chad passed. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know how we were going to pull ourselves up and figure it out. Thank God for Joe and the collaborative process, man. It would’ve been impossible for me to write this thing on my own.
In the initial draft of the script, before Chadwick’s death, how were you looking at the story? What were the challenges?
COOGLER It was, “What are we going to do about the Blip?” [In Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” T’Challa is one of billions of people who suddenly vanish, only to be brought back by the Avengers five years later.] That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons.
In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life. The first scene was an animated sequence. You hear Nakia [T’Challa’s love interest, played by Lupita Nyong’o] talking to Toussaint [the couple’s child, introduced in “Wakanda Forever” in a post-credits sequence]. She says, “Tell me what you know about your father.” You realize that he doesn’t know his dad was the Black Panther. He’s never met him, and Nakia is remarried to a Haitian dude. Then, we cut to reality and it’s the night that everybody comes back from the Blip. You see T’Challa meet the kid for the first time.
Then it cuts ahead three years and he’s essentially co-parenting. We had some crazy scenes in there for Chad, man. Our code name for the movie was “Summer Break,” and the movie was about a summer that the kid spends with his dad. For his eighth birthday, they do a ritual where they go out into the bush and have to live off the land. But something happens and T’Challa has to go save the world with his son on his hip. That was the movie.
Was Namor, the leader of the undersea nation Talokan in “Wakanda Forever,” still the villain?
COOGLER Yeah. But it was a combination. Val [the C.I.A. director, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] was much more active. It was basically a three-way conflict between Wakanda, the U.S. and Talokan. But it was all mostly from the child’s perspective.
In the new version, the opening scene is T’Challa’s death. Why did you decide to start there?
COLE Just practically, everyone was going to be waiting to see how we dealt with it, so doing it right up front made sense. In terms of the characters, we needed to introduce a different version of Shuri [T’Challa’s sister, played by Letitia Wright]. We’re showing the moment that she becomes a different person than the person we met. She’s the smartest person in the world, but she can’t save her brother. What does that do to you?
COOGLER We wanted to have an emotionally intelligent conversation. It’s about the transformative quality of grief and trauma. There’s this expectation with emotional trauma that you just need time. “Oh, give them a couple weeks off; they’ll come back to work and get back to it.” But that person is completely different in some ways. You just don’t see it because the change isn’t visible.
T’Challa’s death is attributed to an illness, but it seems sudden and inexplicable, which profoundly unsettles Shuri. Why did you make that choice?
COOGLER We wanted to keep it simple. At the end of the day, what mattered is that she had a self-expectation of being able to be solve it and she failed. And we didn’t want her to have anywhere to displace her anger. If somebody else would’ve taken T’Challa out, Shuri would’ve looked for that person. We wanted it to be a situation where the only place to go was internal.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character has appeared in other Marvel properties and is being set up as a major antagonist in the studio’s future projects, including the “Thunderbolts” movie due in 2024. Is it challenging to incorporate characters or story lines from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe?
COLE Ryan will have a different perspective as the director, but I’ve never had a conversation where I was asked to incorporate something that didn’t feel organic. The dynamic of the U.S. being an instigator and Western powers being an instigator, that always existed. It wasn’t, “Oh, we need to find a reason to make this character exist.” It was, “Oh, this is already in here and there’s this wonderful actress available.” It always starts from the story and the ideas.
COOGLER Yeah, nobody was shoehorned in or asked to be put into the movie or anything like that. Actually, in this version, [Louis-Dreyfus’s role] was pared back in order to make space for dealing with T’Challa’s death. And we had Val in there before she even appeared in any of the other movies, before “Black Widow” and [the series] “Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” People assume that we were told to put her in, but she was there from the beginning.
Ryan, what’s your appetite to tell more stories in the world of Wakanda?
