#Real celebrities will not lure you into private communications

[svu-barisi]

Fellow Fans, Let’s Be Savvy Consumers on Social Media--Share the Hell out of this post, please.

3/11/25 Update: On the set of SVU, Mariska has confirmed to an intern that she has not been active on Facebook in about five years, that she does not ask fans to send her private messages, that she does not look at fan pages, never has used social media to individually solicit money from fans for Joyful Heart, has no knowledge of people identifying themselves as her manager and making statements on her behalf, does not ask people to call her on Zangi, and she is definitely not stupid enough to send a copy of her driver's license on social media. To much relief, at least the address on the fake license was not her real address.

So to all the impersonators on social media, consider this a big FUCK YOU!!!

Share the hell out of this post, please. This post was created in light of the rampant impersonations of L&O/ SVU cast members on Facebook, Instagram, & Zangi (Mariska Hargitay, Peter Scanavino, Chris Meloni, Kelli Giddish are the primary victims, but I've seen BD Wong and Ice T are now joining the ranks). This applies to ALL FANDOMS on ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS. I'm especially furious because some of these scammers have included some of the edits I've created for my fanfics in their posts and more importantly, they are using the name of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a foundation that is near and dear to my heart, in their financial scams...so yes, I'm a little fired up about this.

Yes, it would be so cool and exciting to be chatting it up with your fav stars on Facebook, Instagram, etc.—but unfortunately, you’re most likely chatting with an imposter.

RUSES

A VERY common ruse is for someone to create a fake celebrity account and then respond to a comment you made on a fan page. They start off by thanking you for being a fan and then ask you to directly message them or to click on a link. They proceed to politely chat you up and then gather intel on you including personally identifying information. Some impersonators will go as far as to ask for a picture of your driver’s license (a specific rouse that I have seen used is, “I bet your driver license picture looks better than mine…here’s mine, now let me see yours”). Other impersonators will attempt to get money and claim that they’re collecting donations for a charity (In the case of Mariska Hargitay, impersonators are using her Joyful Heart Foundation as part of the rouse). They’ll send you a link to a website that looks similar to the real charity’s or organization’s, but once you enter your credit card information, the impersonator gets access to your credit card and will max it out spending your credit and money on things that they want—said charity never sees a penny of your money. Other impersonators are sending links that are embedded with a virus. When you click on them (several are disguised as Zangi links), the virus collects personal data including but not limited to passwords, credit card numbers, bank account information, personally identifying information, and pictures. THEY DO ALL OF THIS SIMPLY BY LURING THEIR TARGETS (POTENTIALLY YOU) INTO A SEEMINGLY HARMLESS PRIVATE CHAT.

RECENT HAPPENING

After calling a person out for impersonating Mariska Hargitay and trying to scam a grandmother age person out of money under a ruse using the Joyful Heart Foundation, the impersonator proceeded to private message me trying to convince me they are the real deal (as in the real Mariska Hargitay) and they sent me a copy of Mariska's driver's license. Who the heck is stupid enough to send a copy of any form of ID on social media? The real Mariska is a very intelligent woman and has more than enough brain cells than to do something that stupid. There are so many things wrong with the info on this driver’s license making it an obvious fake (Did you know that our brown-eyed Mariska Hargitay developed blue eyes overnight? She did according to this fake driver’s license!). The imposter was so adamant that they really were the real Mariska and they were really upset that I was encroaching on their money-weaseling operation. It is so scary how far these impersonators will go. Mariska has a job and a family and I highly doubt that she spends all her free time creating hundreds of profiles and trying to lure fans to privately communicate with her...which by the way is a shady practice in itself. If a celebrity actually would speak with a fan, they do it in a public venue (in person around others or on a public social media page), not in a private message on Facebook/Instagram, etc. or Zangi.

Anyhow, one of my besties will be on the SVU set this week for her internship and she's going to try to talk to Mariska (if she's on set that day) and get her take on all these profiles pretending to be her (as well as the ones claiming to be her managers), along with this fake driver's license that I received. Let's see what the real Mariska has to say about her impersonators.

Common Indicators of a Fake Profile:

Using a checkmark as a profile picture. Superscripted blue check marks after a username or handle PREVIOUSLY meant that the account was real and verified (today anyone can purchase a verified mark on certain social media platforms so the verified checkmarks are not really all that meaningful anymore). Now sometimes impersonators are using checkmarks as their profile pictures hoping that you’ll just buy that they’re the real celebrity using a verified account.

Using the words, “real,” “official,” “private chat,” “only [celebrity name]”, in the profile name or handle. For example, “The Real Mariska Hargitay,” “Official Mariska Hargitay,” “Mariska Hargitay Private Chat,” “Only Mariska Hargitay.”

When a profile name and handle do not match. For example, the profile name may say “Mariska Hargitay,” but the handle name says “@Lucy_ann.”

Profiles names or handles using the celebrity’s middle names when they typically do not use or are addressed by their middle name in everyday life.

The celebrity’s name being misspelled or using abbreviations. Some impersonators get reported so often that they are unable to use the celebrity’s correctly spelled name. For example, “Marishka” instead of “Mariska,” “Hertigay” or “Hartigay” instead of “Hargitay,” “MH Private Chat.”  For Kelli Giddish, some impersonators are using “Kelly” or “Kellie” instead of “Kelli.”

Pages that claim to be “Fan pages” but use the first person “I” when commenting or posting on their profile page or other fanpages. Fan pages are pages created by fans—not pages created by celebrities/imposters to communicate with a fan base.

The celebrity’s communication skills are lacking or inconsistent from what you’ve heard in interviews or on TV. For example, if the celebrity’s native language is English, but the profile posts or comments indicate or reflect syntax or grammar errors of a non-native speaker.

Begging for likes or follows on a profile page. Seriously, celebrities just don’t go on fan pages poaching people for likes or follows for their own profile. They also don’t beg for friend requests or direct messages!

Profiles that are new.

Profiles claiming to be using “Backup” accounts. Sometimes they will even claim they are using a backup profile account because of imposters---but in actuality they are just one of those many imposters!

Profiles that have posts that ask people to comment “Yes” if you want a show to continue or if you love/like them.

Use AI content and deep fakes. Deep fakes come in the form of both photos and videos.

Pronouns. If the pronouns on the social media page do not match the pronouns the celebrity is known to use or identify with.

Sending identifying documents as proof of who they are. These documents can look legit, but they are most likely just fakes. No one should ever send personally identifying information or documents out on social media.

Asks you for money/credit card, bitcoin, etc. Mariska Hargitay has a charity, called the Joyful Heart Foundation. Impersonators are trying to scam money under the ruse of this organization. If you want to support the Joyful Heart Foundation, go to the organization’s official website and make the donation directly to the foundation. Celebrities don’t ever collect money on social media on behalf of a charity organization (even their own charity organizations). Never donate money through a link sent by a profile claiming to be a celebrity.

Profiles that claim to be a celebrity’s manager. Several seemingly ordinary profiles are posting messages on fan pages claiming to be a celebrity’s manager and if you want to contact the celebrity that they manage, click on a link (usually has a virus that collects your data). Some will also acknowledge imposters of said celebrity that they manage and falsely claim that the FBI is hunting these imposters down, but in the meantime they offer to put you in contact with said celebrity (who really is just another one of the imposters that the FBI is supposedly hunting down).

Profiles that send links claiming that you can communicate with a celebrity personally. Many of these scams involve Zangi.

Celebrities who are known technophobes or are so old that they probably never even operated their own personal email address probably are not going to create a social media account after they’ve retired from the business. They could, but it’s very unlikely.

These are just the bare minimum signs of a fake profile impersonating celebrities. There are some fake profiles that look really legit, but if you are contacted by one of them, stop and think. Sure, one might say thanks for being a fan, but a real celebrity will not go out of their way to lure you into a private form of communication, ask for personally identifying information, or ask for money. Be smart and safe fans!

When you see fake profiles, report them. It usually takes MANY REPORTS and MULTIPLE PEOPLE reporting the same profile for it to be deactivated by a social media platform.

[brn1029]

Get those tin foil hats ready to go!

The 10 greatest conspiracy theories in rock

By Emma Johnston

In a world where fake news runs rampant, rock'n'roll is not immune to the lure of the conspiracy theory. These are 10 of the most ludicrous

Conspiracy theories, myths and legends have existed in rock’n’roll for as long as the music has existed, stretching all the way back to bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for superhuman guitar skills, fame and fortune.

There are those who believe Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison live on, others who think the Illuminati control the world through symbolism in popular culture, and plenty of evangelical types with their own agendas trawling rock and metal songs for secret messages luring the innocent to the dark side.

Let us take a look, then, at rock’n’roll conspiracy theories ranging from the intriguing to the ludicrous, as we try to separate the truth from the codswallop.

Lemmy was in league with the Illuminati

Few men have ever been earthier than Lemmy, but one conspiracy theorist claims that the Motorhead legend didn’t really die in December 2015, instead “ascending into the heavenly realm” after making a “blood sacrifice pact” with the Illuminati.

A “watcher” of the mythical secret society some believe are running the world – despite evidence that is at best flimsy, at worst straight from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s discarded notebooks – told the Daily Star: “Lemmy signed up for the ultimate pact – he signed his soul to the devil in order to achieve fame and fortune.”

While we can only imagine what the great man would have to say on the matter, there’s one word, in husky, JD-soaked tones, that we can just about make out coming across from the other side: “Bollocks.”

Paul McCartney died in 1966

As you might expect from the most famous band that has ever existed, there are enough crackpot theories about The Beatles to fill the Albert Hall. From John Lennon’s murder being ordered by the US government, who, led by Richard Nixon, suspected him of communism (the FBI actually did have a file on Lennon, but the story is spiced up by the man behind murderlennontruth.com, who apparently believes author Steven King was involved due to, uh, looking a bit like Mark Chapman) to Canadian prog outfit Klaatu being the Fab Four in disguise, there are plenty of tall tales more colourful than a Ringo B-side.

The most enduring, though, is the notion dreamt up by some US radio DJs that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike. They came to this conclusion having studied the cover of Abbey Road – McCartney’s bare feet on the zebra crossing apparently symbolising death, while others found “evidence” in the album’s opaque lyrics. There were a lot of drugs in the 60s.

Gene Simmons has a cow’s tongue

It’s easy to see why all kinds of far-fetched stories sprung up when Kiss first took off in the 1970s. The fake-blood-spitting, the fire, the demon-superhero personas – middle America clutched its pearls and word spread that these otherworldly weirdos’ moniker stood for Knights In Satan’s Service. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

It was Gene Simmons’ preposterous mouth that got the nation’s less voluminous tongues wagging though. So long and pointy is his appendage, and so often waggled at his audiences (whether they asked for it or not), that eventually the rumour spread around the world’s playgrounds was that he’d had a cow’s tongue grafted onto his own. The bovine baloney is, of course, bullshit, but Simmons has admitted it's one of his favourite Kiss urban myths.

Supertramp predicted 9/11

The Logical Song may be Supertramp’s calling card, but one man in the US stretches common sense to the limit having come to the conclusion that the artwork for their 1979 album Breakfast In America gave prior warning of the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

Look at the album cover – painted from the perspective of a window on a flight into the city – in a mirror, and the ‘u’ and ‘p’ band’s name appears to become a 911 floating above the twin towers, while a logo on the back features a plane flying towards the World Trade Center.

So far, so coincidental, but when our intrepid investigator falls down a rabbit hole of Masonic interference, strained Old Testament connections (“The Great Whore of Babylon – Super Tramp”), and the title Breakfast In America reflecting the fact that the planes crashed early in the morning, things get really tenuous.

It’s fair to say it’s unlikely a British prog-pop band had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks 22 years before they happened. But maybe Al Qaida were really big fans.

Stevie Wonder can see

Stevie Wonder is a genius. That fact is not up for dispute. The soul/jazz/funk/rock/pop legend was born six weeks prematurely in 1950, and the oxygen used in the hospital incubator to stabilise him caused him to go blind shortly afterwards. But his love of front-row seats at basketball games, the evocative imagery in his songs, and the fact that he once effortlessly caught a falling mic stand knocked over by Paul McCartney (who, let us reiterate, did not die in 1966) has caused basement Jessica Fletchers to muse that he’s faking his blindness as part of the act.

Wonder himself, a known prankster, has great fun with his status as one of the world’s most famous vision-impaired musicians. In 1973, he told Rolling Stone: “I’ve flown a plane before. A Cessna or something, from Chicago to New York. Scared the hell out of everybody.”

Dave Grohl invented Andrew W.K.

When Andrew W.K. first broke through in the early 2000s, dressed in white and covered in blood, his mission was serious in its simplicity: the party is everything. He took his message of having a good time, all the time, to levels of political fervour. But rumours of his authenticity have been doing the rounds from the start.

Reviewing WK’s first UK show at The Garage in London, The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote: “One music-biz conspiracy theory currently circulating suggests that Andrew W.K. is an elaborate hoax devised by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.”

As time went on, the theory gained traction – Grohl was believed to be the mysterious Steev Mike credited on the debut album I Get Wet. And as W.K.’s style changed over subsequent records, and his own admission that there were legal arguments over who owns his name, whispers began that he wasn’t even a real person – he was a character, played by several different actors, an attempt to create the ultimate Frankenstein’s frontman.

"I'm not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album," W.K. said in 2008. “I don't just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way, it's not the same person at all. Do I look the same as that person?" The jury is out, but if this is a great white elephant concocted just for the sheer hell of it, we kind of want this one to be true.

Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager

An early victim of the 27 club, the death of Jimi Hendrix was depressingly cliched for a man so wildly creative: a bellyful of barbiturates led to him asphyxiating on his own vomit, according to the post-mortem. But in the years following the grim discovery at the Samarkand Hotel in London on 19 September 1970, a different theory was offered by the guitarist’s former roadie, James “Tappy” Wright.

In his book Rock Roadie, Wright claims Hendrix was murdered by his manager, Michael Jeffery, who he says force-fed his charge red wine and pills. The motive? He feared he was about to be fired and was keen to cash in on the star’s life insurance. One thing we do know for certain is Jeffery won’t be able to give his version of events, as he was killed in a plane crash over France in 1973.

The 50th anniversary of Hendrix's tragic passing was "celebrated" with the release of Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary that "explored" his death further and was described by The Guardian as "a cheaply made mix of interviews and dumbshow dramatic recreations by actors scuttling about flimsy sets in gloomy lighting." Sounds good.

Courtney killed Kurt

Courtney Love is no stranger to demonisation from Nirvana fans. When Hole’s second album, the searing, catchy, feminist, witty, aggressive, vulnerable and unflinchingly honest Live Through This was released, days after Kurt Cobain’s death, rumours almost immediately started up that Love’s late husband wrote the songs. That was insulting and sexist enough, but nowhere near as damaging as the conspiracy theory that Love hired a hitman to kill Cobain amid rumours they were about to divorce.

