#Rally Maya 2017

[xprojectrpg]

Yesterday in X-Project - January 20

2015: Reality Coming Down: Professor X and Emma plan on a strategy to protect the school from the impending danger; Emma, Molly, Tandy and Tyrone defend against their robotic evil selves in the foyer; Gabriel, Miles, Sarah and Johnny defend the stairs against their zombie selves; Sue, Topaz, Hope, and Meggan defend the rear of the school against their evil doppelgangers; Emma’s team are forced to retreat; Sue and Gabriel’s team merge to help relieve some of the pressure on Emma’s team; The teams finish off their evil doppelgangers and try to make sense of what is happening; The New Mutants and Emma are all together when the Dark Phoenix finally reaches the mansion, who buries the teen under the falling debris of the mansion.

The Dark Phoenix: The previously injured regroup in the med lab prepare to set out into the destroyed mansion and help people; North forces Laurie to keep moving despite her unwillingness; the team from India returns to find the mansion in ruins and set out to help; the first group from the med lab find the Dark Phoenix, and are forced into a holding pattern; the second med lab group sets out to rescue people out of the rubble; people regroup in an attempt to find a strategy and stop Dark Phoenix; Dark Phoenix lashes out telekinetically, only to be shut down by Cecilia, Amanda, and Billy, who provide cover; Wanda and Strange grab Doug and North, using them to channel energy and try to hold reality together; the first team moves in to try and take out Dark Phoenix’s shield, but the telekinetic backlash takes several of them out; another team goes hunting for survivors, and Callisto is killed; Dark Phoenix continues her hunt, injuring Jubilee and killing Miles; Paige, trying to defend Tandy, Ty, and Molly, about to die, is visited by Brunhilde, and tries to convince her to save the kids; Clarice, Sooraya, Pixie, and Artie try to help Topaz, Johnny, and Hope back to the Blackbird, only to be attacked by a group of alters; a group tries release Jean from her powers suppressor, intent on using it on Dark Phoenix; a group of semi-invulnerables try to go against Dark Phoenix, but to no avail; Charles takes all the safeties off Cerebro to prepare for his own last stand; Emma and Haller work together on a psychic defense; the force field goes down, and Billy is killed; the psionic defense meets Dark Phoenix, who lashes out and kills Sarah V and Lorna, and Charles goes down; a group gets the power suppressor on Dark Phoenix, but it fails; the psionic defense finally fails; Jean confronts the Dark Phoenix and is overwhelmed; Wanda’s attempts to keep reality together fail, and the power overload kills her and Strange; Jean rallies against Dark Phoenix, finally destroying her; the survivors find themselves facing the end of the world and Xorn, who tells them he will piece together a new world for them to live in; they later wake up on the mansion grounds in the new universe.PHASE 2

2016: Amanda leaves a wreath of English Ivy, Scarlet Poppies, Pink Sweet Peas, and Potato Vine Flowers at the M-Day memorial. Cecilia posts to the journals expressing her disbelief that it’s already been a year since M-Day and inviting anyone who wants to join her and her dog watching movies and eating junk food on the couch.

2017: Maya decides art museums and dance are the best way to cope with Inauguration Day. With Extreme Prejudice: Daredevil and Spider-Man investigate the apartment of one of the victims and are surprised by a detective, who surprisingly turns out to be an ally; Miles discovers a ninja star at the scene.

2018: Tandy makes a journal entry about potentially graduating early, and how her work on the local food bank is coming along.

2019:

2020: Topaz wonders how it can still be January. Kyle approaches Garrison about rejoining the X-Men; after sounding out Garrison, Kyle emails Scott asking to rejoin the team.

2021:

2022:

2023:

[sethshead]

To watch most of these videos, as I sought to do in recent days, and see the seat of our representative government turned into the object of a violent attack by fellow Americans is overwhelming. And what struck me most about them is just how much this assemblage of people assaulting the Capitol reminded me of people I had seen and spoken with over the years at regular Republican campaign events, going all the way back to Sarah Palin’s electric appearances in 2008. At my first Trump rally in 2016, at an airplane hangar outside Dayton, Ohio, I had been amazed by the cross section on display: There were husbands in golf caps with well-manicured wives, frat boys, fathers with sons. All of them, all that year, had thrilled to Trump’s toxic rambles about heroin-toting Mexicans, Democratic voter fraud (a theme he had picked up from plenty of more conventional Republican politicians) and “the swamp” in Congress. Never mind that the Republican Party controlled the lower chamber of the legislature for eight years of the decade and the upper chamber for six.

And now here were many of the same people, or at least, the ones with the means and will to make the trip, a sort of travel-team self-selection of the usual crowds, combined with ranks of the white-supremacist warriors who had descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As at all those rallies, there were the rootless young men spoiling for a fight, and there was also a huge range of more bourgeois sorts — from people who presented as suburban dads to one real estate agent who flew in by private plane, announcing her plans to “storm the capitol” on Facebook — eager for a spectacle, or something more. And they were saying the same things I’d been hearing from them for years.

Except there was one difference: They were actually there, in Washington, at the Capitol — the very targets of their rhetorical fury all those years. And one way of looking at the videos is that they are the story of thousands of people discovering the connection between the rhetoric and the fact of their presence there, at the actual building. Some are so stunned by the connection that they don’t really know what to do about it and mostly hang back. Many others respond to the sudden proximity as if a forgotten, dust-covered cord had been plugged into a power source. They feel the inexorable surge, and they advance.

In the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” We saw who and what Trump’s base was at his rallies, in their unhinged posts and violent rhetoric. Was it ever a surprise to anyone that, empowered and officially encouraged, they would do this and worse?

