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Former Racial Justice Task Force chair explains ballot questions
By Deanna Garcia New York City
PUBLISHED 8:40 PM ET Oct. 27, 2022
With voters hitting the polls this weekend for early voting, New Yorkers will also have the chance to weigh in on four ballot proposals.

Three of the proposals are for city voters only. They explore how to create a statement of values for the government to form a racial equity office and define how the cost of living is calculated in the city.

The Racial Justice Task Force, formed under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the wake of the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder, recommended these citywide questions.

Jennifer Jones Austin, former chair of the city’s Racial Justice Commission, joined Bobby Cuza on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to explain these proposals.

“We can’t policy our way out of racism, we can’t program our way out of racism,” she said. “But what we can do is look at the structures that have birthed it and perpetuate it and when we look at the laws, the New York City, the charter, is our Constitution.”
Article
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2022/10/28/former-racial-justice-task-force-chair-explains-ballot-questions
MY THOUGHTS

Trying to get equality financially between parties who started unevenly is the question. i ask, have any two peoples in one country repaired one being the oppressed with the other the oppressor to become equal kin? does anyone know?

Democrats block Latina Republican from joining Congressional Hispanic Caucus
Opinion by Brad Polumbo - Oct 27

Rep. Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican, made history after taking office as the first female member of Congress who was born in Mexico. You’d think that partisanship aside, the Latina Republican would be considered a win for diversity in Congress.

You’d be wrong. The Democrat-controlled Congressional Hispanic Caucus is reportedly blocking Flores after she requested to join it.

“Flores requested to join CHC in early October and was rejected shortly thereafter,” Townhall’s Julio Rosas reports. “Flores is not only first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, but she also represents a district along the U.S.-Mexico border that is overwhelmingly Latino. CHC used to have [Republican] members but they went on to create the Congressional Hispanic Conference as their own version of the CHC in the 2000s.”

At first glance, this doesn’t make much sense. Flores is indeed Hispanic, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is not supposed to be a partisan entity.

Per its website, the group exists to address “national and international issues” and “craft policies that impact the Hispanic community,” and “serve as a forum for the Hispanic Members of Congress to coalesce around a collective legislative agenda.” There’s nothing on its about page about only being open to progressives or members of a certain political party. Yet the group denied Flores membership in what’s clearly a partisan snub.

Flores isn’t having it.

“As the first Mexican-born American Congresswoman, I thought the Hispanic Caucus would be open in working together,” Flores remarked of the snub. “This denial once again proves a bias towards conservative Latinas that don’t fit their narrative or ideology.”

It’s hard to see any other explanation.

The situation is eerily reminiscent of similar snubs from ostensibly neutral (but Democrat-controlled) diversity caucuses. As Rosas notes, Rep. Byron Donalds, a black Florida Republican, was similarly denied admission to the Congressional Black Caucus.

“The Congressional Black Caucus has a stated commitment to ensuring Black Americans have the opportunity to achieve the American dream,” Donalds said after his snub. “As a newly elected Black Member of Congress, my political party should not exempt me from a seat at the table dedicated to achieving this goal.”

Whether you politically agree with Flores and Donalds, this is deeply wrong. These partisan acts of discrimination reveal the contempt many Democratic elites actually have for diversity. One is not any more or less black or Hispanic because of how one thinks or how one votes — and these decisions implicitly suggest otherwise.

That’s bigoted. There’s simply no other word for it.

If they have any integrity at all, these groups should open up their ranks and actually represent their respective minority communities, which are not partisan or ideological monoliths. If they’re not willing to do that, they should at least rename themselves and reorient their groups’ values to reflect their partisan nature. Anything less is an insult to the diverse Americans they claim to represent and, frankly, pretty racist.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a co-founder of Based-Politics.com, a co-host of the Based Politics podcast, and a Washington Examiner contributor.

MY THOUGHTS

Polumbo's argument has a great flaw. The flaw is in all the parties of governance that exist in the USA, especially the largest two. I call the largest two parties of governance in the United States of America, the POAL <party of abraham lincoln, commonly called the republicans> side POAJ <party of andrew jackson , commonly called the democrats>
Both of those parties, like all the littler ones,  are on racial lines. The problem here is race isn't restricted to phenotype or gender or religion or age. Race/classification/order/ranking are based on any factor. Philosophical races are ... races.
Functionally while Unfortunately, the populace in the USA likes to not consider philosophical races... races? Why? the populace in the usa doesn't have a physical/financial/geographic/religious binder. The only binder the USA populace can have is philosophical.
The populace in the USA has majorities in various racial categories, mostly white, mostly christian, mostly hetero, mostly fiscally poor, but none of the majorities are large enough in modernity to say the USA is explicitly any specific category. It is mostly white but not all white. It is mostly of immigrants but humanity outside the usa is even more multiracial so immigration doesn't yield to cohesion in thinking. 
So all the USA populace has in modernity to bind itself is like mindedness in philosophy as the one racial element that can survive the ever growing multiracial composition.
But, philosophy can be more fracturing than any other racial category, as the war between the states proved in USA history. 
And, this is the problem  with the caucasus. The parties of governance each governing official is a part of is racists, based on philosophy on how to govern, sequentially, how can the caucasus be absent a similar racial reality.
The question going forward is, why not have a latino party of governance, why not have a negro party of governance?
A caucus is designed to represent a union across parties but what about making parties for those agendas? 

ARTICLE
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-block-latina-republican-from-joining-congressional-hispanic-caucus/ar-AA13r419?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=25415f3082f940ba832dcd62cbd3c117

“AND THERE WAS LIGHT: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE”
NOVEMBER 02, 2022 AT 6:30 PM

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and historian Jon Meacham takes fresh look at Abraham Lincoln in a new book “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” Meacham describes how a president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Tonight, Meacham opens up on the former president’s leadership and explains why he chose to dissect his legacy now.

TRanscript or Video 
https://www.thirteen.org/metrofocus/2022/11/abraham-lincoln-and-american-struggle-whqkwd/

MY THOUGHTS

Lincoln was challenged harder than any other president in terms of domestic issues. I argue, that his murder conveniently didn't allow him to shape his success. People forget Lincoln never got to be president in internal peace. and that is important cause the peace after the war between the states needed great management and didn't get it. 

Chaka Khan Reveals Why She Turned Down Steven Spielberg For 'The Color Purple'
The iconic singer shared who she could have played in the award-winning film.
Jazmin Tolliver
By 
Jazmin Tolliver
Nov 4, 2022, 09:10 PM EDT

Chaka Khan wasn’t too keen on the opportunity to star in “The Color Purple.”

The iconic singer, who appeared on “The Jennifer Hudson Show” Friday, said she turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer for a lead role in the beloved 1985 film.

“Funny you should ask that,” Khan said after Hudson asked her about projects she had declined during her long career. “Well, you know I turned down ‘The Color Purple,’ the movie.”

Hudson, who appeared shocked, replied, “What?”

Khan said Spielberg approached her about being in the movie when she was “20, 22 tops,” but nervousness and an aversion to studying kept her from jumping on the opportunity.

“I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid,” the Grammy-winning singer said. ”I was like, ‘Oh God, a movie, oh my God.’”

“I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’” Khan added.

The “Through the Fire” singer said that the Oscar-winning director asked her to play Celie, the role that Whoopi Goldberg ultimately portrayed in the critically acclaimed film.

After Khan revealed who Spielberg asked her to play, Hudson told her audience: “Imagine Chaka Khan as Celie, y’all?”

“Woulda been hot,” Khan replied.

“That would have been a whole other Color Purple,” Hudson quipped.

“The Color Purple”, which starred Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover and Goldberg, was produced by Spielberg and Quincy Jones.

Based on Alice Walker’s classic 1982 novel, the film centers on Black women from the rural South during the early part of the last century, trying to survive and thrive under cruel conditions.

The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Goldberg and Best Supporting Actress for both Winfrey and Margaret Avery.

A new movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” produced by Spielberg and directed by Blitz Bazawule, is currently in the works.

The upcoming musical is set to star Taraji P. Henson as Shug Avery, Fantasia Taylor as Celie, Colman Domingo as Mister, Danielle Brooks as Sofia, Halle Bailey as Nettie, Corey Hawkins as Harpo and singer H.E.R. as Speak.

MY THOUGHTS

well, I think she lied on herself. she said "“I was like, trying to run [from] that because I was afraid ....I like detested school and tests and studying, you know, I said, ‘Oh, that means I’d have to learn the script,’ ""  But Chaka your uncle is quincy jones and you have learned tons of songs, and how to sing them. no,she mischaracterized herself. She likes studying and tests in terms of music, not literature. Chaka khan knows how many songs now? learning the script is hard:) The truth is revealed in the blues brothers. Chaka khan played the head of james browns chorus. She played herself. James brown played the head of the church, himself. the only musicians in blues brothers that some can argue had to act was aretha franklin, but aretha franklin does like to cook and has a strong temperament. Chaka khan is comfortable playing herself. In modernity so many artists push being the multimedia agent and many fail at it. But in the role spielberg wanted for her in the color purple, chaka khan who is very independent minded or strongwilled, former black panther of self defense member, would have to play, small/weak/little/abused Celie who does turn around but I don't think chaka khan felt comfortable with celie. and in defense a better thespian in whoopie goldberg got it. As a comedian who did one person shows, whoopie goldberg had experience shifting in character on stage.  I want to end with , Speilberg wasn't wrong. The man danny glover played would choose a woman that look like chaka khan over whoopie goldberg. He is a wife beater, a black land owner in the usa when it wasn't... common:) <meaning whitey kill black landowners> so.. he want a trophy woman, and i apologize to any woman who may read this and feel insulted, but a trophy woman has physical requirements. Chaka khan in her 20s large or firm breast/buttocks/hourglass shape, natural hair, is what you want over whoopie goldberg if you are looking for a trophy wife. 

IN AMENDMENT

..Someone pointed out Chaka khan couldn't had been asked about the color purple in 1975 when she was 20 or 22 so... . I don't know anything about chaka khan's age. The color purple was published in 1982, so spielberg couldn't had asked anyone to be in the movie in 1981 or earlier. And I checked , the blues brothers was made in 1980. I wonder her experience on set

ARTICLE
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chaka-khan-the-color-purple_n_63659fdae4b08f849aab6d9b

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.

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

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
 

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

Celebrity DJ’s Wife Faked Orgasms for 10 Years of Marriage because of ‘Not Knowing Her Own Body’

(Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)
Popular daily radio and vlog show, The Breakfast Club co-host DJ Envy and his wife Gia Casey have been in the news lately, and not for their job. Gia has admitted she had faked orgasms for 10 years of her marriage. It was something she said she did repeatedly and consistently. The couple sat down with The Shade Room to have an intimate chat and discuss their new book Real Life, Real Love: Life Lessons on Joy, Pain & the Magic That Holds Us Together.

Casey started the conversation about her struggle to reach a climax with her husband because it is a part of the book, which is available now. The radio personality, as Casey shared, was her first and only because they met in high school.

“Most young girls and even many, many, many women, I’m sure so many women can relate, don’t know how to achieve an orgasm,” she said. “A lot of women have no idea what it feels like to have an orgasm through sexual intercourse.”

“We would be intimate and he would be putting his best foot forward…he lives to make me happy. So I would see him trying and really going to work,” she continued. “You want to reward that man for that work and the only reward that you have to offer is an orgasm. But even if I didn’t feel it, I would still be performative.”

In retrospect, Casey says she realized he couldn’t help her reach orgasm because she didn’t know what she needed to get there.

“He was doing everything a man could do to please a woman. The problem was, I didn’t know my own body,” she admitted.

This is more of a common problem for women than you think.

According to the published Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, a whopping 81.6% of women don’t orgasm from intercourse alone (without additional clit stimulation). And nearly 15% of women have never orgasmed ever!
Not reaching an orgasm makes a great number of women feel inadequate, as if her sexual equipment is broken, leading her down a path of exploration to seek and find the BIG O.  After trying many positions, reading self-help books and buying dozens of toys, some women remain unaware of exactly what an orgasm is and why it is so difficult to reach one.  So the question is, why is it so difficult for women to reach orgasm when men seem to be able to reach sexual bliss so easily?

The answer actually consists of a few parts:

1. Women need more than entry to orgasm.
Inserting part A into slot B is the typical sexual situation that the average couple believes will enable both partners to reach a climax, but in actuality women need more than vaginal penetration in order to reach an orgasm.  About 70% of women need clitoral stimulation along with penetrative sex in order to reach an orgasm.  The clitoris is made up of 8000 nerve endings making it the most sensitive body part on a woman, so it needs love and attention as does the rest of the body during sex!

During penetration, the clitoris is stimulated from the inside because of its legs that extend deep into the vagina, but for most women that internal stimulation isn’t enough.  DIRECT contact is where it’s at!  Sex positions that position the pelvises close together, oral sex during foreplay or using a clitoral vibrator during sex are great ways to ensure clitorial stimulation is achieved during intercourse.

2. Women’s sexual energy starts in the brain.
Sexual energy is a vital source of energy that gives life to every living being on the Earth.  When it comes to men and women, sexual energy originates in different parts of the body.  In men, sexual energy originates in the pelvis, which explains why men are ready for sex in 20 seconds as opposed to the 10 minutes it typically takes a woman’s body to be ready for intercourse.  Women’s sexual energy originates in the head, so in order for the genitals to be in a state of welcoming and wanting, the energy has to travel down the spine into the pelvis, and that is some distance to travel!
This fact is one that many women are unaware of, and furthermore, many women have no idea how to move the energy from the brain into the pelvis.  Through meditation, concentrated breathing and focusing the mind on the pelvis, sexual energy can move from the brain into the genitals where it belongs during sex.  This technique has to be learned and it takes some time to master, but once a woman knows how to transfer that energy where it needs to be, orgasm during sex can be achieved with ease every time.

3. Women live in their heads
“What should I make for dinner tomorrow?” “I wonder what the kids are doing right now.” “OMG! I s he looking at my stretch marks?” “Ew, his breath smells like Doritos!”  These thoughts and more are things that can roll through the minds of women during sex.  Women tend to live in their heads and think about everything but sex during sexual experiences, which causes disconnect between the brain (where sexual energy originates for women) and the genitals that need to connect with the sexual energy.  When the mind is everywhere else besides the moment of sexual pleasure, the body will not respond to the typical triggers that should send it into an orgasmic frenzy.
In order to bring the body closer to a climax, the mind needs to be cleared and freed of anything that isn’t sex within that moment. Meditation, a pre-performance massage, stretching or even a hot bath or shower are all great ways to mellow out before the fun begins.  Leave all of the thoughts about work, children and body issues at the door.  Leave the mind open to register touch, smells, sounds and every other sensation associated with the sexual rendezvous taking place in the moment. Live in the moment!

