#Thomas Ragsdale

[trevlad-sounds]

INVISIBLE WAVES EPISODE 011

Intro 00:00

Nacht Plank-Carhaix Nonant 00:08

CHAPTER 1 04:06

arovane-Ausser Welt 06:20 Lo Five-Raising Awareness 09:03 David Cordero-Natural Environments 10:51

CHAPTER 2 14:46

Jeff Greinke-Late Rain at the Station 17:06 Beau Sorenson-Indifference Will Devour You 22:38

CHAPTER 3 30:47

Lunaria-Venus in Transit 33:11

Krakenkraft-There Is No Time 45:36

CHAPTER 4 51:04

Tommaso Nudo-Spirits 54:58 La bibliothèque de la bergerie-Le fleuve de la nuit 1:02:49 L A N D S R A A D-Plans Within Plans//Wensicia 1:06:45

CHAPTER 5 1:13:04

The Night Monitor-UFO Detector (Mk I) 1:15:41

Scott Lawlor-Vanishing Road 1:17:45 Fabien Guiraud-Derrière le chardon 1:41:55

CHAPTER 6 1:43:15

Sulk Rooms-Faces 1:44:50 First Snow of The Year-Kumo 1:40:00 Binaural Space-Hardest Seven Days 1:48:40 Hainbach-End of Work 1:49:40

CHAPTER 7 1:51:40

scav-The Second VIII 1:53:15

OUTRO 2:03:15

[dankusner]

Big D gentrification

Dallas neighborhoods more vulnerable to gentrification

One in five Dallas neighborhoods are in the early stages of gentrification, according to a new report by Builders of Hope that was unveiled Thursday night.

The Ledbetter neighborhood in West Dallas, Red Bird in southern Dallas and Vickery Meadow in northeast Dallas are among the neighborhoods at higher risk of gentrification.

By 2032, the typical Dallas renter will only be able to afford 21% of rental units, while Dallas homebuyers earning the median income will only be able to afford less than 2% of homes on the market at that time, according to the study.

The report’s findings were presented by the Dallas nonprofit developer and community development organization, as it unveiled its multilayered strategy, “A Right to Stay.”

The report involves a study of the current state of gentrification in the city, policy recommendations to protect residents’ rights, solutions to anti-displacement and an analysis of the housing market and demographic changes in Dallas.

West Dallas and South Dallas are already experiencing higher levels of gentrification, according to the anti-displacement tool kit.

Builders of Hope was joined by some of its policy advisers, including Heather K. Way, a clinical professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and J.H. Cullum Clark, director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute, to present the study’s highlights at a panel in Gilley’s South Side Music Hall.

Former Dallas City Councilwoman Diane Ragsdale and Heather Higginbottom, head of research, policy and insights for JPMorgan Chase Co. also participated in the discussion.

“This tool kit is a roadmap for all players, not just the city, because the issue is complex and it’s going to require a lot of partners picking up this tool kit, reading the policy recommendations and understanding where they can play a part in bringing about solutions to displacement,” said James Armstrong, Builders of Hope president and CEO.

Housing affordability for Dallas homeowners has shrunk from 44% of housing stock in 2012 to 12% in 2022, according to a study conducted with the Dallas College Labor Market Intelligent Center.

In the same timeframe, affordability for renters decreased from 50% of rental units to 30%.

A Right to Stay is designed as a tool kit to help Dallas residents and policymakers better understand gentrification and where it is happening.

It also offers policy and programmatic solutions to mitigate residential displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Gentrification is a process that occurs when a neighborhood changes as new investment floods a historically marginalized neighborhood, resulting in rising property values and housing costs.

Reducing the supply of affordable units, the neighborhood is physically transformed by the influx of new, higher-end construction, the neighborhood’s demographics shift, and the cultural character of the neighborhood changes.

“These alarming statistics are the backdrop of shrinking affordability and record breaking economic growth. These realities have created an urgent need for action that protects the legacy of residents and neighborhoods,” said Michelle Thomas, Regional Executive for Global Philanthropy at JPMorganChase, which invested $500,000 to help fund the study.

The study used a three-part gentrification analysis to examine where vulnerable residents live, which neighborhoods have experienced demographic change, strength and change in the neighborhood housing markets.

The overlay of those three variables shows that displacement pressures are widespread throughout Dallas, with over 40% of neighborhoods either susceptible to or experiencing some stage of gentrification, ranging from early to middle to late.

One in 10 Dallas neighborhoods are in the dynamic or late stages of gentrification.

These are neighborhoods with vulnerable populations that have experienced demographic change and have either accelerating or sustained housing markets.

From 2011 to 2021, these neighborhoods lost on average 90 families with children in poverty while gaining 450 households with college degrees, the report indicated.

Stephanie Champion, the chief of Community Development and Policy for Builders of Hope, said if some policies had been implemented 10 years ago, the city would be in a very different situation than where it is now.

“Our city is going to look very different, and we have the opportunity now, to put interventions in place to protect our most vulnerable neighbors and communities,” Champion said.

“If we don’t take action now we stand to lose them.”

The nonprofit released case studies on three neighborhoods, West Dallas, South Dallas and Vickery Meadow, to analyze the impact of gentrification.

In West Dallas, where there are relatively high rates of homeownership among vulnerable residents, securing homesteads, protecting heirs’ property, and ensuring the succession of generational wealth is crucial to neighborhood stabilization, as recommended by the tool kit.

Some of the anti-displacement strategies recommended for West Dallas and similar neighborhoods are displacement mitigation zoning, which is a set of rules created to protect people from being forced to move out of their homes when an area is being developed or changed.

Stephanie Champion, Chief Community Development and Policy Officer at Builders of Hope CDC, gave a toolkit overview before a panel discussion at Gilley’s Southside Music Hall in Dallas, November 14, 2024.

Exemption enrollment programs, that allow certain people to be exempt from specific requirements, usually to help them avoid financial burdens or other challenges.

