Troy

It is not a matter of my personal belief, there is ample documentation to prove the Willy Lynch letter is an authentic @Pioneer1.

not only was a formally enslaved brother literate he was extremely articulate and was good at math. The letter is dated August 1865. He was presumably freed shortly after the war ended in April of the same year any acquired all of these skills in a matter of months? That is why I said the brother must be a genius.

In my opinion, and exchange like this seems highly unlikely. Now I don’t know if the letter was even presented as being written by an ex-slave at the event. I looked at the information provided with the YouTube video and it is indeed presented as an authentic letter.

Jourdon Anderson, the former slave, escaped an 1864 they don’t say what month, but presumably he had a year to learn to write. However, it was said the letter was dictated, so that gets beyond the requirement to write, but it does not explain the vocabulary.

It also does not explain how to general knew where to even send the letter. 
 

It is no doubt, humorous and powerful letter. I’m just not 100% convinced it is real.

I could not hear the woman speak, but we’ve  o for a long time google uses all our personal information. Look at all Gmail accounts that google mines for financial gain.

The only way you gonna stop is not to be 

online. If you think for one second, there’s some other web based company is not selling your data. Good luck.

@richardmurray  i’m not on the lineup year. I don’t think it’s the largest lineup. They generally have a lot of people speak and workshops, but there are quite a number of high profile accomplished people this year.
 

I’m still debating if I will attend. But if I was within driving distance I would not miss it. Honestly I can’t imagine anyone with the marginal interest and Black Book would miss it.

I saw Ruskin and enjoyed it, but it definitely would not be near the top of my list of films.

American Fiction was excellent, I probably enjoyed it more because I’m Black and in the book industry.  I can't wait to read Erasure. which is the book that the film was based on.

I have no interested in watching the new Color Purple Film.  If you'll rave about it, I'll check it out, otherwise I'll pass on this one.

We have some a long way when it comes to Black film.  I remember a time I would watch ANY Black film --  even a white film with a Black character- because there were so few.  Today we have the luxury of passing on films because there are just so many.

6 hours ago, Pioneer1 said:

All jokes aside, these experiences and being able to not only survive but come out and thrive is just ONE of the reasons I admire and rocks with you bro.

Thanks man.  

5 hours ago, Pioneer1 said:

It's possible...but I'd have to ask what neighborhood did you grow up in where you did NOT witness street violence?
Park Avenue?

Funny you should mention that street.  I grew up on Park Ave -- that very same Park Avenue walking distance form the most valuable real-estate in the country.  Of course I had no idea, as a kids that fantastically wealthy people lived down the street from me. I lived on 113th street anything south of 96 street was "white-boy territory."

The stick-up kids used to go down there to rob the rich kids.  The funny thing is that I did not know this as a kid.  As an adult, white guys would tell me how they got robbed and Brothers told me usually older how they would rob the kids downtown.

One thing that was different when I was a kid in NYC versus what I read about Chicago, Philly and other Black northern cities now is the gun violence.  When I was a kid you might catch beat down, but you'd live to see another day. The chances of you actually getting shot was relatively small unless you really were about that life...

Gun violence over the past two decades is just sad -- another reason I'd hate to be a poor Black kid today.  I'm not in favor of these lax gun laws because of this.

This popped to the top of my feed this afternoon, this was a worthwhile distraction. 

If this is indeed a letter from a formerly Black man.  The brother was a genius.

12 hours ago, ProfD said:

Hopefully not Boule.

tell me more about this Boule you speak of.

Well, I grew up in a NYC too, and I’ve been a victim of a crime several times indeed virtually everyone I know has been a victim of a crime or has had a family member who was

when I was a kid my family (two little kids and my mother) was robbed at gunpoint in the lobby our apartment building. On another occasion, a robber held a knife to my little sister‘s throat, and stole my mother‘s purse. This was in the stairwell of my building during that period virtually. Every one’s mother was mugged. Neither of these violent crimes were reported to the police. Often, when crimes were reported to the police, they were miss categorized. The NYC crime statistics as bad as they were, were grossly under reported.

People. In New York City would carry money in separate places on their person; one for the mugger. Generally it was just easier to give them something and get the robbery over as quickly as possible.

When I was a kid Street gangs would rob other kids all the time I knew kids who had their sneakers stolen right off their feet and who were beat up for walking in the wrong neighborhood. 
 

I won’t even get into the poverty, the burnout buildings, the street prostitution that open air drugs trade the corrupt cops and the filth.

It probably comes as no surprise that I know people who have been murdered one of my earliest memories was  an older kid involved with drugs, who was murdered. his body was dumped on the sidewalk in front of his building. 
 

