#Project Management Services New York

[nycerny]

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[neworkimprov]

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[generouspolicegiver]

 Construction Project Management Services Company In New York

Ace Project Management has a mission tore-think construction by introducing new management technologies, carefully selected materials, innovative construction processes and design oversight. All while reducing completion time and increasing quality of construction as compared to conventional approaches.

[aceprojectmanagement]

Construction project management company in new york

[sayruq]

Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale and the 10th floor commons of Google’s New York office. The sit-in will be accompanied by outdoor protests at Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and Seattle beginning at 2 pm ET and 11 am PT. Tuesday’s actions mark an escalation in a series of recent protests organized by tech workers who oppose their employer’s relationship with the Israeli government, especially in light of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Just over a dozen people gathered outside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale on Tuesday. Among those in New York was Google cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who was fired days after disrupting Google Israel’s managing director at March’s Mind The Tech, a company-sponsored conference focused on the Israeli tech industry, in early March. Several hours into the sit-ins on Tuesday, Google security began to accuse the workers of “trespassing” and disrupting work, prompting several people to leave while others vowed to remain until they were forced out. The 2021 contract, known as Project Nimbus, involves Google and Amazon jointly providing cloud computing infrastructure and services across branches of the Israeli government. Last week, Time reported that Google’s work on Project Nimbus involves providing direct services to the Israel Defense Forces. No Tech for Apartheid is a coalition of tech workers and organizers with MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, which are respectively Muslim- and Jewish-led peace-focused activist organizations. The coalition came together shortly after Project Nimbus was signed and its details became public in 2021.

You can read No Tech for Apartheid's open letter here.

[reasonsforhope]

Holy crap, I didn't think Biden would be able to get the Climate Corps established without Congress. This is SUCH fantastic news.

--

"After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.

In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.

Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.

“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that has led the push for a climate corps.

With the new corps “and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible,” Prakash said...

...Environmental activists hailed the new jobs program, which is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, as part of the New Deal...

Lawmakers Weigh In

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also encouraged Biden to create a climate corps, saying in a letter on Monday that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale.”

The lawmakers cited deadly heat waves in the Southwest and across the nation, as well as dangerous floods in New England and devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, among recent examples of climate-related disasters.

Democrats called creation of the climate corps “historic” and the first step toward fulfilling the vision of the Green New Deal.

“Today President Biden listened to the (environmental) movement, and he delivered with an American Climate Corps,” a beaming Markey said at a celebratory news conference outside the Capitol.

“We are starting to turn the green dream into a green reality,” added Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation with Markey four years ago.

“You all are changing the world,” she told young activists.

Program Details and Grant Deadlines

The initiative will provide job training and service opportunities to work on a wide range of projects, including restoring coastal wetlands to protect communities from storm surges and flooding; clean energy projects such as wind and solar power; managing forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and energy efficient solutions to cut energy bills for consumers, the White House said.

Creation of the climate corps comes as the Environmental Protection Agency launches a $4.6 billion grant competition for states, municipalities and tribes to cut climate pollution and advance environmental justice. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants are funded by the 2022 climate law and are intended to drive community-driven solutions to slow climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants will help “communities so they can chart their own paths toward the clean energy future.”

The deadline for states and municipalities to apply is April 1, with grants expected in late 2024. Tribes and territories must apply by May 1, with grants expected by early 2025."

-via Boston.com, September 21, 2023

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #27

July 12-19 2024

President Biden announced the cancellation of $1.2 billion dollars worth of student loan debt. This will cancel the debt of 35,000 public service workers, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters. This brings the total number of people who've had their student debt relived under the Biden Administration to 4.8 million or one out of every ten people with student loan debt, for a total of $168.5 billion in debt forgiven. This came after the Supreme Court threw out an earlier more wide ranging student debt relief plan forcing the administration to undertake a slower more piecemeal process for forgiving debt. President Biden announced a new plan in the spring that will hopefully be finalized by fall that will forgive an additional 30 million people's student loan debt.

President Biden announced actions to lower housing coasts, make more housing available and called on Congress to prevent rent hikes. President Biden's plan calls for landlords who raise the rent by more than 5% a year to face losing major important tax befits, the average rent has gone up by 21% since 2021. The President has also instructed the federal government, the largest land owner in the country, to examine how unused property can be used for housing. The Bureau of Land Management plans on building 15,000 affordable housing units on public land in southern Nevada, the USPS is examining 8,500 unused properties across America to be repurposed for housing, HHS is finalizing a new rule to make it easier to use federal property to house the homeless, and the Administration is calling on state, local, and tribal governments to use their own unused property for housing, which could create approximately 1.9 million units nationwide.