Every woman has the parts necessary to orgasm and can learn how to achieve the greatest climax of her life; it just takes dedicated and focused intention and a little practice to get there.

April 27, 2022 by Tamara Gibson

ARTICLE
https://blackdoctor.org/dj-envy-wife-fake-orgasm/
 

MY THOUGHTS

I said the following a trillion times and I will say it a trillion and one, If you define virginity by first orgasm, most women are virgins into their 30s. ... I want to state other, most women in the usa are virgins based on the stated elemental into their 30s but outside the usa into their late 40s.

What is telling? Somehow this isn't common knowledge.

When a woman orgasm what happens?  The vaginal walls pulse rapidly. This is to coax the penis to ejaculate. Saying the vagina will aid in pushing the sperm to the egg. 

Why are vaginas tight? Lack of use. Girls, meaning any female who never was head of household, have no experience fornicating, thus tightness. Usually , women , meaning any female who lived or lives as head of household, has tightness if she has not fornicated in a long time, side another or with a tool.  Tightness of vagina has nothing to do with vixen qualities. Think of the vagina like your leg. Have you ever sat down to o long and your leg started to cramp. Well that is something like a vagina unused for months. If someone told you to start running as fast as you can after sitting down without moving for hours it will hurt right? that is what happens when a vagina has a penis rummaging in it. The better thing for your leg is a massage to prepare to run. The vagina needs the same patient care when unused.

In the article the woman in question states a simple truth. No matter how much a man is gentle or caring, a woman may not orgasm. It isn't about being loved it is about knowing oneself. This knowing requires experimentation with one self.An eventually side the partner. Being great in bed as a couple demands the two learn what will make them great in bed. It can not be assumed or forced. 

In terms of pleasure, everyone is unique in what gives them pleasure and how two people find pleasure is also unique, but in either case it takes time, trial and error to know.

Beloved (1998) reviewed by Movies That Move We
 

Video Link

MY THOUGHTS WHILE I VIEWED

3:44 ahh it came out a bad week. Ants/Rush Hour/Bride of Chucky/Practical Magic all were hits. Ants is animated. Rush Hour is funny and with jackie chan a global hit and rush hour was his finest usa based film. Chucky for the horror addicts, chucky is a superstar. PRactical magic had nicole kidman and sandra bullock in a women's empowerment film about new england witches... beloved

12:35 good point, I want to add, the multitude of stories is the problem. I argue the problem is, the truth is complex right. Some people were violent, some suffered, some had good fortune. it is a blend of stories. Blend of stories make the end of the civil war /13th amendment/end of slavery complicated

15:16 yes, this is a poltergeist. But i concur, the message is, what is more frightening is the human activity, the enslavement of  whites onto blacks. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Garner
I think it is an important story change from morrison that is carried in the film is that the real life garner was mulatto. she had a white parent. and all her children were from her owner.
I find it also interesting that most of the people they fled, with, the historical garner made it to canada. they didn't stay in the usa but most made it. supposedly seventeen in total with nine making it to canada. And i find it historically compelling that the Garner's  owner/former owner/owner in moving the garner's  around kentucky to escape  an extradition order for murder from ohio  which was going to lead to a pardon, he had to leave kentucky and on a boat to take the garner's to new orleans the baby child was thrown into the water by margaret and died. And then in the end, margaret lived, telling her husband never to marry and bring forth life into the world of slavery. I argue, margaret never let her black enslaved husband bed her or at least bed her in good time for pregnancy. I think margaret hated the idea of being pregnant. Only know have I did any research concerning the true story, thank you Nike,  I have more thoughts for a story I am composing myself now. 

20:30 great point, i agree, from the beginning I saw this film as the poltergeist while present, while dangerous is not as dangerous as the white slave owners, not really. The poltergeist is easier to handle and is handled easier than white folks.

21:53 yes, we don't talk about the truth in the black community. because black parents can not guarantee black chidren will react positively to whites or the usa with knowing it. I have always felt most black parents in the usa, are frightened of the truth because all black parents know, 100% of black children will not reach positive conclusions to whites or the usa with the truth. And I think black parents in majority just don't want that risk so they lie. 

22:44 how can the movie be better in your view Nike?

24:09 I can tell you I know black people were not dancing about based on knowing about my mother's father's mother's life. I do not go into my personal.

24:38 yes, trauma 

25:02 i think the black community in the usa made an effort to kill the life of that past in the black community in the usa, even while white people keep it alive with their actions. and i think, those black people succeeded in killing it. The modern black community in the usa, to be blunt, does not reflect a community that used its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa, that being when enslaved to whites, as a root element of a heritage to empowerment. The Black community in the usa , is a community that reflect a discarding of its most historically relevant or elemental era in the usa. Which has been beneficial. The USA today would not be the country it is if the Black community or the Indigenous community didn't at some point do what both did and that was, start at day one when at day 99.  Black people talk about fighting in world war II and owning homes in the antebellum south. Enslavement was Black folk in the usa  300 year old epoch in the usa, that predated the usa itself.  Our forebears who wanted that reboot, got what they wanted. at the price of it was the gullah language or culture like other unique cultures in the black community in the usa that predate the end of slavery, high john the conqueror and a horde of fiction fantasy that black people had created during slavery/the black free towns no one recalls today. Black people like henry louis gates jr and others like to emphasize the time after slavery cause , like frederick douglass, they want the black community in the usa to be statian, of the usa. The problem with black enslavement to whites being alive is the question of the usa itself. it has to live as well and when you question the country you live in, again the resulting answer may not be positive or convenient or majority. And I think many black people in the past have always feared and some today still fear that possibility in the black community in the usa.  thus why said black people adore modern black immigrants who have more in common with whites when it comes to their initial relationship to the usa than DOSers. 

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What did you think of this film the first time you saw it? 
I didn't like the whites, which says little to nothing. but, I enjoyed the end. Maybe cause I was raised in a home with two loving parents. I enjoyed the resolution at the end, between d and sethe.

Did you know at the time, about Margaret Garner? 
No, I did not. I never thought to research this until now. I think the true story is very compelling, about many issues of mulattoes, of black children in the usa,of the end of slavery or as I like to call one of the mutations of slavery. cause the truth is, slavery simply changed, it did not die. But I always remind people, new orleans was the las vegas of the usa in the 1800s and all the top female prostitutes of new orleans claimed black ancestry. why? white men had created a media myth, like modern day Black women behinds or white women breast. that mulatto women was the sexual best. And I even see the lustful logic. You have a white woman/a light black woman/a luscious black woman all in one white man's house. he is married to one, the white one. her role is to make heirs, she owns nothing. he uses one for general labor and mating for more produce<meaning aside black men>, the luscious black woman. but who is the best of both worlds. it is the light black woman, the mulatto. She is publicly owned by the white man. he has no worry of legal problems with anything he does to her, like the luscious black woman but she may in appearance look no different or more similar to a white woman. So, it is to a white man in a position of total power, the best of both worlds. Most mulattoes look like a thandie newton or halle berry where it is clear, they are a mix, but some look like Christina Cox <she was in chronicles of riddick> or rebecca hall <the director of passing>who in my view can attempt to pass in the old environment in the usa way better than ruth negga or tessa thompson. And I use myself as the proof. I never doubted ruth negga or tessa thompson or halle berry have black ancestry but christina cox or rebecca hall i did not know. and this is powerful. Remember twelve years a slave. paul giamatti's character pointed to the mulatto daughter of the luscious black woman, whose tears and constant crying in light of margaret garner is well balanced, and said, i paraphrase, that little girl is worth all of the rest.. to cumberbatch. In latin america, they are called Alvino's meaning. this is someone with known black ancestry but who does not look black. That is priceless to a white man with money back in slave times.
Thanks again Nike, In cheap retrospect, I Would had went another way than Morrison story wise, plot wise. But morrison being a woman, i think she wanted to redeem the black mother more than anything. I think beloved, as a poltergeist, was betrayed a little bit. I daresay, beloved is more a wraith than a poltergeist. A poltergiest for me acts wildly as a spirit but doesn't necessarily have agenda. a wraith has agenda. the woman in black is a wraith. I think beloved is a wraith. She wants her mother to give take her own life through a slow pain of neglect. that is purpose. Beloved goes away as a poltergiest not a wraith. 

Did you feel differently about the meaning of the film between your first watch and the last time you viewed the movie?
Meaning, no , the meaning didn't change. I only add the comparison to the real event know. I remember relatives not liking that she didn't kill herself. The funny thing in the historical record it seems she was literally stopped by the whites coming to take her back to slavery. but I like how in the historical record she tried to kill herself with the youngest, but simply failed. 

 Do you think of this as a horror movie? 
Yes, but I want to say, this film is a visual representation of what I will call Black Statian Slave Ghost Stories. Growing up as a kid, I was told and then later read many of these kinds of stories, usually shorter in length but the same idea. Being enslaved while dealing with a negative spirit is uncommon theme or shall i say a specific theme to the Black DOS community in the USA. this isn't for willing immigrants or whites or native americans mostly, this is a very specific genre culturally. You have a character dealing with a scenario where they are born disempowered with problems stemming from a past before they were born they can not control while now a negative spirit. I think in these stories the problem is, the horror of the ghost is less important than the horror between humans and that goes against the horror movie genre as a whole in the usa. yes, the ghost is bothering me, but I had my foot cut off and my testicles branded last month. I can't afford any more from this white man so spirit, pick a number. 

yeah, good one:) 

THIS IS THE END (of October): Episode 10 ft Tristan Roach of Xion NEtwork

VIDEO LINK

VIDEO INTRO
Welcome to the tenth episode of "This is the End" with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In this special halloween edition, tune-in to Mohz, Jess, Ian, Cam and Roun as we interview one of the most scarily talented comic book artists on the island, before doing a quick recap of major pop-culture events that resonated with us this month.

MY COMMENT

Dune was a serial in a magazine, turned into a book. but star wars was based on John Carter of Mars over Dune. The multiversity of characters in star wars reflects John carter more than Dune. 

SARCASM Fans enjoy

@charityekezie Replying to @musubifamily No but we also apply some honey on stones and lick it. #sacarsm #charityekezie #Africa ♬ original sound - Charityekezie

straight to the forest:) ok the spirit of the black panther:)  Anyone who loves sarcasm will love this... the community giraffe
 

Thoughts as I read after the ellipsis. Anything I suggest is just that, a suggestion. And you say, Fuck off if you read my thoughts. I totally agree:) I enjoyed the chapter, thanks for sharing. 

....
Look at Luke Cage's language, so modern. "It's cool cap" good

Good question by Jake the reporter, he would ask that. I don't know about the timing. 
The sentence before. I don't know if you need it. I know you want to display the length of eating time. maybe a different tact. Something like, everybody ate until the gumbo was done. Since Cage mentioned it was hot twice, the manners of the federation folk will settle into that. Maybe you can say, Jake noticed Cage was sitting back , whiping his mouth , satisfied with the gumbo and Jake couldn't resist the question burning in his mind for his readers about the stars.

Why did you have Cage say "WOW" after Jake's question? you don't have to tell me anything. You can say fuck off. but, I wonder. Cause would Cage be wow-ed by such a question? In my mind, at this point, I am not certain.

I don't think Cage would say "It's ok cap, it's a good question". I think he would be more simpler in phrase.  Just "It's ok cap"

Question: Who said "I get it" after Cage explained to Jake how he dealt with the past. In my head I think it is sisqo but you don't state who. No problem, just change it.

Like how you used Cage to reemphasize the father son of jake sisqo and benjamin sisqo.

I like the modulation to the next phase. but instead of the word "soon", perhaps, The bedtime arrived. The word soon gives off the impression of speed, but you started with the evening went on, which gives off slowness.

Kasidy and Benjamin is excellent. 

Holodeck time!! RETRACTION NO I made a mistake as a reader. I assumed it had to be the holodeck, when you said three weeks time. Shame on me. Well done. 

Nice intro to it. RETRACTION Still nice intro and Earth in deep space nine time has that wierd in the past feel to it. Like picards farm, it is odd to modernity. People have all this technology but live in a very comfortable way. They don't aspire to live beyond how they want to live. oh star trek.

I can hear Brock Peters lovely voice:) Note. This is when I realized this wasn't the holodeck, but that was my mistake, not yours.

haha! wise decision.. yes:)

I think Jake would say "We all get it" Benjamin/Joseph comprehend too. Jake would emit that collective comprehension I think

ohh, the ending, you, well done:) 

The chapter goal was for Luke Cage to feel at home to feel he has loving ones, family, in this time. Goal achieved. 

Well done.  

 SOURCE OF FAN FICTION
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13028411/4/LUKE-CAGE-ON-DEEP-SPACE-NINE

A free screenplay
https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-nyotenda

Did the error from am*zon start when they were not willing to simply spend money on a fantasy world not made before in film or television? I think a greater lesson to all firms exist. Stop trying to use fictional words that have a ready made fanbase. yes, if you get it correct, the growth can be fast and revenue return can be excellent throughout. But, the potential pitfalls are mighty.

One, you have handicapped the directors/thespians/set designers side others in the project with the weight of prior interpretations of the fictional world. The woman playing galadriel in rings of power has to deal with being what the fanbase expects to be kate blanchett's galadriel younger.  The director didn't have the same detail with costume or sets but fans are expecting the scale model lands and crafted armor and pieces that peter jackson set up for lord of the rings. The highest quality the fans are used to in the past becomes the standard in the present. That is a handicap. Since am*zon couldn't get the complete rights they also add another handicap in their limitation to using certain elements of the story. 

Using an unused fantasy world deletes all the handicaps I mentioned.

AMENDMENT: I Argue now, the Tolkien estate , saw this calamity happening and took the money knowing am*zon would fail like this.

Two. fantasy worlds tend to be expensive. The average film is financially a loser, historically. Thus, any venture into a fantasy world will usually be a loser financially. By using a world already represented, the ability to recover from a failed season is harder. Cause the non fans are not along and the fans have left and the weight of the prior interpretations is still on the production.

AMENDMENT: I wonder the accounting assessments to these shows. I want to know how the accountants make the worst case scenario for these better than the worst case for an unvisualized fantasy world? 