COOGLER I feel blessed that I have the opportunity to work on these movies, bro. When I got asked to do the first one, it was like a moving train. I thank God every day that I was able to jump on it and meet these people, these actors, and to meet Chadwick during some of the last years of his life. I’ll do it as long as folks will have me. But I think it’s bigger than just me or Joe. Between the first and second movie, we made $2 billion at the box office, which is what matters the most to corporations. So I hope that it continues, man. I hope people are still making movies about Wakanda long after we’re gone.
Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter covering a range of subjects, including film, television, music and internet culture. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was a reporter for BuzzFeed News and Billboard magazine. @uugwuu
URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/23/arts/ryan-coogler-black-panther-wakanda-forever.html
Jacobs-Jenkins, far left, on the “Kindred” set during filming. “In honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about,” he said.Credit...Tina Rowden/FX
‘Kindred’ Creator Wants Viewers to ‘Question Their Assumptions’
In his TV adaptation of the Octavia Butler novel, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins changed parts of the story but kept the author’s focus on “making the familial political.”
By Salamishah Tillet
Dec. 26, 2022
“If a ‘Kindred’ movie is ever made, I wouldn’t be involved,” Octavia Butler wrote in a letter in 2000. “It won’t be my movie, and I suspect it won’t look much like my book.”
It was yet another Butler prediction that was mostly on target, though she was wrong about the format. Adapted by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for FX on Hulu, “Kindred” is neither a film nor a completely faithful interpretation of the novel. But it comes at a time when there is more interest in Butler’s body of work than ever before, and in how her prolific writing, mainly science fiction novels, continues to resonate with our world more than 15 years after her death.
“Kindred” is Butler’s most well-known and often-taught novel. Published in 1979, it tells the story of Dana Franklin, a 26-year-old African American writer who repeatedly and unexpectedly travels from 1976 to a mid-19th-century plantation in Maryland. Each time Dana arrives in the past, she finds herself saving the life of Rufus Weylin, her white slaveholding ancestor; she returns to the present only when her own life is at risk.
In a 1988 interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery, Butler said that “Kindred,” with its blend of genres, periods and antebellum histories, was informed by ideological debates she had during college in the 1960s, about the extent to which slaves should have rebelled against their masters.
Knowing this, Jacobs-Jenkins sought to capture those tensions while updating the story to convey the complexity of our post-Obama racial reality. A lifelong Butler fan, he wanted to turn “Kindred” into a television series as far back as 2010, when he debuted his first full-length play, “Neighbors,” at the Public Theater.
The drama was well regarded, but it was Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 Obie-award-winning play, “An Octoroon,” that established him as one of America’s most exciting young playwrights. A satirical adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Octoroon,” a 19th-century melodrama about the tragic love story between a European-educated white plantation owner and the play’s titular character, an enslaved woman, the play inspired critical raves and hot ticket sales. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that its success “seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers about race.”
Even then, Jacobs-Jenkins remained committed to “Kindred.” In 2015, he persuaded Courtney Lee-Mitchell, the rights holder of the novel, that it should be a television series and not a movie as previously imagined by other potential producers and even by Butler herself. The decision to stretch the story over multiple seasons has drawn some criticism. (All eight episodes of Season 1 are available on Hulu, but the series has not yet been renewed.)
Nevertheless, Jacobs-Jenkins hopes that his expansion of the novel’s universe encourages more people to discover Butler’s writing for themselves.
“After watching this, I want people to question their assumptions about what they think they know about history, about themselves,” he said. “I want them to read Octavia’s work.”
In a video interview earlier this month, Jacobs-Jenkins talked about his introduction to Butler’s writing, the motivations behind some of his changes to her story and why he thinks television and theaters need even more stories about slavery. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
When did you first come in contact with “Kindred”?
My relationship with Butler preceded my engagement with “Kindred.” I was one of those kids reading Stephen King on the playground for no good reason, and Ray Bradbury’s novels were important transitional objects for me too. I was like 12 or 13 when I had a babysitter who went to Howard, who was a Black nerd, too. She told me, “You should read Octavia Butler.” So I started with her Patternist series. And when I got to college, I read her on an African American studies syllabus and remember thinking, Oh, this person I read for fun is important academically. That is also when I learned of “Kindred,” which was oddly one of my later introductions to her work.