Property tax relief funds and targeted home repairs programs that help residents keep up to date their homes.

This year, Builders of Hope launched the Property Tax Assistance Program pilot, which is focused on West Dallas residents in the 75212 ZIP code.

The grant covers the difference between their 2020 and current property taxes.

Applicants must have lived in the program area for 10 years — or have inherited a property from a legacy resident who owned the home before 2005.

The pilot program is one of the tools that Builders of Hope recommends as a policy to help legacy residents stay in their homes.

In South Dallas, where the majority of residents are renters occupying single-family units and where there are ample opportunities for new construction of single-family homes, non-traditional homeownership models that promote long-term, deed-restricted affordability and increased access to homeownership for long-time renters are needed to ensure legacy residents can stay in their homes.

For South Dallas and neighborhoods with similar profiles, public land for affordable housing, shared equity housing models and neighborhood stabilization voucher programs are some of the tools that can work to prevent anti-displacement.

In Vickery Meadow, where the majority of the population are migrants and live in low-rent multifamily apartment complexes, policies and programs that support the rehabilitation and preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing units are needed, according to the report.

Vickery Meadow is one of Dallas’s most multicultural neighborhoods, with the majority of the residents from countries in Africa and Latin America.

For Vickery Meadow and neighborhoods with similar profiles, anti-displacement strategies that could enhance the lives of the residents include creating more legal protections for tenants, right-priced affordable housing policy which is an approach designed to make sure that homes are priced fairly and are within reach for people with different income levels and funding for tenant and community organizing.

Builders of Hope’s policy recommendations aim to protect vulnerable residents from displacement and preserve or construct affordable housing for existing and future vulnerable residents.

They also want to empower communities to advocate for themselves.

Builders of Hope has been working with several city departments on implementation strategies and is scheduled to present to the city Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee in January.

This committee needs to approve the policy recommendations before they are sent to the City Council for a full vote.

“A right to stay is really the movement we are trying to spark. These communities were created because of segregation, redlining, that my grandmother and others decided to plant when there were no streets, no water, when people said, ‘these [neighborhoods] were the devil’s back door,’” Armstrong said.

“These individuals should have a right to stay when their neighborhood becomes the new hot spot to be.”

[wikiuntamed]

Five steps of Wikipedia for Saturday, 2nd December 2023

Welcome, bem-vindo, आपका स्वागत है (āpakā svāgata hai), bienvenido 🤗 Five steps of Wikipedia from "Paul Ragsdale" to "1789 Virginia's 5th congressional district election". 🪜👣

Start page 👣🏁: Paul Ragsdale "Paul Ragsdale (January 14, 1945 – August 14, 2011) was an American politician who served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1973 to 1987.He died of a stroke on August 14, 2011, in Tyler, Texas at age 66...."

Step 1️⃣ 👣: Democratic Party (United States) "The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Its main political rival has been the Republican Party since the 1850s. Considered to be a historical successor to the left-wing Democratic-Republican Party, the Democratic Party was founded in 1828 and..."

Image by Gringer

Step 2️⃣ 👣: 1828 United States presidential election "The 1828 United States presidential election was the 11th quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Friday, October 31 to Tuesday, December 2, 1828. It featured a repetition of the 1824 election, as President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the..."

Image by Thomas Sully

Step 3️⃣ 👣: 1816 United States presidential election "The 1816 United States presidential election was the eighth quadrennial presidential election. It was held from November 1 to December 4, 1816. In the first election following the end of the War of 1812, Democratic-Republican candidate James Monroe defeated Federalist Rufus King. The election was..."

Image by John Vanderlyn

Step 4️⃣ 👣: 1808 United States presidential election "The 1808 United States presidential election was the sixth quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, November 4, to Wednesday, December 7, 1808. The Democratic-Republican candidate James Madison defeated Federalist candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney decisively. Madison had served as..."

Image by Cg-realms (current) AndyHogan14 (original)

Step 5️⃣ 👣: 1789 Virginia's 5th congressional district election "The first election for Virginia's 5th congressional district took place on February 2, 1789, for a two-year term to commence on March 4 of that year. In a race that turned on the candidates' positions on the need for amendments (the Bill of Rights) to the recently ratified U.S. Constitution, James..."

[airmanisr]

Alcorn State @ Alabama State 2015 by Benjamin Watson Via Flickr: Photo highlights from the Alcorn State vs. Alabama State football game at Hornet Stadium in Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday, September 12, 2015. John Gibbs, Jr. passed for a touchdown and ran for another and Darryan Ragsdale ran for two more Saturday to help Alcorn State beat Alabama State 31-14. Gibbs completed 26 of 33 passes for 305 yards, including a 62-yard TD pass to Tollette George. Gibbs had 14 carries for 40 yards, with a 3-yard scoring run that tied the game at 14. Alabama State (0-2) outgained the Braves on the ground 109 yards to 86 in the first half, with Ellis Richardson scoring on a 37-yard run and Khalid Thomas on a 7-yarder. After Haiden McCraney's 29-yard field goal put Alcorn State (1-1) up 17-14 at halftime, the Braves pulled away with an improved ground game, finishing with 155 yards rushing. Ragsdale gained 50 yards on 10 carries, scoring on a 7-yard run in the first quarter and a 25-yard run in the third.

[chirhos]

I am Episcopalian and I used to go to a very 'high-church' style church where the priest was gay and had his wedding in the church. Several other gay parishioners were either married in that church or fully welcomed into the congregation with their same-sex spouses. The congregation considered themselves Anglo-catholic and it was virtually indistinguishable from a Catholic church unless you knew that the priest was married. (I mean this in terms of how the service was presented and the liturgy, obviously we as Episcopalians hold certain different beliefs than the Roman Catholic church.)