A COMPLETE DISASTER, Rings of Power Season 1 OVERVIEW

MEDIA THAT MOVES WE- TRAINING DAY 2001
One seasoned crooked narcotics cop. One eager to please rookie. What do you get when you drop this combo in the middle of LA? One helluva day! That’s what! Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke are polar opposites that hold a tight balance from start to finish in this film and make Training Day a fantastic ride. Join the discussion and share your thoughts!

MY THOUGHTS

Ethan HAwke seemed like the same character in The Lord Of War
Caricature cop is more how I look at Denzel in Training Day

I checked 
1993 Schindlers list won best picture the year after Malcolm X in the 66th academy awards, unforgiven won best picture, which is the end of a western film era.  Al PAcino won for scent of a woman. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65th_Academy_Awards
1985 - Out Of Africa won the Oscars during the year of The Color Purple, interestingly, Whoopie goldberg nor meryl streep won the best actress award
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/58th_Academy_Awards
 
Interestingly, when I looked at who was against denzel washington in 2002, it wasn't al pacino or clint eastwood, it was russell crow<who won in 2001> side sean penn side side tom wilkinson <whO i think is a great thespian but is more of a stage man>  side will smith playing ali:) oddly enough, showing nothing had changed in terms of playing biopic characters... at least till ray right. 
While Halle berry beat out  nicole kidman who won the next year <her first of two with the Hours, oddly enough another more negative character than her character in moulin rouge, so...> Judie Dench, who like williamson is british, is old, I don't think is favored, sissy spacek who had already won it through a biopic oddly enough, and zellwinger who will get hers eventually
My point being, the year they both won it, was interesting. in their competitors . 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/74th_Academy_Awards

Good point Nicole, white owned media, created a false narrative around Malcolm X , that the general white community grasped while also many black people who didn't like islam/his background/his positions acted as if Malcolm was being spoken of honestly by that depiction.

For me the film is a 0 from 1 to 5.. the plot is so silly. A lieutenant like him would not have some silly rookie in his car. 

So Nicole + Nike , is the Equalizer the hidden child between Malcolm and the Training cop? 
Or  is his Troy the hidden black man in all three characters: malcolm/training cop/equalizer superhero

Good point, on Black actors career choices. The lesson is, be very careful. I want to ask either of you, is it the black female community that leads to this viewpoint toward male black actors who play such visibly criminal agents towards black women. It is common knowledge that black women in the usa are financially worth more than black men , so with black women being more revenue, is the reception in media of some characters reflecting that?
Well, when parents let children watch the lion king and that romantic scene with the female lion on her back, you never know. 

To be fair, he never hurt a black woman as a fictional character. Malcolm reached out to a black woman and delroy lindo stopped him. Mighty Quin or Mo better blues he stands in the rain. Training Day he had a mestizo woman and he didn't even hit her. 

Nike, your facial expression when you refer to DEnzel as Don Pedro. I can tell you like Don Pedro quite a bit. I will not ask if you wrote about a similar character even though I just did

Nicole, most black women, including Nike, forgave Denzel cause of his looks. I saw Denzel in Fences on stage, the reaction by black women I will never forget when he came on stage, and I said specifically Black Women.

Nike, I think phyliccia rashad is unwilling to play that far from Claire Huxtable

The worst he is done, Virtuosity , I didn't like but I think I can recover, I wonder what you guys think about rewriting the script of a financially poor movie like that.
 

Title: Haitian Goddess 2
Artist: Chevelin Pierre
https://www.deviantart.com/chevelinpierre/art/Haitian-goddess-2-932906268

Watch the work made! magic!!

How to draw a fantasy merchant lady, in european terms a centaur, but I can see a woman with a fish tail

What say you to Chevelin? 

Read a South Carolinian mermaid tale

https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1614&type=status

An example of some of Chevelin's full colored illustrations, lovely work

@chevelin_illustration

Drawing by @chevelin

♬ Stuck In The Middle - Tai Verdes

WARNING: If you have a problem with nudity, do not look or play the following video. Otherwise, enjoy Danto
 

P.S.

We don't Talk About Gabriella?
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2086&type=status

Title->> CD: The Moon Lullaby
Artist->> HaraaJubilee
URL ->> https://www.deviantart.com/haraajubilee/art/CD-The-Moon-Lullaby-931241765

The artist made this work for her sister, and was inspired by a lullaby from Kemet, commonly called egypt in humanity.

    Go to sleep little one
    Let us rest on this straw mat
    Go to sleep while it is yet dark
    Soon the clouds will disappear
    And reveal a great light to light up the neighborhood

    Tomorrow your father will return home
    With money from the lemons he sold
    He will bring you clothes and a scarf
    To keep you warm in December
    My beautiful one, with the lovely handpicked black hair
    Whomever does not love you or kiss you
    Knows not what they are missing

Title->> Nami Nami - Traditional lullaby from Egypt - ODO Ensemble نامي نامي ، تهليل
Poster->> ODO Ensemble - World Music for Soul and Peace

I did a little more research and I found the complete lyrics and also the potential writer of the lullaby

Title->>"NAMI NAMI" (Arabic Lullaby)
Artist->>Azam Ali and Niyaz

I am not sure, but it seems the lullaby was written by a lebanese artists
Title->>Marcel Khalife Nami Nami ya sgery
Poster-->M4U

Coincidentally, youtube's search engine knows my search habits and presented the following... an interpretation of a love song from Kemet on an interpretation of a Kemetian instrument, commonly referred to as a djedjet. Remember, the language or culture of Kemet is not known. It has functionally died. All that modernity has is interpretations to it, not confirmed knowledge.

Title->>ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LOVE SONG
Artist->>Peter Pringle 

This is the transcription of the song- again, remember, this is all interpretation, so it can not be insult. 

Sister!
Sister without rival!
Beautiful!
Most beautiful of all
She is like the star, Sothis, when it rises
Like the star, Sothis, when it rises
At the beginning of a fine new year
Perfect and bright and shining is her skin
And where she looks, she seduces with her eyes
Her lips are sweet when she speaks
And there is never a word too many 

Sister! 
Sister without rival!
Beautiful!
Most beautiful of all!
Slender neck and shining body
Her hair is like true lapis
Her arms outshine the finest gold
Her fingers are like the petals of the lotus flower
Ample hips and slender waist
Her thighs extend her beauty
When she walks gracefully upon the earth 

Sister!
Sister without rival!

Beautiful!
Most Beautiful of all
She has stolen my heart with her kisses
She has stolen my heart with her kisses
She has made the necks of all men
Turn around at the mere sight of her
He who embraces her is a happy man
He is the most fortunate among lovers
For he has seen her in her glory
And known her as the goddess

Sister!
Sister without rival!

Beautiful!
Most beautiful of all!
 

NOTES from the WHite artist 

Here is something that should really set the world on fire! It is a 3000-year-old song, sung in a dead language that no one speaks or understands, accompanied on an instrument called the "djedjet" that hasn't existed in several millennia!  

The words for this song are from an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll, written in a formalized version of the language of the New Kingdom (roughly 1500 B.C.). This was the era of some of Egypt's most famous pharaohs, including Tutankhamun, Queen Hatshepsut and the notorious "heretic king" Akenaten and his wife Queen Nefertiti.

The song itself is written in several parts as a dialog between a young man and the girl he loves. This is the first part of it sung by the young man.  Although he refers to the girl as "sister", she is not his actual sister. It was common for people in those days, as it is in some places today, to refer to one another as "brother" and "sister" when they belonged to the same community.

The language of ancient Egypt died out long ago, and no one is certain exactly how it was pronounced because only consonants were written - no vowels. The song itself is surprisingly explicit and erotic. After I made the video, I decided I had better add subtitles with a translation because without that nothing made any sense.

The instrument I am using to accompany myself is a reproduction of a 22 string Egyptian New Kingdom arched ('C' - shaped) harp called a "djedjet". It is made entirely of cedar and animal skin, without nails or screws of any kind. It has a rich, deep tone and I placed a microphone at the bottom of the instrument to pick up the sound. There is nothing except harp and voice in this recording.

Ancient Egyptians wrote out many of the words to their songs but they did not write down the music, so we have no idea what their songs or instrumental music sounded like. I have tuned the harp in this video to what is called a "double harmonic major scale". This does not correspond to any of the "modes" of western musical theory. Did ancient Egyptians use this scale? No one knows, but it is possible. I believe that the ancient harpists tuned their instruments to suit the piece of music they were playing. 

Many biblical scholars have suggested that this song was the inspiration for the SONG OF SONGS, or "Song Of Solomon" from the Old Testament of the Bible because the parallels between them are striking. The Song Of Solomon would have been written down long after the period of the Egyptian New Kingdom.

P.S. the image from haraaJubilee is clancute 

‘Is That Black Enough for You?!?’ Review: Elvis Mitchell’s Intoxicating Deep Dive into the Black Cinema Revolution of the ’70s

A critic's movie-love documentary artfully celebrates and deconstructs the decade when African-American audiences, for the first time, could see themselves onscreen.

By Owen Gleiberman

In “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary about the American Black cinema revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, Billy Dee Williams, now 85 but still spry, tells a funny story about what it was like to play Louis McKay, the dapper love object and would-be savior of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues.”

The year was 1972, and African-American audiences had rarely (if ever) been given the chance to gawk at a movie star of color who was not just this sexy but this showcased for his sexiness. Louis was like Clark Gable with a dash of Marvin Gaye; when he was on that promenade stairway, Williams says, with a chuckle, that he just about fell in love with himself. That’s how unprecedented the whole thing was. The actor recalls how the lighting was fussed over (we see a shot in which Louis appears bathed in an old-movie glow), and how unreal that was to him on the set. At the time, Black actors didn’t get lighting like that. But Black audiences drank it in with a better-late-than-never swoon, even as they knew that this was a representation they’d been denied for more than half a century.

“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” tells the story of Black film during a singularly creative and unprecedented time — the decade from 1968 to 1978, when Black actors, Black stories, and Black talent behind the camera exploded, in Hollywood and in the adjoining universe of independent film. The actors who came to the fore during this period are legendary: James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Ossie Davis, Diana Ross, Pam Grier, Jim Brown, Tamara Dobson, Max Julien, and many more. The directors, like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles, were wily and paradigmatic game-changers. And the way that Black talent began to flow through a vast array of forms and genres — action movies, historical dramas, film noirs, musicals, close-to-the-bone indie love stories — made the Black film movement a parallel of the New Hollywood, with new voices overthrowing old strictures.

Mitchell, who wrote, directed, and narrates the film, is a veteran critic who has a unique, at times almost musical ability to nail a film’s unconscious essence. “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is subtitled “How one decade changed the movies (and me),” and it’s very much Mitchell’s statement about what the rise of Black cinema meant to him, as a Black moviegoer born into a world where movies were still an engine of racial division. His pithy evocation of each movie — the history, the fantasy, the meaning — turns the documentary into a film fanatic’s diary that never tries to separate the importance of these movies from how each of them made him feel. As a critic-turned-filmmaker, Mitchell puts his soul right out there. His conceit is that the very existence of these movies was life-changing, because African-American moviegoers, at long last, had the catharsis of a big-screen mirror. For the first time, they could see themselves onscreen — not degraded or reductive images of themselves, but a reflection of who they were.  

The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema. “My grandmother,” recalls Mitchell, “told me that movies changed the way she dreamed.” That’s as perfect a summation of the power of movies as I’ve ever heard. Movies change our dreams; they change us. But who, in that formulation, gets to be the “us”?

From the start of the 20th century, white audiences could go to the movies and see themselves. Mitchell, born in 1958, grew up in the Detroit area, where he saw the tumult of the inner-city riot/insurrections of the ’60s, but where he also went to the movies to discover who he was and who he wanted to be. Early on, he takes us back to the studio-system days, where Black actors were reduced to playing hideous racist caricatures. His survey of those images — the servility of Stepin Fetchit, the odd-child-out surrealism of Buckwheat, the shocking minstrel moments that could creep into even a movie by Hitchcock — is searing, not only because of the violence of the racism that defined those roles, but because part of the racism lay in what was not being depicted: Black people in their humanity.

We know that Sidney Poitier was the actor who tore down that wall. But Mitchell, while paying due homage to Poitier’s electric intensity, focuses on another Black actor of the period — the outrageously gifted and charismatic Harry Belafonte, the Calypso singer who’d become a screen actor, appearing opposite Dorothy Dandridge in films like “Carmen Jones” (1954), but who abandoned the movies after the remarkable but mostly ignored film noir “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959), because he couldn’t accept the roles that he was being offered. He didn’t want to be a compromised, patronized, back-of-the-bus movie star; he wanted the whole thing or nothing. Mitchell presents Belafonte as a great actor who became, for a decade, a kind of vanished specter of the star he might have been in a better world.

And then, even with those odds against tomorrow, that world began to come into being.

If you say a phrase like “the Black films of the ’70s,” the first thing that will pop into a lot of people’s heads is the word Blaxploitation. But apart from the reductive and problematic quality of that word, it simply doesn’t do justice to the astonishing range of movies that made up the Black film renaissance. Many, though far from all of them, were written and directed by white filmmakers, yet even as whites continued to commandeer the means of production, these movies became an authentic showcase for the Black experience through the existential expressiveness of the Black actors who starred in them. What those actors had, according to Mitchell, was “the self-possession that would become the core of Black film,” a quality that “created a warrior class where there hadn’t been one before.”

Liberating the films from their too-easy-to-slot-in categories, Mitchell feeds on the eclectic cornucopia of what a “Black movie,” starting in the late ’60s, could be. He explores the emotional transcendence of “Sounder” (1972). The exhilarating, dread-soaked hustler authenticity of “Super Fly” (1972). The performance of Rupert Crosse, the first Black actor to be Oscar-nominated for best supporting actor, in “The Reivers” (1969), where he sparred teasingly with Steve McQueen in a way that subverted racial power dynamics. The conspiratorial paranoia of “Three the Hard Way” (1974), about a serum dumped into the water in Black cities, which the teenage Mitchell thought was funny until his father told him about the Tuskegee Experiment. The jocular knowingness of “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1971), with its wryly repeated catch phrase “Is that black enough for you?”