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 4.7

451 – Attila the Hun sacks the town of Metz and attacks other cities in Gaul. 529 – First draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence) is issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. 611 – Maya king Uneh Chan of Calakmul sacks rival city-state Palenque in southern Mexico. 1141 – Empress Matilda becomes the first female ruler of England, adopting the title 'Lady of the English'. 1348 – Charles University is founded in Prague. 1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Cebu. 1541 – Francis Xavier leaves Lisbon on a mission to the Portuguese East Indies. 1724 – Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion, BWV 245, at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig. 1767 – End of Burmese–Siamese War (1765–67). 1776 – Captain John Barry and the USS Lexington captures the Edward. 1788 – American pioneers to the Northwest Territory establish Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. 1789 – Selim III became Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of Islam. 1798 – The Mississippi Territory is organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and Spain. It is expanded in 1804 and again in 1812. 1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: The Corps of Discovery breaks camp among the Mandan tribe and resumes its journey West along the Missouri River. 1805 – German composer Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. 1827 – John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year. 1829 – Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, commences translation of the Book of Mormon, with Oliver Cowdery as his scribe. 1831 – Emperor Pedro I of Brazil resigns. He goes to his native Portugal to become King Pedro IV. 1862 – American Civil War: The Union's Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio defeat the Confederate Army of Mississippi near Shiloh, Tennessee. 1868 – Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation, is assassinated by a Fenian activist. 1890 – Completion of the first Lake Biwa Canal. 1906 – Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples. 1906 – The Algeciras Conference gives France and Spain control over Morocco. 1922 – The United States Secretary of the Interior leases federal petroleum reserves to private oil companies on excessively generous terms. 1927 – The first long-distance public television broadcast (from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displaying the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover). 1933 – Prohibition in the United States is repealed for beer of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight, eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment. (Now celebrated as National Beer Day in the United States.) 1940 – Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp. 1943 – The Holocaust in Ukraine: In Terebovlia, Germans order 1,100 Jews to undress and march through the city to the nearby village of Plebanivka, where they are shot and buried in ditches. 1943 – Ioannis Rallis becomes collaborationist Prime Minister of Greece during the Axis Occupation. 1945 – World War II: The battleship Yamato, one of the two largest ever constructed, is sunk by American aircraft during Operation Ten-Go. 1945 – World War II: Visoko is liberated by the 7th, 9th, and 17th Krajina brigades from the Tenth division of Yugoslav Partisan forces. 1948 – The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations. 1949 – The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific opened on Broadway; it would run for 1,925 performances and win ten Tony Awards. 1954 – United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower gives his "domino theory" speech during a news conference. 1955 – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health. 1964 – IBM announces the System/360. 1964 – A bulldozer kills Rev. Bruce W. Klunder, a civil rights activist, during a school segregation protest in Cleveland, Ohio, sparking a riot. 1965 – Representatives of the National Congress of American Indians testify before members of the US Senate against the termination of the Colville tribe in Washington DC. 1968 – Motor racing world champion Jim Clark is killed in an accident during a Formula Two race at Hockenheim. 1969 – The Internet's symbolic birth date: Publication of RFC 1. 1971 – President Richard Nixon announces his decision to quicken the pace of Vietnamization. 1972 – Communist forces overran the South Vietnamese town of Loc Ninh. 1976 – Member of Parliament and suspected spy John Stonehouse resigns from the Labour Party (UK) after being arrested for faking his own death. 1977 – German Federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by two Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light. 1978 – Development of the neutron bomb is canceled by President Jimmy Carter. 1980 – During the Iran hostage crisis, the United States severs relations with Iran. 1983 – During STS-6, astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson perform the first Space Shuttle spacewalk. 1989 – Soviet submarine Komsomolets sinks in the Barents Sea off the coast of Norway killing 42 sailors. 1990 – Iran–Contra affair: John Poindexter is found guilty of five charges for his part in the scandal (the conviction is later reversed on appeal). 1990 – A fire breaks out on the passenger ferry Scandinavian Star, killing 159 people. 1994 – Rwandan genocide: Massacres of Tutsis begin in Kigali, Rwanda. 1994 – Auburn Calloway attempts to destroy Federal Express Flight 705 in order to allow his family to benefit from his life insurance policy. 1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops begin a massacre of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya. 1999 – The World Trade Organization rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas. 2001 – Mars Odyssey is launched. 2003 – U.S. troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later. 2009 – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings by security forces. 2009 – Mass protests begin across Moldova under the belief that results from the parliamentary election are fraudulent. 2011 – The Israel Defense Forces use their Iron Dome missile system to successfully intercept a BM-21 Grad launched from Gaza, marking the first short-range missile intercept ever. 2017 – A man deliberately drives a hijacked truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, Sweden, killing five people and injuring fifteen others.

[isladeportiva]

Turismo deportivo, un detonante económico para Carmen

Turismo deportivo, un detonante económico para Carmen

La coordinadora de Turismo Municipal, Ana Ongay, señala que han cumplido con la expectativas en los eventos turísticos en donde se conjuga el deporte

En las últimas fechas Ciudad del Carmen ha recibido una notable presencia de deportistas, gracias a eventos de muy alta relevancia, lo que genera una importante derrama económica; tal como lo fue el Triatlón “Isla de Tris 2017”, Fiesta del Mar, y…

[noticiasencarmen]

Carmen, sede del “Rally Maga México 2017”

Carmen, sede del “Rally Maga México 2017”

Del 18 al 29 de Mayo iniciará la 4ta. edición del “Rally Maya 2017” organizado por Rally Maya México S.A de C.V. , donde se exhiben y compiten autos clásicos que tengan más de 40 años de antigüedad, la cual consiste en recorrer una distancia media establecida más no se trata de una competencia de velocidad. Los estados de Campeche, Yucatán y Quintana Roo será sede del museo rodante del…

[fandomtrumpshate]

FTH nonprofits: RAINN

This year, FTH is dedicating the fight to twelve incredible charity organizations that work ceaselessly to protect marginalized and vulnerable communities. Each day for the next twelve days, we’ll be posting a more in-depth look at what one of these organizations does and how a donation could help their cause.

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network: supporting survivors of rape and abuse, through both individual support and educational and policy outreach

Every 98 seconds an American is sexually assaulted, and every 11 minutes, that victim is a child.(1) Approximately 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. About 1 out of every 33 American men has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in his lifetime. (2) Meanwhile, only 5 out of every 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison.(1) These horrific statistics do not cover the scope of the problem, as sexual violence is “notoriously difficult to measure and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime”, but they do begin to show how pervasive and severe an issue it is.(2) Each of these people not only experiences a traumatic event, but must also bear the stigma and enduring consequences of that event—including an increased awareness of how sexual violence survivors are depicted in the media and discussed by authority figures.