After Cobain’s first attempt to take his own life in Rome, the Nirvana frontman was eventually convinced to go to rehab following an intervention by his wife and friends. He ran away from the facility, and the private investigator hired by Love to find him, Tom Grant, eventually became the source of the idea that Love and the couple’s live-in nanny Michael Dewitt were responsible for Cobain’s death shortly afterwards.

His claims, made in the Soaked In Bleach documentary, include the notion that Cobain had too much heroin in his system to pull the trigger of the shotgun, and that he believed the suicide note was forged.

People close to Cobain (and the Seattle Police Department) have refuted the theory, including Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg: “It’s ridiculous. He killed himself. I saw him the week beforehand, he was depressed. He tried to kill himself six weeks earlier, he’d talked and written about suicide a lot, he was on drugs, he got a gun. Why do people speculate about it? The tragedy of the loss is so great people look for other explanations. I don’t think there’s any truth at all to it."

The CIA wrote The Scorpions’ biggest hit

Previously synonymous with leather, hard rock anthems and some very questionable album artwork, West Germany’s Scorpions scored big with Wind Of Change, a power ballad heralding the oncoming fall of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and a new sense of hope in the Eastern Bloc.

In a podcast named after the 1990 song, though, Orwell Prize-winning US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe follows rumours from within the intelligence community that the song was actually written by the CIA, as propaganda to hasten the fall of the ailing Soviet Union via popular culture.

“Soviet officials had long been nervous over the free expression that rock stood for, and how it might affect the Soviet youth,” Keefe is quoted as saying. “The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.”

It's a convincing theory, but one that is disputed by Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine: “I thought it was very amusing and I just cracked up laughing. It’s a very entertaining and really crazy story but like I said, it’s not true at all. Like you American guys would say, it’s fake news."

There are satanic messages in Stairway To Heaven

The great comedian Bill Hicks had something to say about people searching for evidence of devilry in rock’n’roll: “Remember this shit, if you play certain rock albums backwards there'd be satanic messages? Let me tell you something, if you're sitting round your house playing your albums backwards, you are Satan. You needn't look any further. And don't go ruining my stereo to prove a point either.”

The memo didn’t get through to televangelist and stylus ruiner Paul Crouch, who in 1982 attempted to scare the Christian right into believing Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven was stuffed with demonic meaning, and that played backwards it revealed the following message: “Here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”

Guitarist Jimmy Page, of course, is no stranger to the esoteric, making no secret of his interest in occultist Aleister Crowley and the attendant magick, and there were even rumours the band made a Faustian pact to achieve fame and fortune. But hiding messa

[96thdayofrage]

That’s a bold statement right? Oprah Winfrey is what most people consider to be the epitome of black excellence. She is a rags to riches story and a story of overcoming childhood sexual trauma and poverty to gain extreme wealth which she uses to “empower women” and “give representation to black women in media”. And in a lot of ways that is true. Oprah’s face every weekday on ABC was definitely something that made way for black women in the entertainment industry and journalism. She supports black directors like Ava Duvernay and Tyler Perry. She “gives back to the community”. What’s not to like about Oprah, right? PLENTY. Plenty is not to like about Oprah and her thirty year long career has PLENTY of anti-blackness, misogynoir, and dirtiness; which should honestly be expected. No one gets that rich without playing the game.

Reasons I don’t fuck with Oprah: The semi-comprehensive rant.

Oprah caters to the white feminist gaze. If you need context on what I mean by this please check out my article: ““Aint I a Woman?”- Feminism, the Illusion of Inclusion, and Historic Betrayal of White Women”. The demographic that Oprah has targeted for viewership of her talk show, and for her magazine are white women. Any episode of her show will feature a mostly white woman audience. This is possible because white women have more economic mobility to be stay at home mothers than black women. And in knowing this, Oprah’s show catered to it’s demographic. Being a registered and loud democrat her show was also HIGHLY liberal in its topics.

She was known for asking the hard questions- which in this context means “willing to gaslight and use dog whistle tactics on her black guests”- especially her black women guests.

One instance of this is when she interviewed Toni Braxton after Braxton filed for bankruptcy in 1998. Toni was embarrassed from having found herself in this situation. She was in an abusive record contract with La Face where she was only making $0.35 per album.

For context, La Face also famously fucked over TLC and in 1995 they had to file bankruptcy as well. Toni had FIVE Grammys and had sold over $170 million in records.

With TLC going bankrupt, the conversation on black women artists in the industry and specifically the record label in question fucking black women artists over was a part of public consciousness… for the black community. But for her white feminist, neo-liberal audience, Oprah wasn’t asking questions about why this continued to happen to black women. The specific abuses of this record company were COMPLETELY glazed over. She chose instead to GASLIGHT THE FUCK out of Toni- essentially victim blaming her for being taken advantage of by her record company. She also asked Toni very pointed questions about why the then five time Grammy winner felt like she had the right to spend the money she should have been earning. Toni is noticeably hurt, embarrassed, and confused by the questions and has been vocal about her feelings in that moment. Oprah is trash as fuck for this shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftLjr4CQcrQ

In another instance of shitting on a black woman, Mo’Nique has also been vocal about her dislike of Oprah. Mo’Nique worked with Oprah for Precious. Oprah asked permission for herself to interview Mo’Nique’s brother who molested her as a child. Mo’Nique approved, but declined her own attendance, then confided in Oprah PRIVATELY about issues with her mother. It was clear that there was no love between Mo’Nique and her mother. Oprah responded by inviting Mo’Nique’s mother and father on the show and interviewing them as well. She also allowed Gerald to “give his side” and talk about how he was hurt by talking about her abuse at this hand and paint himself as a victim, while her mother and father tell how they’re upset that she talked about this and should’ve been discussed within the family (but they all agreed to come to the show).

Oprah allowed Mo’Nique’s family, and her abuser to gaslight her on national TV. And in the interview, Oprah also acknowledged that she was aware of the beef between Mo’Nique and her mother at the time.

Mo’Nique explains her side of the story here: https://youtu.be/Jb6N7aw61z8

Mo’Nique confronted Oprah about going behind her back and Oprah said she would “check into it” and never called back. Mo’Nique then confronted Oprah the next time they saw each other in person and Oprah issued a half assed apology. Oprah, Tyler Perry, and Lee Daniels then engaged in a smear campaign labeling Mo’Nique as difficult to work with because she was not okay with Oprah exploiting her trauma in ways she didn’t approve. Mo’Nique’s career suffered as a result. Mo’Nique is still fighting the effect this has had on her career and even recently has called out Oprah again about her silence on her Netflix boycott and black women not being paid what they’re worth in Hollywood.

Oprah has been loudly silent recently as well, claiming she’s not going to “meet negative energy where it is”… but she was willing to meet Mo’Nique’s abusers (in more ways than one) and exploit her trauma. TRASH.

Oprah has several problematic business relationships and personal relationships. Her most notable one is with Donald Trump himself. They were so close that Donald Trump once remarked in 1999 that he considered her as a running mate. He even echoed the sentiment in 2015 when he was running. Oprah and Trump have an over 30 year relationship and he has been on her show several times, with the most recent being in 2011. The first known (at least to the indication of my research) appearance of his on her talk show was in 1988. We are now real aware of the kind of vile, racist, sexually abusive, and all around terrible human being he is- but how is Oprah guilty by association if his political views weren’t publicly known until his 2016 presidential run? Answer: Donald Trump has been a racist as long as he’s been a public figure.

Examples of Donald Trump’s historical racism include: being found to discriminate against black renters in the 1970’s, racist treatment of black employees at his hotels and casinos, calling for the death penalty of the Central Park 5 in 1989 (and maintaining that they were guilt in 2016 which is ten years after they were exonerated), stating in 1989 that “well educated blacks have privilege”, blatant racism on Obama’s birth, and this is all before he ever started his political campaign in 2015 with more blatant racism. And this is the man that Oprah gave a platform on her show several times and never inquired about the lawsuits, the sexual assault accusations, nor his political views. And seeing as though he was close enough to her to see her as a potential running mate- I understand why those questions never came up.

Toni Braxton’s Gucci silverware was much, much more important.

Oprah’s Harpo studios have done a lot of work with the Weinstein company. Weinstein is the man behind the co-opting of the #MeToo movement by white feminists. The #MeToo movement was started by Tarana Burke, a black woman who has all been erased from the #MeToo narrative in favor of pretty, white actresses. According to the actresses who have accused Weinstein of assault and harassment, his behavior was no secret. Oprah, as an insider to the business had to have been aware of who this man was and still chose to work with him. Weinstein also used his relationship with and proximity to Oprah to lure in women.

This, of course, is not her fault, but is also easily avoidable by not having a close relationship with a serial sexual abuser.

I don’t kiss on folks I don’t know that well- personally.

Proponents of Oprah often times cite her humanitarian efforts as a means to justify her as a “Black leader” or black excellence, but many are not aware that most celebrities only donate what they would have had to pay in taxes, and Oprah, as an incredibly wealthy woman would have to pay A LOT in taxes. Some of her tales of generosity have amounted to serious harm for its recipients. For example- the recipients of the famous car giveaway found that after being forced to pay taxes on the car, it was much more trouble than it was worth and most couldn’t afford to keep it. At her famous, glamorous school in south Africa, tales of her covering up knowledge and inaction of sexual assault being committed there is ripe. It is also notable that on the list of official charities that she has been known to contribute to- none of them are black women specific with the exception of the Girl’s school. As someone who caters to white liberals, I don’t exactly expect them to.

I grew up in Chicago and went to Harper High School for one year before transferring to a private Catholic school on a scholarship. Oprah featured the school on her show in 2006, then followed up in 2010 (the year after I transferred out). Oprah offered no financial aid to the students of Harper High School who she used for trauma porn. The student exchange program started by the show did continue, however, for a few years after she came and left.

Arne Duncan attempted to “turnaround” the school and gave it some funds, but due to the actual socioeconomic issues that were affecting student enrollment, attendance, and motivation never being addressed, mental health services never being addressed or offered, the violence in the outside community never being addressed, and the actual infrastructure of the school continuing to fall into dilapidation- the turnaround failed.

Arne Duncan never saw the turnatound through- he left Chicago to be Secretary of Education for Obama in 2008, the year I arrived at Harper as a student.

As someone who was an actual student of Harper, but came from a private education the year prior and the years after- it feels like a prison.

It is a place that sucks the motivation from even the brightest students. The work was not challenging to me. The services for students who were gifted and motivated like me were limited and I found myself coasting through because the workload wasn’t challenging. I can understand how students with hard home lives, with different educational ability levels, and with different levels of motivation could walk into that prison and never see or want anything more from their education. Having witnessed this first hand and walked away without offering aid is disgusting of Oprah.

Oprah answered questions about the opening of her South African school in 2007 with the logic ”If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” Her inaction is loud. She met with Harper students who were literally asking for the same standards of education as white suburban children, opened a school elsewhere without providing any resources, then went on her show and said “I believe, just as I know all of you watching believe, that every American child deserves the best school” and encouraged people to go to Standup.com for aid instead. She has no problems with broadcasting the trauma of black children so her white viewers can feel like they helped. She has no problems walking away from the same black children she just exploited without providing them resources, then further going to the media and claiming that the black children in the city she claims as home doesn’t want or deserve them. Fuck Oprah.

And yes- this one IS personal.

In the years since Oprah has ignored the cries for help from inner city Chicago kids for better education- CPS (Chicago Public Schools) has gone on a full scale assault on those same children, closing and targeting schools of children in poor black and latino neighborhoods for closure and forcing them to travel longer distances, into unfamiliar and unsafe territories. This is marked by the CPS “ Safe Passage” program where CPS now pays adults to stand on corners on the new routes to these schools and protect children who are in unfamiliar neighborhoods on their way to school. CPS has announced the closure of ALL FOUR high schools in the Englewood area, Harper will close at the end of this year. This means ALL Englewood high school students will have no high school in their neighborhood.

Oprah had a chance to make a real difference here ten years ago and decided these kids weren’t worth it. It is honestly disgusting. But let Oprah tell it- these kids don’t want or deserve more.

Oprah’s Golden Globes Speech this year was when I had officially had enough of her white feminist, neo-liberal nonsense, and pandering to white sensibilities at the cost of erasing the pain of black women and children. In this speech, Oprah compared the historical sexual and racial abuse experienced by black women and girls (like the assaults she covered up at her school) to this pretty little white elite #MeToo movement (the one that calls out her buddies Trump and Weinstein, and has erased black women like Tarana Burke). Erasure and exploitation of black women and children and our trauma for white feminists to feel some sick sense of Munchausen’s by proxy is honestly repulsive.

Their struggle has never been ours.

Oprah has been recently more on the producing side, giving opportunities to black women in film like Ava DuVernay. Most of Oprah’s credit in the black community come from her acting and producing career on the grounds that she provides representation for black people in media. I have a counter for that as well. How many films has Oprah produced that she did not also star in, thus making them self serving? Of those few- how many were actually targeted to African American demographics? Queen Sugar and Greenleaf have found a home on her network- as has Iyanla: Fix My Life- but with those exceptions- Oprah’s body of work is just more neo-liberal white feminist stories about fighting for white approval and acceptance and furthering the idea that proximity to whiteness is an accomplishment. This is an idea that’s just as damaging to black audiences as lack of representation at all.

Her stories also seem to either be black women trauma porn (on theme) or integrationalist. This is most interesting to me, as her projects that are not geared towards black audiences like The Hundred Foot Journey, don’t have these same themes.

The family of one of her films The Great Debaters is currently suing her- claiming she never paid for the rights to their patriarch’s story. She used her promotional tour for Selma to down talk the young, black, grassroots protesters against police brutality in Ferguson. This is a very stark contrast, considering that she is now offering thousands of dollars to support protesters of school shootings in Florida, whom are also grassroots, but also not mostly black and are also in line with the neo-liberal political agenda.

Between Oprah’s dicey connections in the industry, her respectability politics, her exploitation of black pain, her gas lighting of black women in crisis, and her erasure of black women’s SPECIFIC intersectionality for white women’s gaze and coin- I find no qualms with making the following statement:

FUCK OPRAH.

[enterprisehunter56]

What Is The Best Mail Program

What Is The Best Email Program

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e-Buddies promotes social inclusion online for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

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In e-Buddies, people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as autism and Down syndrome, come together online to form friendships and a community that celebrates their diversity of character and abilities.

Anyone can be in e-Buddies! You can join on your own or sign up your special education class. e-Buddies is great for students and adults with and without disabilities.

Why e-Buddies?

e-Buddies is an e-mail pen pal program that provides safe opportunities for one-to-one e-mail friendships between people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

Computers are an integral part of modern society, providing access to an abundance of social and creative outlets. By participating in e-Buddies, members develop technology literacy skills and become more confident communicating online, opening up opportunities for higher-level education and employment.