And then there’s the deliverance of the opening credits of “Shaft” (1971), a vérité epiphany in which the camera, accompanied by the snaky imperiousness of Isaac Hayes’s theme song, didn’t just follow Richard Roundtree as he walked through Times Square but worshipped him. The rebel-blues-meets-burn-baby-burn mythology of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971). The “early, all-out glam shower” that was “Lady Sings the Blues.” The way Duane Jones, playing the Black hero of “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), goes through the entire movie without his race being mentioned — and then, after saving the white people, gets paid back by being gunned down. The jaunty self-mockery of Poitier in “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974). The melancholy of William Marshall in “Blacula” (1972). The cowboy effrontery — and haunting commercial failure — of “Buck and the Preacher” (1972). And the clandestine complexity of “Coffy” (1973), in which Pam Grier played a woman bent on vengeance whose every lethal move is weighed down by the gravity of responsibility that’s tearing her in several directions.

“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is built in a formally simple yet elegant kaleidoscopic way, examining one movie after another but looking at each through a different lens. Here’s how Ron O’Neal jumped a chain-link fence in “Super Fly” and why it mattered, here’s Diahann Carroll’s “core of calm” in “Claudine” (1974), here’s why “The Wiz” (1978), which should have been a crowning achievement of the Black film renaissance, turned out to be its swan song. And Mitchell never stops weaving the past — Hollywood’s and his own — into the narrative, so that we see how this era was anticipated by the career of Oscar Micheaux (who from 1919 to 1948 made 44 features), and how Isaac Hayes’ performance at the 1972 Academy Awards was, for Mitchell, as profound and transporting as any of the films he talks about.

Elvis Mitchell celebrates the moment when Black people, for the first time in movie history, had a popular culture of heroes to respond to. Which gave life, of course, to the heroism within themselves. But even as Hollywood, for the first half of the century, was defined as a place of cinematic apartheid, Mitchell argues against the glib and easy liberal separatism that would sanctify Black cinema — or Black moviegoing — as a hermetic experience. He interviews a host of Black artists, like Belafonte and Laurence Fishburne and Whoopi Goldberg and Samuel L. Jackson and the director Charles Burnett, many of whom testify to the mythology they embraced in old Westerns. They felt discriminated against but not shut out; those “white” movies were for them as well.

And Mitchell offers a head-spinning insight when he talks about the place in the larger movie cosmos that Black cinema came to occupy. During the ’70s, the American hero had gone underground, replaced by the disaffected antihero. Mitchell makes the case that Black cinema brought the hero back. “Audiences of all races came to see these movies,” he says, “because they could feel the adrenaline in the actors.” He also argues that the way Black filmmakers interwove the aesthetics of movies and pop music, down to the bold marketing idea of releasing a soundtrack prior to the movie (a tactic Van Peebles innovated with “Sweetback,” and was then repeated with such seismic soundtracks as Curtis Mayfield’s music for “Super Fly”), paved the way for the fusion of those two industries. “Saturday Night Fever,” in Mitchell’s view, was one culmination of the Black cinema renaissance, with John Travolta appropriating Black nihilistic swagger and the movie selling itself in the spirit of Black movie/music synergy. The ultimate message of “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is that Black cinema, for all the racism of Hollywood (and America), was never separate from the cinema that wasn’t Black. How could it be? They shared the same dream space.

ARTICLE

https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/is-that-black-enough-for-you-review-elvis-mitchell-1235396637/

P.S.

Blackwood introduction

https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1837&type=status

Carib Gold

https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1860&type=status

South Side Home Movie Project
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1882&type=status

Yemenyah+ Storm and Rain the movie
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1981&type=status

Why merit doesn't work and the need for communal zones of opportunity in media
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2006&type=status

BLACKWOOD discussions

https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=blackwood&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=relevancy

My DTIYS for Chrissabug 10,000 followers on deviantart
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Chrissabugdtiys10k2022-Invitation-932158374

Poem: THe Truth To The Green Woman Legend
Author: Richard Murray
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-truth-to-the-green-woman-legend

Colored version of Chrsisabugdtiys 10k invitational
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Chrissabugdtiys10k2022-colored-version-932273345

showcase

I am 1:38:13 to 1:39:06 

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d'Italia, at a meeting in Palermo for the 2022 Italian elections. (Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

MY THOUGHTS BEFORE YOU READ THE ARTICLE

I apologize, recently, I have been courteous and not manipulated or coerced a reader's mind with my thoughts, before. But I am compelled this time from my own energies.... you see , as a Black person from the USA whose bloodline has been in the USA too long. I am used to hearing from blacks or whites of the multiracial acceptance of Europe. The old black lindyhop teacher who teaches all age groups in finland. that kind of thing. I have sad it a billion times, most humans despise immigration when it next door. Many countries in Europe never dealt with immigration. This goes back to European empires, where people from Indochine rarely traveled to france. People from the gold coast rarely traveled to england. People from Nova spain rarely traveled to Spain. But, quietly, the European Union, and the poverty in humanity has pushed into europe enough immigrants for the european local farmer or small town resident to notice and as usual, all hell broke lose. 

Europeans love coming to New York City, they spend money, see the rainbow, but they go home to a white village usually, and they can make a diary of their journey. But, dealing with immigration next door is another cultural being and it is clear most Europeans in Europe are not ready. 

I do think of angela merkel who once said, germans must teach people how to be german. I said she was right then and she is clearly right in hindsight. 

But what does this have to relate to Black people in the USA. well... the Black community in the USA has historically had a tribe in itself that is related to other black tribes in the usa , financially rich. Said black rich have always pushed or supported immigratory activities in the usa. 

They were the ones always pushing the black kids de segregate the schools, not get more money for black schools. Desegregate the white communities, not get more money for black communities. 

Meaning, a large percentage of black people support the immigration of non blacks into the black community and the act of blacks immigrating into non black communities. 

I find it funny how europe, often touted by financially wealthy black people as accepting to immigration, is showing the truth we all know to immigration. No one wants the immigrants near them. Russia/China are closing up shop. Texas is sending immigrants to New York. European countries are proving putin is not a european outlier. If Putin holds out, Russia will have destabilized the european union and exposed the countries that stood quietly against russia while changing many countries in Europe into their honest selves. 

I wonder can the black community in the usa be honest?

Immigration, crime propel Europe's move to right, analysts say

Melissa Rossi

·Contributor

Thu, September 22, 2022 at 4:27 PM·10 min read

In Europe, political analysts are pointing to Sweden and Italy as possible harbingers of a political mood shift across the continent driven by a growing wariness of immigrants as well as anger over rising crime rates.

The startlingly strong performance of the far-right Sweden Democrats in this month’s Swedish parliamentary elections and polls showing that the nationalist Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) party is poised for victory in this weekend’s contests in that country have both been spurred by those two issues, analysts told Yahoo News.

“Gang violence in Sweden was the issue in the election,” said Gunilla Herolf, a researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs who specializes in European integration. It’s a problem, she added, that is weighing on every Swede. “Some are furious. Some are just terribly upset.”

In Italy, “security issues are being exploited by right-wing forces,” sociologist Giovanna Campani told Yahoo News.

At a glance, the two countries share relatively few commonalities. Sweden is a wealthy, cohesive welfare state, which over the past 90 years has typically been led by leftist coalition governments. By comparison, Italy’s economy, which is burdened by massive debt, is reeling. Costs of living are soaring, and over the past decade, its government has changed nearly every 18 months. But in both places, rising crime and misgivings about immigrants are prompting a political realignment.

The Sweden Democrats, originally formed as a neo-Nazi party in 1988, were one of four right-leaning parties that won a combined 176 of 349 seats in Sweden’s Parliament in last week’s election, besting the center-left coalition by six seats. Now, details of which parties will partake in the new coalition government, and how much influence the Sweden Democrats will actually have, are being hammered out. Despite being ostracized by mainstream Swedes, the party won 20.5% of the vote, elevating it from the fringes to Sweden’s second-most popular party. Its campaign in Sweden — where 20% of the population is now foreign-born, and the country has become known as “the gun violence capital of Europe” — was built on promises to control crime perpetrated by young migrants and to deport some foreign-born Swedes.

Jimmie Akesson, the new leader of the Sweden Democrats, insists his party has shed its fascist leanings, though the party remains staunchly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and keeps pounding home its messaging linking foreign-born Swedes and crime. The party points to recent crime trends showing that drug-peddling armed gangs have emerged in some migrant communities during the past five years. In 2021, Sweden experienced some 360 gang-related shootings and 47 deaths; by September of this year, 47 had already died in shootings.

“Sweden used to be a completely peaceful country — and safe,” Brussels-based Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the independent think tank GLOBSEC, told Yahoo News. “Now it’s become one of the most unsafe places in Europe” — not only because of its gang shootings but also because of high number of incidents of rape. “So that’s brought an end to the political correctness,” he said. “Even the [liberal] Social Democrats are talking about immigration, law and order, and getting tough on crime.”

The rate of armed violence is growing faster than anywhere else on the continent, according to a 2021 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “The increase in gun homicide in Sweden is closely linked to criminal milieux in socially disadvantaged areas,” according to the report.

Until recently, it was all but taboo in Sweden for mainstream politicians to acknowledge the problem.

“That's why the Sweden Democrats are gaining in popularity,” said Eric Adamson, a Stockholm-based project manager at the Atlantic Council’s Northern Europe office. “They were the only ones talking about this” in recent years. Both socially and politically, he said, the topic had previously been off limits for Swedes to discuss.

In Italy, a Sept. 25 snap election necessitated by the July collapse of the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi seems likely to result in the most conservative leadership there since Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922. The likely new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has also run on an anti-immigrant platform, vowing to mobilize the Italian navy to prevent African refugees from reaching her country.

Like Sweden, Italy has also been dealing with rising violent crime, though much of it doesn’t involve the immigrants who have sought safe haven there in recent years. Youth gangs of Italians, which some 6% of Italian teens are believed to belong to, are becoming a nightmare for the country, especially around Naples and the south, though some African migrants appear to be starting to form them as well.

This June, however, an estimated 1,500 African youths went on a rampage in the northern town of Peschiera, breaking windows, roughing up tourists and allegedly sexually assaulting young women on a train. Matteo Salvini of the League, a right-wing political alliance he formed with Brothers of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia for the upcoming election, lambasted the attack. Meloni, the Brothers of Italy leader, who has promised to protect Italy from “Islamization,” seized on the uproar, posting a video on her Twitter account of an African man allegedly raping a woman in broad daylight.

The bigger issue for Meloni, however, may be the changing face and complexion of Italian citizens. The woman who promotes “God, homeland and family” frequently laments Italy’s low birth rate and fears the extinction of Italians and their replacement by immigrants from Africa, a conspiracy she has accused the government of the European Union of orchestrating. “The EU is complicit in uncontrolled immigration, the invasion of Europe and the project of ethnic replacement of European citizens,” she wrote on her website in February.

Campani thinks there are a number of factors at work in Italy that end up working in the right’s favor — including anger over the bureaucracy of the European Union, which imposes rules on many aspects of Italy’s government, such as the treatment of migrants, how to utilize COVID funds, what sorts of energy to invest in and how to handle its debt crisis.

Meloni has promised to challenge Brussels’ authority, vowing that if she’s elected to lead Italy’s government, “the fun is over.”

If she does become prime minister, Freudenstein said, European policymakers will find “a more pugnacious and feistier Italy.”

“She’s a fresh face — and I think Italians want to try out something new,” he added.

According to a December 2021 YouGov poll of residents in 10 European nations, both Italy and Sweden were among the top three European countries saying that the number of foreigners allowed to immigrate to European countries has been excessive — a statement with which 77% percent of Italians and 73% of Swedes agreed.

In April, young migrant men, protesting the planned burning of the Quran by a Swedish provocateur in towns across the country, kicked off riots in three cities that injured more than 100 Swedish police — just one disturbing event that forced then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, a Social Democrat, into admitting a problem with violence among some migrant communities, and the existence of “parallel societies” of many foreign-born in Sweden. “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden,” she told reporters. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”

The issue in Sweden, said Herolf of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, isn’t immigration itself. It’s the mafia-like Eastern European clans and gangs that made it into the country along with legitimate asylum seekers and refugees.

“There are people coming into Sweden who bring criminality with them,” she said, including some from the former Yugoslavia. “But there were also loads of decent hardworking people from there too. So [previously] we didn’t want to talk about that and risk hurting the good people.”

What’s more, she said, it’s now widely recognized that Sweden has taken in far too many refugees since 2015, when the civil war in Syria broke out creating a refugee crisis, and that the government in Stockholm has been reticent to force them to integrate into Swedish society. “We have a responsibility to make demands on them to learn Swedish, to join in Swedish society," and not just live in foreign bubbles.

“Sweden has been an extremely tolerant and antiracist country,” Johan Martinsson, a political science professor and research director of the Laboratory of Opinion Research and the Citizen Panel at the University of Gothenburg, told Yahoo News. He pointed to an incident in 2002 when a politician suggested that foreigners should be given a basic language test before being given citizenship. “It was considered an outrage,” Martinsson said. “He was called a racist for even suggesting it.”

The increasing popularity of nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, such as Marine LePen’s rise in France, underscores the need for mainstream politicians to openly admit to issues as they emerge, and to stop worrying that acknowledging them simply reinforces the radical right, said Freudenstein. “Integration policies for migrants have to become much tougher,” he added, and governments need “to be tougher about language, about [banning the wearing of] burqas, and about prohibiting afternoon [Islamist] schools where children unlearn what they learned in the morning about women’s rights and the separation of church and state.”

Freudenstein, for one, is concerned about what the rise of far-right parties will mean for the cohesion of the European Union — all the more with soaring energy prices and potential shortages, even the possibility of natural gas rationing — as the continent heads into the colder months. “We know a crisis winter is coming,” he said. “And it’s going to reinforce this feeling of ‘Let’s try something new,’ and the feeling that the structures and powers in place have failed.” He points to the growing possibility of “a severe recession that will dramatically increase social tensions.” The next six months will be crucial, he believes, and will “decide the future of politics in Europe.”