Before, when I was reading her, it felt very much still like a secret; it felt good to be a part of that weird underground. And now, she’s been mainstreamed in this gigantic way.
How did this adaptation come about?
Slavery is the material of my creative life. I remember becoming obsessed with the visual work of Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall and wondered why they were so ahead of theater. So back then, I said, I’m going to deep-dive these people, and I’m going to write a play based on my deep dive. I just inhaled whatever their discourse was and tried to translate it into a theater space. And the truth is, my creative life is also ultimately guided by fandom on some level, and I remember rereading “Kindred” in 2010 and thinking, This is a TV show. It was a eureka moment.
I immediately started figuring out how to get the rights. It had been under option since 1979 because people kept trying to make a movie out of it. And I was like, It’s not a movie. Because the whole book is about the experience of time’s passage and watching people transform, witnessing their development, growth, decay and shift of their allegiances. It took six years for me to get the rights, and then my task became trying to translate it and ultimately peel back the layers for people.
Speaking of time passages, her novel was set in 1976 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence. Why did you set the series in 2016?
Along the way, I became very friendly with Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s literary executor and her lifelong agent. One of the things she said to me was, “Octavia would’ve wanted you to make this for now.” So I took that to heart. I think 2016 was that last gasp of naïveté about how we had processed the legacies of this racial regime that the country’s founded on. Do you remember the day after Obama was elected, suddenly, there was a discussion of a phrase called post-race? I remember asking, “What is that?” I also think because people did not see the results of the 2016 [presidential] election coming, we suddenly felt like we were backsliding as a country. “Kindred” was the ultimate metaphor for that, too.
Another surprising change was your inclusion of her mother as a major character. What inspired that story line?
Merrilee also told me that Octavia referred to this book as one she never quite cracked. That interested me because this is her most widely read and known book, and that also sent me to her archives, which had just been cataloged at the Huntington Library.
I read every draft of “Kindred,” and there are ones in which she experimented with this mother figure. In her canon, she’s obsessed with mothers. I don’t want to be psychoanalyzing another artist, but her relationship with her mother was very complicated. Merrilee told me once that she would say, “Octavia, I want you to write a memoir.” And she would say, “I’ve already written a memoir; it’s called ‘Kindred.’”
Unlike many other contemporary representations of enslaved people in television and film, Dana is not by herself. She has a community in each of her periods to help her. Why was this important to portray?
I think Octavia was obsessed with family. I mean, it’s called “Kindred,” and it is about making the familial political. My approach was to always think of what she was doing and try to echo or expand on that universe — I took all my cues from her, except for setting it in 2016. At the same time, she was always trying to understand why tribalism exists, why genes are so varied as a concept, how they’re weaponized to oppress people and what oppression ultimately is rooted in.
Dana has to make some hard choices for herself and often risks the lives of other enslaved African Americans to ensure that she continues to exist in the present. How did you approach bringing her moral ambiguity to the screen?
That’s an essential part of the book, and I think that’s what makes Dana interesting. Most folks are not participating in active insurrection but are fighting in small ways to maintain their agency. This is driven home in Dana, who says to herself: “Wait a minute, to ensure my existence, I have become someone who might destroy or erase the existences of countless people. I want to be perceived as good, and I want to think that my goodness will rub off on Rufus too.” But playing both sides isn’t how justice happens. You wind up being morally compromised in all your actions if you are still thinking about yourself. That’s the interesting challenge she has to negotiate.
Why did you think a multi-season arc was best for this story versus adapting it as a single-season limited series?
I just didn’t think you could do this book in eight hours. It’s about being with people over time and really feeling these tectonic shifts in their personhood. I thought the idea of squeezing in six different actors for Rufus would have felt like a party trick. I’m sure that someone out there could have made that thing, but I just really wanted to give us the fullest canvas I could to tell the story.