The Department of Transportation announced $5 billion to replace or restore major bridges across the country. The money will go to 13 significant bridges in 16 states. Some bridges are suffering from years of neglect others are nearly 100 years old and no longer fit for modern demands. Some of the projects include the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River which connects Portland Oregon to Vancouver Washington, replacing the Sagamore Bridge which connects Cape Cod to the mainland built in 1933, replacing the I- 83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Wilmington, North Carolina, among others.

President Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at boosting Latino college attendance. The order established the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges with 25% or above Hispanic/Latino enrollment, currently 55% of Hispanic college students are enrolled in an HSI. The initiative seeks to stream line the relationship between the federal government and HSIs to allow them to more easily take advantage of federal programs and expand their reach to better serve students and boost Hispanic enrollment nationwide.

HUD announced $325 million in grants for housing and community development in 7 cities. the cities in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, New York and New Jersey, have collectively pledged to develop over 6,500 new mixed-income units, including the one-for-one replacement of 2,677 severely distressed public housing units. The 7 collectively will invest $2.65 billion in additional resources within the Choice Neighborhood area – so that every $1 in HUD funds will generate $8.65 in additional resources.

President Biden took extensive new actions on immigration. On June 18th The President announced a new policy that would allow the foreign born spouses and step children of American citizens who don't have legal status to apply for it without having to leave the country, this would effect about half a million spouses and 50,000 children. This week Biden announced that people can start applying on August 19, 2024. Also in June President Biden announced an easing of Visa rules that will allow Dreamers, Americans brought to the country as children without legal status, to finally get work visas to give them legal status and a path way to citizenship. This week the Biden Administration announced a new rule to expand the federal TRIO program to cover Dreamers. TRIO is a program that aims to support low income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college transition from high school to college, the change would support 50,000 more students each year. The Administration also plans to double the number of free immigration lawyers available to those going through immigration court.

The EPA announced $160 million in grants to support Clean U.S. Manufacturing of Steel and Other Construction Materials. The EPA estimates that the manufacturing of construction materials, such as concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass, accounts for 15% of the  annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is supporting 38 projects aimed at measuring and combatting the environmental impact of construction materials.

The US announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Sudan. Sudan's out of control civil war has caused the largest refugee crisis in the world with 11 million Sudanese having fled their homes in the face of violence. The war is also causing the gravest food crisis in the world, with a record setting 25 million people facing acute food insecurity, and fears that nearly a million will face famine in the next months. This aid brings the total aid the US has given Sudan since September 2023 to $1.6 billion, making America the single largest donor to Sudan.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new rule that would better regulate popular paycheck advance products. 2/3rds of workers are payed every two weeks or once a month and since 2020 the number of short term loans that allow employees to receive their paycheck days before it’s scheduled to hit their account has grown by 90%. the CFPB says that many of these programs are decided with employers not employees and millions of Americans are paying fees they didn't know about before signing up. The new rule would require lenders to tell costumers up front about any and all fees and charges, as well as cracking down on deceptive "tipping" options.

[dcdreamblog]

Can you tell us anything about the Creature Commandos? I read a brief blurb about them in a book of "Weird War Tales" with other stuff like the GI Robot and the Boy Commandos, but trying to google anything on them just leads to debates as to whether or not they were actually supernatural or some kind of science project.

Oh dammit, James Gunn's little Inglorious Bastards-esque cartoon just came out didn't it? Jokes on you guys though, I actually ordered and read the appropriate books ahead of time! You're not slick!/s

Thank you for providing the image for this one so I don't have to go looking for it. (I truly hope you did not watch the old TV movie this was made for though. My god this poster it the best part of it)

To answer the most pressing question, they're a science experiment. Buckle in because if you thought your opinion of the US Army could not get any lower!

The Creature Commandos were formed in 1941 under the auspices of an outfit known as Project M which was the pot the US Army threw money into with the expectation it would use them to come up with super weapons to end the Nazi threat with no oversight or ethical constraint. They were responsible for the construction of G.I Robot as you mentioned and one of their failed experiments even granted New York native Joan Dale the powers she would use to become Miss America.