Trump has openly derided the testimony of a sexual assault victim while on stage at a political rally. (3) Trump himself has had allegations of harassment and assault leveled at him by at least 19 women, who cite incidents dating as far back as the 1980s.(4) (5) The Trump administration’s new policies on sexual violence in colleges and universities has created a legal exemption for the investigation of any assaults that do not take place on campus, or are not reported to the school official designated to deal with such cases. The alleged victim could also have to prove their case by the “clear and convincing” standard of evidence, as opposed to the less strict “preponderance of the evidence” standard previously required.(6)

Additionally, the Trump administration has changed the Department of Justice’s definitions of sexual assault so that it is now defined as “any non-consensual sexual act proscribed by Federal, tribal, or State law, including when the victim lacks capacity to consent”, narrowing the definition and to an “act” and erasing the lack of explicit consent of the recipient as the defining characteristic of an assault.(7) It is clear that through semantic changes, policy amendments and toxic rhetoric, the Trump administration intends to devalue sexual assault victims and harm their chances of overcoming their experiences. This can also be regarded as part of a larger trend of pushing back women’s rights in general, and speaks to the continued marginalisation of vulnerable communities under the Trump administration.

The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) is the US’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, and the leading authority on sexual violence. Encompassing public education, public policy, consulting services and technology, RAINN’s team of experts in victim services, educators and trained volunteers work together to create victim-centered, trauma-informed services.  It operates the free National Sexual Assault Hotline, which is accessible 24/7 by phone as well as its anonymous, IM-based online counterpart since 2008, the first of its kind.(8) Working with over 1,000 local sexual assault service providers, RAINN helps offer confidential support services to survivors regardless of where they are in their recovery.(9) (10) Founded as a phone hotline, RAINN widened their mission to include educating the public; improving public policy; and, most recently, consulting for companies and institutions to improve how they handle sexual assault prevention and response. (11)

RAINN’s public education programme runs education workshops and trainings on sexual violence, plus raises the visibility of sexual violence and advances the public’s understanding of the crime by liaising and consulting for the media, entertainment industries and colleges to provide expert advice and accurate information. RAINN operates the Speakers Bureau, a network of more than 1,500 survivors who voluntarily share their stories with local communities and the media, ensuring that real stories are being heard. RAINN also works on public policy at the federal and state level to improve the criminal justice system, prevent sexual assault, and ensure justice for survivors. This includes leading the US effort to overcome the rape kit backlog and maintaining the Laws in Your State database which contains up-to-date information on sexual violence laws across the US.(10) 2018 saw the longest, sustained growth of people reaching out in RAINN’s 25-year history, with the result of 73 victim services professionals being hired, and the recruitment of dozens of new hotline volunteers to handle the increased demand. (12) Thus far, RAINN’S hotlines have helped over 2.7 million survivors since its foundation in 1994.(13)

The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network is a tax deductible 501(c)3 charitable organisation.

Citations:

[1] “Statistics.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[2] “Scope of the Problem: Statistics.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[3] Bever, Lindsey. “Trump's Onstage Mockery of Christine Blasey Ford Was 'Hurtful' to Sexual Assault Survivors.” The Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2018.

[4] Ford, Matt. “What About the 19 Women Who Accused Trump of Sexual Misconduct?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 Dec. 2017.

[5] Evon, Dan. “FACT CHECK: Did Sexual Assault Allegations Against Donald Trump Only Start With the 2016 Election?” Snopes.com.

[6] Caroline Kitchener, Adam Harris. “A Step-by-Step Guide to Trump's New College Sexual-Assault Policy.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 7 Sept. 2018.

[7] Oppenheim, Maya. “Trump's Decision to Change Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Definitions 'Roll Women's Rights Back 50 Years'.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 24 Jan. 2019.

[8] Kornblum, Janet. “More Abuse Victims Able to Get Help Online.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 14 Apr. 2008.

[9] “Programs and Expertise.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[10] “About the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[11] Berkowitz, Scott. “RAINN’s President and Founder Reflects on 25 Years.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[12] “In 2018, RAINN Helped More Survivors Than Ever.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[13] “About RAINN.” RAINN | The Nation's Largest Anti-Sexual Violence Organization.

[mxgol]

Una vez más el Rally Maya hará historia con ultramar

Una vez más el Rally Maya hará historia con ultramar

Cada año el Rally Maya México busca innovar, cautivar, enamorar a sus participantes. En 2017 la organización del museo rodante y Ultramar se dieron a la tarea de planificar todo un trabajo de compleja logística, para que la caravana de joyas automotrices llegara a la Isla de Cozumel y después de dos etapas cruzara el caribe mexicano para volver a territorio continental de Quintana Roo.

(more…)

[peace-love-colbert]

Anti-LGBT politician resigns after being 'caught having sex with man in his office'

The Independent | Maya Oppenheim | November 17, 2017

An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office.

Wes Goodman, who is the Republican state legislator for Ohio, is married to a woman who is assistant director of an annual anti-abortion rally known as March for Life.

The right-wing legislator, who pushed “family values”, was reportedly witnessed having sex with a man inside his office who was not employed by the legislator.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, the observer told Ohio House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe what had happened on Tuesday afternoon. Mr Dittoe responded by telling House Speaker Republican Cliff Rosenberger who in turn met with Mr Goodman. 

The 33-year-old, who has been branded the “conscience of the conservative movement”, resigned for “inappropriate conduct” shortly after the meeting took place.