Do you ever worry that audiences will grow weary of stories on slavery?
There is this interesting quota that we all want to put on stories about slavery, and I think that question is often asked only of Black creatives. There are a thousand shows on the air about rich white families doing evil sympathetically, and no one puts a quota on that. I think it’s interesting that there’s this desire to police any storytelling about a creative’s history. I mean, this is my history and my family history.
I also think people are worried, afraid of, or sick of the tropes and stereotypes that come with this work and are waiting for the familiar scene in which some female enslaved person is raped or someone is tied to a pole or a tree and whipped. But in honoring Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about. We should never stop telling these stories, especially when people try to erase them from history books.
Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works. @salamishah
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Thanks for sharing Kindred should have just been a movie. It feels dragged it. Learning that it is supposed to go more than 1 season. It just does not make sense to me.
I’ve watched the first 5 episodes and I’m not feeling it at all…
The Black Panther details were interesting. I wonder why no one even considered just getting another actor to play Black Panther If multiple actors can play Superman and James Bond someone new could have played T’Challa — maybe even better.
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@Troy my pleasure , but from my own fringe experience , the reason kindred is a series not a film is the money. Netflix didn't feel kindred better served netflix as a film over a multi season show. I think the answer to the last question is the reality for all slavery dramas. they are hit or miss, many black people, some in this sites forums have a no want policy to anything involving slavery in a plot. These shows will always be hit or miss.
You make another valid point, all I want to say is, I would had not recast tchalla, but my reasons are from my views towards media. I am tired of the recast I am tired of the immortal character. The comic book industry in the usa and the film industry in the usa despise letting characters die, letting stories move on and I like the fact that they let a character die. The actor died and they let the character die, lets move on. I admit , I was very saddened when milestone comics rebooted all their characters. I despise reboots or recasts, move on. Having said that, if they would had recast tchalla, I would not had been sad. It would had been the normal in media. And that is fine, not my liking, but fine. and someone else may have played tchalla better. In defense James Bond has been killed and the next 007 film will not have bond. And I think the reality is, superman since the end of christopher reeves has been knocked recast after knocked recast.
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All of these people who are making comic books into movies are functionally retarded, liars, bad people, and have wicked intent, they are using these traits to manifest their political based desires as a profit. While actively disrespecting the source material, and continuously disrespecting the readers of that source material, in multiple ways.
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Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 13, 2022. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)
Shelby, One of the Senate's Last Big Spenders, 'Got Everything' for Alabama
Catie Edmondson and Carl Hulse
Mon, December 26, 2022 at 2:14 PM EST
SHELBY POINT, Ala. — For the first time in years, there are signs of dramatic transformation on the banks of the Mobile River. The waterway is dug wider and deeper by the day. Mobile’s airport will soon move in. And sitting watch from the waterfront is a 3-foot bronze bust of the man who brought home the money to finance it: Sen. Richard C. Shelby.
Determined to the point of obsession to harness the potential of Alabama’s only seaport, Shelby, who has served in Congress for more than four decades, has used his perch on the powerful committee that controls federal spending to bring in more than $1 billion to modernize the city’s harbor, procuring funding for projects including new wharves and better railways. The result is one of the fastest-growing ports of its kind, which today contributes to one in seven jobs in the state.
It is also something of a monument to a waning way of doing business on Capitol Hill, one that has fueled many a bipartisan deal — including the $1.7 trillion spending bill that cleared Congress last week, averting a government shutdown — and whose demise has contributed to the dysfunction and paralysis that has gripped Congress in recent years.
Shelby, who is retiring at 88, is one of the last of the big-time pork barrel legends who managed to sustain the flow of money to his state even as anti-spending fervor gripped his party during the rise of the Tea Party and never quite let go.