Here is a picture I found of the wedding between two Episcopal priests, Rev Mally Lloyd and Rev Katherine Ragsdale of the Diocese of Massachusetts! The man in between them is Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, also of Massachusetts.

The "high" ness of an Episcopal church can vary greatly: in the city where I used to live, my church was the "high"est of the Episcopal churches and the rest of them varied a lot.

do you think its possible to have a gay marriage inside of a catholic church? my femme and i happen to fantasize about having a big church wedding someday but we are lesbians skskls

hello!

it sounds lovely! i wish you and your femme all the love and joy. i must say it’s not possible, though, sadly. Catholic churches only allow Catholic sacramental marriage to happen within the building, and that’s reserved for cishet marriages of two (or one) Catholic people/person.

however, there is hope! depending on your area, try looking for some high-church affirming churches. i’m sure you could find one! there are *some* Independent Catholic churches around the world, as well as *some* Episcopalian, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran churches that allow lgbt+ couples to marry within their churches. all of these are considered high-church, so if what you are seeking are the aesthetics and ritual aspects, these are great options for a big church wedding. it all depends on the area and who has the local authority.

if anyone has more information on christian high-church lgbt+ weddings, do share!

[lflip]

(Thomas Ragsdale)

[complexdistractions]

Sulk Rooms : Hymns For The Bone Horse

Sulk Rooms : Hymns For The Bone Horse

Thomas Ragsdale is a bit of a sonic wizard. His solo work propels from techno abandon to atmospheric sound collages that offer up a cinematic scope of mood and sonic grace. There’s also his work in Ffion which double downs on musical ARP odysseys and the stuttering heartbeat of a haunted dance floor. In his latest creation, the drone-heavy Sulk Rooms, Ragsdale paints with circuits and…

[colgriff]

299. Föllakzoid: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds [21.8.18]

299. Föllakzoid: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds [21.8.18]

Artist: Föllakzoid

Support: Thomas Ragsdale

Venue: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

Date: 21.8.18

No lights, no backdrop, no banter; just a powerfully progressive groove, faintly illuminated by a glowing spliff. Niche Chilean krautrock at it’s finest.

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

https://ift.tt/2JEEStS 👤 Thomas Ragsdale ▶️ Wandering Spider 💽 Death's Head

[earinfluxion]

worriedaboutsatan: Blank Tape (This Is It Forever)

Blank Tape is my first experience with the music of worriedaboutsatan, and honestly the name had me leery of what lurked within. But the music of worriedaboutsatan is lush and even sublime at times, a health blend of classically melodic IDM, indie pop, and voluptuous atmospheres so thick you can practically wade through them. It's the duo's third album, and their first for project member Gavin Miller's label, This Is It Forever. After the vibrant tease of opening cut “A Way Out,” “The Violent Sequence” is carried by a steady 4-4 muted kick and persistent arpeggios and syncopated stabs. It's a nice way to kick off the proceedings, but it's with “The Tower and the Steward” that Blank Tape really gets going, in my opinion. Its deep bass synth is the perfect counterpoint to its swooning, sweeping wall of strings, pads, and brass, capturing the same big atmosphere of a contemporary act like Bersarin Quartett, Murcof, or Apparat. In fact, the vocal collaborations on Blank Tape distinctly recall the big emotive swoon of Moderat (Apparat's collaborative project with Modeselektor). Vincent Cavanagh's airy vocal even sounds a bit like Sascha Ring or Thom Yorke, another reason to draw the Moderat comparisons.

Blank Tape by worriedaboutsatan

Face+Heel contributes airy, female vocals to “Lament” while stereo delays skitter in the periphery. Those are the only two cuts that feature vocals at all, but they are crucial to Blank Tape's success, positioned close together with an instrumental between them in the front-center of the playlist. And it was smart to include “From a Dead Man… Part 2” at the end of the album (though it brings up the question: where is part 1?), whose synth murmurs at its beginning percolate into rolling arps over a steady beat. It feels like a book-end to “The Violent Sequence” toward the front of the album, and there is a keen sense of balance, harmony, and unity between the album's ten tracks. Whether its cuts are more atmospheric, propulsive, instrumental, or vocal, Blank Tape is a great success from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Buy it: Bandcamp

[paul3461]

lessTracklistSkip Tracklist

1

Sufjan Stevens

Meditation II

Open Meditation II by Sufjan Stevens in external music player

2

James McAllister

Cycle 3

Open Cycle 3 by James McAllister in external music player

3

Terekke

unother

Open unother by Terekke in external music player

4

Elori Saxl

The Blue of Distance

Open The Blue of Distance by Elori Saxl in external music player

5

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Chilly Gonzales

Tearjerker

Open Tearjerker by Ryuichi Sakamoto & Chilly Gonzales in external music player

6

Christina Vantzou

Anna Mae

Open Anna Mae by Christina Vantzou in external music player

7

Pauline Anna Strom

Small Reptiles on the Forest Floor

Open Small Reptiles on the Forest Floor by Pauline Anna Strom in external music player

8

Andrew Heath

Chalk, Flint and Willow Banks

Open Chalk, Flint and Willow Banks by Andrew Heath in external music player

9

Robert Fripp & Brian Eno

Evening Star

Open Evening Star by Robert Fripp & Brian Eno in external music player

10

Not Waving & Romance

While My Heart Is Still Beating

Open While My Heart Is Still Beating by Not Waving & Romance in external music player

11

Sam Gendel

Eternal Loop

Open Eternal Loop by Sam Gendel in external music player

12

Elysian Spring

Blue Sands

Open Blue Sands by Elysian Spring in external music player

13

Khotin

Somehow More Sad

Open Somehow More Sad by Khotin in external music player

14

Ki Oni

Dream World

Open Dream World by Ki Oni in external music player

15

H Hunt

C U Soon

Open C U Soon by H Hunt in external music player

16

Hans‐Joachim Roedelius & Arnold Kasar

Rolling

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17

Sweatson Klank

Form & Formless

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18

Oneohtrix Point Never

Blue Drive

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19

Roberto Carlos Lange

An Explosion Made Me Think Of You

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20

Thomas Ragsdale

Warning Mass

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21

Mark LeVan

Sunless Sea

22

Clark

Amor (CB Rework)

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23

Kara‐Lis Coverdale

Touch me & die

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24

Group Listening

Wenn der südwind weht

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[trevlad-sounds]

Wednesday 4 October Mixtape 380 “Fated Particles EXCLUSIVE” Retro Space Electronic Idm Wednesdays, Fridays & Sundays. Support the artists and labels. Don't forget to tip so future shows can bloom.