Mr Goodman, whose Twitter biography describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027”, has regularly claimed "natural marriage" occurs between a man and a woman. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE Nov. 18: The Washington Post reports that Goodman allegedly fondled an 18-year-old college student in a hotel room at a 2015 event for the Council for National Policy. It’s unclear if this was the alleged incident that prompted Goodman’s resignation or a separate claim. [The Huffington Post]

[didanawisgi]

The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

By Bob Moser (2019)

“In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two, had been fired. The official statement sent by Cohen, who took control of the S.P.L.C. in 2003, didn’t specify why Dees had been dismissed, but it contained some broad hints. “We’re committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we espouse—truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” Cohen wrote. “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” Dees’s profile was immediately erased from the S.P.L.C.’s Web site—amazing, considering that he had remained, to the end, the main face and voice of the center, his signature on most of the direct-mail appeals that didn’t come from celebrity supporters, such as the author Toni Morrison.

While right-wingers tweeted gleefully about the demise of a figure they’d long vilified—“Hate group founder has been fired by his hate group,” the alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich chirped—S.P.L.C. alums immediately reconnected with one another, buzzing about what might have happened and puzzling over the timing, sixteen years after Dees handed the reins to Cohen and went into semi-retirement. “I guess there’s nothing like a funeral to bring families back together,” another former writer at the center said, speculating about what might have prompted the move. “It could be racial, sexual, financial—that place was a virtual buffet of injustices,” she said. Why would they fire him now?

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the center’s current leadership, stretching back many years. (The S.P.L.C. has since appointed Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff for Michelle Obama, to conduct a review of its workplace environment.) If Cohen and other senior leaders thought that they could shunt the blame, the riled-up staffers seem determined to prove them wrong. One of my former female colleagues told me that she didn’t want to go into details of her harassment for this story, because she believes the focus should be on the S.P.L.C.’s current leadership. “I just gotta hope your piece helps keep the momentum for change going,” she said. Stephen Bright, a Yale professor and longtime S.P.L.C. critic, told me, “These chickens took a very long flight before they came home to roost.” The question, for current and former staffers alike, is how many chickens will come to justice before this long-overdue reckoning is complete.

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers. But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,” a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us. Working together, we can push back against these bigots.”

In 1971, when the center opened, Dees was already a colorful and controversial figure in Alabama. While studying law at the University of Alabama, in the late nineteen-fifties, “Dees sold holly wreaths and birthday cakes, published a student telephone directory, dabbled in real estate,” Egerton wrote. He also worked for George Wallace’s first, unsuccessful bid for governor, in 1958. Upon graduating, in 1960, Dees teamed up with another ambitious student, Millard Fuller, who’d go on to found Habitat for Humanity. They opened a direct-mail business in Montgomery, selling doormats, tractor-seat cushions, and cookbooks. “Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” Fuller would later recall. “We were not particular about how we did it.” While running their business, the two also practiced law. In 1961, they defended one of the men charged with beating up Freedom Riders at a bus terminal in Montgomery. According to Fuller, “Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council.”

In the late sixties, Dees sold the direct-mail operation to the Times Mirror Company, of Los Angeles, reportedly for between six and seven million dollars. But he soon sniffed out a new avenue for his marketing genius. In 1969, he successfully sued to integrate the local Y.M.C.A., after two black children were turned away from summer camp. Two years later, he co-founded the Law Center, with another Montgomery attorney, Joe Levin, Jr. He volunteered to raise money for George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, and, with McGovern’s blessing, used its donor list of seven hundred thousand people to help launch the S.P.L.C.’s direct-mail operations. The center won some big cases early on, including a lawsuit that forced the Alabama legislature to divide into single-member districts, insuring the election of the state’s first African-American lawmakers since Reconstruction. In 1975, the S.P.L.C. started a defense fund for Joan Little, a black prisoner in North Carolina who’d stabbed to death a jailer who attempted to rape her; the case became a national sensation and drew attention to the intrepid little operation in Montgomery. Dees, of course, had already positioned the Law Center to capitalize on the positive press.

A decade or so later, the center began to abandon poverty law—representing death-row defendants and others who lacked the means to hire proper representation—to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan. This was a seemingly odd mission, given that the Klan, which had millions of members in the nineteen-twenties, was mostly a spent force by the mid-eighties, with only an estimated ten thousand members scattered across the country. But “Dees saw the Klan as a perfect target,” Egerton wrote. For millions of Americans, the K.K.K. still personified violent white supremacy in America, and Dees “perceived chinks in the Klan’s armor: poverty and poor education in its ranks, competitive squabbling among the leaders, scattered and disunited factions, undisciplined behavior, limited funds, few if any good lawyers.” Along with legal challenges to what was left of the Klan, the center launched Klanwatch, which monitored the group’s activities. Klanwatch was the seed for what became the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list.

The only thing easier than beating the Klan in court—“like shooting fish in a barrel,” one of Dees’s associates told Egerton—was raising money off Klan-fighting from liberals up north, who still had fresh visions of the violent confrontations of the sixties in their heads. The S.P.L.C. got a huge publicity boost in July, 1983, when three Klansmen firebombed its headquarters. A melted clock from the burned-down building, stuck at 3:47 a.m., is featured in the main lobby of the Montgomery office today. In 1987, the center won a landmark seven-million-dollar damage judgment against the Klan; a decade later, in 1998, it scored a thirty-eight-million-dollar judgment against Klansmen who burned down a black church in South Carolina. With those victories, Dees claimed the right to boast into perpetuity that the S.P.L.C. had effectively “shut down” the K.K.K.

By the time I touched down in Montgomery, the center had increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list, which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the “rising tide of hate” discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups. As critics have long pointed out, however, the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the S.P.L.C.’s “attacks.”

In recent years, the center has broadened its legal work, returning to some poverty law; around eighty attorneys now work in five Southern states, challenging, among other things, penal juvenile-justice systems and draconian anti-immigration laws. But the center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention. The most notable, when I was there, was a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument that was brazenly placed in the main lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building, just across the street from S.P.L.C. headquarters, by Roy Moore, who was then the state’s chief justice. Like the S.P.L.C.’s well-publicized 2017 lawsuit against Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi publisher of the Daily Stormer, it was a vintage example of the center’s central strategy: taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.

These days, whenever I tell people in New York or Washington, D.C., that I used to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center, their eyes tend to light up. “Oh, wow, what was that like?” they’ll ask. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I’ll regale them with stories about the reporting I did there—exposing anti-immigration extremists on the Arizona-Mexico border, tracking down a wave of anti-transgender hate crimes, writing a comprehensive history of the religious right’s war on gays. But then, considering whether to explain what an unsettling experience it could be, I’ll add, “It’s complicated, though,” and try to change the subject.