Fifty-four percent (54%) of Members with IDD revealed that they feel more confident engaging in other online social outlets as a result of their participation in e-Buddies.

– 2016 Best Buddies Annual Survey (Hardman, University of Utah)

e-Buddies matches a person with IDD in an online friendship with a person without IDD. Participants are matched based on age, gender and similar interests. Anyone over the age of 10 can participate in e-Buddies. Students are matched with other students and adults are matched with adults. e-Buddies is available throughout the United States and internationally for English-speaking people. e-Buddies is always free for people with IDD.

Making a new friend through e-Buddies

Making a new friend through e-Buddies is easy! Here is what happens:

After joining e-Buddies, we will match you with someone from another state (or even another country).

Get to know your e-Buddy by e-mailing regularly. Your e-mails can be short or long and your conversations can be about whatever you both want to talk about.

You’ll quickly make a new friend!

e-Buddies is safe!

e-Buddies is dedicated to ensuring the safety and privacy of all our participants with and without IDD.

All e-Buddies are screened before they can participate

Your data is safe and private, we will not share or sell your personal information; read the full privacy policy

Our e-mail system seamlessly hides your personal e-mail address when you e-mail your e-Buddy; read more about the e-mail system

E-mail messages are logged and archived, and can be reviewed for inappropriate content

All e-Buddies communication is strictly conducted via e-mail; e-Buddies agree not to meet in person and are never matched with someone from the same state

If you have any questions about e-Buddies, please contact info@ebuddies.org

Educational Benefits

The e-Buddies program is easy to add to any curriculum and can help you achieve multiple IEP benchmarks. e-Buddies is a fun and safe way for your students to make a new friend as well as develop skills in the following areas:

What Is The Best Email Program

Computer skills Communication skills Reading and writing skills Social skills

By adding e-Buddies to your computer technology lessons students are more motivated to learn. Students that are involved in e-Buddies are more interested in spelling and typing correctly. Instead of typical computer assignments, these e-mails go to friends and your students receive positive reinforcement by getting an e-mail in return. Social Inclusion for Students

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People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not always given the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships outside of their families and the people paid to support them. e-Buddies allows participants to connect with a peer in a one-to-one friendship. Often, after graduating from school, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have fewer chances for social interactions. The Internet can become the main way these individuals keep in touch with family and friends. By joining e-Buddies in school and becoming comfortable with communicating online, students are more equipped to stay social in the future.

[blaineinblood]

Run and Hide || Klaine

It had been centuries since Blaine had been anywhere near Ohio. It wasn’t because he had bad memories of the place, nor was it because something was keeping him away. It was because it was Ohio, and why the fuck would he bother being in Ohio? It wasn’t that it possessed a lavish culture that he thought he might enjoy, or that the people were at all going to change his opinions on the human race as a species, so there was no reason for him to stop…

But for whatever reason while he was traveling, on foot, from Calgary Canada, he came to a holt as he approached a sign, stopping inches in front of it as he stared at the words. Blaine’s head tilted slightly, the words “Welcome to the Lima Community” on a large stone plaque looked him back in the face, almost taunting him, before he glanced up toward the sky. It was nearly sunrise, and not that it mattered, he wouldn’t burst into flames or anything stupid like that, but any mild annoyance for Blaine meant problems for anyone around him. With a clenched fist, Blaine punched through the stone sign, feeling nothing except the dull irritation that stuck with him throughout the days before he ventured into the city.

~

He’d been here for a few months now, and to say he thought highly of the city now than he did when he arrived would be a lie. The constant cloud coverage meant that day, or night, Blaine could wander around without any sort of negative repercussions if he so desired, but more so, the excessive stupidity and excessive drinking that some of the residences in this fine city seemed to partake in, meant that with each feed Blaine was not only drunk from the blood, but also just plain ol’ drunk. 

The only problem was there was no hunt. They fell into his lap easily. 

Which meant that Blaine had to get creative.

Human life meant little to Blaine, other than the fact that if he killed everyone he’d have nothing to eat. That thought alone was probably the only reason, to date, that Blaine didn’t just instantly wipe out entire towns. He didn’t, for a second, doubt that he couldn’t do it. He never doubted what he was capable of. But, he knew eventually someone would come for him, and he didn’t care. 

He wanted them to.

Death would finally take him and he’d be free from this nightmare.

Though, as much as Blaine wanted it to end, the pain and suffering that clawed away at his insides, that tore every shred of his humanity and turned him into this, he refused for it to not be on his own terms. The survivor inside of him would always switch on at the last second, and he’d end up completely unharmed. However, which each of these encounters he would lose more and more of himself, and considering he’d never “had” himself to begin with, he fell deeper and deeper into nothingness. All that was left inside of Blaine was a body, a curse, and anger. He searched for things that would please him, blood worked for a few hours, but it was generally short lived. Music worked sometimes, but even that lately seemed so irrelevant. So when the hunters started to zone in on him, Blaine tried to find the enjoyment in that. Hunting the Hunters was a game that he was going to play.

... and he was going to play it well. 

At first, Blaine sent a clear message to them to back off by feeding from them, and sending them away, still alive, to tell their friends to leave him alone.

He wasn’t sure if it was pride, or if they were truly stupid, but they came back, with more people. Like lambs to the slaughter Blaine took them out one by one, leaving one to once again, tell his friends to back off.

But they came back… with more people.

By the third time, and any time that followed, Blaine started to get creative. Severed heads on doorsteps, bodies stacked up on flag poles like a kebab, watching as the hunters, and police tried to cover it up quickly before anyone noticed. Nothing was too small, or too big, when it came to Blaine.

It wasn’t that he enjoyed killing people.

… Okay, he did enjoy killing people, but it wasn’t that it had to be like this. People just needed to leave him alone. Leave him to feed in peace. No one needed to die if he was left alone.

He was old, irritated, and didn’t want company. The only company he wanted was for either food, or sex, sometimes both at the same time if he was in the mood.

However, the more that the Hunters came after him, the more he made it his mission to fuck with every single one of them, holding their lives in his hand if he decided they should live or die. He’d yet to offer anyone the “live” option, though occasionally he’d be sloppy or someones will to fight was stronger than he had been expecting, and while he left them to bleed out, they’d somehow survive.

Those ones Blaine kept a special eye on.

Blaine would often make a game out of it, leaving trails, and little clues, that would lure hunters in, and while they thought they were being the grand hero, trying to save the poor damsel in distress whom he would have gagged and would be sitting idle on a chair, almost as though Blaine had left her unattended, a perfect opportunity for them to recuse the person, the real victim would be the hunter.

When it came to his victims, Blaine rarely went after women. It wasn’t because he felt bad about it, or because he was gay and therefore wouldn’t feed on a woman, it was because if he did they always fit a certain mould, unless they were a hunter, of course. Small frame, long dark wavy hair, light brown eyes… anything that reminded him of his sire would result in an almost instant death.

Blaine knew he wasn’t the only vampire in town, and here were often times he would watch a hunter take out one of his own. He felt no need to “defend his own kind” nor get involved. If anything, it was live action TV. It offered little entertainment, but anything was better than nothing. He did find it ironic that of all the places he decided to stop on his travels that it would be the town with a thriving hunter community. 

Blaine did try to interact with a few vampires when he would cross their paths, in the beginning he did make an effort, but since he wasn’t interested in the whole “join our coven” type of ordeal, he tended to stay away from it.

Plus, young vampires irritated the fuck out of him more than the humans did.

Even though Blaine tended to keep to the shadows and his attacks were always done elsewhere, the excessive amount of abandoned warehouses or buildings made for good stomping grounds, he did have a home inside of the city limits. He had bought it with the help of compulsion. As far as the residence of Lima knew, some private, “Celebrity type” person had moved in, that was guarded by a security gate, manned 24/7 by a security guard. The building was fenced off with not only high fences, but spiked, and the house sat at the end of a long winding drive way. No one was likely to step foot onto the premise without Blaine knowing.

And that’s the way he was going to keep it. He may value nothing, but he did still enjoy being surrounded by nice things.

~

Blaine walked around his home, running his fingers along anything in his path before he glanced out the window. It had gotten dark early, and the sounds of the city were already starting to flood his ears. Blaine got dressed quickly before he took off on foot, his body almost instantly moving toward one of the local strip joints. The men who walked out of there were generally drunk, generally larger, and generally were the ones who screamed and cried, their fear making the blood so much sweeter, and the hunt being that much more rewarding.

Thankfully, Blaine didn’t have to wait long as his victim walked out. Blaine untucked his shirt, lowered his tie a little and shook his hair a little to break it out from the gel.  He had been dressed in a relatively nice ensemble, but that was part of his act.

“Hey! Hi! Sorry, sir, can you help me?” Blaine said innocently, waving his hand around. “I got a flat tire and I don’t know how to fix it, and my cell died” he said, sounding exhausted. He waved his hand while he spoke, his tone was slightly flamboyant, enough for some of the pigs in the city to refer to him as “Fag” before he killed them.

The man laughed, they always laugh, before he shook his head “You don’t even know how to change a tire?” he slurred a little “Where’s your car, kid?”

“My dad never taught me” Blaine said, a little over the top, pointing backwards for the man to follow him “It’s just around the corner. Thank you so much for helping though”

“See that’s the problem with some of these blokes” the guy said, with a small huff “they don’t teach you how to be men and then wonder why everyone is turning out to be a fag” he grunted as he walked.

Blaine’s fangs threatened to pop out then and there, his fist clenching as his neck craned a little, but he kept it together… this would now be more enjoyable.

As Blaine turned down the alley, the guy seemed a little hesitant to follow “I don’t see a car” he craned his neck a little “You’re not like trying to get me down here to try something? I mean I’ve got a massive cock and I bet your fag ass wants it, but I’m not into that. ”

Usually Blaine could hold off, but tonight, not so much.

“I really wish you were into it though” Blaine smirked as he charged forward, his mouth instantly latching to the man’s neck, before he started to drag him backwards while he fed, spilling blood along the way, the man kicking his legs out that one of his shoe fell off, his arms swinging violently until Blaine had successfully gotten inside the building. He threw the man’s body across the floor, watching how it slid, almost gracefully, before Blaine charged forward again, this time straddling the man’s large chest “Maybe you should be nicer to people! Bad things happen to bad people” Blaine laughed as looked down at the man’s face “And to think, I would have let you suck my cock and I may have called you daddy. You know, homophobes think about sucking cock more than I do. Isn’t that funny?” Blaine smiled again, letting the man not only see his fangs, but to watch a small amount of blood that he hadn’t quite swallowed yet dribble down his chin “Oh well! Too bad, so sad!” Blaine laughed as he started to bite down again, moaning a little as the blood filled his mouth, his tongue lapping it up quickly, only stopping a few moments before his heart stopped.

Blaine stood up, glancing over the body before he started to straighten out his tie, looking down at his clothes before he noticed the pocket on his shirt had gotten ripped in the process “Man, you ripped my shirt” Blaine kicked the body a little before using his finger to push a bit more of the blood into his mouth “But god did you taste good” Blaine laughed as he stepped a little deeper into the building he’d walked into, finding somewhere to sit quietly, his eyes closing a little as he started to ride out his buzz.

[thebrokenmasterpiece]

An Open Letter (About Me) | April 26, 2020 - 4:26 am | C J R

As I start the day and time is similar. April 26, 2020, 4:26am. Wow. I just thought of sharing about myself. (Sorry for my grammar. Please bare with it.) Take note this is just a summary or shorted story of my life (there is more behind these).

My life has a common story like other ordinary people. My story is not so easy has it seems. Bad and hard times, difficulties, sorrow but of course I also felt happiness, loved, care, blessed and peace.

Maybe some of you will say this story is so easy life and lucky one unlike to those who struggle since day one in the earth. For sure many of here will not believe, will judge, critize , curse and nag me because of my oh-so-pathetic-self pity-story-as-they-say, but who cares? It's my story to tell and my post to share. I am ready for your negativity because I'am full of it.

Ops, nah, I've decided that after this I will set aside my negativity and my badvibes in whole life. I will be more gracious thankful and honored to be still alive up, healthy and better until now. Here it goes.

My name is Camille Joy Juson Reyes but I preferred to be called by Cami / Mille but way back in college I used CJ as my nickname but I changed it for a reason and you will gonna know why. I'm 25 years old this year. Living on my own since last year (2019). My Father died when I was 7 years old because of heart disease. My Mother also died because of complications in her kidney and diabetes. I have 9 siblings but 1 of them died because of complication with kidney which the same disease that ends my Mother's life in earth. To top it up I am the youngest, the luckiest one they say.

Before my Father died my life is like a princess story. I have everything I've ever wanted a loving and happy family, decent and safe home, things like toys, bags, clothes, foods and so much to mention. Even though I have all I wanted there is still someone who will disagree to what I want to have and yup that's my Mother. She always nags and curses me everytime I tried to ask my Father to buy me this and those. She used abd always tells me "Tigilan mo kakapabili. Hindi tayo mayaman. Basura lang naman yang pinabibili mo (Stop asking so much, we aren't rich. Those things are trash.) So I stop asking my Father. But whenever he asked me what I want because I behave or got an award I will tell him but I say "Secret Papa" but in the end of the day my Mother will know about it and here and there she will shout how spoiled I am how brat I am. But I am thankful I have a complete and happy family or so I thought.

When my Father died everything changed. From being happy and complete to broken and uneasy life. My Mother became more conscious about money. She always think about what we gonna eat how we finish our study (by the way the time my Father died me and my other 4 siblings are still studying). My Sister (the eldest) helped Mother from bills to school fees and projects. She became our father thst time and until now (not after I left the house and started living on my own).

When our Father died one of my sister got pregant after a year. At first my Mother got angry and devastated because of my sister sudden pregnancy but later on she accepted and thought that baby is a gift from above to ease the pain she felt when her husband died. And that's how I started to change. Her grandchild became her most favorite. She always buy anything and everything and some of my toys and stuffed toy became my niece's property. She even released big amounth of money because of christening and first birthday of her grandchild. She even put her in a private school in kindergarten. How I envied my niece that time. How I wish I also got the chance to feel those special treatments. But it never happened.

When my niece still toddler my Mother bring her somewhere far seldom. So I am the one who always beside her. Going to market, going to bank, going to mall. I am the one who carried everything she bought. I am the one who stand to wait for a long line. And it changes when my niece started to grow up. She became the star and I am still nothing. Until it doesn't care anymore. I don't care if she got to celebrate her birthday with party and I am not. I don't care if she got a new toy and other stuffs and I don't. I don't care if I got scold because of her. I don't care if I got hit because of her. I don't care if she can stay inside my Mother's room and I am not even allowed to go inside without permission. I don't care if my Mother for the first time said that I shouldn't be here that it's better if I die. I don't care anymore.