Sensations' Fix-Moving Particles 00:31

James Adrian Brown-There Is Space Under Your Seat 02:47

Thomas Ragsdale & Richard Arnold-Rings Of Grain 05:46

Dr Atmo-Evaporate 11:19

Luke Sanger-Horsey Sunset 17:06

d'Voxx-Aotou 19:49

Kosmischer Läufer-Nordlicht 26:04

Albin-Forsen 31:00

Tangerine Dream-Para Guy 35:06

Lisa Bella Donna-Ecliptic 40:19

Ogle-At Night 41:16

Fontän-Meh-Teh 44:39

Hawksmoor-The City Ships of Alpha 47:52

The New Emphatic-Potlatch 51:23

Prairiewolf-Return to the Lonesome Prairie 53:06

Apta-North Star (La Vache Fantome) 55:48

In Fields-Hands 1:00:46

Golden Bug, In Fields-Lungs 1:05:22

Bird of Paradise-Tito 1:10:21

Golden Brown-Worm Charming 1:17:17

John Haughey-Supernova 1:18:50

Simon James-The Procedure 1:23:46

Metamono-Mr Smith 1:29:10

Schicke Führs Fröhling-Explorer 1:31:55

Lucas Tripaldi-Mi alma, su alma 1:36:32

Jonas Reinhardt-Quest Or Go Fanatic 1:41:45

The Metamorph-Flesh & Steel 1:43:31

Ardala-One Night in Nanjing 1:46:25

Chris Otchy-Ambient Computing, Second Movement 1:50:32

Binaural Space-Fated Ending 1:55:48

Monochrome Echo-We Are Not Alone 1:56:33

[mariacallous]

Five years ago, Charles Bethea was reporting on the Senate race in Alabama when he visited the Gadsden Mall, northeast of Birmingham, where more than dozen people he spoke to, including police officers and former store managers, said that the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, had been banned from the mall for bothering teen-age girls. Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, lost the election. He also began filing lawsuits. This year, in August, he won one of them, brought against a Democratic Party-aligned PAC that helped fund a 2017 ad, in which a narrator describes Moore’s pursuit of underage girls, quoting various news outlets—including Bethea’s reporting. “The jury,” Bethea writes, “which was composed of five men and three women, all but one of them white, rendered a verdict in less than two hours, awarding Moore more than eight million dollars in damages.” Bethea delves into how the case unfolded—with surprise testimony from a former officer at the mall—and how it has set off crucial questions about the future of libel law.

Five years ago, I was covering the U.S. Senate race in Alabama between the Republican Roy Moore and the Democrat Doug Jones when the Washington Post reported an allegation that Moore, in 1979, when he was in his thirties, had initiated a sexual encounter with a fourteen-year-old named Leigh Corfman. Other women then came forward to say that Moore had sexually assaulted or harassed them when they were teen-agers, too. He denied the accusations. But a source told me that his reputation for bothering young girls was well known in his home town of Gadsden. In fact, the source said, he was known to be banned from the mall.

I went to Gadsden and talked to a dozen or so people who told me that they’d heard the same thing. One of them was a former employee at the mall named Greg Legat, who said that the ban was instituted around 1979, and that he’d been told about it by a police officer who worked security at the mall, J. D. Thomas. “J.D. was a fixture there,” Legat said. “He really looked after the kids there. He was a good guy. J.D. told me, ‘If you see Roy, let me know. He’s banned from the mall.’ ” I got hold of Thomas, and he told me, “I don’t have anything to say about that.” Moore did not respond to my requests for comment on the alleged ban.

He lost the election. He ran again in 2020, but lost the Republican primary. He also began filing lawsuits: against Leigh Corfman; against all the women who came forward, whom he accused of conspiracy; against Sacha Baron Cohen, who had Moore on his show “Who Is America?” and waved an imaginary device that he said could “detect a pedophile.” (On the show, the device goes off.) A judge rejected the suit against Cohen, and a jury ruled against Moore in his suit against Corfman; the suit alleging conspiracy has been stalled, in part because so many judges in Alabama have recused themselves. (Moore, who has been a controversial figure for decades, was once the Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court.)

Moore had better luck with a lawsuit that he filed against Senate Majority PAC, a political group aligned with the Democratic Party. The PAC helped fund an ad that ran in Alabama during the 2017 campaign. In it, a narrator reads five quotes describing Moore’s pursuit of underage girls, as images of malls flash across the screen. The quotes come from an Alabama news site, AL.com, from a blog called the New American Journal, and from my story about the mall.

“The ad didn’t say anything that hadn’t already been reported elsewhere,” Barry Ragsdale, a Birmingham attorney who argued the defense’s case, told me. (He was joined by Marc Elias, a Democratic Party elections lawyer based in Washington, D.C.) Even so, Corey Maze, a judge in Alabama’s Northern District, sent the civil defamation claim to a jury. As Ragsdale prepared his defense, there was one witness he really wanted to put on the stand: J. D. Thomas. Ragsdale kept coming back to Thomas’s comment: “I don’t have anything to say about that.” “I thought, Well, he doesn’t deny it,” Ragsdale told me. “Much to the chagrin of my co-counsel, I kept pushing for us to find him, put him on our witness list.”