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.

It wasn’t funny then. At this moment, it seems even grimmer. The firing of Dees has flushed up all the uncomfortable questions again. Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out? “Of course we did,” a former colleague told me, as we parsed the news over the phone. “It’s shameful, but when you’re there you kind of end up accepting things. I never even considered speaking out when things happened to me! It doesn’t feel good to recognize that. I was so into the work, and so motivated by it, I kind of shrugged off what was going on.” A couple of days later, she texted me: “I’m having SPLC nightmares.” Aren’t we all, I thought.”

Bob Moser is the author of “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority.”

[xprojectrpg]

PHASE 2

2015: Clint texts Felicia about having good revenge. Warren posts about game night. Jubilee posts about her and Cookie Monster being friends. Maya emails Wade about wanting to attend a mutant rights rally. Dial My Number: Darcy posts on Facebook about being doxxed; Darcy contacts Clint after stalkerish photos of herself and her family land in her inbox; Clarice and Clint bring Darcy to the mansion.

2016: Artie shares a video featuring contemporary visionary art and architecture. Cecilia and Laurie decide to play catch up over dinner and drinks.

2017: Sooraya emails Angelo, Scott, Garrison and Everett, and then Julian, Kyle and Angel about her powers manual project.

2018:

2019: Lorna texts Alex to inform him they have the 12th to the 18th off for their anniversary. Tandy is looking for volunteers for the food bank for the holiday season.

2020:

2021: Nica uses National Coming Out Day to come out as asexual. Terry emails Sue for help regarding a showcase she's trying to organize. Alani reminds everyone that Christopher Columbus sucks. Maya reinforces the message. Topaz posts about a totally random library inventory audit. Jean and Darcy talk about powers.

2022:

[ivandimarcofotografo]

Queens’ Land: the indigenous Mayan queens of Guatemala – photo essay

Hundreds of indigenous queens are elected each year in Guatemala. Photographer Julia Zabrodzka presents this little-known part of modern Mayan culture

Angelica Cardona, with a microphone in her hand, stands among a group of candidates. Her voice reverberates firmly from the stage: “The art of weaving forms part of our Mayan identity. Nowadays, however, cheap printed fabrics are replacing our ancestral hand-woven textiles. This is how capitalism is killing our culture and preventing us from putting our heart in each artisanal piece we produce.” Her last words sound like a cry of protest. Seems rather like a leftwing party’s rally than a beauty pageant, doesn’t it? Well, indigenous queen elections are not typical beauty contests.

Invited queens rest during the coronation in San Sebastián Huehuetenango.

Angelica Cardona and Juana Col taking a selfie during election in La Económica Carranza in 2018.

Betzaida Marisol Cahuoc López, indigenous queen of San Miguel Chicaj. Neydi Francisca Daniela Ac Rax - from Rimam Ajau, the Granddaughter of the King.

A mass before the election in Tamahú. All the candidates wear traditional clothes from their town.

Candidates for the crown of Tamahú.

Lily Ixkotz’ij Saloj, 2017-2018 indigenous queen of Chaquijya village and Sololá municipality in her parents’ house. Right – on stage in 2017, and preparing for the Christmas parade.

Marily López, indigenous queen of San Rafael Petzal in her room. Right, Odethy Tzep, 2017-2018 indigenous queen of Chuachinup before a recording for a local TV station.

Sara Elisabeth Mesia, indigenous queen of Santiago Atitlán.

Maribel Cal, 2017-2018 indigenous representative of San Cristóbal Verapaz, with her father and teacher.

Quetzalí, the first trans indigenous Princess of Guatemala 2017-2018. For the past couple of years the Maya LGBT community has been organising its own elections.

Maybe Noemy Canahui Sis, indigenous queen of El Progreso village, San Miguel Chicaj, and Imelda Quej, indigenous queen of Tamahú on the last day of her term in 2020.

Ana Monroy, 2017-2018 indigenous queen of San Pedro Sacatepéquez, in her mother’s house.

Meal for the invited queens in Chiché.

One of the queens invited to the election in Tamahú is walking down the ‘red carpet’ made of pine needles, a typical adornment of Maya ceremonies.

Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/01/queens-land-the-indigenous-mayan-queens-of-guatemala-photo-essay

[intellectual-philosopher-blog]

The "Idiocracy" of our Political System

The state of our collective idiocy astounds me on a daily basis. It doesn't matter if you are left or right in your views, both sides still fall into the duped category. This is astoundingly prevalent in North America currently. I cannot think of two more opposing political views than the ones held by Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump. However, both share resounding similarities when you get down to the roots of who they are and what they represent.

Both of these characters have carefully crafted images to appeal to their bases....Trumps may actually be a little less careful....maybe we should say, managed. Let's start with Justin Trudeau, the flowing locks of the compassionate feminist doing yoga while taking a selfie. An image that he works hard to portray to appeal to the softer side of the Canadian collective consciousness. People eat that dog shit up like its handed to them on a silver platter. The comments of "He's so good looking" are enough to make me want to throw up.....why would you hire the leader of your nation based on garbage like that. This guy was literally a ski instructor and a drama teacher.....not exactly the resume you would think you need to run a nation. Buuuut, Jr. has some very wealthy and powerful friends who required his image to push forth their agenda.

And Trump...the orange bombastic megalomaniac. The flowing locks of carefully crafted madness upon his head, with the suit and tie of a successful business man. Doesn't matter how he gains his success that is his image, the larger than life character literally building his empire to see his name plated in gold on his various buildings. This appealed to the collective consciousness of the U.S. that this businessman could put more money in their pockets at the end of day than some extension of the Obama legacy liberal agenda. It did not matter that Trump is a racist, womanizing "pussy" grabber, people believed he'd be better than the money grabbing liberals. This guy literally had ZERO experience in the political arena....not exactly the resume you would think you need to run a nation. Buuuut, Jr. has some very wealthy and powerful friends who required his image to push forth their agenda.