ARTICLE

https://news.yahoo.com/immigration-crime-propel-europes-move-to-right-analysts-say-202748280.html

Happy September Equinox- 9:04 pm eastern standard time - the beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere and Spring in the southern hemisphere
the following is an image of Neptune, from the James Webb, it is a composite image, that is not one image from James Webb.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/52373132207/in/feed-37440125-1663769703-1-72157721637473044

Enjoy

a story
The Last Homily On Liturgoid 
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-last-homily-on-liturgoid

a poem, click the image

An art gallery
Witchtember 2022
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/gallery/84411925/witchtember-2022

A fun post 
from the Black Games Elite public group
Breath of the wild playhouse
https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/323-breath-of-the-wild-playhouse/

some other dates after in the month of september
23: Mercury between sun and earth, inferior
Judy Reed, Black woman, in 1884 made a patent for... wait for it... Dough kneeder and roller
Here is the proof of the patent claim, I read it was signed with an X and it seems true. so for Black kids, or yourself, when someone says what you need to know to have a great imagination, tell them they are wrong
https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=00305474

25: Rosh Hashanah- The Ethiopian jews, some call Beta Israelites, originally spoke Agaw. Genetic studies say that they are genetically related to east africans not jews from across the Red Sea, like from israel/palestine/yemen
Mercury<->Moon; Venus <->Moon conjunctions

26: Jupiter will be 180 degrees in the sky, opposite the sun, Jupiter will be no brighter or bigger this year than on this day
1872 first shrine temple in New York City
https://www.meccashriners.org/history

27: St. Vincent de Paul saint day, Charity
Samuel Adams born 1722- he used his influence to get boston to give education to boys plus girls. 
He opposed the still in existence Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary fraternity. Some might call that the patriarchy today:)
He opposed the constitution, as he felt it didn't make a federation but made a nation. It can be argued in cheap hindsight, samuel adams was 100% correct. if you consider usa history, the constitution has become a legal document that has been used effectively to destroy the concept of a union of states who can be dissimilar to each other while having a unity of purpose. 
He pushed for the Bill of Rights to be entered into the Constitution and supported it. 
Lastly, Samuel Adams was a poor fiscal operator and didn't brew a damn thing:)

28: Woodchuck's hibernate
Moon goes north to south of the ecliptic

29: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra born 1547 - he wrote a book in two parts, which you may know. He only worked for three years. Odd for me as a writer, that I have a similar quantity of work in similar short spans in multiples.  

His first work is LA Galatea
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/la-galatea-8

His first short story collection and only surviving Novelas Ejemplares
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/novelas-ejemplares-english
In Audio book form
https://librivox.org/the-exemplary-novels-of-miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra-by-miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra/

His last work is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
The 400th anniversary edition in spanish made by the Real Academia Española, Royal Academy of Spain
https://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Hojear_Persiles_y_Sigismunda.pdf
Persiles in english translation
http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e006.html
 

An exclusive interview with Philotée Mukiza, the winner Best of the Best Eiica

Philotee Muzica’s story

“I’m from Rwanda. I worked for Rwalf Export LTD as a production manager. Today I’m we won the Ernesto illy International Coffee Award. “

Why did you choose to make a living with coffee? Was it for passion or for something else?

“At the beginning I didn’t know much about coffee. I was just fresh graduated and I was just looking for a job. But then, I was more and more interested in what I was learning. I think that now I’m more passionate in what I’m doing on daily bases. That’s because I saw the important meaning of our work for our farmers and their families. And that we are helping them in an international level. So now I feel more confortable with my job. “

According to you, why are you the first woman to win these two important Awards?

“Sincerely I don’t’ know. Maybe it was only a coincidence. Actually I don’t think that the reason of this winning it’s related to the fact that I’m a woman. But it’s only thanks to the quality of the coffee that we took to the cupping. “

What is so special about your coffee? Rwanda isn’t really known until now, for his role as coffee producer. What has changed?

“First of all it exists a natural factor, the altitude and the climate. But, what we do from farm to dry living farm? This year we tried a new strategy of processing as Rwalf coffee team. So the tecniques that farmers do daily is some soaking. This was something which wasn’t’ really used years ago. Now we are doing that and that really change the finala result in cup. “

What about the women that usually has a specific role in the coffee chain, because they work in the farm?

“In Rwanda there are several cooperatives of women in most of Rwanda coffee stations. We’re working with them not only regarding the coffee processes, but also in activities that involves their daily lives. We support them to improve in other sectors. We also give them trainings about to develop different skills.”

Has it been difficult to gain the top of the coffee chain, becoming manager as a woman?

“I started with a job that requires a hard work. It was more difficult for a woman, because some activities in coffee especially fields activities are located in a very rural areas. And moving on the motorcicles and walking, isn’t something very easy for me. Sometimes I acted as a man. I walked with men and now we felt like a team. “

The future programs?

“We need to continue sustaining what we’re doing now, especially regarding the quality. It’s important for us to go towards people needs in cupping. Also we want to continue with the local farmers, in helping them to get more activies to improve their incomings. “

You coffee is a product that can be appreciated by an Italian customer?

“I think the taste is not familiar for an italian customer, because it’s unic in his genre. In fact, coffee in Rwanda has a different taste in cupping. It’s something new, that can be appreciated even if it doesn’t mirror exactly the traditional italian taste. “

Article

https://www.comunicaffe.com/an-exclusive-interview-with-philotee-mukiza-the-winner-best-of-the-best-eiica/

Referral

http://www.coffeeandteanewsletter.com/aug22.html#1
 

Feds: Minnesota food scheme stole $250M; 47 people charged

AMY FORLITI

Tue, September 20, 2022 at 12:11 PM·5 min read

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal authorities charged 47 people in Minnesota with conspiracy and other counts in what they said Tuesday was the largest fraud scheme yet to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by stealing $250 million from a federal program that provides meals to low-income children.

Prosecutors say the defendants created companies that claimed to be offering food to tens of thousands of children across Minnesota, then sought reimbursement for those meals through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food nutrition programs. Prosecutors say few meals were actually served, and the defendants used the money to buy luxury cars, property and jewelry.

“This $250 million is the floor," Andy Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said at a news conference. “Our investigation continues.”

Many of the companies that claimed to be serving food were sponsored by a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which submitted the companies' claims for reimbursement. Feeding Our Future’s founder and executive director, Aimee Bock, was among those indicted, and authorities say she and others in her organization submitted the fraudulent claims for reimbursement and received kickbacks.

Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, said the indictment “doesn’t indicate guilt or innocence.” He said he wouldn't comment further until seeing the indictment.

In interviews after law enforcement searched multiple sites in January, including Bock's home and offices, Bock denied stealing money and said she never saw evidence of fraud.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice made prosecuting pandemic-related fraud a priority. The department has already taken enforcement actions related to more than $8 billion in suspected pandemic fraud, including bringing charges in more than 1,000 criminal cases involving losses in excess of $1.1 billion.

Federal officials repeatedly described the alleged fraud as “brazen,” and decried that it involved a program intended to feed children who needed help during the pandemic. Michael Paul, special agent in charge of the Minneapolis FBI office, called it “an astonishing display of deceit."

Luger said the government was billed for more than 125 million fake meals, with some defendants making up names for children by using an online random name generator. He displayed one form for reimbursement that claimed a site served exactly 2,500 meals each day Monday through Friday — with no children ever getting sick or otherwise missing from the program.

“These children were simply invented,” Luger said.

He said the government has so far recovered $50 million in money and property and expects to recover more.

The defendants in Minnesota face multiple counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and bribery. Luger said some of them were arrested Tuesday morning.

According to court documents, the alleged scheme targeted the USDA's federal child nutrition programs, which provide food to low-income children and adults. In Minnesota, the funds are administered by the state Department of Education, and meals have historically been provided to kids through educational programs, such as schools or day care centers.

The sites that serve the food are sponsored by public or nonprofit groups, such as Feeding Our Future. The sponsoring agency keeps 10% to 15% of the reimbursement funds as an administrative fee in exchange for submitting claims, sponsoring the sites and disbursing the funds.

But during the pandemic, some of the standard requirements for sites to participate in the federal food nutrition programs were waived. The USDA allowed for-profit restaurants to participate, and allowed food to be distributed outside educational programs. The charging documents say the defendants exploited such changes “to enrich themselves."

The documents say Bock oversaw the scheme and that she and Feeding Our Future sponsored the opening of nearly 200 federal child nutrition program sites throughout the state, knowing that the sites intended to submit fraudulent claims.

“The sites fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day within just days or weeks of being formed and despite having few, if any staff and little to no experience serving this volume of meals,” according to the indictments.

One example described a small storefront restaurant in Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, that typically served only a few dozen people a day. Two defendants offered the owner $40,000 a month to use his restaurant, then billed the government for some 1.6 million meals through 11 months of 2021, according to one indictment. They listed the names of around 2,000 children — nearly half of the local school district's total enrollment — and only 33 names matched actual students, the indictment said.

Feeding Our Future received nearly $18 million in federal child nutrition program funds as administrative fees in 2021 alone, and Bock and other employees received additional kickbacks, which were often disguised as “consulting fees” paid to shell companies, the charging documents said.

According to an FBI affidavit unsealed earlier this year, Feeding Our Future received $307,000 in reimbursements from the USDA in 2018, $3.45 million in 2019 and $42.7 million in 2020. The amount of reimbursements jumped to $197.9 million in 2021.

Court documents say the Minnesota Department of Education was growing concerned about the rapid increase in the number of sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future, as well as the increase in reimbursements.

The department began scrutinizing Feeding Our Future’s site applications more carefully, and denied dozens of them. In response, Bock sued the department in November 2020, alleging discrimination, saying the majority of her sites were based in immigrant communities. That case has since been dismissed.

Article

Feds: Minnesota food scheme stole $250M; 47 people charged (yahoo.com)

My thoughts  

47 people for 250 million dollars. circa 4 million and seven hundred thousand per head.

The two hundred and fifty million dollars is the floor in this one case, while the united states department of justice has grabbed a floor of eight billion already in sars-cov-2 era related stolen money. 

Eight billion is the floor.

I share this so whenever I read a black person talk about financial planning, I will advise them to read this article. PRovide the black people you want to hire with these kind of schemes and then succeed and then talk about your grand plans. otherwise be quiet. 

Oh, and we all need to see AImee Bock whose face somehow wasn't in every article about this. 

A black man hustles in the street some marijuana and fights law enforcement and his face is face of crime. A white woman is part of a two hundred and fifty million dollar theft and she is just an unlucky entrepreneur.

Brooklyn mother accused of drowning 3 children near ocean shore is arraigned

Liam Quigley and Thomas Tracy, New York Daily News - Yesterday 1:58 PM

NEW YORK — The troubled Brooklyn woman accused of drowning her three children in the ocean off Coney Island was arraigned on murder charges Friday.

A judge ordered Erin Merdy, 30, held without bail during the brief arraignment at NYU Langone-Brooklyn, where she’d been undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. Merdy allegedly drowned her children, 7-year-old Zachary, 4-year-old Liliana and 3-month-old Oliver in the surf in the wee hours on Monday morning.

Her eyes closed, Merdy whispered her responses to the judge’s question as she leaned over in her bed dressed in a yellow hospital gown, a video feed from the arraignment showed.

George Cooke, Merdy’s attorney from Brooklyn Defender Services, asked that his client be kept in protective custody as the case continues, which the judge granted.

Merdy’s panicked sister and aunt called police at about 1 a.m. Monday after the young mom called them, claiming that the “babies were gone,” police said.

Responding officers found Merdy, wet and barefoot, wandering alone along the Coney Island Boardwalk at about 3:15 a.m. A short time later, cops found her children dead in the water. An autopsy later revealed that the children had been drowned.

Merdy was incoherent when questioned by police, but she did allude to a dream she had where she had taken her children into the water, cops said.

Surveillance footage recovered by police showed Merdy walking to the beach with her three children before they died, according to court records.

Merdy’s mother told the Daily News that she thought her daughter might be suffering from postpartum depression and was described by other relatives as struggling with mental health issues.

She was served with an eviction notice on Jan. 12 claiming she was more than $5,000 behind in payments on her $1,531 monthly rent.

Zachary’s football coach said the boy regularly arrived for team practices hungry until he left the squad last year.

The boy’s mom rarely attended games to watch her son play and often left early when she did appear, said Coney Island Training Youth Program head coach Allen McFarland.

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services investigated Merdy after a father of one of the children reported that the kids weren’t going to school, but they “fell through the cracks” a few weeks before the killings, a source with knowledge of the case said.

“Her (youngest) baby was born in May and she was discharged from (ACS) services on July 15,” the source said. “Someone in the (ACS) Family Services Unit discharged her when they shouldn’t have. At the very least, a psych exam should have been done — and that wasn’t done.”

Hundreds of people attended a wake for Zachary and Liliana Thursday. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was among the mourners.

———

©2022 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

ARTICLE

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/brooklyn-mother-accused-of-drowning-3-children-near-ocean-shore-is-arraigned/ar-AA11V1HS

MY THOUGHTS

Search "mom in new york killed kids at beach" and you see it is not uncommon, most faces are white.  The reality is, the USA is rife with these incidents but they never make front page cause the people in the USA who want to forgive the USA or feel settled in the USA don't want to admit the people who are not have every right not to be and the reasoning isn't mental imbalance it is simply people accepting the reality of their situation and not lying to themselves about getting out. The people in the USA who talk about the USA dream are the ones who never say that most in the USA have always been in a nightmare. But those dreamers don't care and treat the more in a nightmare as acceptable for their individual or minority success.

Halle Bailey as Ariel in the Little Mermaid 2023

beautiful sister, I wonder if a natural black woman's hair will behave that way in the water. I saw black women with a beautiful unmanicured afro in the water... it wasn't like this but anyway. Glad she has a job. I wonder what is the best mermaid story written by a black writer you know in your knowledge? 

Photo Courtesy of Megan Piphus Peace/Vanderbilt/Sesame Street

MEET THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN PUPPETEER ON SESAME STREET
29th August 2022 by BOTWC Staff

The “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist’ has now made history as the first Black woman puppeteer on Sesame Street, Vanderbilt University reports. 

Megan Piphus Peace was first introduced to puppetry at the age of 10, attending a puppetry conference in Illinois with her Vacation Bible School teacher. She fell in love with the artform and ventriloquism, relating it to her favorite childhood TV programs like Sesame Street and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. Her mother saw Peace’s passion, supporting her with VHS tapes of ventriloquists to study and a doll from famous entertainer Edgar Bergen so Peace could practice. It all paid off and Peace began performing when she was just in elementary school. By the time she was 15, she was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. 

“What I consider the magic of ventriloquism is getting to share that experience with someone else and have them believe that our conversations are real. I realized what an impact the writing could have on the audience, and that every age could learn something from the show. From then on, my goal was to have a theme…woven into every performance,” Peace explained.

She continued her work through highschool and when she started college at Vanderbilt University, she became known as the “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist,” performing on major platforms like the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and America’s Got Talent. Peace graduated in 2014, subsequently earning her master’s in finance from Vanderbilt as well and beginning a professional career in real estate finance. 