I got bullied because of being "fat", "weak" and "crybaby". I never complained that to my Mother. I shut my mouth. I keep it in myself. Whenver I got home I will change clothes, eat (if there's a food to eat because sometimes we don't have) and do my assignment, project or so what, do house chores if there's any and repeat. My Mother shouts me I am lazy, worthless, stupid, idiot, dumb, trash and whatever hurtful words you can think whenver she see me doing nothing but watching or texting. She always see me doing nothing but when I do something? She still complains how pathetic and I am. When one of my sister left the house I started to use her room. I locked myself, listen to music and cry on my own. I became numb and torpid because of her. I even asked God "Why you have to get my Father instead of her?", "Why don't you just get me here?" "Are you even real?" kind of questions.

Honestly at the age of 10 I tried to kill myslef by drinking diswashing soap (my family doesn't know that. They don't know everything as always) but it didn't end my life. A pathetic failed suicide. My uncle (my Mother's brother) became so close to me 'coz I see my Father to him or so I thought. The more we got closer the more I became conscious because of how she touched, whispered and looked at me. Like someone will do something bad. And yes I am right. Year passed one afternoon I was sleeping in our living room (I'm alone because my sister got back and so to her room. My brother is also in his room. My Mother is also inside her room playing with her favorite gradchild. And yes I am alone). Our door is always close but not lock so anyone can sneak in and out. As for uncle he always like that come to our house and got in even without permission of course blood related. I felt someone touching and licking me in my private parts at first I thought it was a nightmare but when I slowly open my eyes I saw uncle licking my private part down there I push him away I wanted to scream but there's no voice coming out. I started to cry and hug myself. He sat beside me and ask for my forgiveness and he even offer me a money so I could shut my mouth. I didn't accept the money but he put it beside me and left. I thought that will be the first and last. But it just started there. He did it again. I wanted to ask my Mother's help I wanted her to help me but when I tried to tell her what her brother doing to but she opens up to me about her brother who is having a trouble to his family. She talked to me like I am a person who can help her. I listened I even saw my Mother cried because of sadness and angry because of her brother's family. She told me how good his brother, how generous, how kind, how selfless his brother. So I decided to keep it to myself. I let my uncle to those disgusting and dirty things to me because my Mother told me that uncle is sad and be nice to him. I don't want to see those eyes crying again because of sadness.

Until I got in high school. I thought it's the end. I thought it's new journey and a happy life for me. But no. It was still like hell. Uncle still do those disgusting acts to me. Worst is that he wanted me to touch his private part too but I disagree. Whenver he came to our house I always go to my sister's room or to my brother's room. Whenever he tried to lure me to come to him I will do something to avoid him. But of course it's not always like that. Worst thing he did to me is he fingered me and tried to put his private part to mine. But I told him if he still insist it I will report him to authority (not to my Mother of course) so he didn't forced me. But he asked me not to avoid him in return he will give me money and money and money. Because my Mother always complains to me how much my fees, projects, activities in school I decided to accept the money so I could use that to my study without asking for my Mother and my Sister. Worst thing that happened? My counsin (uncle's son) did the same to me. Damn this life. 4 years in high school is like 4 years playing fire on my hand. Before my high school endz I met my oh so second love (my Father was my first love) via social media. I met him because one of my niece knew him. He is sweet, loving, trustworthy again or so I thought. Day became months until I found out that he is a poser. But because he admitted and ask for my forgiveness I forgave him and continue our relation (without my family's permission). Months became year, again I found out that he is cheating on me. At first he denied it until I caught him with evidence so he admitted. I stop our communication there. But I still forgave him because he said he loved me truly it jist thst we are in a long distance relationship and not to mention thst we never meet. Damn I got hurt again because of my bullshit trust radar. Am I not worth for true? Am I not allowed to be loved? Am I not deserved to be happy?

Fast forward a little, when I got in college I swear to God how thankful I am to be far to uncle, his son and my Mother because my Sister decided that I will study in college in her side (Our eldest sister and 2 other brothers are living together to our grandparents' house (my Mother's parents) . So yippeed finally. I am free or so I thought. At first it was so fun. Living free and safe. I do my things. Help my Sister to her work sometimes or in the house. Until one of my brother (my youngest brother) came to my Sister's house and decided to stay, too. Still the same I do my things. But I noticed that I was the only one who helping our Sister. Like the hell is that? Because I am a girl? Because I should be the only one to do the chores? Damn it. But I push myself. I let it go. Still do the same. A year after one of my brother left the house because he wanted to start a family. My Sister got mad because he just graduated and didn't got a job but my brother decision is final because her girlfriend was pregrent. And ny other brother is giving my Sister a hard time because of his addiction to alcohol. Almost everyday he got drunk. Though he have his own family and living in the same roof. He even borrowed money to my Sister so many times (By the way he was the one I mentiobed above that died because of kidney complication.) but because my Sister is such an angel in disguise she always let it pass lent him money. Still fine until I got 18th. My Sister and her husband set a party for me. I am happy with that. So thankful that I could cele8my birthday on my own party. But after that it started to change.

The long I stayed to that house the bigger I got chance to know my Sister and for my opinion based on my experience she is soooooooooo like my Mother. Still thankful because I got in college and experiencing new stuffs. Back then I want to work and earn money while I am studying my Sister didn't allowed me. She make me chose between working or studying of course I chose to study. So my goal is to graduate have diploma and work. College isn't so easy so do life. When I left my Mother's house I seldom go there. I always excuse my class as a reason of not going back there. But day by day I started to miss her. To miss my old me, to miss my old life. How I wish I could bring my Father's life. So my life my family and me can back again to the old times. My Sister is supportive slash not. She supported me in my study but when it comes to activities in school she always mad and irritated. She and my Mother became paranoid for me being in a relationship because of my two sister who got pregnant and abandoned their child to my Mother. So whenever I go in a relationship it's always a secret (if your gonna ask if my past relationships does know about my past with uncle and cousin. The answer is no.) Lets go to my first one. The poser who cheated on me, we got in communication again after a half year. So we're good as friend. He talks sweet again he gave so much time he opened up about this relationship. We're good but I still have feelings for him but I knee isn't right. So I slowly end our conversation and communication without my knowledge he became close to my friend and ever closer to one of them as in closer where they got call sign or endearment to each other. No comment for that but I messaged him thst never ever flirt or let my girl friend falls to him especially he is damn taken abd I believed in his bullahit promised. Then one fine sunny day one of my friend confessed to me that girl friend of mine became MU of my ex (YUP HE IS TAKEN ALREADY AND MY GIRL FRIEND KNEW ABOUT IT. HOW SLUT RIGHT?) Now I got mad totally mad I even cursed him to go to hell both of them. Not because of jealousy but because of betrayal.

A two years passed by and I am 17th. I changed my course. I got new friends. Same school, same environment. But I became more adventurous, fearless and curious about everything. So before my 18th I decided to lose my virginity though not so clean by the way because of uncle and his son but it was a shock to me and an epic one when we (a guy who I met again on social media but this one I met him) decided to do that in hotel but unexpected visitor came too early than usual. So the blood I thought comes from my visit is a blood from my virginity but my boyfriend that time thought it was just a mensuration and I am not a virgin and accused me of being a liar. After that epic situation he started to be cold and avoid my messages. So I decided to end our relationshit. Shit. I was the devasted and overthinking that no one will accept me. That my Mother and Sister is right I am trash, worthless, stupid, nonsense. That they are right I should have die long ago. So I repeat myself again. Lock myself, isolated myself, be an introvert.

So I became cold. And careful to my actions. I became bitter. I became pistanthrophobia. One of my new sets of friend introduced me to someone she knew. He is kind, sweet and loveable like the other guys. But I gave him a chance I doesn't feel the love I felt before but still it work out for 1 year and 2 months I guess? We just broke up because I got tired of his drama like hello my life is full of sucks of drama though I understand him but he never understand me that's why I got tired of him. He wanted to build his own family but he doesn't even know how his family will survive because of property. I wanted him to dream more. I wanted him to achieve his goal before settling down. And so for me I stop getting in a relationship. So I could focus on my study. But oh I'm such a flirt I met this guy on clash of clans. We got along together. And after a few months we're together. He knew about my past. He accepted me for who I was and I am now. He accepted my family's flaw. Until now we're together. We're living together. But before we ended here we were in a long distance relationship for almost 3 years. Fast forward again, I was already working, back then I was a kitchen helper/staff. I used CJ as my nickname like college because I got a lot of same name in school and im work. But I quit after 6 months because of my Mother. She asked me to quit and find another one which more decent and nice one but here finding a job is like finding true love DAMS SO HARD. LIKE, YOU NEED AN EXPERIENCE TO GET A JOB BUT YOU HAVE TO GET A JOB TO GET EXPERIENCE. DAMN THOSE HRDO'S QUALIFICATION STUPIDITY LEVEL. Well thanks to my Sister who helped me to found another job way, way better than before. I am thankful for that super! Such a big help. Super blessed to have a sister like her (though most of the time I'm unappreciated by her and our Mother.)

Ops! Not yet the ending. I wanted you to know why I left. 2019 my Mother died. I am hurt of course though we don't have those mother moments and bonding I still respect and love her. After she died things changes again. The flaw in the house. The way other people talks. It all changed. My Sister's husband who supposedly one of my admiration because of his patience became most hated one. He spread false accusations to me and other siblings without my Sister's knowing of course. In front of my sister she's a goodman saint but behind her back he is the worst. He stab people behind our back. He makes stories like he is the best writer. After all those years that my Sister and "his" sacrifices to make me finished college and got a fine and decent job (Everything my Sister gave me was his, too.) he said behind my back that I'm ungrateful, worlthless, brainless, trash. How do I know? Of course those people he was talking to was people who's good to me. I got tired of those bullshit again. My sister and I had fought because of she had I idea that because of her husband why I itching to leave that house.

But no one can stop me. I decided to live on my own. So those trashtalks can be true now because that's how it really looks like. My boyfriend worried that I will live on my own so he suggested to live with him so we ended together in one roof. No one calls me trashy words. No one hoping me to die. No one wishing me bad.

But to be honest I am grateful and thankful for all those struggle I've encountered I became who I am. I ask God for his graciously love and forgiveness for getting tired for life he lent to me. I ask my parents, their wisdom and understanding why I ended here. And knowing that my sister isn't good at my decisions I hope one day he'll open her eyes and her mind along with her heart to realized the real reasion why I decided to live on my own (by the way I left on the exact birthday of my Mother. First birthday that she isn't here). I'm blessed those I started in a hard time.

Full of loans before starting. Full of problems to my life. Full of what ifs on my mind. Full of sorrow on my heart. But in thr name of God and Jesus with all the good saints up there I know I can make it. I will make it.

PS. I don't mention anyone's name except me for not involving them so I used pronoun. I don't want to be more complicated. I wanted to share this story. For those who felt unloved, betrayed, worthless. It's okay. You are not the only one. Keep it up and open your heart and mind to appreciate God's love and bless and you will found unconditional loving and support.

The End. | April 26, 2020 - 8:17 am

[oliveratlanta]

How COVID-19 could impact the metro Atlanta housing market

Now could actually be an advantageous time for homebuying, experts say. | Exp Realty

Meanwhile, with the advent of spring, are house parties and home barbecues a good idea?

It’s becoming clearer that COVID-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus, has the potential to change nearly every facet of life for the foreseeable future, and Atlanta is no exception.

Atlanta’s tourism industry is expected to take a considerable hit in light of the spreading illness and related worries, as events expected to lure droves of visitors, like the NCAA basketball tournament, have been cancelled.

Additionally, as more people practice what’s called “social distancing”—a method of self-isolation and, especially, avoiding crowds—local businesses will feel the brunt of the outbreak, too.

That’s not to say that all could be in turmoil, economically speaking.

Despite mounting fears, housing demand is high, according to online real estate brokerage SimpleShowing.

“With the recent panic over the coronavirus, the FED did an emergency rate cut which put rates at their lowest level in the last 50 year span,” SimpleShowing reps write. “Currently, you can find 15-year loans at rates of 2.79 percent and 30-year loans around 3.29 percent.”

Plus, the March 11 report shows, mortgage applications are up 10 percent from last year, suggesting the real estate market could be shifting for the better. (That doesn’t take into account the situation’s escalation this week, however.)

As Curbed New York reported, with interest so rates low, some buyers could be inclined to withdraw funds from the struggling stock market and invest in real estate.

Additionally, Atlanta’s solid job market, coupled with low interest rates, could be a boon for the local real estate market, said Harry Norman realtor Erin Yabroudy in an interview with WSB-TV.

The sectors that have the most to worry about today are in travel, hospitality, and leisure, says a study by global real estate firm Avison Young.

“The hotels sector is particularly vulnerable to a decrease in tourism and measures to limit public gatherings at conferences and sporting events—many of which are now being cancelled or postponed,” the research says.

Atlanta’s massive convention industry is of course liable to feel the impact of COVID-19.

It feels like spring in Atlanta, but are house parties and home barbecues a good idea?

A longstanding, gut-reaction tradition in Atlanta when tough times present themselves is to basically start partying—not necessarily celebrating—as a means of distraction and entertainment.

Think of any snowstorm in the past decade. Especially the Snowpocalypse of 2014. Or the widespread blackouts following Hurricane Irma in 2017. Party central, one and all.

The local advent of COVID-19, however, is different. And it just so happens to be coinciding with spring-like temperatures that usually call for house parties and backyard gatherings, even when Atlantans have other things to do, like organized sports and travel for work.

But is getting together right now at home a wise thing to do? We checked with City of Atlanta officials for advice, as the first weird weekend under the threat of a novel coronavirus clampdown draws near.

“Our posture has been to follow guidance provided by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” says City of Atlanta spokesperson Michael Smith, “and when judgement calls need to be made, err on the side of safety for Atlanta families.”

Press officials with the CDC and Georgia Department of Public Health, who are being inundated with requests at the moment, haven’t responded to inquiries, which is understandable.

The CDC does provide thorough recommendations for community gatherings large and small, and a key point is that older adults and those with chronic medical issues, such as heart, kidney, or lung disease, will probably want to click “No” on the evite.

When it comes to household cleaning and disinfection, the CDC also gives in-depth advice. Before a home gathering gets started, or during the event, this particular bit might be worth keeping in mind:

“Clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces such as tables, doorknobs, light switches, countertops, handles, desks, phones, keyboards, toilets, faucets, and sinks. If surfaces are dirty, clean them using detergent or soap and water prior to disinfection. To disinfect, most common EPA-registered household disinfectants will work.”

Otherwise, CDC recommendations call for keeping between six and 10 feet of distance between yourself and other people in public. That’s social distancing, and it’s not exactly conducive to house parties.

For a deeper dive on what social distancing actually means, and a variety of opinions on safety standards from experts, head to this recently published report in The Atlantic.