These are our choices... Really??? This is the best and the brightest that these two nations have to offer....Really? This is the point that idiocy comes into play in our political systems. For the most part people are voting based on an image, not the substance of the candidate. If it was based on substance both of these leaders would have more credentials on their resume. These 2 characters are the puppets for their political donors. It takes MONEY to get elected, not substance. That money equals favors and obligations for the candidate who gets elected to push forth the donors agendas...not any of the lies that the candidates are telling you.

Trudeau and Trump at the core of who they are are actually quite similar. They are both narcissistic wealthy trust fund kids who are there for gain for themselves and their friends. I don't believe for a second that these two have any real cares about the "middle class". Both are very media savvy and know how to work the human brain into complacency. This is about power and corruption for these two, just delivered on different plates. Trudeau is old guard of Central Canada, Trump is old guard of corporate America. If you actually look at the policies moving forward (not the spin version of the policies) its all about putting money in their friends pockets.

Trudeau gives away money like its candy to buy power and more friends, all in the name of "helping the middle class. Money for Bombardier is an easy gift in vote rich Quebec. Changing tax policy to benefit his own finance minister is exceptionally corrupt. Bill Morneau's family sells private investment tools for retirement...so lets take away good tax policy for small business owners so Bill Morneau's family can benefit, disgusting. What does this get us?? Higher tax bills and higher national debt.

Trump is planning on taking away a health care plan that will literally leave millions of people with no options if they get sick. All the while gutting the EPA which will mean more pollution for more people to get sick. He also plans on a massive tax cut will leave more money in his and his wealthiest friends bank accounts even though its bad policy and will add a trillion dollars to the nations balance sheet. Don't get wrong here, I am actually very pro low taxes...money in the hands of government is inefficient but that's for another post. He claims this is necessary for the "middle class" even though unemployment rates are at their lowest point in over a decade. His policies are racist class warfare which will just leave people with bigger bills and less money.

So what does the collective "we" do while this shit show goes on? Nothing. There are rallies and protests but for the most part most people don't have the time or the energy to get anywhere. The real policies are delivered by the well funded lobbyists to get their agendas passed by making promises of future donations. We just get tired and go back to work so we can buy more crap.

So where does the term "Idiocracy" come from? It is a 2006 movie starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. Now it seems as though it was a prophecy for our state of politics in 2017. I would push everyone to watch it....its the movie version of our current reality. How do we find our way out of this mess? Who knows, maybe we are designed to be the sheep that the political establishments believe's we are. Maybe a spiritual enlightenment of the collective consciousness will guide the way. Until then, we can watch this madness unfold and hope that Trump doesn't start a nuclear war in the mean time.

[raceforequality-blog]

Films & Documentaries celebrating Black people

Representation for Black communities in popular culture in Hollywood is important because the impact of seeing yourself represented in pop culture and the media starts as early as age four or five when kids are becoming interested in superheroes, princes, or princesses. So why is it so important to have representation?  The real answer is that everyone deserves to be represented and have a role model that is like them. Being represented is able to show us that anything is possible, shows us that there are people out there that are just like us, accomplishing their dreams, breaking barriers, and destroying stereotypes. Representation is important because every person should be able to turn on the television or open up a magazine and say, “Hey that person is like me!” As the Black community continually receives more and more recognition and representation in Hollywood, here is a list of 5 films and documentaries featuring a mostly Black cast, or are directed by Black directors. 

1. The Hate U Give (2018)

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Sypnosis: Starr Carner is constantly switching between two worlds -- the poor, mostly black neighborhood where she lives and the wealthy, mostly white prep school that she attends. However, after witnessing the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer, the fragile balance between these two worlds shatters. Now, facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what's right.

Background Information: This film is based on the 2017 novel of the same name, written by Angie Thomas

2. Fruitvale Station (2013) 

Sypnosis: A 22-year-old black man Oscar Grant tries hard to live a clean life and support his girlfriend and young daughter. On the last day of Oscar's life, he goes to San Fransisco with his family and friends to watch fireworks on New Year's Eve. However, on the way back home, became swept up in an altercation with police that ended in tragedy. 

Background Information: This film was based on true events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young man who was shot and killed in 2009 by a BART police officer - Johannes Mehserle, in the Fruitvale district of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in Oakland.

3. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise (2016)

Directors: Rita Coburn Whack, Bob Hercules

Sypnosis: An award-winning documentary telling the story of the iconic writer, poet, actress, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, whose life intersected some of the most significant moments in the recent history of the United States of America. Angelou’s own words are played over rare photos and videos in order to showcase her life. With commentary offered by many prominent figures, such as Oprah Winfrey, Common, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

4. Queen of Katwe (2016)

Director: Mira Nair

Sypnosis: 10-year-old Phiona and her family constantly struggle to survive in the slum of Katwe in Uganda. Her world changes when she meets Robert Katende, a missionary who teaches children how to play chess. Phiona is intrigued by chess and becomes fascinated with the game, becoming a top player under Katende's guidance. Her success in local competitions and tournaments paves a path to a bright future and a golden chance for her to escape from a life of poverty.

5. Black Panther (2018)

Director: Ryan Coogler 

Sypnosis: T’Challa returns home to Wakanda to succeed his father as king, following his death. When a powerful enemy reappears, T'Challa's mettle as king -- and as Black Panther -- gets tested when he's drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of his nation, and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people.

Background Information: This film was a major breakthrough for the Black community, featuring almost an entirely Black cast. It was very highly anticipated and ultimately received positive critical response, thus propelling it to earn over a billion dollars in the box office, making it the second most profitable film of 2018. It was both a success economically, and a win for Black people all around the world. 

Sources: 

https://www.amazon.com/Poster-Limited-Amandla-Stenberg-Regina/dp/B07J1MZH92

http://www.sactownmag.com/Blog/2013/Sac-State-alum-wins-two-new-film-awards-and-garners-Oscar-buzz/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334649/

https://www.inverse.com/article/41221-black-history-month-netflix-tv-film-television-shows

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/american-masters-maya-angelou-and-still-i-rise/id1196429282

https://www.bollywoodlife.com/news-gossip/queen-of-katwe-poster-mira-nairs-this-inspiring-tale-starring-lupita-nyongo-is-riveting/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825683/

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/representation-is-important

[creativesage]

(via What Is the Equal Rights Amendment, and Why Are We Talking About It Now? — The New York Times)

It would provide equal protection to women under the law — and it could still be added to the U.S. Constitution.