The Alabama senator did not just use his seat on the Appropriations Committee to turn the expanding port into an economic engine. Applying his influence, seniority, craftiness and deep knowledge of the arcane and secretive congressional spending process, he single-handedly transformed the landscape of his home state, harnessing billions of federal dollars to conjure the creation and expansion of university buildings and research programs, airports and seaports, and military and space facilities.
Shelby honed his tactics at a time when lawmakers across the political spectrum were willing to set aside ideology and unite behind a common zeal for grabbing federal money for their states and districts. That smoothed the path to passing major spending deals and keeping the government running in large part because those lawmakers had a vested interest in securing wins for their constituents.
He unapologetically followed in the footsteps of predecessors known in congressional parlance as “old bull appropriators,” like Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Democrats Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii. They saw their primary task in Congress as steering as much money as they could to their states, which they saw as neglected in favor of more populous ones with more influence.
“They trained me,” Shelby said.
The ascendant right-wing Republicans who wield the greatest influence in Congress these days have received different training altogether.
They are lawmakers who reflexively vote against any federal funding measure and regard big spenders like Shelby as establishment stooges who have been corrupted by the lure of wasteful government spending. And as the party prepares to assume the House majority next week, they have made it clear that they will demand severe cuts, potentially leading to the kind of spending stalemate that has become commonplace in recent years.
“Other people would say, ‘Oh you shouldn’t do anything for your state, you shouldn’t spend any money on this.’ I differ with that,” Shelby said last week, sitting in his office in Washington, feet away from his desk that once belonged to another Southern senator who used his perch in Congress to build his state, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Part of the task of a senator, he argued, is to help build the conditions for his state’s prosperity.
“I’m a pretty conservative guy in a lot of ways,” Shelby said. “But I thought that’s the role Congress has played since the Erie Canal.”
As Shelby’s contributions have sprung up across his home state, so too have the monuments in his honor. Beyond the statue at the Port of Mobile, which was unveiled early this month, there are no fewer than seven buildings in Alabama named for him — mostly academic buildings, but also a missile intelligence center. An eighth, a federal courthouse, is on the way.
“No one will ever accuse Richard Shelby of being timid or thinking small,” said Jo Bonner, the president of the University of South Alabama, and a former Republican congressman who served five terms. The senator’s ability to “dream big and look years down the road,” he said, made Shelby “the most consequential elected official in Alabama history.”
Bradley Byrne, a former Republican congressman from Mobile, recalled marveling when he first arrived to Congress at how thoroughly Shelby had stuffed the year-end spending bill.
“Senator, you got a whole lot of stuff for Alabama in that bill,” Byrne recalled telling Shelby.
“Bradley,” Shelby replied in his signature baritone drawl, “I got everything.”
Born in Birmingham during the Great Depression, Shelby said he had never even met a Republican growing up. A lawyer by trade, he began in politics as a conservative Democrat, first in the Alabama Senate, then as a U.S. congressman. By the time Shelby had climbed the ranks of seniority in the Senate, becoming the chair of the appropriations panel after helming three others, including the Intelligence Committee, he had changed parties as part of the vanguard of the Southern realignment.
Outside of his push for federal money, Shelby legislated and voted like a conventional conservative when it came to social and economic issues, and his relationship with the Clinton administration soured when, in 1993, he greeted the new president’s economic plan with the memorable phrase: “The taxman cometh.”
His enthusiasm for earmarks has long drawn detractors. Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan organization that opposes the use of earmarks, once published a report titled “Senator Shelby’s pork parade.”
“Sen. Shelby has long used his seniority on the Appropriations Committee to receive far more earmarks than his peers,” including last year, “when he received nearly twice as many dollars in earmarks as the next-highest recipient,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s director of policy and research.
Even as the term “earmark” became a four-letter word in his party in the 2000s, Shelby remained unabashed about the parade of federal funds he steered his state’s way. When local cartoonists published images of Shelby depicting him as one of the state’s chief benefactors, such as one of Shelby carrying a pig in a large sack bearing a money symbol captioned, “Alabama’s Santa Claus,” his wife would display them at their home. It was a reminder, Shelby said, “to keep my humor.”
