richardmurray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

IN AMENDMENT

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

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

FROM

Olayemi Olurin (@msolurin)

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

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

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

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

ARTICLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2022 The New York Times Company

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

MY THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

IN AMENDMENT

What do you think of a Black party of governance LINK