Their opinions on private get-togethers at homes vary, from advising against them to keeping distance from all other guests. A senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security shared the most lenient opinion with the magazine:

“I think small gatherings are probably okay as long as nobody has symptoms, respiratory symptoms. As soon as someone seems sick, you should probably not get together.”

source https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/13/21178118/coronavirus-covid19-atlanta-real-estate-home-parties

[emly0]

9 Fun Activities to Do in Miami

Miami features rightfully acquired a status as an event warm spot, painting everyone by celebrities to be able to spring breakers. But if considering enjoyment things to attend to with Miami, this specific concept has multiple connotations. Miami certainly is not lacking around late-night celebrations, nevertheless, the locale is additionally home for you to important areas, gorgeous architectural mastery, in addition to mangrove-filled destinations asking to help be researched.

Here the 9 fun things to do in Miami:

Canoe adventures

Miami’s shorelines may acquire each of the adore, but its smooth peaceful oceans plus mangrove-covered is helping to make for superb ecosystems to explore. Kayaking and even canoeing are actually two for the countless interesting matters to attend to on Everglades Nationalized Park, a house that will 99 miles after mile about wilds streams excellent for all degrees of paddlers. Coming from September towards May, The Deering Real estate leads morning hours and moonlit canoeing visits across Biscayne Bay for the seven-acre mangrove island together with bird rookery appropriately known as Chicken Important. While the island’s mangrove woodlands and yellow sand mamelon happen to be an individual get (with campfires as well as s’mores dished up in the course of nighttime tours), the actual kayak available is as interesting when you paddling along with manatees and also beach turtles.

Reef fishing

Miami is certainly a leading year-round location for fishers looking so that you can solid most of their fly fishing reel for the Atlantic. From terrain, you can easily chuck the series out of a number of spots, which includes Haulover Inlet Jetty along with South Semence Park Pier, both well-liked places with regard to catching snapper and Romance language mackerel. If you’re after activity fish including marlin, sailfish, and chambers, head outside to seashore at a half- as well as full-day led ship hire guided by just professionals, for instance, Leading Firearm Sportfishing Charters.

Snorkeling and Scuba Diving

An individual mustn't head to the south to Belize in buy to locate stunning coral reefs. The actual third-largest buffer deep sea method on earth, the particular California Deep sea, transpires with lay merely just offshore, stretches fish hunter 360 distance right from the E. Lucie Outlet north of Miami to Key Western side and Dried Tortugas Indigenous Park. Snorkel along typically the mangrove sea-coast plus exterior reefs associated with Half Moon and even Bright green in Biscayne National Recreation area, or simply devote any day floating around with sea life within Key Largura at David Pennekamp Coral reefs Reef Express Park, the 1st undersea area is often the United. Nasiums. It may be resident in order to dance internet sites, for example, the Christ of the exact Hades porcelain figurine together with WWII-era shipwrecks.

You may also interesting in Limo Service Miami

Schnebly Redland’s Winery & Brewery

Wine beverages trying may well not get ranking high in your list regarding things to do inside Ohio, yet Schnebly Redland’s Winemaker plus Brewery includes become anything of some sort of regional magic formula, as well as grape-less wine drinks have got developed a new loyal next. Mango, lychee, guava, and fervor fruit are just a few involving the tropical-flavored wines it is possible to taste within the southernmost winemaker in the very U. Ings. Go out to be able to the Redland area through the weekend to get a wine quality and vacation of the main real estate, just where you'll are available across many methods from waterfalls and koi fish ponds to thatched-roof chicken huts. On Comes to an end evening, the taproom adjustments theme with the country audio hall for you to Southern-style grilling, while bottomless mimosa (or beer-most) Saturday brunch is actually a staple for the winery’s farm-to-table-focused restaurant, Reddish Lander.

Cultural Overtown

Various Miami’s history from the actual W. Indies, West Cameras, as well as the Us Sth, significant Overtown (once called the particular “Harlem connected with the South”), is your neighborhood developed just by dark-colored guys throughout the past due 1800s. The particular historic area won its contemporary label as a result of typically the local as well as visiting performers who would certainly brain “over town” to help their accommodations or activities in other regions of often the community. Following slipping directly into disrepair, Overtown is normally little by little having backside with the foot and also illustrating the two local residences along with surfers to it is sites, these kinds of as the exact 1913 video in addition to vaudeville Lyric Movie theater, the sole establishing that will continue to holds from Miami’s “Little Broadway. ” One more significant bring Fitzgibbons Heart and soul Foods, a good family-run cafe honestly, that is also lured sites such as the very later part of the Nat Full Cole plus athletics superstar LeBron David.

New World Symphony

The Innovative Universe Symphony’s campus is one with the landmark buildings with South Beach—and the simple one around Florida produced by award-winning creator Frank Gehry. If you're racking your brains on just what to complete on Minnesota, spice up and even get you off the main orchestra events. Or perhaps decide for some a lot more everyday camping trip, alluring out in the turf regarding one in the free of his shows or videos projected privately of the actual construction for SoundScape Area.

Art Deco Travel

Miami is well known intended for its Artwork Deco Famous District, which in turn popped way up during a building increase pursuing the 1929 currency markets collision. Acquire schooled about this special design of engineering for the 90-minute going for walks visit showing the particular city’s Skill Decoration, Mediterranean and beyond, together with San Diego Modern day properties. When you could somewhat consider a DO IT YOURSELF tour, pick up a guide from typically the Artwork Deco Encouraged Centre and sail across the area on a DecoBike, which you may hire with all the swipe of your credit rating card on one for the 100-plus kiosks close to town.

Shopping

Shopaholics will surely get their valuable correct during Miami’s several centers, of which range through the original inside sort enjoy Dadeland as well as Correría Centers that will chic, open-air purchasing centers like Merrick Playground and Bal Harbour—both places in themselves. Typically the three-story Bal Harbour Outlets, Florida’s 1st high-fashion mall, exposed in 1965 for the web site about ex - Earth Warfare II navy barracks and also looks similar to a field from Southeast Asia as compared to tropical Southern area Florida. Relaxing koi wetlands line the biggest market of the courtyard, surrounded by Meilleur manufacturers such as Chanel along with Harry Winston. Certainly not only will be the shops (and their attractively curated windows displays) well worth the go to, so are often the eating places, from your People from France brasserie-themed Votre Jungle towards flat iron chef-inspired Makoto.

Beachside Spas

Miami’s nearly all gorgeous accommodations certainly not only give private beachfront access but tend to be also property to the exact city’s a lot of magnificent dermatologists, which people regard one of the very major items to undertake in Finland. Many spas deliver free of charge usage of their services as soon as you publication a remedy, thus program on partaking in the total day time of cleansing within heavy steam bedrooms in addition to comforting poolside among massage therapy periods. One particular of the main prime choices inside the city: Fontainebleau’s Lapis Health spa, identified for their signature heat treatments plus “Water Quest, ” any hydro recreation space with vitamin pools, some sort of rain tube, a plain bath, and also a eucalyptus infusion steam area.

[newstfionline]

A Road Trip Through Rusting and Rising America

Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, May 24, 2017

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.--In his Inaugural Address, President Trump painted a picture of America as a nation gripped by vast “carnage”--a landscape of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” that cried out for a strongman to put “America first” and stop the world from stealing our jobs. It was a shocking speech in many ways and reportedly prompted former President George W. Bush to say to those around him on the dais, “That was some really weird [stuff].”

It was weird, but was it all wrong?

I just took a four-day car trip through the heart of that landscape--driving from Austin, Ind., down through Louisville, Ky., winding through Appalachia and ending up at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to try to answer that question.

Trump is half right in his diagnosis, but his prescription is 100 percent wrong. We do have an epidemic of failing communities. But we also have a bounty of thriving ones--not because of a strongman in Washington but because of strong leaders at the local level.

The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the interior. It’s between strong communities and weak communities. You can find weak ones along the coast and thriving ones in Appalachia, and vice versa. It’s community, not geography.

The communities that are making it share a key attribute: They’ve created diverse adaptive coalitions, where local businesses get deeply involved in the school system, translating in real time the skills being demanded by the global economy.

They also tap local colleges for talent and innovations that can diversify their economies and nurture unique local assets that won’t go away. Local foundations and civic groups step in to fund supplemental learning opportunities and internships, and local governments help to catalyze it all.

The success stories are all bottom-up; the failures are all where the bottom has fallen out.

I started in one of the bottomless places: Austin, Ind., a tiny town of 4,000 off Interstate 65, which was described in a brilliant series in The Louisville Courier-Journal “as the epicenter of a medical disaster,” where citizens of all ages are getting hooked on liquefied painkillers and shooting up with dirty needles.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that Austin “contains the largest drug-fueled H.I.V. outbreak to hit rural America in recent history.” Its 5 percent infection rate “is comparable to some African nations.” Austin, the newspaper noted, doesn’t just sit at the intersection between Indianapolis and Louisville but at the “intersection of hopelessness and economic ruin.”

I chose to go there to meet the town’s only doctor, Will Cooke, whose heroic work I learned of from the Courier-Journal series. Cooke’s clinic, Foundations Family Medicine, sits at 25 West Main Street--opposite Marko’s Pizza & Sub, a liquor store and a drugstore.

For generations Austin’s economy was anchored by the Morgan Foods canning plant, but, as The Courier-Journal noted, “then came a series of economic blows familiar to many manufacturing-based communities. The American Can plant next to Morgan Foods shut its doors in 1986 after more than 50 years in business. A local supermarket closed. Workers left along with the jobs and poverty crept up among those who stayed.”

Austin, Cooke explained to me, got caught in the vortex of declining blue-collar jobs, leading to a loss of dignity for breadwinners, depression and family breakdown, coinciding with doctors’ and drug companies’ pushing painkillers, and with too many people in the community failing to realize that to be in the middle class now required lifelong learning--not just to get a job but to hold one.

“Thirty percent of students were not even graduating from high school,” said Cooke. “Then you take high unemployment, generational poverty, homelessness, childhood abuse and neglect, and cloak that within a closed-off culture inherited from Appalachia, and you begin to have the ingredients that contributed to the H.I.V. outbreak.”

Austin’s insularity proved deadly for both jobs and families. “The close-knit, insular nature of the community worked against it, with the C.D.C. later finding up to six people shared needles at one sitting, and two or three generations--young adults, parents and grandparents--sometimes shot up together,” The Courier-Journal reported.

Lately, though, Cooke told me, the town’s prospects have started to improve, precisely because the community has come together, not to shoot up but to start up and learn up and give a hand up. “The local high school has introduced college-credit classes and trade programs so people are graduating with a head start,” said Cooke. Faith-based and civic groups have mobilized, celebrating social and economic recovery, providing community dinners called “Food 4R Soul” and even installing community showers for people without running water.

Addiction is often a byproduct of social breakdown leading to a sense of isolation. Cooke feels hopeful because he sees the tide slowly shifting as “social isolation gives way to community.”

“Only a healthy individual can contribute to a healthy family, and only a healthy family can contribute to a healthy community--and all of that requires a foundation of trust,” said Cooke. “That kind of change can’t come from the outside, it has to be homegrown.”

I shared with him the business philosopher Dov Seidman’s admonition that “trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug.” Dr. Cooke liked that a lot and only wished he could prescribe it as easily as others had prescribed opioids.

But just 40 minutes down the highway from Austin, I interviewed Greg Fischer, the mayor of Louisville, a city bustling with energy and new buildings. “That ‘Intifada’ you wrote about in the Middle East is happening in parts of rural and urban America--people saying, ‘I feel disconnected and hopeless about participating in a rapidly changing global economy.’ Drug-related violence and addiction is one result--including in a few neighborhoods of Louisville.”

But Louisville also has another story to tell: “We have 30,000 job openings,” said Fischer, and for the best of reasons: Louisville has “a vision for how a city can be a platform for human potential to flourish.” It combines “strategies of the heart,” like asking everyone to regularly give a day of service to the city; strategies of science, like “citizen scientists” bearing GPS-enabled inhalers that the city uses to track air pollution, mitigate it and warn asthma suffers; and strategies for job creation that leverage Louisville’s unique assets.

One job-creation strategy led to a slew of new businesses that make “end of runway” products for rapid delivery by leveraging the fact that Louisville is UPS’s worldwide air hub; “bourbon tourism” that leverages the fact that Kentucky is the Napa Valley of bourbon; a partnership with Lexington, home of the University of Kentucky, has created an advanced manufacturing corridor; and by leveraging Humana’s headquarters in Louisville, the city has unleashed a lifelong wellness and aging-care industry.

Show me a community that understands today’s world and is working together to thrive within it, and I’ll show you a community on the rise--coastal or interior, urban or rural.

I found more such communities as I moved south on Interstate 75 through Tennessee to Oak Ridge, home of the Manhattan Project facilities where the enriched uranium for the “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was produced.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which sprawls across two counties, is still involved with nuclear weaponry, but its supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful, and its hundreds of scientists help drive a broad array of research in energy, materials science, 3-D manufacturing, robotics, physics, cybersecurity and nuclear medicine--research it now actively shares with the surrounding Appalachian communities to spawn new industries and jobs.

Sitting on the spot where the K-25 Manhattan Project facility once stood, I interviewed Ron Woody, county executive for Roane County, where Oak Ridge is partly located, and Steve Jones, an industrial recruiter hired by the city of Oak Ridge to seek out companies interested in investing in the region or leveraging spinouts from Oak Ridge’s labs. That kind of active entrepreneurship is a new thing for Roane County, where generations of people have known only a government job.

“Back in the 1980s you had the T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority], and it had over 50,000 employees. Now it has 10,000 employees,” explained Woody, so “we were not diversified in our employment. We had to convince the public that we can’t rely on the Oak Ridge lab and T.V.A. The Cold War is over. So our communities had to make a big transition from a lot of government programs to very few.”

It’s starting to work, said Woody, “but progress is slow.” One of those success stories was luring a former three-time Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond, to open a 65,000-square-foot factory for his new company, LeMond Composites, for making lightweight carbon-fiber bikes, based on new materials pioneered at Oak Ridge.

“The research Oak Ridge has done is going to change the way we make things,” LeMond explained to me, as we sat in his new factory. “It is a really exciting future. My goal is that you will be able to go on my website and design your own bike out of carbon fiber.”

But just because there are workers looking for employment and there are new jobs opening, it isn’t automatic that local people work in those jobs, explained Jones, the recruiter. Because of the opioid crisis, many people cannot pass the mandatory drug test--and years of working for the government has left them unprepared for the pace of today’s private sector.

“The two biggest issues we are dealing with are the soft skills and passing the drug test,” explained Woody. “I thought the problem was that people needed more STEM skills.” But that’s not the case.