Just before the trial, Thomas was subpoenaed and agreed to testify. “It doesn’t happen in the law very often that you have literally a surprise witness that shows up right before the trial and is your ‘Perry Mason’ or ‘My Cousin Vinny’ moment,” Ragsdale said. “But this guy was it.”

Thomas, who is now in his eighties, testified that, in 2017, when reporters asked him about the alleged mall ban, he “wanted to stay out of it completely.” He also testified that, during a roughly six-week period in the late nineteen-seventies, when he was working security at the Gadsden Mall, he’d received around ten complaints about Roy Moore. “Mostly it was young girls, teen-age girls, saying that he was asking them out, maybe talking inappropriately,” he said. After “so many complaints,” he initiated a “very tactful” conversation with Moore, he said, telling Moore he was “going to have to kind of cool it.” Ultimately, Thomas recalled, “I just mentioned to him that we’ve had so many complaints that I’m going to have to ban him from the mall.” Thomas remembered Moore defending himself “a small amount, not a lot,” and then leaving. To Thomas’s knowledge, Moore did not come back to the mall for a while.

Attempting to underline that there was no political motive behind this testimony, Ragsdale asked Thomas what news stations he watched. “Most of the time Newsmax or Channel 6, WBRC,” he responded. “And have you been watching Newsmax today?” Ragsdale continued. “Yes,” Thomas said, “I have.”

One of the questions that came up when I was reporting on the mall ban five years ago was whether Moore’s name had been added to a list of banned people that was maintained by mall security. Thomas told the court that such a list existed, but that he left Moore’s name off of it, because it would have been “very embarrassing” for Moore, the District Attorney’s office—Moore was an Assistant District Attorney at the time—and the police department, given Moore’s connection to law enforcement. Thomas acknowledged that he did tell others about the ban, though, including Greg Legat.

The plaintiff’s attorneys sought to cast doubt on Thomas’s memory, and to minimize or refute any inappropriateness in Moore’s interactions with girls at the mall. They also argued that the order of the ad’s quotes was misleading: a quote from the New American Journal noting that Moore was banned from the mall “for soliciting sex from young girls” was followed by a quote from AL.com noting that “one he approached was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.” The Santa’s helper was Wendy Miller, who told the court that she met Moore at fourteen, but that he hadn’t asked her out until she was sixteen, which is the legal age of consent in Alabama. “We think that that meant she was one of the young girls he approached,” Ragsdale explained. Jeffrey Wittenbrink, Moore’s lead counsel, told me that the implication that Moore had solicited sex from a fourteen-year-old was clear and false. “Putting those two things together in that ad, as it was played, it was really unmistakable they intended for those two lines to be read together,” Wittenbrink said. A major question for the jury then, as Ragsdale put it to me, was “whether or not the juxtaposition creates the suggestion of something that hadn’t been reported previously.”

During the trial, Wittenbrink described the PAC’s ad as “the big lie” and talked about the #MeToo movement with air quotes. Wittenbrink told me that he’d only brought up #MeToo because a witness for the defense had done so, implicitly, by saying, of Moore’s accusers, “I believe those women.” Wittenbrink described this as “clearly a political statement.” The jury, which was composed of five men and three women, all but one of them white, rendered a verdict in less than two hours, awarding Moore more than eight million dollars in damages.

Ragsdale and his co-counsel have filed a motion asking for a new trial, or for Maze to set aside the judgment. Ragsdale is already a notable figure in the history of Alabama defamation law: two decades ago, he represented a man named Garfield Ivey, who was convicted of criminal defamation after allegedly paying a sex worker to say that a candidate for lieutenant governor, whom Ivey opposed, was a client, and had beaten her. At the time, Alabama law did not require the proof of “actual malice” in defamation cases, a standard which stipulates that a public official cannot win damages without proving that a defamatory statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not,” as the Supreme Court Justice William Brennan put it in a 1964 decision known as New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Ragsdale won his case; the Alabama law was declared unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court, and the actual-malice standard was enforced.

Now Ragsdale worries that the legal winds are blowing the other way. “This is a case that will live and die on the ‘actual malice’ standard for defamation,” he said, of Moore’s lawsuit, “at a time when that standard is under attack.”

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan also has its roots in Alabama. L. B. Sullivan was the police commissioner in Montgomery; he sued the Times after it ran a full-page ad, in March, 1960, that claimed that Alabama police had arrested Martin Luther King, Jr., seven times—the correct figure was four—and had “ringed” the Alabama State College campus after students there held a protest. (Officers were deployed nearby, but not because of the protest; they did not circle the campus.) A jury ordered the Times to pay Sullivan half a million dollars. The paper appealed the decision, arguing that it did not suspect the ad had any errors and did not intend to harm Sullivan. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Times, concluding, as Brennan wrote, that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open,” and should even allow for mistakes such as those in the ad.

Although the Justices ruled unanimously, they did not all use the same reasoning, as Eugene Volokh, who teaches First Amendment law at U.C.L.A., pointed out to me recently. There were two concurring opinions, signed by three Justices in all. Hugo Black went furthest. “The requirement that malice be proved provides, at best, an evanescent protection for the right to critically discuss public affairs,” he wrote in his concurrence. “Unlike the Court, therefore, I vote to reverse exclusively on the grounds that the Times and the individual defendants had an absolute unconditional constitutional right to publish in the Times advertisement their criticisms.” Black described the civil-rights movement as “one of the acute and highly emotional issues in this country.” In other words, Volokh said, it was “not the kind of thing that you can expect a jury to dispassionately resolve.”