Peace continued doubling as a puppeteer, continuing performing across the country and abroad, working on various television shows and collaborating with the University of Cincinnati in 2019 on a musical series that taught children basic financial literacy. For her work, she received two Emmy awards for best composition and best children’s short. Now Peace has landed her biggest deal yet, joining the cast of Sesame Street in 2020 and making history last September as the first Black woman puppeteer, playing the role of 6-year-old Gabrielle. 

The puppeteer said she had no idea the role was historic and she is so grateful for the opportunity. 

“I would have cried like a baby on the 123 steps if they had told me beforehand…The sets of Sesame Street are like walking into a fantasy. To be there is really something,” said Peace. 

The process to be on the show was arduous, Peace submitting her first audition tape in 2017. She wouldn’t get a call back from Matt Vogel, the show’s puppet captain, until March 2020. He suggested she enroll in a virtual workshop to learn Muppet-style puppetry. She did and it paid off. 

“It takes time to go through video submissions, but once we do, we earmark people that we’d like to invite to a workshop where we see their skills as a puppeteer and actor in person. Zoom is not an ideal way to conduct a workshop, but we made the best of it and Megan was game to learn,” Vogel explained. 

During that time Sesame Workshop was working on their racial justice initiative and Vogel, who voices Big Bird and Kermit the Frog, said Peace was on a shortlist to play Gabrielle. 

“Megan was our choice from the beginning. She already had lip sync skills from her abilities as a ventriloquist,” said Vogel. 

Once Peace perfected her monitor work, it was a perfect match, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, another puppeteer on the show calling her “incredible.”

“We needed authentic representation, and Megan is incredible. She’s got a light inside her,” said Carrara-Rudolph. 

Congratulations Megan! Because of you, we can!

ARticle URL

https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/botwc-firsts/vanderbilt-ventriloquist-makes-history-as-first-black-woman-puppeteer-on-sesame-street

Female Workers Face Rape, Harassment In U.S. Agriculture Industry

June 25, 2013, 2:39 am ET by Bernice Yeung and Grace Rubenstein, The Center for Investigative Reporting

SUNNYSIDE, Wash. – Esther Abarca said the foreman drove to parts of the apple orchard that she had never seen. Deep into the ranch, in what she could describe only as a “desolate place,” he parked the truck, reached over and tried to grab her.

Weeping as she told her story, Abarca said the foreman got out of the truck when she resisted his advances. He opened the side door, climbed on top of her, and began to kiss and grope her. She called for help and tried to push him away, but he got her pants halfway off.

“I kept screaming, but there was nobody there,” Abarca said.

Abarca said she kept screaming as the foreman groped her. But then, as if suddenly chastened by her crying, kicking and pushing, she said he stopped. He told her that if she didn’t tell anyone what had happened, he’d give her $3,000 for a new car.

Abarca, a mother of three, said she refused the money.

“I told him that that was the very reason why I had come here to work, that I did not need him to give me any money at all,” she said.

The foreman’s alleged first assault came in 2009, during the long days of the Yakima Valley apple harvest in central Washington. An immigrant from Mexico, Abarca was new to the Evans Fruit Co., one of the country’s largest apple producers.

Nearly four years later, Abarca’s story was the subject of a federal court case testing whether the owners of Evans Fruit looked the other way as their workers claimed they were subjected to repeated sexual violence and harassment by an orchard foreman and crew bosses.

It was a rare public accusation for an immigrant, many of whom fear retaliation and deportation if they speak up. Abarca was testifying in only the second case of a farmworker claiming sexual harassment to reach a federal court trial.

Although the exact scope of sexual violence and harassment against agricultural workers is impossible to pinpoint, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism reveals persistent peril for women working in the food industry. An estimated 560,000 women work on U.S. farms.

In partnership with FRONTLINE and Univision, CIR and IRP spent nearly a year reviewing thousands of pages of documents and crisscrossing the nation – from the tightly ordered orchards of the Yakima Valley to the leafy tomato fields of southern Florida – to hear workers’ stories of sexual assault.

Hundreds of female agricultural workers have complained to the federal government about being raped and assaulted, verbally and physically harassed on the job, while law enforcement has done almost nothing to prosecute potential crimes.

In virtually all of the cases reviewed, the alleged perpetrators held positions of power over the women. Despite the accusations, these supervisors have remained on the job for years without fear of arrest.

At the trial, Abarca was among more than a dozen women who had accused a foreman, Juan Marin, and a handful of crew leaders at Evans Fruit of sexually assaulting or harassing them. For her part, Abarca said she had been topping off bins with just-picked apples when the foreman called to her from his pickup. He told her to get in the truck, she testified.

Marin said he never sexually assaulted or harassed Abarca or any of the other women, and he has not been arrested or prosecuted in criminal court for the allegations.

At a federal civil trial this year featuring 14 women telling their stories, a jury found that whatever had happened at Evans Fruit, it did not create a sexually hostile work environment, which had to be established before the company could be held liable.

Government attorneys who prosecuted the civil case have requested a new trial. In court filings, they called the verdict “unmoored from the actual evidence.”

Marin, who had worked for Evans Fruit for more than three decades, said the claims are based on lies and rumors spread by “a bunch of jealous people” who are trying to win money from the company.

“I’ve been accused of sexual harassment, and that’s completely a lie,” Marin said in one of several interviews. “Because I never bothered nobody. The only thing I’ve been doing in my life is work. To me it’s so unfair, because I never did nothing like that in my life.”

Nevertheless, two complaints against Marin prompted owner Bill Evans to write him a letter in 2006, four years before Marin was fired for alleged embezzlement.

“We don’t have the time or energy to continue dealing with the problems you are bringing down on us,” the letter said. “Any further incidents or complaints of sexual harassment and you will be discharged.”

The company drafted its first sexual harassment policy in 2008.

A National Problem

Reports of harassment and sexual violence against female farmworkers span the U.S. map.

In Molalla, Ore., a worker at a tree farm accused her supervisor of repeatedly raping her over the course of several months in 2006 and 2007, often holding gardening shears to her throat. If she complained to anyone, he allegedly told her, he would fire her and kill her entire family.

The supervisor never was prosecuted, and a civil case against the tree farm was settled for $150,000 in 2011 without the company acknowledging wrongdoing. The payment went to the woman and three family members who said they were harassed or fired in retaliation.

Three hundred miles away, in Lind, Wash., an egg farm manager forced a woman working alone in a hen-laying house to routinely give him oral sex to keep her job between 2003 and 2010, according to a statement she gave to the sheriff. In an interview with the sheriff, the manager denied the accusation. He did not return calls for comment.

That case was settled for $650,000 this year – most of it to be paid to the woman and four other workers who claimed the company had fired them in retaliation for complaining. The manager no longer works at the farm.

In a case pending in Mississippi federal court, dozens of women hired to debone chickens at a poultry processing plant said they were violently groped by a supervisor between 2004 and 2008. One woman who said she was grabbed between her legs had to seek medical attention, according to court filings.

And a worker at a Salinas, Calif.-based lettuce farm accused a manager of raping her in 2006 – a charge he denied to company management, according to court documents. Maricruz Ladino sued the grower, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2010. She did not file a police report, and there was no criminal prosecution. He no longer works for the company.

“There are supervisors who try to use their power to mistreat people or to abuse them,” said Ladino, who has since left the company. “And it’s very difficult to fight against that because we are working out of necessity, because we need to provide for our families.”

Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association, an employment firm that coordinates farm and seasonal employees in the Pacific Northwest, said similar problems exist in other industries, and he points to an example of workplace rape that involved a real estate company.

“Harassment occurs in agriculture,” he said, “but there is no proof that it occurs more (often) in agriculture.”

But a review of the 41 federal sexual harassment lawsuits filed against agricultural enterprises since 1998 – when the first federal lawsuit was filed against an agricultural company for failing to stop harassment or abuse – reveals a pattern of supervisors accused of preying on multiple workers.

Among these were at least 153 people who alleged workplace abuses, the vast majority by their superiors. Of the lawsuits, 7 out of 8 involved workers claiming physical harassment, assault or rape.

According to civil court documents, in nearly every case, workers made complaints to company management and, among those, 85 percent faced retaliation – such as being demoted, fired or further harassed. In their review of the federal cases, CIR and IRP could not find a single case in which the men accused of sexual assault or rape in the civil suits had been criminally prosecuted.

Cycle of Silence

An estimated 50 to 75 percent of U.S. farmworkers immigrated to the U.S. illegally, according to advocacy groups and government surveys. In interviews, more than 100 government officials, law enforcement officials, lawyers and social service providers said shame, fear of deportation or losing a job, language barriers and ignorance of workplace laws keep low-wage immigrant laborers silent.

For government lawyer William R. Tamayo, whose father worked at sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, the first inkling of what was happening to women in America’s fields and packinghouses came when he visited with California labor advocates in the mid-1990s.

“They said farmworker women were talking about the fields as the fils de calzón, or ‘fields of panties,’ ” said Tamayo, the regional attorney in San Francisco for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which files sexual harassment lawsuits on behalf of employees, including farm and food factory workers. “They referred to the fields as the ‘green motel.’ ”

Without immigration papers or job options, many agricultural workers live the largely traceless lives that low-wage seasonal work demands. For some, it’s a shadow dimension of disposable phones, weekly visits to check-cashing chains and elusive last-known addresses.

It’s a life based on the incessant search for the next job in whatever crop needs harvesting. Migrant workers can land year-round gigs at dairies or processing plants, but it’s not easy to forget their own financial instability – and supervisors know this.

If a foreman wants to test the extent of his authority, here are the perfect victims, worker advocates said.

“Sexual violence doesn’t happen unless there’s an imbalance of power,” Tamayo said. “And in the agricultural industry, the imbalance of power between perpetrator, company and the worker is probably at its greatest.”

The combination of financial desperation and tenuous immigration status make agricultural workers vulnerable to workplace violence and less inclined to report crimes. The federal government estimates that 65 percent of all sexual assault and rape victims never report the crime.

Immigrants, especially those who entered the country without authorization, are even less likely to complain, according to academic studies.

The legal research and advocacy group ASISTA surveyed more than 100 women working at Iowa meatpacking plants in 2009. An analysis of these surveys shows that 41 percent said they’d experienced unwanted touching, and about 30 percent reported receiving sexual propositions.

More than 25 percent of the women said they’d been threatened with firing or harder work if they didn’t let the aggressor have his way.

It’s a similar picture in California, where a UC Santa Cruz study of 150 female farmworkers published in 2010 found that nearly 40 percent experienced sexual harassment ranging from verbal advances to rape on the job, and 24 percent said they had experienced sexual coercion by a supervisor.

Many take sexual harassment as a job hazard, advocates said.

When attorney Laura Mahr started talking to Oregon’s female farmworkers about sexual harassment and assault, some of them said, “ ‘Oh, that’s not just part of the job? You have laws about that?’ ”

Many women, Mahr said, have risked their lives to cross the border, sometimes becoming indebted to human smugglers along the way. Coming forward means possibly losing their livelihood.

“It’s an epidemic in the field,” said Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers. “It goes back to the vulnerability that women have … especially if they’re undocumented. And you know, the machismo culture of power and when you think of this type of sexual harassment or rape, it’s always about power of men over women.”

Few Complaints Make It To Court

The only federal agency actively and systematically pursuing on-the-job sexual violence and harassment cases on behalf of agricultural workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace.

In the past 15 years, workers have filed 1,106 sexual harassment complaints with the commission against agricultural-related industries. The allegations range from verbal harassment to rape.

Only a fraction will make it to federal court. The commission declines to pursue about 50 percent of the sexual harassment complaints across all industries for lack of substance. Another portion is settled out of court.

For the few cases in which the commission files a lawsuit in federal court – 130 cases last year out of about 11,000 sexual harassment complaints across all businesses in the U.S. – a handful will make it to trial.

Some growers said they believe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is too adversarial and aggressive through litigation. Brendan V. Monahan, an attorney for Evans Fruit, said the commission approaches farmers as the enemy rather than trying to work constructively with them.

“The EEOC has imagined this adversarial relationship between farmers and laborers that I don’t think really exists, and they have chosen to champion labor in an imagined fight against farmers,” he said. “It should be a matter of conciliation and compliance rather than confrontation and coerced enforcement.”

But David Lopez, general counsel for the commission, disagreed and said it files cases involving “egregious cases of discrimination” that warrant civil prosecution, and he warned against painting the entire agricultural industry as bad actors.

Nevertheless, he said, “I do know that we do see very serious cases of discrimination and harassment in the agricultural industry.”

Although agriculture is America’s oldest industry, the first sexual harassment lawsuit against a grower to reach a jury trial was in 2004. The Evans Fruit trial this year was the second.

That landmark first case involved Olivia Tamayo, who worked for California-based Harris Farms, among the largest agribusinesses in the country. (Olivia Tamayo is not related to William Tamayo, the attorney for the federal commission.) She said a supervisor named Rene Rodriguez raped her three separate times after showing her he was carrying a gun. Rodriguez denied it.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Harris Farms on her behalf in 2002. After a 23-day trial, the jury found Harris Farms liable for sexual harassment and retaliation and awarded nearly $800,000 in lost wages and compensatory and punitive damages.

In a statement, CEO John Harris said the company denies any wrongdoing. The workers had a consensual relationship that the company did not know about, Harris said in the statement. He said although the jury believed the accused employee was a supervisor, “we felt he was not.”

Rodriguez retired in 1999. At an interview at his home in South Texas, Rodriguez insisted that he and Olivia Tamayo had been dating. She accused him of rape, he said, because she wanted money.

“No, no, no, no,” he said when asked if he’d used violence against Olivia Tamayo. “If that was how it was from the beginning, I would have been jailed or something.”

Olivia Tamayo’s lawyer, William J. Smith, a longtime civil rights advocate, said that when she won her case, he thought it would change the landscape for agricultural workers. He said he knows differently now.

“Even though Olivia Tamayo stood up for her rights, people are still afraid,” he said. “I don’t think it caught on the way we thought it would because the fear is still out there.”

Farmworkers’ vulnerability is compounded because a number of federal labor laws, ranging from minimum wage to underage work, don’t apply in agriculture. A handful of states, including California, Oregon and Washington, provide stronger legal protections.

“If there’s violation of wage and hour laws, if there are children laboring in the fields, of course there’s going to be sexual harassment, because even the bread-and-butter issues aren’t being addressed,” said Ramón Ramírez, a founder and president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the farmworkers union based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This year, growers and labor advocates are closely watching as a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws makes its way through Congress. Proponents say the bill, if approved, could offer protections for agricultural workers to more readily report abuse on the job.