By Maya Salam

Illustration by Ping Zhu

“It’s 2019 and I still don’t have equal rights under the Constitution. Neither do any of you, the nearly 162 million women across the U.S.” — Alyssa Milano, in a recent Cosmopolitan article about the E.R.A.

Do you understand the Equal Rights Amendment? That’s been my go-to party question lately, and to my surprise, most people don’t politely excuse themselves for a refill when asked.

The most common responses I’ve heard, especially from women my age, were to the effect of: “Don’t we already have that?” or “That was a ’70s thing, right?”

In fact, we don’t have it — and it wasn’t just a ’70s thing. And yet until recently, I too had little idea what it was. (Sorry to my feminist friends, young and old, who are surely horrified by this gap in knowledge. The chapter was unsurprisingly absent from my history books.) So I asked two leading E.R.A. advocates, Carol Jenkins and Carol Robles-Román, to explain what the Equal Rights Amendment is and why we’re talking about it. Here’s what I learned.

Why does the E.R.A. matter?

Because women don’t currently have equal protection under the United States Constitution. By some estimates, 80 percent of Americans mistakenly believe that women and men are guaranteed equal rights, but the only right the Constitution explicitly extends to both men and women is the right to vote.

The E.R.A., a proposed amendment to the Constitution, would guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It would also require states to intervene in cases of gender violence, such as domestic violence and sexual harassment; it would guard against pregnancy and motherhood discrimination; and it would federally guarantee equal pay.

Doesn’t the 14th Amendment make it unnecessary?

Not exactly. The E.R.A. was first proposed in 1923 but wasn’t passed by Congress until 1972. It then needed to be ratified by 38 states by 1982 (a mostly arbitrary deadline) to be added to the Constitution, but only 35 states ratified it in time.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped to persuade the Supreme Court to extend the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit unequal treatment on the basis of sex — similar to what the E.R.A. would have done. But supporters said that clause doesn’t go far enough, particularly when it comes to violence against women, sexual harassment and equal pay.

The amendment also has symbolic value. “I would like to be able to take out my pocket Constitution and say that the equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental tenet of our society like free speech,” Justice Ginsburg said in 2017.

Why did the E.R.A. stall?

The undoing of the E.R.A. is largely considered the handiwork of one woman: Phyllis Schlafly, a proudly anti-feminist Republican, who rallied housewives to fight the amendment in the 1970s.

Her argument was mostly that women already had equal rights, but also that the E.R.A. would tear apart the traditional family structure and strip women of remaining privileges, such as having separate bathrooms and college dormitories for men and women. These are the same arguments opponents have made in recent years as E.R.A. efforts picked up steam.

Why are we talking about it again now?

In 2017, Nevada ratified the amendment, an effort led by State Senator Pat Spearman, a Democrat. “It was then that other states said, ‘Wait a minute, you mean we can still do that?’” Robles-Román told me.

In 2018, Illinois followed suit. And last month, Virginia came close to being the 38th and final state needed to ratify the amendment — until the state House killed its progress.

So just one more state is needed for the E.R.A. to move forward?

It’s a start. Aside from finding another state to ratify, the 1982 deadline would need to be repealed or overruled — an effort to do so is currently in the works by Jerry Nadler, the House judiciary chairman, Robles-Román and Jenkins said. (There are questions about whether a deadline can in fact be imposed for ratifying an amendment.)

Another potential obstacle: Five states have since rescinded their ratifications, though the Constitution speaks only to a state’s power to ratify an amendment, not to the power to rescind a ratification, which may lead to another legal entanglement.

Regardless, there’s renewed hope among supporters, especially with the House now in Democratic control and more women than ever in office. “So much of this now is the energy and the momentum,” Robles-Román said.

Are you ready to see the E.R.A. added to the Constitution?

______

From the archives, 1977: ‘This is a strange little book’

In 1977, amid the fight for and against the E.R.A., Phyllis Schlafly wrote the book “The Power of the Positive Woman,” in which she challenged women’s movements. The book received a withering review in The Times.

“This is a strange little book,” wrote Lucinda Franks, who years earlier became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. “Whatever the secret of Mrs. Schlafly’s appeal, it certainly does not lie in the lucidity of her mind.”

“What is most disturbing about her book is its undertone of contempt for everyone,” Franks went on, saying that Schlafly was “basically anti‐woman” and also “anti‐men.”

***

Welcome to In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at dearmaya@nytimes.com.

Are you on Instagram? Follow us here.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at the New York Times, and to view the additional illustrations.]

[politicoscope]

Juan Guaido Biography and Profile

New Post has been published on https://www.politicoscope.com/juan-guaido-biography-and-profile/

Juan Guaido Biography and Profile

Juan Guaido (Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez) was born on 28 July 1983, one of seven children in the port city of La Guaira in the state of Vargas. Guaido and his family survived a catastrophic mudslide in 1999 that killed thousands of people and destroyed thousands of homes in La Guaira.

“Seeing your daily life wiped out from one day to the next forced us to detach ourselves from material things, but brought us closer,” Juan Guaidó told the newspaper El Nacional.

Juan Gerardo Guaido Marquez, an industrial engineer by training, began organizing demonstrations against Hugo Chavez more than a decade ago after the late leader silenced critics by refusing to renew the broadcast license of Venezuela’s most popular television channel. Guaido formed a close relationship with Leopoldo Lopez and helped the former Caracas mayor establish the Popular Will party. Even with Lopez under house arrest, they talk several times a day.