Volokh, whose blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, is now hosted by the libertarian magazine Reason, believes that the Moore verdict was a “defensible application of existing First Amendment libel law.” It was plausible, he said, for a jury to view the PAC’s arguably misleading juxtaposition of statements in the ad as deliberate. “We don’t read in a hyper-rationalist sense, looking at every word for only its literal meaning,” he said. “We often draw implications that we think the author is trying to make.” He doesn’t believe that this case is a good vehicle for overturning the actual-malice standard; Ragsdale agrees. (Ragsdale said, of Moore, “He’s not the best poster child for an effort to make this standard go away.”) But both men think that the current court is more open to eliminating the actual-malice standard than the court has been in years. The standard’s chief opponent is Clarence Thomas; Neil Gorsuch is “more tentative” in his opposition, but also seems against it, Volokh said. Elena Kagan, a more liberal judge, wrote an article criticizing Sullivan when she was a young law professor, in the early nineties, “but it’s not clear that today she’d vote to actually overrule it,” Volokh told me.

The judge who sent Moore’s case to a jury, Corey Maze, cited Thomas in a 2020 opinion related to the case. “Whether the Constitution requires proof of ‘actual malice’ is still debated,” he wrote. “Justice Thomas, for example, recently said that ‘[t]here are sound reasons to question whether either the First or Fourteenth Amendment, as originally understood, encompasses an actual-malice standard for public figures or otherwise displaces vast swaths of state defamation law’ and has thus called on the Court to reconsider its holding in New York Times.” (Maze and Thomas have another connection: Crystal Clanton, who, as Jane Mayer reported for this magazine, appeared, several years ago, to have texted a fellow-employee at the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, “i hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” She said that she did not recall sending the texts. She was subsequently fired, but then moved in with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, and is now a clerk for Maze, who has said that he determined the allegations against her to be false. A review of her hiring was recently reopened after a previous investigation, conducted by a panel of judges from another district, determined that there was no misconduct in Clanton’s hiring.)

Ragsdale is troubled by the idea of making it easier for public officials to win defamation claims. I asked him what legal checks, if any, he thought there should be on political advertising. “There are rules and regulations that govern what goes over the airwaves,” he said. The Federal Election Commission requires that ads include disclosures and disclaimers that make clear to viewers who is paying for them, for instance—although there are ways of obscuring this. The ad that Moore sued over was attributed to an organization called Highway 31, and some days passed before Politico reported, citing anonymous senior officials, that the “mystery super PAC” was a joint project of Senate Majority PAC and another PAC aligned with the Democratic Party, Priorities USA Action. States can work with networks and online platforms to police ads: during the Moore-Jones race, Google pulled an ad from YouTube which claimed that a voter’s choice of Moore or Jones would be “public record,” after Alabama’s Secretary of State pointed out to Google’s media-and-advertising team that this was false. (Highway 31 was behind that ad, too.) “But the balance you have to strike is that you don’t chill valid criticism of public officials,” Ragsdale went on. “One of the fears with a verdict like this is that future campaigns—and also journalists—will be reluctant to report things.” ♦

[oots-digitalmedia]

Queer Rep in The Blood Crow Stories

Title: The Blood Crow Stories

    Status: Indefinite Hiatus

    Writer, Director, Producer: Ellie Collins

Cast: Angel Ashe, Leaf Ballard, David Benedict, Charlie Close, Ellie Collins, Trevor Garner, Justin Harless, Laura Houser, Evan Ivey, Jim Kelley, Peter Lalush, Gray Lin, Brandee Mack, Judson Ragsdale, Eric Ravenscraft, Joe Ravenson, Riki Robinson, Tyler Sutherland, Audrey Stadler, Emily Thomas, Amanda Whittle VanHiel, Daniel VanHiel, Lindsay Van Pelt, Zachary Vaudo,

    Queer Creators: Yes

    Accessibility: Transcripts and content warnings are in progress, available on their website here.

        Content Warnings: This podcast contains domestic abuse and gory violence, explicit discussions of child abuse, drowning, animal abuse/death, says that ppl who listen to the podcast will die

Summary: The Blood Crow Stories is an anthology series of horror stories. Each season we will tell a new, original story over the course of 20 episodes. Each season will have its own unique production and storytelling style.

Our first season highlights the story of the S.S. Utopia, a cruise ship in the early 1900's. Modern-day college student, Max, begins to do his thesis on the audio diaries of the passengers on the ship. What he doesn't expect are the horrors that are waiting for him among the tapes, and the true reason why the ship sank so mysteriously almost 100 years ago.

Our second season takes us out to the old western town of Blackchapel; a quiet mining community full of hardworking people. Sheriff Thomas has been married to his job for many years. However, when men start turning up dead, all in the same fashion, he sets out to learn about these murders plaguing not just his quiet town. There's a serial killer loose in the Old West.

S1: S.S. Utopia

Tags: bisexual polyamorous main charactercharacter, multiple bisexual characters, multiple lesbian characters, asexual character

S2: Black Chapel

    Tags: trans character, multiple polyamorous wlw characters, multiple mlm characters

      S3: The Neon Lodge

   Tags: Multiple lesbian characters, pansexual character, non-binary character, multiple agender characters, multiple gay characters, multiple polyamorous characters, multiple asexual characters

More identity and relationship details/spoilers under the break.

Check out our other queer podcast recommendations here.

Please feel free to offer suggestions and updates!