The Commandos specifically were the brainchild of one Dr. Myron Mazurksy, a real mad scientist type with the pet theory that the tales of monsters and ghouls making up the bulk of human mythology were the triggers for an kind of evolutionary fear, his hypothesis was that altering subjects through chemical and surgical methods to resemble these monsters of legend would give them an edge on the battlefield. (Of course we know now that these stories are not psychological misinterpretations at all but instead tales of actual beings that really do exist)

The Creature Commandos were made up of four founding members:

Private Warren Griffith was diagnosed with psychological lycanthropy and so was remanded into Project M's custody where he was surgically altered into and actual wolf man with very little conscious control of the time of his painful metamorphosis. He had committed no crime other than being considered psychologically unfit for service.

Pilot Officer Vincent Velcoro, a member of the Royal Air Force convicted of high treason for striking a well connected superior officer. Remanded into American custody without any due process under British military law he was given the choice of a 30 year sentence or experimentation which turned him into a human vampire, forced to drink blood at least once a day and only able to stomach consuming raw meat.

Private Elliot "Lucky" Taylor, a newly minted marine who was nearly killed by a land mine during a war gaming exercise. Surgically reconstructed by Project M his vocal cords were severed by the procedure, his family was told he was KIA and Taylor himself was never consulted about the procedure nor was he allowed to leave after the fact. Again he had committed no crime and was not even unfit for service, simply fed into the mill for the sake of "progress"

and Dr Myrra Rhodes who, when operating upon a wounded soldier within Project M's compound was mutated by a poorly secured batch of mutagen chemicals, transformed into a living medusa. She was also unable to leave military custody and was listed as KIA, losing her entire life due to Project M's negligence.

They were placed under the command of one Lieutenant Matt Shrieve who noted in his later unearthed war journal a personal loathing for his "freakish" subordinates whom he treated with inhuman disdain. Providing for their needs only reluctantly and below the standards of what they would have received in a brig back home. They were sent on what were, frankly, suicide missions, managing to survive time and again based on good luck and the members' trust in one another above all.

A truly demonstrative directive, unearthed by a freedom of information request submitted by their families well after the fact showed that the Creature Commandos were under command from the highest echelon that their existence be kept an absolute secret from the All Star Squadron or any of its members. A personal note, written by a redacted command officer at the bottom of the ledger opines

"The long underwear freaks would just get their bleeding hearts in a twist anyway."

Meaning that the army specifically kept the Commandos a secret from the Squadron, KNOWING that the Squadron would object to the less than human conditions and expectations of the Commandos and most likely would have seen to their emancipation under Squadron protection.

As the war drew to a close, the Commandos were marked for execution by firing squad. No trial or crime was ever given as reason. "Spared" from execution they were sent in a rocket toward the then ongoing battle of Berlin to do some final "good" or die trying.

Their presence is not noted at the battle and their bodies, or indeed their trails have never been found. Make of that what you will.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this press release from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:

Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced more than $17 million in funding through the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, for 45 conservation projects in the Delaware River watershed. The grants will generate nearly $20.7 million in matching contributions from the grantees, providing a total conservation impact of $38 million.

Funding includes more than $4.7 million from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for six projects aimed at improving public access, recreational opportunities, and water quality, as well as enhancing shoreline resiliency and critical habitat. 

The Delaware River watershed spans parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York — a landscape that encompasses one of the most densely populated urban areas in the nation yet remains 50 percent forested. Four hundred miles of the Delaware River are classified as National Wild and Scenic River, indicating their shorelines remain largely undeveloped but accessible in places by roads. These projects supported by the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund will benefit the millions of people who rely on the Delaware River and its tributaries by improving habitats, reducing flood risks, improving water quality, and increasing access to natural places. 

Multistate: $94,069 for building capacity for dam removals in the Delaware River watershed through trainings and workshops.

Delaware: $500,000 for re-envisioning Rodney Reservoir Park with restored natural spaces to enhance water quality, wildlife habitat and recreation.

New York: $779,306 for reconnecting rivers in the upper Delaware River watershed to enhance brook trout habitat and mitigating flooding.

Pennsylvania: $1.5 million for restoring habitat and increasing equitable access to nature at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park. 

Pennsylvania: $830,400 for improving public safety, access and water quality at Stroud Preserve.

Pennsylvania: $1 million for implementing green stormwater infrastructure projects at four under-served elementary schools in Philadelphia.

The total funding also includes $347,450 from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for projects such as collaborative forest management in New York and Pennsylvania. This project, co-funded between the Service and USDA-NRCS, is part of a new federal partnership to support conservation efforts on working lands. 