Shelby’s work was about “trying to make sure we got our fair share,” said Sandy Stimpson, the mayor of Mobile, where an estimated one in five people lives in poverty.
Shelby has funded roads and bridges and hospitals and public libraries and drinking water systems; university research into topics as varied as the prevention of diseases in local foods like catfish and oranges, to improved monitoring systems for coastal flooding and hurricanes, to the combustion behavior of liquid oxygen.
For some of his biggest priorities — such as the Redstone Arsenal, the military installation near Huntsville that houses Army missile programs, the FBI, and the Marshall Space Flight Center — Shelby secured vast infusions of federal funds bit by bit each year, shoehorning them into bill after bill over the course of decades.
“I thought the best thing I could do with federal money was not pave somebody’s driveway,” Shelby said. What he tried to do instead was “to build institutions, and then infrastructure that would create more of a competitive environment for the long run.”
At Redstone Arsenal, he successfully lobbied the Air Force to build the new U.S. Space Command’s headquarters, and pushed the FBI to expand its footprint there, an investment that has now topped $2.48 billion, much of it built by earmarks. And he sent billions of dollars to support research and expand jobs at NASA’s civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center there.
Sometimes his advocacy came in the form of a few paragraphs. In 2011, when lawmakers were rushing to approve a short-term spending bill to ensure the government did not shut down, Shelby tucked in language that blocked NASA from scrapping an effort to commission rockets with “heavy-lift” capabilities, a move that would have eliminated hundreds of jobs at Redstone Arsenal.
Shelby, in part for personal reasons, has also taken a special interest in Alabama’s universities, which have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of his largess. In 1987, during Shelby’s first year in the Senate, his wife, the first woman to become a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s business school, suffered kidney failure from lupus. The family turned to the medical staff at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
“UAB saved her life,” Shelby says now. “I realized what they had there, and could have there.”
Since then, Shelby has secured funding for four academic buildings — all of them hubs for scientific research and teaching, none of them smaller than 150,000 square feet, and most built in the federal style with Doric columns. There is Shelby Hall at the University of Alabama; Shelby Hall at the University of South Alabama; the 12-story, 340,000 square foot Shelby Biomedical Research Building at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; and the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, two-thirds of which was built with federal funds.
At Tuscaloosa, more than $60 million secured by Shelby helped build what became one of the largest academic buildings on the University of Alabama campus, a 200,000-square-foot hall that houses more than 70 research labs, three lecture halls and more than 120 offices for faculty and graduate students.
“It allowed us to put students in laboratory facilities that otherwise they would not have been able to be a part of,” said Dr. Chuck Karr, the president of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a previous engineering dean at the University of Alabama. “It really served as the catalyst for other growth.”
When local officials unveiled the bust of Shelby at the Port of Mobile earlier this month, they also surprised him by announcing that they were privately financing two engineering and computing scholarships in his name at the University of South Alabama.
Seated in his office weeks later, he was more interested in talking about the scholarships than the twice-life-size bronze edifice modeled after him.
“If you have tried to educate everybody in your community — everybody,” Shelby said, “you’re going to create opportunity.”
Statues, he said with a mischievous glint in his eye, “are for dogs and birds.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company
URL : https://news.yahoo.com/shelby-one-senates-last-big-191432668.html
MY THOUGHTS
At the end the biggest issue I have is the notion of anti action in modern elected officials. I think of black elected officials to black districts, how many black elected officials in my lifetime have done absolutely nothing for their districts. If every black elected official to a black district did as shelby the black community in the usa would have more. I am 100% certain. The question is how do you change the culture of black elected officials.
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The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation in Online Communities
richardmurray replied to Troy's topic in Culture, Race & Economy
@ProfD why don't you share your music on aalbc?