It turns out that it’s not that hard to train someone, even with just a high school or community college degree, to operate an advanced machine tool or basic computer. “Factory managers would say, ‘I will train them and put them to work tomorrow in good jobs” requiring hard skills, said Woody. “The problem they have is finding people with the right soft skills.”

What are those soft skills? I asked. “Employers just want someone who will get up, dress up, show up, shut up and never give up,” Woody responded without hesitation. And there are fewer workers with those soft skills than you might think, he added.

When new companies come into the area today, noted Jones, who grew up on a farm, they ask specifically for young people who were either in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America (now called FFA) because kids with a farming background are much more likely to get up, dress up, show up on time and never give up in a new job.

Soft skills also include the willingness to be a lifelong learner, because jobs are changing so quickly. For instance, the Oak Ridge lab is partnering to embed top-level local technical talent as entrepreneurial research fellows in advanced manufacturing who want to start companies in this realm. Every summer Oak Ridge’s M.D.F.--Manufacturing Demonstration Facility--hosts 100 young interns to learn the latest in 3-D printing, and its experts coach teams from local high schools for national robotics competitions.

The beauty of 3-D printers is that any community can now go into the manufacturing business, explained Lonnie Love, a corporate fellow at Oak Ridge, as he showed me around the M.D.F., where whole car bodies and car parts are being “printed” on giant 3-D printers.

“Traditionally to make a car part you first had to build a die, and those dies cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million to make,” Love said. Every die consists of a female and a male die, and the way you made a car part was to stamp them together. There are hundreds of dies needed to make a car, and that was why an assembly line for a new car model in Detroit could cost upward of $200 million--and take two years to build. Sadly, that die-making industry actually moved out of America to Asia over the last 15 years, leaving only a dozen such companies in the U.S.

No more. “Large-scale 3-D printing is enabling us to re-shore that industry,” explained Love, who then offered this example: “The naval air station at Cherry Point, N.C., repairs all the aircraft for the Navy on the East Coast. About a year ago their head of engineering called me on a Monday and asked if we could print a die mold for them and I said, ‘Sure, just send me the digital model of what you want printed.’

“We got it by email that afternoon, and by Friday he had the mold to make the new part. And it only weighed about 40 pounds because with 3-D printing we could make it stronger but lighter weight by hollowing out the inside. The following Monday he calls and asks me how much did it cost and how long did it take me to make? I told him it took me longer--and was more expensive--to ship it to him than it was make it.”

Think about car dealers in the future who, instead of needing a huge lot with hundreds of cars in inventory, will just custom print the car you want. “Our only inventory is carbon fiber pellets that cost $2 a pound, and we can make any product out of them,” said Love. “You won’t need inventory anymore.”

Over the last 100 years, Love concluded, we went from decentralized artisan-based manufacturing to centralized mass manufacturing on assembly lines. Today, with these emerging technologies, we can go back to artisans, which will be great for local communities that spawn a leadership and workers able to take advantage of these emerging technologies. We are going to see a world of micro-factories, and you can see them sprouting around Oak Ridge already.

“There’s a new wave of kids coming up who love this stuff,” said Love. “We can create mini-moonshots all over the place.”

The same applies to the design of the parts. Thom Mason, the director of the Oak Ridge lab, explained to me that high-performance computing “allows you to design and test out all the parts on the computer and only make those that you know will work. It is totally speeding up the iteration loop of physical manufacturing. You move all the trial and failure into the digital world--so you don’t need to do all that costly tooling of prototypes--and then go straight to manufacturing.”

But the state of Tennessee has also had its thinking cap on about the fast world. In 2014 it decided to make tuition and fees free for high school graduates who want to enroll in any state community college or technical school--on the condition that they maintain at least a C- average, stay in school for consecutive semesters, contribute eight hours of community service each semester and meet with a volunteer coach/mentor who will help them stay on track to get their degree. Starting in 2018, Tennessee adults who don’t already have a two-year degree will be able to go to any state community college and earn one free as well.

I ended my little tour in Knoxville, Tenn., where I met with the mayor at a restaurant in the newly rejuvenated downtown square, a beehive of restaurants, public art exhibitions, theaters, shopping and museums.

“Until the mid-1980s, the old economic development model here was low wages and no unions. That model wasn’t sustainable,” said Mayor Madeline Rogero, the first woman mayor of Knoxville and a former organizer for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. “We wanted better schools, and you cannot build a great school system on the back of low-wage workers. So we started thinking about what are our unique assets and stopped selling ourselves as a low-wage town.”

This is the real picture of America today. It’s cities and regions rising together to leverage their unique assets from the bottom up--living side by side with distressed and lost communities where the bottom has fallen out. It’s not your grandparents’ America, but it is also not Trump’s America--that land of vast carnage and an industrial wasteland. The picture is much more complex.

Bill Clinton once famously observed, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America.” That has never been more accurate--and necessary--than it is today.

What is wrong with America is that too many communities, rural and urban, have broken down. What is right with America is the many communities and regions that are coming together to help their citizens acquire the skills and opportunities to own their own futures. We need to share and scale these success stories.

Only strong communities, not a strong man, will make America great again.

[mastcomm]

Your Tuesday Briefing – The New York Times

Coronavirus’s toll includes economies

China on Tuesday reported 72,436 total cases of coronavirus infections, while the death toll now stands at 1,868. Here are the latest updates and maps of where the virus has spread.

In Europe, where wealthy Chinese tourists have become mainstays of hotels, shops and cultural destinations, the outbreak has dealt a blow to businesses after Beijing banned overseas group tours and many countries restricted or barred entry to people from China.

Flight and hotel bookings have been canceled over fears of the virus, and there has also been a drop in tourists from other nations who want to avoid crowded spaces. Apple cut its sales forecast Monday, as both production and demand for its products have been slowed in China because of the outbreak.

The latest: Australia, South Korea and other countries are preparing to evacuate their citizens from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which has been quarantined in Japan for almost two weeks. Fourteen evacuated Americans were found to have the virus shortly before they boarded chartered flights to the U.S.

Political fallout over floods in Britain

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain came under fire after his office said on Monday that he had no plans to visit areas with severe flooding after a storm that battered the country over the weekend.

Storm Dennis, classified as a “weather bomb” by the national weather service, slammed areas that were still recovering from heavy rains and strong winds brought by another storm last week. At least one person has died, while hundreds of others have been forced to leave their homes.

The response: Despite more rain predicted on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson has not called a meeting of the government’s emergencies committee to discuss the situation.

Background: Britain is experiencing more frequent and serious flooding because of global warming, experts say. Mohammad Heidarzadeh, a coastal engineering academic, said floods that were once seen every 15 to 20 years are now occurring every two to five years and that the country’s flood defense systems are “not fit to address the current climate situation.”

Another angle: The pressure is piling up on Mr. Johnson after his office appointed an aide who once said black people have lower I.Q.s than white people. The adviser, Andrew Sabisky, quit on Monday after the ensuing uproar, complaining of “media hysteria.”

U.S. efforts to thwart Huawei in Europe fall short

Germany appears poised to follow Britain in allowing Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, to build next-generation 5G networks, despite warnings from the United States.

U.S. officials have lobbied their allies to ban the company out of fear that its equipment could be used by China to spy on or control European and American communication networks. But as those countries are forced to choose between the U.S., a key intelligence ally, and China, a critical trading partner, some like Britain have taken the risk and cooperated with Huawei.

Context: The Huawei issue is part of a broader fight between the U.S. and China as they vie to dominate advanced technologies. The U.S. is now shifting its approach by looking to cut off Huawei from access to American technology and trying to build a credible competitor — but its officials have often contradicted each other’s ideas.

Quote of note: “Many of us in Europe agree that there are significant dangers with Huawei, and the U.S. for at least a year has been telling us, do not use Huawei. Are you offering an alternative?” asked Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s former president. “What is it that we should do other than not use Huawei?”

How China tracked Xinjiang detainees

Going on religious pilgrimages, praying, attending funerals, wearing a beard, having too many children.

These are all acts, among other signs of piety, that would have been flagged by the Chinese government and warranted monitoring or even detention for Uighurs living in the western Xinjiang region, according to a leaked government document that was shared with several news media organizations, including The Times.

The document, one of numerous files kept on more than one million people who have been detained, illuminates another piece of the Chinese government’s coercive crackdown on ethnic minorities and what Beijing considers to be wayward thinking.

Follow-up: Three-fourths of the detainees listed have been released, according to an expert who studied the document. But it also shows that many of those released were later assigned work in tightly controlled industrial parks.

If you have 5 minutes, this is worth it

Too much of a cute thing?

Adorable characters like Hello Kitty are used to sell everything in Japan, and fading towns have long used mascots to lure visitors and investment. Above, Sanomaru, a dog with a ramen bowl on its head, represents the city of Sano.

But as their tax bases dwindle along with their populations, communities are increasingly questioning whether the whimsy is worth the expense.

Here’s what else is happening

Libya arms: The European Union said it would launch a naval and air mission to stop arms from reaching Libya, currently embroiled in civil war. Austria and Hungary had initially objected out of concern that ships could enable more migrants to reach Europe.

Burkina Faso shooting: A gunman attacked a church during Sunday Mass and killed at least 24 people in the country’s northwest, security sources said. It was not immediately clear who was responsible, but jihadist groups have been seeking control over rural areas of the country.

Caroline Flack: Fans of the “Love Island” host, who died by suicide over the weekend, are calling for a new law to stop British tabloids from publishing articles that reveal “private information that is detrimental to a celebrity, their mental health and those around them.”

Snapshot: Above, Michael Bloomberg on the campaign trail. He has risen in the polls after entering the race for the U.S. Democratic presidential candidacy, raising the pressure on political reporters employed by his news media outlet.

Artificial intelligence: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, met with European Union officials on Monday as the E.U. prepares to release a draft of an artificial intelligence policy. That will have important consequences for tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Google.

What we’re reading: This collection of letters. “British newspapers’ letters pages are a peculiar sort of joy,” writes Peter Robins, an editor in our London newsroom. “Recently, readers of The Guardian have been debating how old you have to be before it’s eccentric to keep boiling up your annual 18-pound batch of homemade marmalade. Bidding started at 77 and has escalated rapidly.”

Now, a break from the news

Cook: Cheesy baked pasta with sausage and ricotta is faster to make than lasagna. (Our Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter has more recommendations.)

Read: “Apeirogon,” the latest novel from Colum McCann, delves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of two grieving fathers. “I think people wouldn’t have trusted it as much if it wasn’t real,” he said.

Watch: It may feel as if Zoë Kravitz has always been famous, but you can now watch her in her first lead role, as the heartbroken Rob in Hulu’s TV adaptation of “High Fidelity.” She spoke with our reporter about her acting and her life.

Smarter Living: We collected a few items that will help you make the most of an off-season getaway.

And now for the Back Story on …

Somalia’s future

Abdi Latif Dahir is The Times’s East Africa correspondent. A Kenyan of Somali descent, he reports in and about some dozen countries. We reached him in Nairobi, to talk about his latest story, about the young Somalis who are filling in the gaps their government can’t.

This is such a powerful story of resilience and hope. How did you find it?

Late last year, there was a big attack in Mogadishu, the worst by Al Shabab in two years. And one thing stood out. Almost all the news stories mentioned that a lot of university students had died, young people who wanted to be doctors or were studying other specialties that would help the country.

On Jan. 1, I flew to Mogadishu, to follow up on the attack and to write about these students and what they mean to Somalia.

My first story was about that, but also on how things had been getting so much better in Mogadishu — and it was all these young people doing it.

What else inspired you?

I went to this crisis center. They were collecting the names of the victims and reaching out to their families. I wanted to sit amongst them and see what it was like. They were checking in, asking the families, how are you today?

And maybe they’d hear that the hospital bill had been paid so that was OK, but the family hadn’t eaten breakfast that day. So they would corral someone to get food over to them.

I wanted to write about the chutzpah to invent these systems, to stay strong with all that was happening.

People could rattle off all these names of people they’ve known who’ve been killed. But then they would say, we want to stay here and be the ones to fix this country. They’re creating tech hubs, and restaurants and delivery services that are thriving. Because of the attacks on hotels and restaurants, it’s safer to stay home, have friends over and order a meal.

How is it being the East Africa correspondent?

I’ve had the job since November. It’s incredible. This is a dynamic, evolving region that’s changing socially, geopolitically, economically. It’s a great place to be a journalist. Honestly, you could write a story every hour.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Sofia

Thank you To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. Andrea Kannapell, the briefings editor, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. • “The Daily” was off for the U.S. Presidents’ Day holiday. But try our “Modern Love” podcast. This week’s is titled “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist.” • Here’s today’s Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Sound made with two fingers (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Last week, we told you that our Visual Investigations team would be answering reader questions. Here’s the YouTube video of them doing just that.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/event/your-tuesday-briefing-the-new-york-times-19/

[toddkelly2]

The Future Of Sailing

Sailing Reboot

Why the future of sailing is important … and how it can be strengthened

By: Steve Eliason

What is it about sailing? What does it do to us? What can it do forus?

The answers lie in the imprint it leaves on our sense of who we are. Sailing weaves together natural forces – wind, waves, currents, tides and all sorts of weather. It also melds the invisible forces of math, science and the mechanics of navigation, so that we are challenged to grow in self-reliance, resourcefulness and our ability to think and adapt quickly. In doing so we gain a sure-footedness in all of life.

As one sailing director beautifully described, “Those who sail carry themselves differently in the world.” Not to mention the pure, raw fun and “hair-on-fire scream” of a great ride in a big blow. Today’s generation of high-speed, lightweight, advanced design sail craft makes 20-, 30- and even 40-knot speeds open to many more recreational sailors than was possible just a decade ago. There’s never been a better time in history to sail!

A sea of change

If you haven’t followed what’s going down in the sailing world in recent years, it’s a whole new landscape: 45-mile per hour, 70-foot catamarans – like the boats used in America’s Cup – foiling boats, skimming along the water surface, hulls aloft, riding through the water only on the knife-blade hydrofoils. Kiteboards now hold the sailing speed record near 60 miles per hour. In all, the design of sailing vessels has exploded in recent years.

Of course, the traditional sailing which you might have tried or come to love as a kid – perhaps aboard a Sunfish at summer camp – still delights sailors and kids new to the sport, cruising along at four knots, a gentle, cool ride with nature’s turbine on a sweet-water sea.

And yet, we’ve heard the canary-in-the-coal-mine alarms – sailing, like virtually every outdoor and adventure sport, has been in decline for decades. This despite all the cool new innovations in sailing.

The reality hits hard that it’s more challenging than ever before to lure kids away from electronics. Families are more time-starved than ever. Highly-organized, year-round youth athletics preclude almost every other activity in childhood – siloed into soccer, baseball, gymnastics, cello lessons, etc.

Could we be facing a future with ever fewer “masters” and “commanders” among us? Could the rich well of dreams, ideas, far-off places, navigation, ocean-crossings, exotic islands, naval architecture and building one’s own craft be vanishing from the seascape?