[shiorimakibawrites]

inside the mind with peter parker!!!! also, congrats bestie!!!!

Thanks bestie! I hope this helps cheer you up:

After the events of NWH, Peter tries several jobs that one can get with only a high school education - waiter and/or barista at various fast food or local cafes, cleaning services for hotels or office buildings. Name a low-level service industry job, he’s probably tried it. Along with day labor with construction projects.

Each job ends up running into one little problem: Spider-Man. Saving people sometimes makes him late for work. Sometimes hours late. Or he runs off in the middle of shift to save someone he notices in trouble. Needless to say, his bosses don’t like this. And often fire him.

He has better luck when he starts doing freelance work or online work where it doesn’t really matter when or where he gets the work done as long as he meets the deadline.

Some of this freelance work is vigilante photography. He develops a reputation for getting the best shots of New York’s vigilantes and their battles. Mostly Spider-Man (for obvious reasons) but he has gotten some very good shots of Daredevil.

Peter is torn on those Tumblr posts comparing his ass to those other heroes in the city. The jokes can be funny. But some of the NSFW comments have left him rather red-faced and at times uncomfortable.

He does find it absolutely hilarious that Daredevil won that Hottest Vigilante Ass thing. Easily the funniest part was the look on the man in question’s face when he was informed about this . . . honor.

One of the freelance jobs he picks up is doing electronics repairs. One day, he ends up in the office of Nelson, Murdock, & Page trying to convince their braille printer not to die. He managed it but also captured the interest of the lawyers. Who insisted he take a bonus payment in the form of food.

Peter thought about arguing but his metabolism is very high and his budget low. No sense in turning down (more or less) free food.

The law firm starts regularly calling him with offers of various temp work. He has gone to the office often enough that he has met Mr. Nelson’s mom. Who thinks he’s far too skinny.

Somehow it was after this meeting that Peter gained the attention of Daredevil. Which was . . . cool. Even if the way Peter threw punches made the man grimace and tell him to come to some rundown gym to learn how to do it properly - “you’re gonna break all your fingers doing that way, kid.”

Peter’s protest that (a) he will be healed by morning and (b) that he wasn’t a kid held no water. But Daredevil had a point that breaking the bones in his hands hurt and hampered his ability to fight or flee until those broken bones healed.

He calls the other vigilante Mr. Devil, despite repeated attempts to get him to just call him Devil or Daredevil. Fair is fair. Daredevil kept calling him a kid despite being told repeatedly that Peter was ‘not a kid.’

[nycerny]

Structural engineering is one of our core competencies, stemming from our initial beginnings more than 6 years ago. From construction engineering design including: sheathing, shoring, excavation, foundation, underpinning to complex scaffold system design, calculations, and non-destructive materials’ testing, we do it all! Our engineers have decades of experience with planning and designing new building construction plans as well.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at The New Republic:

“Does fascism intend to restore state authority or subvert it? Is it order or disorder? Can you be conservatives and subversives at the same time?” Six months before the March on Rome in October 1922, when Benito Mussolini was the head of the Fascist Party and its decentralized militia movement, he isolated the contradictions at the heart of fascism that remain fundamental to authoritarianism today. During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment, and the economy.

Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as “a shock to the system” that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.

PROJECT 2025 AS COUNTERREVOLUTION

The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do. Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to “[d]ismantle the administrative state” and “decentralize and privatize as much as possible,” allowing the American people to “live freely.” “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts told The New York Times in January. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.” The solution to this “slow start”—code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy—is counterrevolution.

The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion.

During Trump’s presidency, far-right Roman Catholic attorney Roger Severino headed the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, transforming it into an office that prioritized the protection of the rights of white Christians and the “natural family.” During his tenure, the department banned the use of the words “fetus” and “transgender” in government communications and made other moves long embraced by evangelical Christians and their far-right allies in politics. In the future, this office could be elevated into an autonomous entity. Appropriating civil rights for white Christians furthers the Trumpist goal of delegitimizing the cause of racial equality while also making Christian nationalism a core value of domestic policy. Doing away with the separation of church and state is the goal of many architects of Trumpism, from Project 2025 contributor Russ Vought to far-right proselytizer Michael Flynn, who uses the idea of “spiritual war” as counterrevolutionary fuel.