“One of the fundamental reasons we have to get comprehensive immigration reform is so we can stop the daily routine rape of women in the workplace,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., a vocal proponent of an overhaul.

But some who support new immigration laws have doubts that they would curb sexual harassment in the fields.

Fazio of the Washington Farm Labor Association said workers who have been assaulted or raped already qualify for a special visa for crime victims. Providing provisional status through the bill, he said, “is not going to make a person more likely to come forward.”

The primary solution lies with employers, who must create a “culture of compliance,” he said. “They need to put systems in place.”

Cases Difficult to Pursue

Beyond the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, farmworkers in some parts of the country can turn to state agencies to file workplace sexual harassment cases against agricultural employers. But those are rare.

In Washington – home to more agricultural workers than any state except California – laborers filed 92 cases of alleged sexual harassment with the state Human Rights Commission against agricultural companies between 2005 and 2012. Of those, 67 cases were shelved by the commission for having “no reasonable cause” or because the office faced uncooperative witnesses or a statute of limitation.

The rest – 25 cases – resulted in settlements or remain open.

In rural areas, access to attorneys for low-income clients is limited, making it difficult for farmworkers to file civil cases on their own in state courts. For example, in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast, some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, there are a handful of private and legal aid organizations that take on these cases.

Michael Marsh, directing attorney of the Salinas office of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of the few organizations in the state to take farmworker sexual harassment cases, said that each harvest, at least two farmworkers come to his office to say their boss raped them. This year, he and his colleagues have already met with three.

In March, a berry farm supervisor who raped a farmworker represented by Marsh’s office was convicted in a state case and sentenced to prison, but the chances of other criminal cases moving forward are not high.

In some cases, state prosecutors are reluctant to file criminal charges. Sheriffs and police officials said these cases can be difficult to pursue. When reports are made, there often is scant evidence and few witnesses, they said. The burden of proof in criminal cases is much higher than in civil court.

“If you get into a courtroom and there is no physical evidence, it’s a tough nut to crack,” said Sgt. Kris Zuniga of the Avenal Police Department in agriculturally rich Kings County, Calif. “If there is some evidence, he can say it was consensual and then you’re back to a he said, she said.”

The 2002 civil sexual harassment case against DeCoster Farms of Iowa, an egg processing plant, and a co-defendant, Iowa Ag LLC, illustrates how well-documented civil cases go nowhere in criminal court.

After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a civil lawsuit accused three plant supervisors of “repeated and systematic raping” and sexual harassment of nearly a dozen women in boiler rooms and trucks over six years, law enforcement intervened. The Wright County Sheriff’s Department investigated the claims, along with representatives from the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office.

In one interview, a 28-year-old worker said a supervisor violated her in his truck when he was moving her from one part of the plant to another. She tried to scream and fight off the assault, the sheriff’s report said, but “he put the knife up to the side of her face and told her he would kill her if she didn’t let him do it.”

He told her that she was not the only woman he had raped, according to the sheriff’s report. None of the supervisors still works for the egg farm.
Paul Schultz, then the sheriff of Wright County, took statements from seven women, and five of them said they were regularly raped at DeCoster. But the local prosecutor told him there was not enough evidence to take the case to court.

It’s a case that still fills Schultz with regret. Most of the women have moved away. But Schultz said that if he had an opportunity to speak with them again, he would apologize. He’d tell them, “I’m sorry that the prosecution could not be pursued,” he said.

DeCoster Farms and Iowa Ag paid $1.5 million to settle the federal civil lawsuit later that year. In the process, they denied all of the allegations. Another Iowa egg company owned by Austin DeCoster, known as Quality Egg, settled a federal sexual harassment lawsuit in 2012 for $85,000.

But for the three men accused of serially raping the DeCoster workers, life goes on. One of the alleged perpetrators lives in a tree-lined subdivision in a small Iowa town.

According to family members, the other two have relocated to Mexico. One of them on his Facebook page lists members of the DeCoster family as his friends.

An Image At Odds With Allegations

The Evans Fruit Co. is one of the biggest apple operations in the country, shipping 320 million pounds a year to markets around the globe. A job there is desirable, workers said in interviews, because the size of the operation means more work, longer days and bigger paychecks.

The claims lodged against Evans Fruit for failing to stop sexual assault and harassment can be difficult to reconcile with its homespun image.

The company’s beginnings make it seem beyond reproach. Bill and Jeannette Evans, now in their 80s, first met at a chocolate shop in downtown Yakima, Wash., got married as teenagers and started the company with 10 acres. They work nearly every day of the year, and now the company cultivates its award-winning crop across 7,500 acres on various farms.

The ranch that Juan Marin managed is Evans Fruit’s second largest. The orchard sits at the foot of the Rattlesnake Hills, near the city of Sunnyside. The property is vast: From the main road, stands of apple trees blend into distant orchards, a blur of fruit, branches and greenery.

Here, some 50 miles from company headquarters, Marin wielded power in the ugliest ways, workers claimed in interviews and court testimony. In these remote and endless groves, Marin is said to have bragged constantly about his sexual exploits and to have groped women while they stood on ladders filling picking bags.

It’s where he allegedly pinned 15-year-old Jacqueline Abundez between tree branches and said – loudly enough for bystanders to hear – that despite her young age, she could “already endure the stick,” a former Evans Fruit tractor driver told government investigators.

Abundez filed a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006. Her mother, Angela Mendoza, filed another claim based on what allegedly happened to her daughter, telling lawyers in a deposition that Marin had said: “Give me your daughter. I’ll marry her and I’ll have her give birth every year to a son or a daughter year after year.”

In an unrelated case, Abundez was found dead in 2008 at age 17, her body dumped in an irrigation canal. The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office investigated, but her death remains unsolved. The judge dropped her harassment case, along with her mother’s.

Attorneys for Evans Fruit said the company could not substantiate the claims by Abundez or Mendoza that they had been harassed.

In 2008, more complaints came in. An apple picker named Wendy Granados told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Marin separated women from their husbands, who also worked for Evans Fruit, so that he could harass them. He “offered pay raises, cars, and houses in exchange for sexual favors,” according to her complaint.

Later that year, another Evans worker named Norma Valdez filed a claim alleging that Marin had forcibly hugged and kissed her in his truck and said he had done the same thing in 2005. He called her “my love” and “my star,” and he told people at the ranch that she was pregnant with his child, according to the complaint.

The company’s lawyers said they could find no corroborating evidence of misbehavior, and Marin kept his job.

In June 2010, the commission filed a lawsuit against Evans Fruit alleging that Marin and some of the crew leaders had sexually harassed or assaulted at least seven women at the Sunnyside ranch. As the case progressed, a total of 26 women with similar claims joined the lawsuit.

In her case, Esther Abarca testified that Marin groped her three more times – once again in his truck and twice after he had taken her to properties he owned.

At trial, these incidents were used to discredit Abarca because she hadn’t mentioned the later incidents in her deposition testimony.

“It made my job on cross-exam much easier,” said Monahan, the attorney for Evans Fruit. “I was able to illustrate for the jury this remarkable escalation of alleged offenses. My sense is the jury found her absolutely not credible.”

Four additional women told stories like Abarca’s in federal court: Marin ordered them into his truck and then fondled or attacked them, they said. Others said Marin had propositioned them for sex or offered to put them up as mistresses in exchange for bearing him a son.

Several women accused other crew leaders of misbehavior at the ranch, including one who allegedly exposed himself and showed pictures of male genitalia on his cellphone.

Motivation Questioned

About a month after the suit was filed, Marin was fired. His letter of dismissal did not mention sexual harassment allegations – company lawyers said they still have no proof of the women’s claims. Instead, the letter said he was let go because the company had evidence he had embezzled money.

A father of seven daughters who emigrated from Mexico in the early 1970s by crawling through a sewer tunnel, Marin emphatically denies stealing from the company. He said the apartment buildings and houses he owns around Sunnyside – valued at more than $1.8 million – are the product of hard work and sound investment decisions.

“Had to be somebody else because (it was) not me,” Marin said. “I can never betray the company.”

Lawyers for Evans Fruit argued that the women who have accused the company of wrongdoing were motivated by financial gain.

“The claimants need money, and you may consider that that is a powerful incentive to invent or exaggerate their stories,” attorney Carolyn Cairns said at the trial. “These folks are poor. For the most part, they’re uneducated, and their career paths, frankly, are not bright. This is their chance to get some extra money, and they’re grabbing the brass ring.”

But women who did not participate in the lawsuit also have accused Marin of making sexual advances.

One of those women – who is mentioned repeatedly as a Marin target in court filings – trembled as she drove down Cemetery Road, four miles from the Evans Fruit orchard. Turning onto a fire road, she pointed to a house where Marin and his family now live. She said that when she was a 17-year-old employee, he offered to let her live there for free if she would bear him a son. She refused.

A 39-year-old woman who worked at Evans Fruit eight years ago said in an interview that Marin would order her into his truck, where he would flirt and touch her legs in a way that upset her. If she defied him, she would be fired, she said.

“I know more women who have gone through this and don’t want to talk,” she said. “They’re scared. But we have to talk so that there is justice and the bosses don’t keep doing these things.”

In an interview, Marin said these claims are tall tales that have been passed around the ranch by embittered employees.

“Everyone knows each other,” he said. “And the bad people talk to other people, and people that don’t even know me start talking bad about me.”

Monahan, the company’s lawyer, said Evans Fruit never was confronted with definitive proof of sexual harassment at its Sunnyside orchard, and if it had been, the owners would have acted immediately.

By the trial date, the number of former Evans Fruit workers who remained in the case had dropped from 26 to 15. Some women could not be located. The judge ruled that the others had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment.

In the end, 14 women testified about being groped, verbally harassed and attacked at the Sunnyside ranch. Most of the allegations were lodged against Marin, who denied them all.

“I would never do that,” he said repeatedly at the trial.

In April, the jury – seven men and two women – found in favor of Evans Fruit. The jury members determined that the women, including Abarca, had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment. And, they decided, even if a hostile work environment had been proven, Evans Fruit was not liable because Marin was not found to be “a proxy for Evans Fruit” and the other alleged harassers were not technically supervisors.

When the verdict came down, the claimants who attended the final day and their lawyers sat in stunned silence in the courtroom.

“I was very sad because I felt they gave to the supervisors a free pass to do whatever they want with women, that there was no law to punish them,” said Danelia Barajas, one of the women who claimed Marin groped her in his truck.

But members of the jury nonetheless believed there was something happening in the orchard.

Bill Huntington, a juror from Walla Walla, said the jury “felt pretty much that there was some level of harassment,” though the women’s lawyers didn’t prove it to the legal standard.

“It’s not so much that we believed Juan Marin,” Huntington said. “But their (the women’s) stories lacked consistency. I hope the Evanses will realize that they need to be more vigilant in their sexual harassment policies. They trusted Juan Marin, and they didn’t think it could happen. They were a little too reliant on him.”

Even the Evans Fruit lawyers concede Marin’s stories have not always been consistent.

“Juan Marin has told a number of different stories, and it’s difficult to figure out what happened,” Monahan said. “But you can’t make these broad assertions that Juan Marin is a bad person and sexual harassment occurred and therefore find the company liable.”

The case is not over yet. Aside from its request for a new trial, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A separate case against Marin, filed by three of the women in the federal case, is moving forward in federal court based on alleged violations of state laws.

But the trial was a sweeping victory for the company.

After they got word of the verdict, the Evanses were jubilant as they stood in the parking lot across from the courthouse.

“It is a great win,” Bill Evans said. “It all comes down to accountability and credibility.”

Before getting into his car, the jury foreman, Cameron Fischer, suggested to the Evanses that they should modernize their operations by hiring a professional human resources staffer.

“You have to get on with the times and with the way things are run today,” said Fischer, a former state workplace safety and health officer.

The couple thanked him and then drove to a Dairy Queen, where they celebrated over ice cream.

Creating Anti-harassment Policies

Throughout the trial, the Evans Fruit lawyers argued that the company should not be held responsible for the alleged harassment because Bill and Jeannette Evans could not have known about it because no one complained to them.

Because the Evanses run a business over thousands of acres, “they wanted their employees to know that if they’re out there in the orchard and the Evanses aren’t around, that they can still come to the Evanses and tell them what their problem is,” Evans Fruit attorney Cairns said at trial.

Cairns noted for the jury that some people did go to the Evanses with concerns about their supervisors or paychecks, but they were silent when it came to sexual harassment.

The women countered in court that they didn’t think they could complain because Marin was their foreman. Some said they thought raising the issue would get them fired, or they said nobody would believe them because Marin bragged that the Evanses loved him more than their own son. Others said they were embarrassed to discuss these types of issues with the owners.

The growers’ role in ferreting out sexual harassment became a key question in the Evans Fruit trial, and it’s a problem that vexes agribusiness across the country.

“If I’m the grower and I have my foreman supervising, and he’s misbehaving and I don’t know what’s going on, at the end of the day, I’m responsible,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents agricultural businesses in five states. “But if the worker is being controlled by somebody who has an upper hand, how is a grower going to know that?”

Sexual harassment policies and complaint procedures can help, but agricultural enterprises don’t always operate on the cutting edge of human resources practices.

Gail Wadsworth, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, said some growers are focused on farming and might not have the capacity or awareness to implement policies on sexual harassment.

“There is a tendency to look at farming businesses as being different from other businesses, and that’s rooted in this concept of the agrarian ideal in the U.S.,” Wadsworth said. “But I do think that farms need to create a corporate culture to include safety for women.”

For instance, in the case of the Oregon tree farm supervisor who was accused of raping a female worker while holding gardening shears to her throat, the grower testified that the company didn’t have a sexual harassment policy because “we’re just farmers.”

Likewise, Bill and Jeannette Evans said at their company’s trial that they didn’t think they had needed a sexual harassment policy before 2008, because the law doesn’t require it and because the company is guided by common sense and respect for its workers.

Sexual harassment policies and training are not mandatory in many states. California, Connecticut and Maine have instituted laws that require sexual harassment seminars for supervisors.

Joe Del Bosque, a California farmworker-turned-grower, said the culture in the fields has changed since he started harvesting cantaloupes as a 10-year-old during summer breaks.

“In the ’70s, it (sexual harassment) might have been more common,” he said. “You knew that when it’s cantaloupe season, there are going to be young women coming, and it’s open season.”