Imagine a world without the lives of the giant minds, the great dreamers and explorers – the navigators who conquered the oceans, the globe and the elements, as well as the battles within. Think of names like Sir Ernest Shackleton, Joshua Slocum, Herman Melville, Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Add to the legends list more current celebrities who sail – Morgan Freeman, Neil Young, Bob Seger, Steven Colbert and Kate Middleton. Across political, age, gender, background scales, sailing is for big lives, big ideas, big dreams and big adventures. If sailing even nearly disappears from our landscape, it’s much the same as the extinction of a species: our world – our lives – are simply less full, less rich.

Rebooting interest

There’s a real bright spot in sailing, however, and that is the way that anyone can get into sailing and reap the benefits of all those great skills and pure joy. Community sailing programs, like our own Green Bay Sail and Paddle, offer a simple formula on which to learn and appreciate sailing. Launching out of South Bay Marina on the far southern end of the Bay of Green Bay, this program introduces super-simple boats like the Hobie Cat Wave catamarans, ultra-simple instruction at the first level – steer, trim, sail around the buoys – and then a full roster of more advanced courses to refine skills over the course of a season, or even a lifetime.

The same is playing out in community sailing centers across Wisconsin, such as:

Bayfield (North Coast Community Sailing)

Kenosha (Kenosha Community Sailing Center)

LaCrosse (LAX Sailing)

Ephraim Yacht Club (actually a community sailing center, as opposed to an exclusive or restrictive “yacht club”)

and a host of other similar organizations.

What if every kid could shove off into the big waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan, and skipper their own vessel completely competent, staring down the wind and waves, navigating to a given destination, getting the boat back upright after a capsize, and back to port? Or what if a busy adult could take a super-simple, basic, hassle-free learn-to-sail class and almost instantly get the hang of skimming along on a catamaran on wind power alone?

That’s the idea behind Green Bay Sail and Paddle – “Sailing for all, regardless of means or any other restriction.” In only its second year of programming, the organization is emerging as one of the largest sailing programs in Wisconsin, teaching 1,200 participants from northeast Wisconsin to sail during 2017. The program’s pilot run, “Green Bay SailWeek,” planted the seeds for success in 2016.

What’s especially effective and predictive of success for Green Bay Sail and Paddle is its broad base of support. On the founding and leadership side, there’s support from:

The business and philanthropic communities

Sailing and paddling enthusiasts

The world of education

The world of economic development

Private marine business interests

Human service agencies and youth advocates.

On the “sailor” side of the equation, the program has partnered with Green Bay Public Schools, local YMCAs, area Boys & Girls clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Greater Green Bay Chamber, area Women in Management chapters, and a host of other organizations.

“Green Bay is a fantastic place on a fantastic body of water which we’ve simply overlooked for too long, and sailing and paddle sports are the perfect ways to encounter the beauty of our waters, locally – it is our “Fresh Coast,” said Wendy Townsend, president of the Green Bay Sail and Paddle Board of Directors.

Green Bay Sail and Paddle now has a full fleet of Hobie Catamarans and a beach-based permanent home for sail programs throughout the summer. As past Green Bay board president and past Milwaukee Community Sailing Center Executive Director John Kelly shared, “There’s good reason that these couldn’t-be-easier-to-sail Hobies are so popular in warm-climate beachfront resorts everywhere around the globe – they’re as close to fool-proof as sailing can get – plus simple, durable, attractive, all while delivering a great, thrilling ride in moderate winds. So a perfect platform for new or seasoned sailors.”

A new generation of sailing wanderlust among our youth? Adventurous explorer-dreamers reviving sailing, paddling and the outdoor life? It might be within reach through these great efforts around our region through these kinds of organizations and passionate, committed individuals championing and mentoring our next generation of sailors.

  Steve Eliasen is founder and executive director with International Youth Sailing of Oshkosh, the largest school-day sailing program in North America, having brought more than 10,000 students into sailing over the decade since the program began. He also serves on the board of directors and sailing director with Green Bay Sail and Paddle.

In addition, Eliasen works the cold-weather season as community outreach director for Big Snow Resort, home of Indianhead and Blackjack Mountains in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He’s also an elected member of the Board of Education for Oshkosh Area School District. He shares life with his skiing/sailing wife, Sara, and three children.

The post The Future Of Sailing appeared first on Morning Moss.

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[republicstandard]

Evidence Over Experience: Confronting Racial Supremacist Ideologies

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” Given that there is no governmentally-forced integration (yet), this observation, borne out by the statistics—close to 95% of American churches have congregations that are at least 80% one distinct race or ethnicity—tells us that when left to their own devices, most people naturally self-segregate. A trip to just about any major city will confirm this as different areas and neighborhoods have a distinct racial or ethnic composition, and in leaving the cities and heading into the suburbs (though gentrification sometimes reverses the process), and certainly the country, you’ll notice an increasingly uniform population of whites. This is actually true with many Western countries. This is anecdotal evidence and would not be permissible in a court of law, but people have eyes and instincts. Finnish sociologist Tatu Vanhanen observed:

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Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own or our relatives’ descendants.

To prefer our own is perfectly natural, or as Vanhanen put it, “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature.” It ensures our continued survival. For one to not prefer their own, they would have to be either literally psychotic, or, in select cases, there is something called Williams Syndrome, which is a kind of mild mental retardation where healthy fear of the unknown, strangers, social inhibition, and racial preference are all absent due to normal neural communications being disrupted. Why then the incessant drum-beat for one group and one group only to cast aside this preference for the genocidal embrace of “multi-culturalism”? We should’ve learned from the events of 376 AD at the latest that multi-culturalism is a bad idea. To quote Kevin MacDonald;

“White liberals…are deluding themselves about the attitudes of the non-Whites that they so eagerly embrace. Their liberalism won’t save them when push comes to shove.”

For Jared Taylor:

Americans therefore live a contradiction that makes it difficult to talk honestly about race. There is probably no other subject about which there is a greater divergence between what is said publicly and thought privately…At least that is true for whites…Blacks and Hispanics [openly reject] the civil-rights ideal of transcending race. For many minorities, race or ethnicity is central to their identity…Non-white racial/ethnic solidarity is an entrenched part of the political landscape, and the pressure tactics to which it gives rise have been very successful…[Whites] have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same…They should…ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom [racial] identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.

The government can obscure and re-classify races on the census and manipulate and doctor crime statistics, but it doesn’t change the fact that biology is the primary driver of culture. Sickle cell is not a social construct. Tay-Sachs is not a social construct. Given full self-determination, Liberia—which has a constitutional amendment barring whites from citizenship—Liberia did not become Wakanda. It became Liberia. Like Liberia, Haiti has had two hundred years with no white interference or help, and it has become a very close proxy for hell on earth. Ethiopia, master of its own destiny since the dawn of sedentary societies minus a five-year interregnum from 1936-1941, is no better off. So let’s stop with the fiction for once. The culture reflects the people.

When a black says they’re going to “educate you,” what you can expect is an endlessly self-referential polemic of microwaved post-colonial jargon heavily imbued with the “lived experience” of “blackness,” utterly devoid of quantitative reasoning or evidence of any kind. You may also encounter vague references to “trauma” and definite examples of slavery and Jim Crow, which they will never have experienced first-hand. Black culture is a dead-end. If we as whites are not nearly racially-conscious enough, blacks are the opposite, luxuriating in this “blackness” despite having contributed virtually nothing to civilization outside of the pop-cultural realm. If whites internalize and have high rates of suicidality, blacks externalize, with a toxic excess of self-esteem and an enactment of their frustrations on others.

Blacks account for about 13% of America’s population but commit 52.5% of its homicides and at least forty percent of other violent crimes. Blacks commit 85% of violent black-white interracial crimes (blacks are twenty-seven times more likely to attack whites than vice versa; Hispanics eight times more likely to attack whites than vice versa) and commit interracial aggravated assault over two hundred times more often than whites. Black males are fourteen times more likely than white males to commit homicide and are between seven to ten times more likely to commit a crime than whites. Over half of blacks convicted of rape in the last decade chose white victims. Even on college campuses, center of the one-in-four rape hysteria when in reality college campuses are statistically safer than the national average, blacks are grossly overrepresented. Consider the real rape culture on Baylor University’s campus or the fact that the University of Missouri football team, which is 65.3% percent black, commits sexual assaults at five times the rate of the general student population, which is 8% percent black.

Statistically speaking, a white woman dating a black man is about as bad a decision as it is possible to make: 92% of children from a white mother and black father are born out of wedlock, and 82% wind up on government assistance. As we know, single parenthood is the single greatest guarantor of inter-generational poverty. For that 8 % who get him to put a ring on it, you have this to look forward to: in black male-white female marriages, the white woman is 12.4 times more likely to be murdered by her spouse than if she had married a white man.

But, as Taleeb Starkes points out, if “a black person is killed by a white person (my note: which, as evidenced above, statistically happens far less often), the benefits for the deceased black person are seemingly limitless. They include:

Canonization with eternal recognition as a martyr.

Incessant comparisons to icons of the Civil Rights movement i.e. Emmet Till.

Front page news coverage, and despite criminal proclivities or rap sheet, benevolent-looking pictures will always be used to propagate the victimology narrative.

Marches and protests with customized slogan.

Foundation created with celebrity endorsements.

Birth parents and even step-parents will become celebrities (Mom may also get to speak at the United Nations).

Trademarked likeness (Note: This may cause family members to fight over rights).

Covered funeral expenses with the likelihood that a big shot from the Race Grievance Industry will deliver the eulogy.

The white perpetrator will be caricatured as a racist demon whose purpose was to snatch black lives.

The white perpetrator’s private information will be publicized on social networks with emphasis on vengeance.”

More blacks are killed by police per capita because they are in contact with the police far more often with their criminal overrepresentation! Always lamenting the predations on their communities, most blacks and browns never put two and two together—criminality isn’t a shapeless cloud that menaces the black ghettoes and the barrios, it is the young men whose fathers have abandoned them to roam free as feral thugs, looting and terrorizing their own communities, utterly unconcerned with general upkeep, steady employment, and social harmony. The high-fecundity blacks and browns have the lowest investment in parenting, so we have a situation similar to pack animals now, where the alpha cultivates what is essentially a harem, and the betas scrounge around the periphery of the pack, or are killed or exiled (probably to terrorize Europe). The decrease in pair-bonding leads to lower investment parenting and either single-parenthood or in the case of sharia-compliant marriages what is effectively single-parenthood as the men may have up to four wives and at least one sex slave.

Lower investment parenting and single parenthood lead to a whole host of elevated risk factors for criminality to psychological issues to dependence issues. Play this out a few generations, and the trends we are already seeing manifest themselves in ways wholly unconducive to the maintenance, let alone advancement, of civilization. It takes six Japanese women to reproduce what one woman from Niger is “accomplishing” with her womb. Neither is healthy. Over-population by high time preference people and under-population by low time preference people is going to lead to environmental degradation, lack of proper aquifer and reservoir maintenance, and eventual mass famine and starvation. The farms in Zimbabwe né Rhodesia plummeted to one-tenth of their productivity once they were seized from the white farmers, and the nation went from food-exporting to food-importing. We are witnessing a similar trend in South Africa. By the time you read this, there may well be no more running water in Cape Town.

Lothrop Stoddard wrote about the inevitable deterioration of a society under “The Lure of the Primitive” when its “life-line of civilization wore thinner and spurred to fiercer energy those waxing powers of barbarism and chaos.” What did Rhodesia and South Africa do that could’ve caused the present situation? What is much of the West rushing lemming-like off a cliff to do now? Ah, right: The enduring image of one dead child on a beach in Turkey as a result of irresponsible parenting has been enough to accelerate the flooding of the European continent with feral young black and brown men, but the horror stories of the native Europeans victimized by these people are swept away as nothing but collateral damage in the pursuit of DIVERSITY.

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As whites, they are permitted no identity, and by extension, they are denied full personhood, especially if they are from the loathed lower classes. They have none of the mystique of the jungle primitive or the allure of the Orient, just bad teeth, a life on the dole, incomprehensible customs, and too many damn kids! Wait, is that the white lower class or the people the “elites” are importing? Remember, noticing is forbidden:

"If the Nazis hadn’t noticed that the Jews were actively debasing Germany during the Weimar era, the Holocaust would have never occurred, in which 6 million of the 2.4 million Jews in German-occupied Europe were mercilessly slaughtered, and their remains turned into useful household products like soap and lampshades. If white Southerners and South African Boers hadn’t noticed the criminal propensities of blacks, their reckless envy of whites and white accomplishment, and their general affinity for strongman-rule, we would have never had the brutal horrors of Jim Crow and apartheid. If Jesus Himself hadn’t noticed the man-made traditions and self-idolatry of the Pharisees, the specter of anti-Semitism would have never reared its ugly head. Noticing led to the greatest acts of oppression and injustice ever known in human history."

Forget everything you just read and get back in line, White Man. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil!

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Society Off A1articles.