People were was dying from overdoses dope fiends were all over the place.

As an adult in the mid 90s My car was stolen in New York City from right in front of the apartment I lived in. That was not uncommon. Many of my friends have had at least one car stolen. 

By the time, the 2000s came along crime in New York City was infinitely better. By the time I moved back to Harlem from brooklyn, there was crime, but it never touched me. 
 

my kids, who grew up in New York City, have never been robbed , beat up by rogue gangs. they've never had to fight in the streets or gotten jumped the way we did growing up.

I don’t know what world Richard, and the good professor grew up in, but the New York City of my youth was hellacious. The stress alone sent many adults to the bottle and early graves.
 

Of course, it was not all bad and I have many good memories for my childhood. The countless games we played in the street, Doing the freak in some recreation center party during the early days of hip-hop and more. 
 

But make no mistake. A great many lives were destroyed, cut short, adversely impacted by the crime of the city during a decades of the 70s through 90s.

I didn’t see Biden speech. had I had knowledge of the specifics, would’ve prompted the AI to include some of those specifics, and it would’ve been a better poem

Sure children will need to go to school, because there will always be jobs and the need for people skilled in the trades.
 

Culturally will want an educated population so that people can pursue a variety of activities. 

I did not write poem I just asked chat got to spit something about Biden’s address.

a poor judge of poetry

In the chamber’s hush, under the Capitol’s dome,
Biden stood, addressing the nation’s home.
Words were spoken with hopeful intent,
Yet beneath the surface, critiques were ferment.

“Unity and progress,” he claimed with a voice so bold,
But skeptics found the message somewhat cold.
For in the spaces between the lines read,
Lay unaddressed issues, silently spread.

Healthcare, climate, justice, and strife,
Parts of the fabric of the American life.
Yet in his speech, some found lack,
A roadmap clear, the vision slack.

Promises like stars in the night sky, bright,
But without action, they fade from sight.
Inequality’s shadow still looms large,
Unspoken, it charged a silent charge.

The union’s state, a complex weave,
Not just what one man can conceive.
Critique not of person, but of power’s role,
In shaping a future that’s whole.

So let this poem, in verse and rhyme,
Reflect the complexity of our time.
For in democracy, critique must have a part,
In the ever-evolving American heart.

I watched some of Kamala‘s video. She looked quite presidential, striding up to the podium.

I know @Pioneer1 was feening  over the sister with the red hair and the white dress who greeted Kamala.

I think Harris spent so much time talking about Gaza because the perception is Black people don’t like the US funding Israel’s bombardment over Gaza. So her speech was an attempt to create a counter narrative.

Yeah, I think she would’ve been better served not addressing the issue at all particularly at that event. 
 

9 hours ago, Pioneer1 said:

Shout out to Professor Black Truth...lol

I checked out this brother on YouTube. I heard him before. I saw the video about Kamala’s speech but the algorithm put the video about Wendy Williams and Puff Daddy ahead of it so I’ll listened to a few minutes of it.

There was a lot I did not know about their respective situations and I’m glad. 

8 hours ago, Pioneer1 said:

Do you mean Determined or Known?

I mean determined and therefore knowable, by a sufficiently intelligent entity, but not by us mere humans or anything built by us.

Even the dream/dreamer Frankster speaks of are predetermined.

I think one percenters will appreciate the fact that this will keep the pitch forks at bay. 

On 3/4/2024 at 7:54 PM, richardmurray said:

rent or food keep raising

Here in suburban Tampa it is like night and day compared to when I started living here in 2011.  It still a lot chaps than NYC, but I used to describe the area as "very inexpensive" not anymore.

On 3/4/2024 at 7:54 PM, richardmurray said:

I argue, the internet is full of people who have lesser spheres of influence that is surviving. 

I'm sure, but they remain largely undiscoverable.  This was less true before Google dominance and our collective obsequiousness to them.

On 3/4/2024 at 7:54 PM, richardmurray said:

no firm is ever accepted for consistent financial results. Public trading demands greater growth all the time

The reason is investors demand increasing returns.  Period.

On 3/4/2024 at 7:54 PM, richardmurray said:

the village voice is gone in nyc, amsterdam news in harlem is a weekly, tough time

Is the Amsterdam News still in print?  I used to subscribe to the print edition.  The covered AALBC back in 2008.  We need Black-owned media.  Who else will tell our stories.

On 3/4/2024 at 7:54 PM, richardmurray said:

any analogies to the ATT or MA Bell breakup in the 80s. 

Believe it or not AT&T was worse.  They were a "true" monopoly and as such completely stifled innovation. But you were there Richard you know how much phone calls cost and greatest innovation we saw in the phone was push buttons.