Now, “we’ve taken a new attitude,” he said. “We take these things seriously, and our people understand that.”

As chairman of the workplace safety organization AgSafe, Del Bosque has come to champion sexual harassment prevention. AgSafe helps growers, packinghouse bosses and labor contractors follow California law by providing regular sexual harassment training.

During a meeting in a Fresno hotel conference room in December attended by CIR and IRP, farm labor contractor Josh Beas took careful notes as Amy Wolfe, AgSafe’s president and CEO, clicked through a series of slides.

She encouraged attendees to create a sexual harassment policy, hold supervisors accountable, conduct random inspections and document any problems that arise. It’s about “creating a culture where people can come to work and do the job they were hired to do and people treat each other with respect and dignity,” she said.

But the message doesn’t always travel well with some managers in the industry.

From the back row, Ralph Collazo, who runs a Southern California packinghouse, offered running commentary on the proceedings. As Wolfe worked her way through the presentation, Collazo cracked jokes.

“I want a girl to sexually harass me,” he quipped to the people near him. Collazo did not return calls for comment.

When Wolfe offered some real-world case studies, such as the story of a farmworker who was repeatedly raped by her supervisor, he sounded skeptical.

“She was eating eggs and bacon,” he said, implying that the sex was consensual, “and then she decided she didn’t like it.”

ARTICLE

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/female-workers-face-rape-harassment-in-u-s-agriculture-industry/

Some solutions
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/three-plans-to-stop-rape-in-the-fields/

A Festival That Conjures the Magic of H.P. Lovecraft and Beyond
At the Rhode Island event, revelers danced to murder ballads and celebrated all things weird. They even found time to reckon with the writer’s racism.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli https://www.evincentelli.com

Matt Cosby of NY Times is the photographer

Aug. 28, 2022

There’s bacon and eggs, and then there’s bacon and eggs at the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast. Named after the cosmically malevolent and abundantly tentacled entity dreamed up by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the event, among the most popular at NecronomiCon Providence 2022, filled a vast hotel ballroom at 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday.

To the delighted worshipers, Cody Goodfellow, here a Most Exalted Hierophant, delivered a sermon that started with growled mentions of “doom-engines, black and red,” “great hammers of the scouring” and so on.

Then the speech took a left turn.

“I must confess myself among those who always trusted that a coven of sexless black-robed liches would change the world for the better,” said Goodfellow, who had flown in from the netherworld known as San Diego, Calif. “But the malignant forces of misplaced morality have regrouped from the backlash that stopped them in the ’80s, and the re-lash is in full swing.”

And so it went, with delicious jabs at incel culture (of which, one might argue, Lovecraft was a proto-member) and plutocrats.

The conference, which took place on Aug. 18-21 in Providence, R.I., for the first time since 2019, is named after Lovecraft’s hometown and another of his literary inventions — a grimoire so dangerous that those who read it meet ghastly ends. (The biannual convention takes place around his birthday; he was born on Aug. 20, 1890.)

The problem is that Lovecraft was a deeply racist and xenophobic man. How we deal with the legacy of a decidedly unsavory person is an issue of great political and cultural relevance nowadays, and the event has tackled it not by retreating or trying to defend the indefensible but by opening up its programming and the range of people invited to participate.

Cordelia Abrams, 49, a Bostonian life coach dressed as an anglerfish at the breakfast, has been attending these events for almost a decade. “This is weird and literary and local,” she said.

Although the event was Lovecraft-centric in its 1990s iteration, it has broadened since a 2013 reboot under the aegis of the nonprofit Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council and is now subtitled “the international festival of weird fiction, art and academia.” Which, of course, poses the question: What does weird even mean when swaths of the mainstream have a slipping grip on reality? A large number of folks, after all, falsely believe that satanic pedophiles operated out of a pizzeria.

At the “Welcome to the New Weird” panel, the editor and publisher Ann VanderMeer, one of the festival’s guests of honor, posited that “the weird is a way to connect with the world around us and make sense of it.” Most people I met or heard speak over the weekend agreed there was a common element of unease and unsettlement, which explains the panels dedicated to simpatico artists like Clive Barker, David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard.

What was striking was how many of the participants have worked through the problem of Lovecraft himself to repurpose the basic tropes in his fiction. They are appropriating its overarching themes — the powerlessness of humanity against great, unknowable forces — and turning the weird into an instrument of self-exploration, liberation and creativity.

“What really brought me here is the fact that I love horror,” said Zin E. Rocklyn, a 38-year-old queer Black writer from Florida who was on three panels. “I love the catharsis that it brings, the truth that it brings. An incredible imagination came up with some really shady” garbage, she added, using a stronger word to describe Lovecraft’s views. “It’s based in ignorance and fear, but it taps into a universal fear. Being able to examine that and talk about that and expand on that is a great example of what you can do with such an ignorant business.”

Besides academic papers, the convention offered an abundance of panels sharing a dark sensibility: “Not Just Three Acts: Narrative Structure and the Weird”; “Out of the Shadows: A History of the Queer Weird”; and “The Horizon Is Still Way Beyond You: Zora Neale Hurston’s Life and Legacy.” For the last session, the panelists somehow wrangled an interesting 75 minutes out of Hurston’s and Lovecraft’s irreconcilable differences — contrasting, for example, her searching curiosity about other people with his bigotry.

Among the most eye- and mind-opening panels was the one on body horror, which, for you literary fiction folks, included a reminder that the subgenre encompasses classics like “Frankenstein” and “The Metamorphosis.” That panel felt pointed at a time when control over one’s body is being hotly debated in issues relating to transgender lives and abortion.

Another bracing session dealt with Lovecraft and Southeast Asia, in which the Indonesian-American writer Nadia Bulkin said she loved the idea that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (ancient gods as powerful as they are malignant) “are the European invaders trampling on lands that aren’t theirs.” Cassandra Khaw, a Malaysian-born writer and another guest of honor, pointed out an essential distinction between Asian horror movies and their American remakes: The American versions are inferior because they add an element of salvation or moral redemption where there was none.

But many attendees preferred gaming over metaphysical discussions. Several sessions were spread over various tables, mostly on two floors, and ranged from the popular (“Call of Cthulhu,” which is widely credited to have reignited interest in Lovecraft when it came out in 1981) to the willfully obscure (“Hecatomb,” a failed collectible-card game meant to be a dark version of “Magic: The Gathering”) and the hilariously entertaining (“Pirate Borg,” complete with swashbuckling outfits and a screen showing close-ups of the dice rolls).

The volume and variety of the programming was enough to make your head spin like Regan MacNeil’s. There were also film screenings, readings, concerts, live podcasts, walking tours of Lovecraft’s Providence, an art exhibit and theatrical performances. There was even a mushroom jaunt in a nearby park, in tribute to the recurrence of things fungal in Lovecraft’s fiction.

According to Niels Hobbs, the “arch director” of the convention and a marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island (he was on the “Under the Sea: Horrors of the Deep Ocean” panel), this year’s edition drew around 200 guest panelists, artists and reading authors; over 100 volunteer staff members and “minions”; and 1,400 attendees. (Absent from the official proceedings was the pre-eminent Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi, who later wrote in an email that he had been at NecronomiCon but “kept a low profile.”)

Some preferred focusing on the core mythos, like Brian Vann, 53, a data analyst from Costa Mesa, Calif. “His characters are so frequently warned off: ‘Don’t go there, bad things happen,’” Vann said. “But they go, with terrible results. That speaks a lot to the human condition: How do we just ignore the warnings?”

In comparison to commercial enterprises like Comic Con, Providence had no Hollywood presence and only an infinitesimal amount of cosplay. The one big event that involved dressing up, the Eldritch Ball, had a theme, “Masque of the Red Death,” that freed up the imagination rather than constricted it to trademarked characters — instead of, say, Darth Vader, there was a woman dressed as Persephone, queen of the underworld, and a tuxedoed man in what looked like a green crochet Cthulhu mask. Revelers slow‌ dancing to murder ballads was a sight to behold.

Lovecraft himself might have been surprised to see his work bringing together such an inquisitive, welcoming congregation. But to Goodfellow, 53, the conference is a good antidote to the nihilism ravaging parts of America.

“Instead of rooting for the apocalypse, we’re rooting for sustainability and for people to radically accept each other as who we are and all move forward together,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully ironic backhanded way of finding positivity in absolute negativity.”

Article link
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/books/necronomicon-providence-hp-lovecraft.html

My Thoughts 
I am not a fan of the squid god:) But I never knew of the festival and it seems on reading like what the comic con used to be in NYC, what jazzmobile used to be in harlem, what many festivals used to be that I liked once upon a time.
I oppose the idea that Lovecraft was unsavory. Hitler as leader in the german government did many things that hurt people, whether german or not, ala The romani. But, Hitler had friends. I have never supported Donald Trump's as a real estate man or reality television mogul or president of the united states of america. But I don't know Donald Trump. The white men of european descent who enslaved my forebears , before during or after slavery , I do not like or support or have positive thoughts to. But that doesn't mean they were unsavory. Said white men had friends and loving ones. JK rowlings isn't unsavory. She has positions or viewpoints many do not like, many oppose, many despise, but that doesn't mean she is unsavory. An artist person not fitting a heritage or cultural mold in any community isn't a problem. Their art can still be liked. The problem is communities who confuse liking an art to liking an artist. I don't like the Nazi German party as I am black and by their law I am unfit to live or be treated with positivity if they have control to determine things. But, their night marches are lovely. 
The article shows in this convention, the people who attend it were able to do what I have heard or read many artist say they can not do, to Michael JAckson or R Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or DW Griffith and that is separate the artists from the art. And that shows a maturity that is rarer or rarer within the consumers or creators of art. 

MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON #1 (OF 5)
Written by EVE L. EWING
Art by MICHAEL STA. MARIA
Cover by LUCAS WERNECK
On Sale 12/7

THOUGHTS ON THE ARTICLE BELOW

Where to begin...first, even though some know it, all do not. The whole captain marvel comic book line was created to keep a name safe. DC Comics denied the original creator of the first character named captain marvel to exists. Then DC bought that company. But, Before DC bought that company, MArvel comics realized, DC comics having a character named Captain Marvel would be just ... so to keep a trademark, they have to publish a captain marvel comic for the legal sake. 
So, this is a comic book born from fiscal warfare... That is the first problem. Art has nothing to do with the genesis of the Captain Marvel line in Marvel Comics. 
Second, because this comic book line was never about artistic quality, but always legal activity, it probably has <I didn't check> the longest comic book run without any consistency in the marvel comics universe. Marvel has to keep the making captain marvel comics for the name. But, the nature of the USA comic book industry is to make erratic plot changes to characters over time. 
Third, the greatest erratic plot twist to captain marvel was when Marvel Comics now owned by Disney, decided to make Ms Marvel, Captain Marvel and give the mantle of Ms Marvel to a young female non white/non christian acolyte/arab. Which on its own, you may suggest, what is the problem? In the line of Captain Marvel's was already someone not male/not white/not european who had already been rechristened, not killed like the first marvel captain marvel <poor patriarchy> three times. So the original female Captain Marvel was technically still alive in the Marvel Comics universe as spectrum or pulsar or photon but Marvel decided to make Ms Marvel , captain marvel. 
It is called plot quagmire. 
As a writer, it disgusts me. The comic book industry in the USA's great flaw is the disrespect to plot. Plot means nothing. Reboot universes, kill off, always do random radical things. I argue, what will the USA comic book world be if all the comic books, Marvel + DC+ all the smaller prints, actually kept to a real plot, and never cheated or schemed or did silly radical things, but actually kept to plots. 

Now, as someone who supports Black artists, and knows the importance of Black characters in majority white owned/employed media organizations in the USA to a large ,not necessarly majority, percentage of black people in the USA. I say, the new photon comic book is great on arrival.
Black Woman, slick outfit- no cape nonsense, glowing fists- punch everybody, flying through space with no need for a suit while her makeup is perfectly on and she has a creamy crack hairdo, so near godlike. Drop the Mic buy the comic, and start reading, and get to cosplaying. 

Storywise, I have long since, left the USA comic book world. I enjoy images and I don't bother with most stories. Cause I don't appreciate the reboot nature. That is silly to me. But, love the look.

SOME OTHER THOUGHTS OF MINE ON SUPERHERO-DOME
Is Superman Outdated? 
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1905&type=status
Multiracial in multiversal
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1967&type=status
Making more money by changing the palette
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1562&type=status
reparations in comic book world
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1712&type=status
Does Disney need to buy Milestone? 
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1663&type=status
I don't publish agenda that isn't from my heart
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1514&type=status

THE ARTICLE

Photon's Limitless Power Threatens to Break the Marvel Universe in Monica Rambeau's First Solo Comic Series
Eve L. Ewing and Michael Sta. Maria launch 'Monica Rambeau: Photon,' a new limited series coming in December.
BY MARVEL

This December, universal powerhouse Monica Rambeau will star in first-ever solo comic series! A five-issue limited series, MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON, will be written by award-winning author and scholar Eve L. Ewing and drawn by new Marvel talent, artist Michael Sta. Maria. The iconic Marvel super hero with four decades' worth of amazing stories will at long last headline her own saga. 

From the New Orleans Harbor Patrol to the Avengers to the Ultimates, Monica Rambeau has been a leader and team player her entire life, but now she’ll face a reality-shattering crisis that she’ll have no choice but to take on single-handedly. In order to do so, Photon will need to reach new heights of her incredible abilities—and then surpass them!

In a revelatory journey spanning time and space, fan will behold Photon’s true potential. The adventure begins when Photon is charged with making a very special, very cosmic delivery. What should be light work (get it?) for Monica becomes increasingly complex and dangerous due to a threat from beyond and family drama.  

“It's such an honor to be taking on the story of a legacy character like Monica Rambeau,” Ewing said. “Monica's character has a long history in the Marvel Universe, but she's way overdue for getting her own story told. I'm picking the pen up from the legend himself, Dwayne McDuffie, who put out the last Monica Rambeau solo adventure almost three decades ago. It's a privilege and I'm excited to tell the story in a way that both highlights her incredible cosmic abilities as well as her everyday, relatable struggles. I hope this will be a title that has something equal to offer to veteran readers and folks who may be brand new to comics.”

Explore the outer reaches and wildest vagaries of the Marvel Universe through the eyes of one of its most powerful heroes when MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON #1 arrives in December.

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/photon-monica-rambeau-first-solo-comic-series-eve-l-ewing