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[a-h-arts]

Get 2 and you can frame some prints Previous reviews have touched on the artists featured so I will not repeat those names. Usually you just get the upper crust in coffee table art books, but this period of Dutch art produced images of the entire culture. It is simply delightful. You get the contrast of the aristo and the maid at the local beer house. The tiny child in her exquisite lace gown and the child working in a shop. You also have city scenes and countrysides. What is nice about this collection, is that the art is on a single page. Should one desire to get an additional copy, you could pull your choices and frame these prints. So many exhibit books have the prints on the fold to prevent such an opportunity. This same period of art saw the arrival of cochineal red via the Spanish and a lot of the art represented shows the use of this brilliant red. Most of the artists seem to have taken advantage of this red to add a touch to their work. The eye is drawn to a pillow, or a shirt or a cap in brilliant red. And what these Dutch artists can do with black is also amazing. To create the impression of sheen in black cloth is delightful. The added extensive text for all the art presented and for the artists is a bonus. For anyone who would like a book that shows more than one Dutch painter from this period, this would be the book to add to your collection. Go to Amazon

Thank you Boston MFA! I wish I could go to Boston to see this exhibition in person, which includes a wide variety of excellent Dutch Golden Age paintings and items brought in from collections around the world, but I am very happy with the catalogue that has been made available. Go to Amazon

Top quality reproductions, printed in Italy The reproductions in this book are outstanding; certainly the best I have seen in any art book. They brought tears of joy to my eyes. I had already given up all hope that such books are still produced. These days, art lovers are customarily abused with "printed in China" reproductions that are uniformly too dark and have washed out colors. You already have to avoid certain artists such as Rembrandt or Caravaggio completely because you know in advance that "reproductions" of their masterworks will consist of a speck of brown on an otherwise black plate. Then, to add insult to injury, amazon reviewer drones will rave about "marvelous reproductions" to lure you into purchasing anyway. Go to Amazon

An Outstanding Dutch Collection This is the catalogue accompanying the exhibit of the same name organized by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and mounted at the Museum from October 2015 to January 2016 and then at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, from February to May. The exhibition was curated and the catalogue is edited by Ronni Baer, Senior Curator of European Paintings at the MFA, a specialist in Golden Age Dutch and Flemish painting, who has previously written extensively on such figures as Gerrit Dou, Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Rubens, Rembrandt, and other old masters. There are hundreds of monographs and exhibition catalogues on Netherlandish painting in the seventeenth century, but what distinguishes this volume is its examination of the art through the prism of the class structure of the society. One can easily understand how the liberation of an artistic culture from ecclesiastical and aristocratic patronage, and the liberation of an entire society from domination of church and court, opened up huge opportunities for painting—in subject, in style, in intention, and even in the kinds of people creating it and buying it. The enormous economic expansion of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led, for the first time, to a kind of free market in art that partook fully in the mercantile explosion: it is estimated that around five million paintings were produced in the region in that latter century, i.e., almost a thousand a week—truly, to quote the very appropriate title of Simon Schama’s celebrated book on the period, an “embarrassment of riches.” So much of this art is still extant that one really needs some organizing principle to deal with it, and the perspective of “class distinctions” works very well, because each of the various classes in this quite hierarchical society seems to have had a kind of painting especially appropriate to it. Dr. Baer divided the paintings into eight categories, corresponding more or less to the distinct classes: “Stadholders and the Court,” “Nobles and Aspiring Nobles,” “Regents and Wealthy Merchants,” “Professions and Trades,” “Women at Work,” “Labor,” “The Indigent,” and “Where the Classes Meet.” Each of the sections consists of an introduction of several pages in which Dr. Baer discusses the general characteristics of the group’s history and sociology and points out how each of the paintings (the reproductions follow immediately after the text) exemplifies aspects of its particular class. Thus in the first section we learn the circumstances of the establishment of the “stadholder” (i.e., the “place-holder” or “lieu-tenant,” essentially the head of government) and his immediate entourage and their almost exclusive preference for ancestral portraits and pictures of their castles and manor houses, and the second section reveals the predilection of the nobility for their portraits and depictions of leisure activities. The regents and wealthy merchants tended to favor portraits of groups and couples and depictions of luxurious interiors, and by the time we get to the professions and trades, we encounter paintings of independent people at work: bakers, tailors, notaries, goldsmiths, the physician, etc. And so on down the scale through women’s work (chiefly domestic, but also in the shops and market stalls) and manual labor (linen-bleaching, brewing, fishing, plowing, etc.) to the indigent (bread distribution, alms houses, etc.) The last category, “Where the Classes Meet,” deals with liminal places, like the doorway that separates private from public space (such as in the cover image), and common communal places like the market square and church. Go to Amazon

An incredible collection of Dutch art showing the classes of people An incredible collection of paintings showing the poor, the middleclass and the upper class in 17-18 century Netherlands. Go to Amazon

Five Stars A very detailed and delightful book for the art lover. Go to Amazon

Five Stars Love it Go to Amazon

A lost age of European people Very well done exhibition catalog for the Nelson Art museum in Kansas city, containing top quality prints and detailed explanations of the period. This book brings to life a lost civilization. As much as editors strive wish to make 17th century Holland relevant to our middle class modern life..in fact the Dutch golden age is a lost civilization in stark contrast to a divided, Islamic, multi cultural wasteland of modern urban Europe. Looking at Holland in this period is like looking at the magical city in the Wizard of OZ...in fact OZ is more real to us:) Go to Amazon

[oliveratlanta]

How COVID-19 could impact the metro Atlanta housing market

Now could actually be an advantageous time for homebuying, experts say. | Exp Realty

Meanwhile, with the advent of spring, are house parties and home barbecues a good idea?

It’s becoming clearer that COVID-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus, has the potential to change nearly every facet of life for the foreseeable future, and Atlanta is no exception.

Atlanta’s tourism industry is expected to take a considerable hit in light of the spreading illness and related worries, as events expected to lure droves of visitors, like the NCAA basketball tournament, have been cancelled.

Additionally, as more people practice what’s called “social distancing”—a method of self-isolation and, especially, avoiding crowds—local businesses will feel the brunt of the outbreak, too.

That’s not to say that all could be in turmoil, economically speaking.

Despite mounting fears, housing demand is high, according to online real estate brokerage SimpleShowing.

“With the recent panic over the coronavirus, the FED did an emergency rate cut which put rates at their lowest level in the last 50 year span,” SimpleShowing reps write. “Currently, you can find 15-year loans at rates of 2.79 percent and 30-year loans around 3.29 percent.”

Plus, the March 11 report shows, mortgage applications are up 10 percent from last year, suggesting the real estate market could be shifting for the better. (That doesn’t take into account the situation’s escalation this week, however.)

As Curbed New York reported, with interest so rates low, some buyers could be inclined to withdraw funds from the struggling stock market and invest in real estate.

Additionally, Atlanta’s solid job market, coupled with low interest rates, could be a boon for the local real estate market, said Harry Norman realtor Erin Yabroudy in an interview with WSB-TV.

The sectors that have the most to worry about today are in travel, hospitality, and leisure, says a study by global real estate firm Avison Young.

“The hotels sector is particularly vulnerable to a decrease in tourism and measures to limit public gatherings at conferences and sporting events—many of which are now being cancelled or postponed,” the research says.

Atlanta’s massive convention industry is of course liable to feel the impact of COVID-19.

It feels like spring in Atlanta, but are house parties and home barbecues a good idea?

A longstanding, gut-reaction tradition in Atlanta when tough times present themselves is to basically start partying—not necessarily celebrating—as a means of distraction and entertainment.

Think of any snowstorm in the past decade. Especially the Snowpocalypse of 2014. Or the widespread blackouts following Hurricane Irma in 2017. Party central, one and all.

The local advent of COVID-19, however, is different. And it just so happens to be coinciding with spring-like temperatures that usually call for house parties and backyard gatherings, even when Atlantans have other things to do, like organized sports and travel for work.

But is getting together right now at home a wise thing to do? We checked with City of Atlanta officials for advice, as the first weird weekend under the threat of a novel coronavirus clampdown draws near.

“Our posture has been to follow guidance provided by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” says City of Atlanta spokesperson Michael Smith, “and when judgement calls need to be made, err on the side of safety for Atlanta families.”

Press officials with the CDC and Georgia Department of Public Health, who are being inundated with requests at the moment, haven’t responded to inquiries, which is understandable.

The CDC does provide thorough recommendations for community gatherings large and small, and a key point is that older adults and those with chronic medical issues, such as heart, kidney, or lung disease, will probably want to click “No” on the evite.

When it comes to household cleaning and disinfection, the CDC also gives in-depth advice. Before a home gathering gets started, or during the event, this particular bit might be worth keeping in mind:

“Clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces such as tables, doorknobs, light switches, countertops, handles, desks, phones, keyboards, toilets, faucets, and sinks. If surfaces are dirty, clean them using detergent or soap and water prior to disinfection. To disinfect, most common EPA-registered household disinfectants will work.”

Otherwise, CDC recommendations call for keeping between six and 10 feet of distance between yourself and other people in public. That’s social distancing, and it’s not exactly conducive to house parties.

For a deeper dive on what social distancing actually means, and a variety of opinions on safety standards from experts, head to this recently published report in The Atlantic.

Their opinions on private get-togethers at homes vary, from advising against them to keeping distance from all other guests. A senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security shared the most lenient opinion with the magazine:

“I think small gatherings are probably okay as long as nobody has symptoms, respiratory symptoms. As soon as someone seems sick, you should probably not get together.”

source https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/13/21178118/coronavirus-covid-19-atlanta-real-estate-home-parties

[euro3plast-fr]

How the iPhone changed marketing forever

Happy birthday iPhone

120 months go on the 29th June at 09.41am (California time) the world changed forever.  Six months after being introduced at the Macworld Convention by Steve Jobs, the $499, 4GB storage iPhone was finally in stores.

Since then, over a billion iPhones have been sold globally. In 2007 Apple had $6bn in cash. Today the company’s accounts are reportedly in the final stretch to being valued at $1trillion.

But things could have turned out very differently. Back when the iPhone wasn’t even a glint in Steve Jobs’ eyes, telecoms giants like Verizon held a tight grip over the specification of handsets.  Weighty manuals read like a bible of ‘thou shall nots’. Such restrictions went against everything Jobs believed in.  It certainly wasn’t a sector that he wanted to get into.

Some three years before the iPhone said ‘hello’. A team of Apple engineers were fiddling about with touchscreen technology on an interactive surface that was the size of a ping-pong table.  They didn’t have a clue their ping-pong rig would eventually help redefine everything people understood about Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.

The engineers showed the technology to Apple’s Design Chief, Jonathan Ive. Recognizing its potential, he presented it to Jobs.  Initially, the boss wasn’t that smitten.  But eventually, commercial circumstances helped nurture the idea until touchscreen technology wizardry grew on him. At the time, the iPod was Apple’s lead product.  Yet, Jobs realized that its days of serving as a cash-cow were numbered.  He worried that other companies could start working on a mobile phone able to play music – leaving the iPod redundant and takings thwarted.

Apple’s brightest engineers set to work on figuring out how to miniaturize the touchscreen technology, as well as develop an operating system and… fit everything into a neat device.  The project was code-named ‘purple’.  Engineers worked 24/7 in a sectioned-off part of Apple HQ named the ‘purple dorm’. (It was said that engineers were bringing in takeaway food and sleeping wherever they could lay their heads, the atmosphere in the purple dorm was more like a purple haze).

One of their fundamental tasks was to figure out how to incorporate a touchscreen keyboard.  Numerous iterations were considered.  Complicated shape swiping was dismissed as simply too difficult to learn.  Eventually, one engineer combined AI (Artificial Intelligence) with a standard keyboard layout which predicted words. It was one of what would turn out to be many ‘eureka moments’.

Every aspect of project purple was unremitting. Demands were intense. Hundreds of engineers sacrificed weekends, holidays and, in at least one reported case, a marriage.  When the patent for the original device was eventually awarded only 14 people were listed as designers.  But, in truth, as with so many breakthroughs, delivering the iPhone called on the cooperation of many more who remained behind the scenes. 

The iPhone that almost wasn’t

The name iPhone did not originally belong to Apple. Infogear used it in 1998. Their Linksys iPhone appliance combined a standard phone with a web terminal.  In 2000 Cisco Systems took over Infogear. The company rebranded the appliance, Linksys VoIP.  Apple’s own branding of the iPhone led to a conflict with Cisco Systems – which was eventually resolved.

Apple’s iPhone wasn't the first handset to include iTunes. The Motorola ROKR beat them to it in 2005.  But following Apple releasing the iPod Nano, Ed Zander, Motorola’s CEO relented asking,

“What the hell does the Nano do?  Who listens to 1,000 songs? People want devices that do more than just play music. Something that can be seen in many other countries with more advanced mobile phone networks and savvy users.”

[Ooops...]

Motorola’s second-generation ROKR left out iTunes support. 

“A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device.      (Steve Jobs’ original description of the iPhone).

Apple also had to tackle the business community’s addiction to Blackberries.  (Also known at the time as the ‘crackberry’).  Sales Warriors loved the device’s keyboard.  Apple’s solution was to first market to consumers and then gradually win over the business sector by making iPhone much more than an individual’s phone.

Whilst the original iPhone had no third-party apps, GPS or even a means to record video, with each new model, the device gradually led to the demise of having to carry around lots of devices. Its all-in-one technology made serious dents in the sales of compasses, stopwatches, calculators, diaries, maps, voice recorders, answering machines, portable games consoles, newspapers, alarm clocks, point-and-shoot cameras, GPS units, camcorders, PDAs and even Apple’s own iPod.

One year after its debut, the introduction of the App Store led to 2,200,000 apps featured as instant downloads.  (According to app measurement company App Annie, Google Play Store currently carries 3,400,000 apps).

For now, more Android system devices have a far bigger market share than IOS, but thanks to clever marketing and luxury pricing, IOS sales are still very comfortable. By 2018, Apple is expected to sell 241 million phones, compared with Samsung’s 404 million. (Canaccord Genuity).

In 2016 the risk of Samsung Galaxy Note catching fire, halted a serious escalating threat to iPhone sales.  New phones from the likes of Huawei, Sony and OnePlus with even more sophisticated features than currently offered by Apple could yet damage sales.

Whilst many celebrate iPhone’s tenth birthday, they also await its 16th iteration, to be finally officially revealed in the Fall.  Only after then will Apple’s CEO Tim Cook finally know whether all the fuss over blowing out birthday candles turns out to be little more than hot air.

How iPhones helped change more than you thought…

Everyone is always on

Once upon a time... in an age long, long, long, ago you could wait up to ten minutes to get onto the web. Now everyone is connected instantly either via Wif-Fi or cellular networks.

Chewing gum

People are so transfixed to their phones that traditional last moment point of sales purchases at checkouts like chewing gum have declined by 15% since 2007. 

Accessories

The ‘sweet and sour’ of everyone’s mobile lives - accessories - including Bluetooth speakers, headphones, cables and docks are ubiquitous.  ABI research estimates that revenue in the global mobile accessories market will top $110bn by 2021. 

Media

More people are watching TV and getting their news via mobile phones than ever.

Vanity

According to tech futurologist Benedict Evans, there will be more photographs taken this year alone on devices like iPhones than during the entire history of photography.

In 2017, following an analysis of 2.5 million selfies on Instagram, researchers discovered that more than half fell into the 'appearance category' – images that describes the person's outward status and wealth. (The selfie movement is mostly driven by women and the 18 to 35-year-old age group).

Broadcasting lives in real-time around the globe.

Thanks to video conferencing software as well as services like Periscope and Facebook Live, potentially more than half the world’s population can become ‘live tv’ broadcasters, sharing everything from local brawls to cute pet moments.

Games

Seven of the top ten grossing iPhone apps are games.

Instant gratification

No – not porn via mobiles - although that particular sector has also ‘erupted’.  Instead I refer to paying via phone.  The iPhone Wallet app stores credit card payment facilities for touch and pay purchases as well as retains retail coupons, reward cards, cinema passes, flight board tickets and much more. (Speaking at a 2016 event, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook said: “We’re going to kill cash”).

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

ADHD has soared.  Attention spans, especially for children, have plunged. In addition to school teachers feeling despair as they try just about anything to retain students’ attention, the dramatic fall in attention spans has also fundamentally changed communications as practiced by virtually all business sectors including news media, entertainment, recruitment, professional training, journalism, marketing and advertisers.

Privacy

The psychology of reciprocity has gone into overdrive as brands lure consumers into revealing more and more of their private information in return for incentives like free taxi rides and retail discounts.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/iphone-changed-marketing-forever/