Even if the Department of Education is abolished, some other entity would appear to take its place, since it is unlikely that the task of undoing liberal democratic models of pedagogy would be left entirely to individual states. Not everyone will be able to homeschool their children—the preferred extremist option, since it removes children from exposure to the multifaith and multiracial environments of public schools. It is not so far-fetched to imagine the special Bible Trump has been hawking, which includes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance, as a required text in a Christian nationalist curriculum.

Mussolini kicked off his counterrevolutionary police state in the 1920s with new “public security” laws that justified the arrest of anyone deemed a security threat—meaning anyone who opposed fascism from a liberal democratic or leftist point of view. Trump’s assertion a century later that “people within our country” pose “the greatest threat” to the United States, and his desire to “root [them] out,” could translate into counterterror and counterinsurgency operations. These would require a recasting or expansion of existing federal and state security agencies—for example, if the National Guard is federalized or the promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants come into being.

[...]

Personalist leaders organize government institutions around their self-preservation. Their private interests and needs shape party politics, legislative action, and national policy, just as their relationships with foreign autocrats influence foreign affairs. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who served as the translator of Vladimir Putin’s views and desires in Europe for a decade, was able to personalize Italy’s foreign policy. He excluded Italian diplomats from meetings with Putin, allowing only his private translator-envoy, Valentino Valentini, to be present. An Italian parliamentary investigation later revealed that Berlusconi would have received a kickback from the profits of a planned Italy-and-Russia-built South Stream pipeline. Trump holds a similarly proprietary vision of governance, which is why classified national security documents ended up in the bathroom of his private residence in Florida. Like most autocrats, Trump sees holding public office as a means of personal enrichment. 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in The New Republic as part of their American Fascism series about the right-wing fascist counterrevolution that is brewing in America, and if Trump wins again, America will be headed down the same path as Hungary, Russia, El Salvador, and Turkey.

See Also:

The New Republic: What American Fascism Would Look Like

[0nlythrowharrybeaux]

#4 angst pls!

This one's an AU!

Warnings: Mentions of depression

You knew that Harry was going through it recently. He had been struggling to find a new job and his current job was really draining him. He had an asshole boss and very self-serving coworkers that made advancing in the work and collaborating unnecessarily difficult. On top of that, you were newly married and well, despite what people think, adjusting to living with him had been hard on both of you since you hadn't cohabitated prior to getting married.

It was hard for him to turn his place into your place from one day to the next. Yeah, you had some stuff over there from before, but everything was shared now so it was a bit different. It was hard for you too to feel like his home was now your home as well. And you'd had the proper discussions long before you got engaged and even did pre-marital counseling just to make sure that you two could really do this together. With you both being children of divorced parents you didn't want to take that step if you knew from the start that you had irreconcilable differences.

But all of this to say that Harry felt like he was a bit stuck. He felt drained all the time and absolutely over everything. One of the hardest things for him now was that when he was feeling this way he didn't really have alone time. You knew that Harry really liked to wind down from his frustrations alone at his own pace. His home had always been his safe space to do that and well now, that was a bit different. But today, Harry felt that he was in luck.

He had just returned from a business trip to New York and he was absolutely spent. He decided to get a car service to pick him up as to not interrupt your day and also to have some alone time just in case you beat him home. You knew that he was coming back and that he hadn't had the best time on this trip with his coworker based on what he'd filled you in on briefly, so you made some plans after work to give him some time.

When Harry got home he texted you because you clearly hadn't arrived yet. You didn't say anything about when you'd be back so he decided to wind down with a nice relaxing bath. He kind of started to unpack and had a couple things strewn around the bed before deciding to take care of it after his bath when he was in a much better mood. He had a shower and then got in the tub for a good half hour before he wrapped himself up in his robe and headed back into your bedroom to change. He sat on the edge of the bed and picked up his phone only to see several missed calls from his office and he groaned as he called back.

"Harry!" he heard his name almost immediately after the line rang.

"Yes, Mr. Thomas? Sorry, I missed your call." he said to one of the directors that he got along with a bit better than the other bosses.

"It's alright, I have some news." he said and Harry hummed indicating that he go on, "Tomorrow, Roger's going to announce that he's decided to go with Byron's proposal for the deal with the investment firm." he sighed. Harry immediately frowned.