He joined the National Assembly in 2011, serving as an alternate until he was elected in 2016 as representative for the state of Vargas — a position that he currently holds. He was among several lawmakers who went on a hunger strike demanding parliamentary elections in 2015. He was a relative unknown until he was chosen to lead Venezuela’s legislative body. Guaido was briefly detained by Venezuelan government operatives on the way to a political rally, days after he said he was ready to replace Maduro. As a legislator, he visited a disputed zone between Venezuela and Guyana that dates back to 1966. He also took part in the hunger strike to pressure the National Electoral Council (CNE), which was controlled by Chávez loyalists, to set a date for the parliamentary elections that the opposition eventually won on Dec. 6, 2015.

Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez Full Biography and Profile Juan Gerardo Guaido Marquez’s partner is Fabiana Rosales, a fellow student leader. Their daughter, Miranda, named after a forerunner to South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, was born amid the 2017 wave of protests, during which her father was hit in the neck by plastic buckshot and broke his hand in clashes with police.

Guaido’s party, Voluntad Popular (Popular Will or Will of the People) is a centrist social-democratic party. It holds just 14 of the national assembly’s 167 seats, but is a member of the Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition, which holds a super majority in the assembly.

According to the party’s website, its origins date back to 2004. It was formed to “promote social action and social leadership,” and it was officially recognized as a party in 2011.

Its manifesto states that it seeks to “bring together Venezuelans to work toward peace, freedom and democracy” and to “build a more secure, united and prosperous country where everyone will be entitled to all rights.”

The party was co-founded and is currently led by Leopoldo Lopez, a well-known political prisoner in Venezuela and Guaido’s mentor.

In his short career, Guaido has been applauded for building unity among fellow legislators. Now his challenge is to do the same across the country, channeling the desperate desire for change within the limits of a regime intent on suppressing dissent. “The situation has catapulted him into the spotlight,” Romero said.

“He’s breathed new life into the opposition,” said David Smilde, an analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. “The opposition has finally put forward a fresh face that has courage, new ideas and leadership skills that has started to revive them.”

Already, some in the military have taken up Mr. Guaidó’s call, staging a brief act of resistance at a military base in Caracas, which was followed by violent protests after it was put down.

Mr. Maduro called the opposition a bunch of “little boys,” saying they were pawns of the Trump administration. María Iris Varela Rangel, a top politician in Maduro’s party, wrote on Twitter: “Guaidó: I have already gotten your jail cell ready with the right uniform, and I hope you name your cabinet quickly to know who will keep you company, you stupid kid.”

Mr. Guaidó’s challenge to Mr. Maduro comes at a time when his presidency faces mounting challenges of legitimacy. On Jan. 10, the president was sworn in for a second six-year term after a disputed election in May that many countries did not recognize.

“People have been frustrated with the opposition, and tired of the same old faces of the politicians of the old establishment that have failed,” said Margarita López Maya, a retired political scientist in Caracas who taught at the Central University of Venezuela.

Does Guaidó have a chance at taking power? Guaidó called the mass protests on Jan. 23 in order to get a show of public support for his plan to take over the presidency. “We will stay in the streets until we have freedom for Venezuela,” Guaido told supporters and television cameras at the protest. “We will fight back until we have democracy.”

Small-scale protests happen on a daily basis in Venezuela over food shortages and labor rights. But if demonstrations become large enough to overwhelm security forces’ ability contain them, that could trigger “a break in the chain of command within the military,” Moya-Ocampos says. “Then it is possible they could withdraw their support for Maduro.”

Juan Guaido has declared himself president of Venezuela — a move quickly endorsed by several Latin American countries, as well as Canada and the United States. Many people around the world, and even inside Venezuela, may not have known Guaido’s name.

Foreign officials, particularly in the United States, who want to see a transitional government in Venezuela, say they saw in Mr. Guaidó a fresh-faced leader from humble origins who contrasted with previous opposition leaders, whom Mr. Maduro disparaged as oligarchs and right-wing extremists.

While the United States recognized Mr. Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader, senior American officials have denounced Mr. Maduro as a dictator and made clear their support for Mr. Guaidó’s effort to oust Mr. Maduro and set up a transitional government. Last year, Trump administration officials met in secret with rebellious members of the military to discuss their plans to overthrow Mr. Maduro.

Vice President Mike Pence spoke directly to the Venezuelan people in a video released on YouTube and Twitter on Tuesday, calling Mr. Maduro a “dictator with no legitimate claim to power.” Mr. Pence said he recognized the National Assembly, led by Mr. Guaidó, as “the last vestige of democracy in your country,” and stated that, “we are with you, we stand with you, and we will stay with you until democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of libertad.”

In response, Mr. Maduro said Tuesday evening that he had ordered a “a total and absolute revision” of relations with the United States. He provided no details on what that might produce, but said decisions would be imminent.

“Who elects the president of Venezuela? Mike Pence?” Mr. Maduro asked during a live address on state television.

With short black hair peppered with grey, he had never one for these big public speeches, but Guaidó pushed himself to become the leader of a divided and unstructured opposition, whose biggest leaders were imprisoned, exiled or out of action.

“Guaidó is a fresh young man, and educated — he looks like the people, he talks like the people, he is a survivor and a family man, and also had prospects in big-league baseball,” José Manuel Bolívar, one of his party directors said.

Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez Biography and Profile (Politicoscope / NYT / Reuters / Time)

[scenefromthesidewalk]

May 17, 2017

THE BLACK UNITED FUND OF OREGON

by Pastic Birdie and EatCho

In the early ‘80s leaders in North and Northeast Portland were concerned that communities of color were not receiving an equitable level of support from the city’s philanthropic organizations. Since forming BUFOR in 1983 millions of dollars have been channeled into life-changing programs and they report that last year alone 75,000 lives were touched by grants from more than 30 organizations. In 2015 they rallied Vox Siren, an agency dedicated to gender equality, and ArtUprisings, a non-profit connecting organizations and artists, to support the addition of this mural to the side of their Alberta St. headquarters. The resulting collaboration between Jeremy Nichols, aka Plastic Birdie, and EatCho, honors the women of the civil rights movement and includes, woven through the incredibly elaborate symbolism of the composition, the likenesses of such important figures as Coretta Scott King, Ruby Bridges, and Maya Angelou. @plasticbirdie  @eatcho  @blackunitedfundor  @voxsiren