richardmurray

Various constitutional amendments prohibit denying voting rights to women, racial minorities and other groups. But the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote.Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

Biden and Trump Share One Thing
Oct. 24, 2022

By Yuval Levin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin Is Onto Us
Oct. 25, 2022

By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

IN AMENDMENT

An unverified image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask what else people get wrong about her.

There’s that laugh again.

“Everything.”

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

She is just so sexy:)
 

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

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

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

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

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

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Thoughts

Enjoy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Reeves’s unsympathetic colleagues are legion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

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

Kidowaum- a four part series, all created by Richard Murray

build your beast 
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/697691205314756608/had-great-fun-i-like-the-concept-that-this-was

lay out your lair 
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/699685490448809984/here-is-the-build-your-beast-entry-before-this

fashion your familiar 
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/699685700293033984/the-lay-out-your-lair-beforehand

conjure your costume 
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/699685800676343808/the-fashion-your-familiar-beforehand
 

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

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

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

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

Special Guest Speaker

Denise Jackson

COVID: Mental Health of Domestic Violence 

Thursday, October, 27, 2022, 11 am est

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

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

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2022 12-noon pm est 

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

Dr. LaTarsha Holden, MBA
  Leadership Consultant  | Author

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

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2022 12-noon est

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

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

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

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

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

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2022  4:30 PM EST
 

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

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

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

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

Sunday, October 30, 2022 4:30 PM EST

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

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

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

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

Literature

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

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

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

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