He felt completely devastated as he heard this. The only thing he felt confident about from this entire trip was his proposal to this investment firm. He had managed to strike up a better deal than Byron's. He had gotten them to agree on early access for new investment opportunities. He had gotten them to remove the "finders" fee that was charged on top of their standard fee as well. And yes, his plan was slightly more expensive than Byron's but based on the financial projections he had run, their company would be making a greater profit now because they'd have access to the more promising opportunities along with the bigger and more wellknown companies. With that profit essentially the cost of the deal would pay itself! He was at a loss and he couldn't help the rage building up inside of his body. His eyes started welling up as his tears threatened to spill over his waterline.

"Harry?" he heard Mr. Thomas call to him and he exhaled shakily.

"Sorry, sir. Just...processing." he said and Mr. Thomas hummed.

"I did what I could. I mean, I even told Roger he was backing the wrong man, but...you know how Byron is. And you know how Roger is..." he sighed in disappointment, "I just ummm...I wanted you to know so that little prick doesn't have the satisfaction of seeing you upset." Mr. Thomas explained.

"I appreciate it. Thank you."

"Of course. And look...you're a bright guy, Harry. And I just think that...maybe this is not the place for you. You're not like these other people, they've no self respect, no principles they adhere to. I'd sayit'll be sad to see you go, but no one here is interested in helping you reach your potential. Just... think about that." he advised and Harry hummed.

"Well thank you, I'll give that some thought."

"Yep. See you tomorrow. Game face, alright?"

"Yes, Mr. Thomas." he said and then hung up.

As soon as he pulled his phone away from his ear he started to cry. He was so frustrated and it felt like he just couldn't get a win, no matter how hard he tried! More than that, he needed to succeed now because your future depended on it. There was so much riding on him having a good job and bringing in money and he was failing at that. He felt like a failure as an employee, as a man, as a husband! He had felt like a shell of himself for months and he knew you saw it and you tried to help, but he felt beyond help. He just felt like giving up. He let himself fall back on the bed as he cried quietly, he'd unpack after...

You got home and were so excited to see Harry. He clearly hadn't eaten since there were no dishes in the sink. So you rushed over to your bedroom and quickly kept in your greeting when you saw him passed out on the bed, breathing heavily. You walked over quietly and you frowned when you saw his tear-stained cheeks. You pushed some of his things aside and gently laid beside him and raked your fingers through his damp curls. He woke up almost immediately with a deep exhale and he turned to you with a frown that soon relaxed upon seeing you.

"Hey, babe. Are you alright?" you asked him softly and he sighed.

"No. I'm just...done." he sniffled, "I feel like I can't do anything right! I'm always tired and irritable, and I work so hard and these people don't even care!" he vented, "My boss is a prick who values getting his ass kissed over actual thoughtful ideas! But I can't find something nearly as good and well now there's us and I can't just quit because I have a responsibility to you now and I just hate my life right now!" he groaned in frustration and you frowned.

You knew he didn't mean that he hated what you guys had now, but it still made you feel bad that he felt like he was responsible for you. Harry was a protector, he wasn't fragile by any means, but lately he had been and you suspected that the struggles at his job were making him depressed. And well, that tends to follow you around to every part of your life and this was the result. You hated seeing him be so unsure of himself, it just didn't make sense, it was wrong.

"I'm sorry." you said simply and he sighed and reached for your hand.

"I'm sorry for saying I hate my life. I don't hate our life. It's just...not a good time for me." he explained.

"I know, baby. And I get that you like to deal on your own before you share things but...we're a team. That's the point of us getting married, we're supposed to help each other out. And well, if you need to find something else then do it! I don't mind having to work a little more to make sure we stay afloat. Your happiness means a lot to me." you explained.

"I just...don't have the energy. Do you ever just feel like...giving up. Or like disappearing?" he asked you quietly.

"I have before, yes." you admitted and he sighed.

"Me too...but, not like this." he confessed, "It feels like...too much. Like it's out of my hands now." he confessed as he teared up again and you just hugged around him as he started to cry again.

Harry knew he had so much to be grateful for, but all the of the bad things felt like they were too overwhelming for him to even mind the good things. He felt like he was drowning, he was barely staying afloat and that scared him so much. He felt foreign in his own mind and body, it worried him, but he was scared of saying it. And now he was saying it to you and he was worried about your reaction, but when you held him and said nothing about it, it did help a little bit. He didn't need you to say anything, he just needed you to be there.

"I love you so much." you said quietly and he sniffled.

"I love you too." he responded as he just stared at the ceiling while you held him. And as you just laid there with him he decided that maybe it was time to get some help. He didn't feel like he could keep doing this alone. Not this time.