S1: S.S. Utopia

ID tags: Max: Bisexual and Polyamorous, Dara: Bisexual, Barry: Bisexual, Mary: Lesbian, Cindy: Lesbian, Leo: Asexual

Details and/or Spoilers: Max is dating Chris and Amelia, Cindy and Mary are dating

S2: Black Chapel

  ID Tags: Wyatt Whaley: trans, Jessamine Callaghan: poly wlw, Adelaide Callaghan: poly, wlw, Silver Shot: mlm, Everett Woodyard: mlm,

   Details and/or Spoilers: Jessamine, Adelaide and Clementine are married, Silver Shot and Everett Woodyard are in a relationship,        

S3: The Neon Lodge

    ID Tags: Kesha Charles: lesbian, Tiffany Harris: Lesbian, Prince$$: Pansexual, Non-binary, BR1: Agender, D4L4: Agender, Travis/Behemoth: Gay, Roger Destros: No Canon Sexuality, Klarity: No Canon Sexuality, Molly Shears: Bisexual Polyamorous, Trixie Q: Asexual, Gabriel Castle: Bisexual, Enzo Ford: Asexual Heteroromantic, Quincy/Leviathan - Bisexual, Agender, Zoe/Ziz: Agender, Flynn Stephenson: Gay, Jason/Berith: Asexual, Agender, Darrick/Mammon: No Canon Sexuality, Agender, Hermès/Astaroth: Bisexual, Agender, Sergei/Belfegor: No Canon Sexuality, Agender, Tobias/Asmodeus: Pansexual, Agender, Philip/Belial: Gay, Agender, LuLu: Asexual, Agender Cera/TBA - Bisexual, Agender,

[airmanisr]

Alcorn State @ Alabama State 2015 by Benjamin Watson Via Flickr: Photo highlights from the Alcorn State vs. Alabama State football game at Hornet Stadium in Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday, September 12, 2015. John Gibbs, Jr. passed for a touchdown and ran for another and Darryan Ragsdale ran for two more Saturday to help Alcorn State beat Alabama State 31-14. Gibbs completed 26 of 33 passes for 305 yards, including a 62-yard TD pass to Tollette George. Gibbs had 14 carries for 40 yards, with a 3-yard scoring run that tied the game at 14. Alabama State (0-2) outgained the Braves on the ground 109 yards to 86 in the first half, with Ellis Richardson scoring on a 37-yard run and Khalid Thomas on a 7-yarder. After Haiden McCraney's 29-yard field goal put Alcorn State (1-1) up 17-14 at halftime, the Braves pulled away with an improved ground game, finishing with 155 yards rushing. Ragsdale gained 50 yards on 10 carries, scoring on a 7-yard run in the first quarter and a 25-yard run in the third.

[geopolicraticus]

Bird Brains: Better than We Thought

Alternative Neural Architectures for Consciousness 

The issue of Science for 25 September 2020 features a crow on its cover with the headline “Avian Awareness: Carrion crows display sensory consciousness.” There are three articles in the journal on this theme, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain” by Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, and Onur Güntürkün, and “Birds do have a brain cortex—and think” by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Everyone who has watched crows carefully knows that they are intelligent birds. A friend once told me that if he went outside and pretended to target crows with a broom handle as though it were a gun, the birds would not move, but if he went outside with an actual gun, the birds would scatter. There is a video of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof, as well as another video of two crows sliding and rolling on a snow-covered car, which looks like the kind of intentional play behavior we associate with mammals (there are many similar videos of crows playing). I’m sure everyone has their own anecdotal account of avian intelligence.

Now we have something more than anecdotal evidence for corvid intelligence. The articles in Science report, respectively, an experiment that implies sensory consciousness and anatomical features of the corvid brain that are analogous, but not identical, to the mammalian brain. Herculano-Houzel notes that it has long been said that birds have no cerebral cortex, but she goes on to explain that the avian pallium derives from the same embryonic developmental structures from which the mammalian cerebral cortex derives. (She cites “A developmental ontology for the mammalian brain based on the prosomeric model” by Luis Puelles, Megan Harrison, George Paxinos, and Charles Watson, in which the authors argue, “Because genomic control of neural morphogenesis is remarkably conservative, this ontology should prove essentially valid for all vertebrates…” which would include both birds and mammals.)

Similarly, the conventional view has been that the limbic system is unique to mammals, but there may be structures in the avian brain that are homologous to the limbic system. A re-assessment of the avian brain is evident from papers such as Avian brains and a new understanding of vertebrate brain evolution by The Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, and Cell-type homologies and the origins of the neocortex by Jennifer Dugas-Ford, Joanna J. Rowell, and Clifton W. Ragsdale, and this re-assessment has been carried back to common ancestors of mammals and birds, as we find in the paper The Limbic System of Tetrapods: A Comparative Analysis of Cortical and Amygdalar Populations by Laura L. Bruce and Timothy J. Neary. All of this points to the increasing complexity and detailed articulation of evo-devo conceptions and the idea of deep homology, such that highly conserved genes produce similar structures—eyes, brains, and perhaps consciousness too—across many different species, even when there isn’t a direct line of descent; we should take this as a memo to similarly examine behavioral evolution from an evo-devo standpoint, but leave that aside for now.

Given the earlier research in the papers cited above, we would not be surprised to learn of further homologies being recognized to hold between avian and mammalian brains, but while there may be unrecognized neural homologies between birds and mammals, the bird brain is quite different from a mammalian brain. The Stacho, et al., paper addresses these different neuronal structures, but they conclude, “Our study reveals a hitherto unknown neuroarchitecture of the avian sensory forebrain that is composed of iteratively organized canonical circuits within tangentially organized lamina-like and orthogonally positioned column-like entities.” In other words, the avian pallium exhibits an architecture of layered neurons, and columns connecting the layers, which is a structure than has long been understood to characterize the mammalian cerebral cortex. The two structures are distinct in detail, but display overall similarities in the way in which iterated and interconnected neural circuits are arranged.

The Nieder, et al., paper approaches avian intelligence through behavioral research rather than through anatomy, although the stimulus response experiments are traced to a single neuron, so that there is an anatomical component to this research as well. The authors write:

“We trained two carrion crows (Corvus corone) to report the presence or absence of visual stimuli around perceptual threshold in a rule-based delayed detection task. At perceptual threshold, the internal state of the crows determined whether stimuli of identical intensity would be seen or not perceived. After a delay, a rule cue informed the crow about which motor action was required to report its percept. Thus, the crows could not prepare motor responses prior to the rule cues, which enabled the investigation of neuronal activity related to subjective sensory experience and its lasting accessibility.”