Thanks for you detailed analysis @richardmurray

 @Delano interesting article.  I'm not familiar with the publisher and I always take opinion pieces on unfamiliar platforms with a grain of salt. 

The article referenced "erasing" white men several times and was clearly biased in this regard.  The following tweet was presented as evidence.

PLEASE! How in the hell can a company owned, run, and principally populated by white men be accused of holding back white men?!  I sure if Shaun was any good at his job, he would not be on Twitter bitching, but collecting his fat paycheck. 

Ignoring the perception of anti-whoite make bias at Google. The follow paragraph is taken from the article:

Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.

Again, DEI is not the real problem.  I do think the "Innovator’s Dilemma" is a problem, as the classic search engine's days are numbered along with the bazillions of dollars their's generates. 

Google perverted their search engine.  AI's ability to Seach the web is a refreshing improvement over Google search.  However, AI hurts websites, which further hurts Google.

On 3/4/2024 at 8:20 PM, Delano said:

Most people can't deal with a lot of free time.

Sure some, initially with struggle, like the retiree who is bored silly because they don't have a job to go to every day and don't know what to do with themselves.    As the culture shifts to providing people with a minimal standard of living (including education and medical care), people will learn how to utilize their free time to discover and peruse their passions. 

This country would be a better place.  We have the financial resources to do this too.

Subscribe to the Hurston/Wright's YouTube channel.  In fact, subscribe to AALBC's channel while you are at it.*  

*Ya'll know me, I'm not trying to promote YouTube's channel, but subscribers help.  YouTube doesn't even count video views unless the video is viewed on YouTube, so if a million people video the video here and 1 person watches it on YouTube will report only one view which signals to people on YouTube that the video is not worth you time.  Of course, this creates a strong incentive for video creators to push people to watch videos on YouTube.  Some producers even pay for video views.  The worst part is YouTube's algorithm favors baser content 

7 hours ago, Delano said:

Content will have watermarks and be copyrighted.

so they say… tell me how that will translate into revenue for the creators?

@ProfD I appreciate the encouraging words, but experience tells me something different. However, that does not mean I’m throwing in the towel.  
 

i always saw social, Amazon, google as a threats, but not existential ones. AI is a whole ‘nother thing.

I don’t know exactly when this will happen, but everything that I see going on suggests that the days for websites are numbered  which means that I need to figure some things out.

You have AI Systems that’s scrape the web and provide brilliantly crafted responses to user questions based on that content. They do this without paying the contact creators. And in the vast majority of cases the uses have no reason to go to the underlying website, meaning websites, go increasingly uncompensated for their content.

This is one of the ways that Google has really hurt websites, but AI promises to make this far worse and is an existential threat to all websites, perhaps more importantly, to websites that require journalists.

The problem is AI needs content creators and publishers but if AI kills websites indeed, even journalism where will they get new content to drive their systems?

as far as AALBC is concerned, the newsletter holds some promise for the time being. More interestingly, these discussion forms can be even more promising, but that will require more human participation that we’ve seen in recent years.

 There are some open source social networks like bluesky, that I can host locally that allows people to share their followers and engagement  across the web, but people have shown little interest in leaving the older social platform and Black peoples are not exactly early posters as a group. 
 

…. so say the determinists.

toss a ball in the air. If we know the force applied, we know the exact trajectory the bar will take.

The same as true not just for your life but the entire universe. Free will is an illusion.
 

Our minds are too feeble to calculate the exact trajectory of our lives, or even  wrap our brains around the entire notion, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

Maybe as people get older, they begin to realize this, on some level, and they become increasingly bored with life. In much the same way a little kid can be entertained by the game, I Declare War, as they grow older they begin to find the game boring —dumb even.

Gives new meaning to the saying “everything happens for a reason.“

@Pioneer1 I don’t think citizenship is a requirement for being counted in the census. 

Thanks so much @Chevdove!

Well, I find it hard to believe that first picture of Wendy Williams is real.

I know Wendy used to be one of those gossip people.  But I find it hard to feel nothing but sympathy for her and her situation.

The hyperlinked article did not interest me enough to finish it. It was really just more gossip. 
 

Has Charlemagne da God been quoted regarding Wendy Williams in the documentary or the article? I would be interested in his take, as he seems like a standup guy and I know he worked with her in the past.

I’ve seen Wendy on a couple of occasions once at one of her events really just hanging out drinking. And then years later on a book signing and she was the exact opposite of her public personality.

@Pioneer1 I don’t think Wendy is a dude. Dudes can’t have babies. She is not a petite dainty little woman either, but that does not make her a man.