[aceprojectmanagement]

Construction project management company in new york

[justforbooks]

Bill Viola

Video artist who melded the material and the spiritual and applied modern technology to Renaissance subjects

In 1957, on a family holiday, Bill Viola fell in a lake. He was six years old. Sixty years later, Viola, who has died aged 73, recalled the event. “I didn’t hold on to my float when I went into the water, and I went right to the bottom,” he said. “I experienced weightlessness and a profound visual sense that I never forgot. It was like a dream and blue and light, and I thought I was in heaven as it was the most beautiful thing I had seen.” And then … “my uncle pulled me out.”

It seemed an unpromising start to an artistic career. However, in 1977 Viola began a series of five works called The Reflecting Pool. Four years out of university, this was his first multipart artwork, its constituent films occupying their maker for three years. In the title piece, a shirtless man – Viola – emerges from a wood, walks toward a pond, makes as if to jump into it and freezes in mid-air. The pool registers his entry nonetheless, its surface rippling as though disturbed; the flying man fades slowly away; and, after seven long minutes, Viola emerges, dripping, from the water and walks back into the woods. The Reflecting Pool drew on the near-drowning of his six-year-old self. It was also classic Viola, its most notable features – slowness, water, a numinous spirituality – recurring in his work of the next half century.

It was the subaqueous blue glow of the screen of a Sony Portapak video camera, donated to his high school in Flushing, New York, that first attracted Viola to the medium. He was raised in the neighbouring lower-middle-class suburb of Queens. It was not, recalled Viola, a cultured household, but his mother, Wynne (nee Lee) “had some ability and sort of taught me how to draw, so when I was three years old I could do pretty good motorboats”. A year before his near death by drowning, a kindergarten finger-painting of a tornado won public praise from his teacher. It was then, Viola said, that he decided to be an artist.

His father, a Pan Am flight attendant turned service manager, had other ideas. Fearing that an art school education would leave his son unemployable, Viola senior insisted that he study for a liberal arts degree at Syracuse, a respected university in upstate New York. “And in saying that,” Viola would admit, “he saved me.”

As luck would have it, Syracuse, in 1970, was among the first universities to promote experimentation in new media. A fellow student had set up a studio where projects could be made using a video camera. Signing up for it, Viola was instantly converted: “Something in my brain said I’d be doing this all my life,” he remembered. He spent the following summer wiring up the university’s new cable TV system, taking a job as a janitor in its technology centre so that he could spend his nights mastering the newfangled colour video system. In 1972, he made his first artwork, Tape I, a study of his own reflection in a mirror. This, too, would be trademark Viola, bewitched by video’s ability simultaneously to see and be seen, but also by his own image. The I in the work’s title was not a Roman numeral but a personal pronoun.

Tape I and works like it were enough to catch the eye of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, whose pioneering Florence studio, ART/TAPES/22, made videos for Arte Povera artists. When Viola took a job there in 1974, he found himself working alongside such giants as Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis. By 1977, his own reputation in the small but growing world of video art led to his being invited to show his work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, his acceptance encouraged by the offer of free Pan Am flights from his father.

The invitation had come from La Trobe’s director of culture, Kira Perov. The following year, Perov moved to New York to be with Viola, and they married in 1978. They would stay in the house in Long Beach, California, that they moved into three years later, for the rest of their married lives. In 1980-81, the couple spent 18 months in Japan, Viola simultaneously working as the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi laboratories and studying Zen Buddhism.

This melding of the sacred and technologically profane would mark Viola’s work of the next four decades. Viola listed “eastern and western spiritual traditions including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism” as influences on his art, although it was the last of these that was the most apparent. At university, he said, he had “hated” the old masters, and proximity to the greatest of them in Florence had not changed that view. It was only with the death of his mother in 1991 that he began to feel the weight of western art history, and to acknowledge it in his own work.

Having struggled with a creative block since the late 1980s, he found that the grief of his mother’s death freed him. Summoned to her side by his father, Viola filmed first the dying woman and then her body lying in an open coffin. This footage would be used in a 54-minute work called The Passing, and then again the following year in the Nantes Triptych, its three screens concurrently showing a woman giving birth, Viola’s dying mother and, in between them, a man submerged in a tank of water.

The first of Viola and Perov’s two sons had been born in 1988. Nantes Triptych was, or appeared to be, a meditation on birth, death and rebirth through baptism. If the subject was traditional, so too was Viola’s use of the triptych form. His references to the old masters would soon become more direct still. In 1995, Viola was chosen to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. One part of the work, Buried Secrets, that he showed in the American pavilion drew openly on a painting by Jacopo da Pontormo of the visitation of the Virgin Mary to her elderly cousin, Elizabeth.