Nieder, et al., recognize the philosophical problems involved here by citing the famous paper by Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” They add, “…whether pure subjective experience itself (“phenomenal consciousness”) can and should be dissociated from its report (“access consciousness”) remains intensely debated.” And so it is.

The Nieder, et al., paper, though it appears in the same issue of Science as the Stacho, et al., paper, is entirely independent of the Stacho, et al., paper, and the former repeats many of the traditional assumptions about the absence of a cerebral cortext in the avian brain. However, knowing what is now shown in the Stacho, et al., paper, and its earlier anticipations, we should not be at all surprised to find both empirical evidence of consciousness and mechanisms of sensory consciousness in birds that are apparently parallel to those of mammals. Our common terrestrial ancestry, and the DNA all life in the terrestrial biosphere shares, seems to count quite significantly toward cognitive similarity, and points to the possibility of an evo-devo cognitive science.  

Both Nieder, et al, and Herculano-Houzel discuss the phylogenesis of consciousness: since mammals and birds have a common ancestor about 320 million years ago, this raises the question of whether the common ancestor to both birds and mammals had some rudimentary form of consciousness, or whether consciousness appeared later, independently emerging in both birds and mammals. (I just discussed what I call the phylogenesis of mind in my newsletter 101.)

On the one hand, accounting for consciousness by the deep homology of highly conserved genes closely ties consciousness to the terrestrial biosphere and its contingent processes; on the other hand, multiple distinct biological mechanisms that realize consciousness suggest that consciousness as an emergent complexity is not exclusively reliant upon the specific biological mechanisms and neuronal architecture of highly developed mammal brains, which is the way in which we ourselves are familiar with consciousness. This in turn suggests that other intelligence in the universe could also be conscious intelligence something like we know from our own experience, and a mind constrained by the reality of consciousness as we know it would be at least partially understandable by us—and we would be at least partially understandable by an alien conscious intelligence—in virtue of shared consciousness, even if the biological underpinnings of consciousness were distinct in each case.

We cannot communicate via (grammatically structured) language with other forms of life on Earth, but we can and do communicate with them in terms of conscious interaction with other conscious beings. Even a biological relationship as adversarial as predation, for example, is mediated by consciousness—both beings seeking to survive, while one listens and watches in order to detect a threat, while the other waits and watches for a moment to pounce. (I earlier made a similar point in A Sentience-Rich Biosphere.) This ecological relationship is mediated by a conscious relationship between predator and prey, i.e., the shared consciousness of both predator and prey. Similarly, communicative relationships between ourselves and other beings that evolved in other biospheres, such as is posulated as the basis of SETI, could have a similar communicative structure based in shared consciousness that mediates an ecological relationship (with “ecological” here understood in a cosmological sense), even if it should turn out to be the case that human and alien minds are incommensurable and communication in the sense of shared information content is not possible (i.e., if what Freeman Dyson criticized as the “philosophical discourse dogma” is, in fact, an unsupported dogma).  

These findings regarding avian consciousness should also be of great interest to artificial intelligence researchers, in so far as artificial intelligence can be conceived (even if it is not always conceived) as machine consciousness. Machine intelligence that is not conscious would be alien from human intelligence in a fundamental way (in the same way that an extraterrestrial intelligence what was not conscious would be more alien to us than a conscious mind). Artificial intelligence that was the result of machine consciousness, like an alien consciousness, would have at least something in common with us, increasing the possibility of our having aligned interests (i.e., the constructed AI more likely to be friendly AI).

Knowing that consciousness in both avian and mammalian brains may be associated with layered neural structures, engineers of computer hardware involved in artificial intelligence might consider constructing an iterated architecture of layered neural pathways—that is to say, layered neural networks—connected every so often by columns, and so producing a different kind of hardware more specifically suited to the emergence of consciousness.

The economic motive for artificial intelligence research is simply to extend automation beyond what automation has accomplished to date, and this is certainly where the most significant economic gains are likely to be found; this research will pay for itself. But the epochal breakthrough in computer science will not appear from the incremental improvement of increasingly “intelligent” expert systems, but from the appearance of machine consciousness, which is something entirely different from what is today understood by “artificial intelligence.” Since artificial intelligence researchers seem to be mostly content writing and re-writing software that runs on more or less the same hardware, artificial consciousness is not likely to emerge from these efforts; machine consciousness will probably require distinctive hardware that imitates the neuronal architecture of biological brains from which consciousness is an emergent.

But suppose that we can isolate the neuronal circuits of consciousness, and reproduce them in hardware form: once we can do this, we can do this at a larger and at a more complex scale than exists in any biological brain. If consciousness is an emergent from iterated layers and columns of neurons, hardware mimicking layers and columns of neurons could be constructed that also serves as an emergent basis for consciousness, and a consciousness that could be far more sophisticated than any biological consciousness, insofar as the technological basis of consciousness could be rapidly streamlined and miniaturized. From such a research program an optimized consciousness could emerge. And not only optimized consciousness, but it might also be possible to engineer qualitatively distinct forms of consciousness that are variously optimized for specific tasks.

Schematic drawings of a rat brain (left) and a pigeon brain (right) depict their overall pallial organization. The mammalian dorsal pallium harbors the six-layered neocortex with a granular input layer IV (purple) and supra- and infragranular layers II/III and V/VI, respectively (blue). The avian pallium comprises the Wulst and the DVR, which both, at first glance, display a nuclear organization. Their primary sensory input zones are shown in purple, comparable to layer IV. According to this study, both mammals and birds show an orthogonal fiber architecture constituted by radially (dark blue) and tangentially (white) oriented fibers. Tangential fibers associate distant pallial territories. Whereas this pattern dominates the whole mammalian neocortex, in birds, only the sensory DVR and the Wulst (light green) display such an architecture, and the associative and motor areas (dark green), as in the caudal DVR, are devoid of this cortex-like fiber architecture. NC, caudal nidopallium.