Not surprisingly in these secular times, Viola’s subject matter was not universally popular. The art world was particularly divided. When his videos were shown among the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London in an exhibition called The Passions in 2003, one outraged critic dubbed Viola “a master of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity”.

The pairing at the Royal Academy in 2019 of his work with drawings by Michelangelo from the Royal Collection drew the barbed comment from the Guardian critic that “Viola’s art is so much of its own time that it is already dated, dead in the water”.

Predictably, he was more popular with the public at large, a survey at a Viola retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris showing that visitors had spent an average of two-and-a-half hours at the exhibition. Churchmen, too, were won over by Viola’s work, particularly those of the Church of England. In 1996, the artist was invited to make a video piece, The Messenger, for Durham Cathedral. In 2014, the first part of a two-part commission called Martyrs and Mary was installed at St Paul’s, the second joining it two years later. The project, thanks to ecclesiastical wrangling, had been a decade in the making. “The church works kind of slow,” remarked Viola, mildly. “But then I also work kind of slow.”

That mildness, and the religiosity of his subjects, may have led critics to underestimate the rigour of his work. Like Viola’s art or not, he was a master of it. His appreciation of the promise – and the threat – of technology was profound. Viola chafed against the primitiveness of early video, seeing each development in the medium as an opportunity to be grasped. The close-up portraits of The Passions series, for example, made use of flatscreen technology almost as it was invented.

By contrast, the binary nature of the modern world bothered him. “The age of computers is a very dangerous one because they work on ‘yes or no’, ‘1 or 0’,” Viola mourned. “There’s no maybe, perhaps or both. And I think this is affecting our consciousness.” The dissemination of video as an art form had not been like the spread of oil painting by the Van Eyck brothers 500 years before, he said, video having appeared everywhere and at once. True to these beliefs, Viola saw no contradiction in treating Renaissance subjects, and a Renaissance belief system, with the latest inventions from Sony. “The two are actually very close,” he said. “I see the digital age as the joining of the material and the spiritual into a yet-to-be-determined whole.”

In 2012, Viola was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. His work after this was increasingly made with the help of Perov, a fact that lent a new poignancy to the themes of memory and loss that often ran through it.

Viola is survived by his wife and their sons, Blake and Andrei, and by his siblings, Andrea and Robert .

🔔 Bill (William John) Viola, video artist, born 25 January 1951; died 12 July 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[gatheringbones]

[“Another thread in the American privileging of forgiveness over repentance has to do with how theology was used in the service of power in the wake of the Civil War.

Shortly after the conflict ended, northern white clergy began preaching forgiveness, reconciliation, and unity with white southerners, at the expense of justice, or even safety, for Black Americans, whether newly emancipated or already free.

One of the main proponents of this viewpoint was the white Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, long known for his support of abolition alongside other progressive issues like Darwin’s theory of evolution and women’s suffrage. And yet, by 1865, he was preaching things like, “There are no antagonistic interests between the North and the South. Religion, blood, business are same, and if there are no social or political reasons for hatred, why should we not be the best of friends?”

But more than that, Beecher encouraged white northerners to ignore reports of abuse committed by white southerners against Black Americans—writing, for example, in the New York Independent, “You must not be disappointed or startled because you see in the newspapers accounts of shocking barbarities committed upon”newly liberated people.

One reason for this approach, as the white historian Dr. Hanne Blank puts it, is that

forgiveness—and finding common ground—between white southerners and northerners was part of the larger political project of thinking about the U.S. as a union that was “unbreakable.” The stress that state-level autonomy placed on the federal identity of the U.S. as a whole was seen as something that had to be “managed,” and one of the ways to manage it was to [approach it as] “Okay, we’ve had our fight and now we need to kiss and make up so we can be Americans again.”

But that reunification was predicated not only on white northerners ignoring white southerners’ violence against Black people, but on the assumption that the “we” who had been fighting were white, that the “we” who would kiss and make up were white, and that “we” would not ask anything of those so attached to the institution of slavery that they were willing to wage the bloodiest war in American history over it. “We” were all fine now, went the logic. And perhaps “we,” united in this way, could thus also exclude Black Americans from the equation, making it easier to deny them the full rights of citizenship and belonging.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022