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California sued ExxonMobil Monday, alleging the oil giant deceived the public for half a century by promising that the plastics it produced would be recycled. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said that less than 5% of plastic is recycled into another plastic product in the U.S. even though the items are labeled as “recyclable.” As a result, landfills and oceans are filled with plastic waste, creating a global pollution crisis, while consumers diligently place plastic water bottles and other containers into recycling bins, the lawsuit alleges. “‘Buy as much as you want, no problem, it’ll be recycled,’ they say. Lies, and they aim to make us feel less guilty about our waste if we recycle it,” said Bonta, a Democrat, at a virtual news conference, where he was joined by representatives of environmental groups that filed a separate but similar lawsuit Monday, also in San Francisco County Superior Court. “The end goal is to drive people to buy, buy, buy and to drive ExxonMobil’s profits up, up, up,” he said. ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest producers of plastics, blamed California for its flawed recycling system. “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills,” Lauren Kight, spokesperson for ExxonMobil, said in an email. Dozens of U.S. municipalities as well as eight states and Washington, D.C., have sued oil and gas companies in recent years over their role in climate change, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. Those are still making their way through courts, including a lawsuit filed by California a year ago against some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, claiming they deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels.
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A Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden, February 20th 1939
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
October 21, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 22, 2024
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
#Heather Cox Richardson#Letters From An American#nazis#Madison Square Garden#1930s#WWII#American History#fascism#world history#Dorothy Thompson#It Can't Happen Here#journalism#history#election 2024
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Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former president Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not issue a directive last month giving US soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against Trump supporters who riot if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said that Florida would not use Dominion Voting machines in next week’s election. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.
These are just a small sample of the flood of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook in the build up to November 5.
The election denial movement never left, and it’s bigger than ever.
In the weeks before the 2020 vote, Trump and his allies had already begun to spread claims that the election would be stolen, but those allegations were vague and unorganized. Over the past four years, however, a well-funded network of election denial groups across the US have worked tirelessly to marshal their supporters and drum up conspiracy theories about voting machines flipping votes in the middle of the night, votes being shredded by the bagful, and “mules” stuffing drop boxes with ballots.
These conspiracy theories are being shared by right-wing election denial networks, the Trump campaign, and Russian propaganda groups. With a week left to go before the historic vote, fully formed conspiracy theories about threats to voting are being pushed to audiences that have been primed to believe everything they hear.
Many of these narratives are spreading virtually unchecked on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook, where those in charge have all but abdicated their responsibility to fact-check information around one of the most critical votes in US history—and have also made it harder for everyone else to see what is going on.
“What worries me most about this year is that we have a much more opaque window into the penetration of these lies, no matter where they come from,” says Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project. “Social media platforms have by and large stopped moderating such content, and just as worryingly have cut off researcher access to data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media platforms.”
So when voters in Oregon heard earlier this month that the state’s Democratic secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, had removed Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, from her website, they believed it was part of a plan to undermine Trump. The narrative was boosted by right-wing influencers and Trump supporters on platforms like X and Instagram and gained so much traction that Griffin-Valade’s office was forced to shut down its phone lines.
The reality is that the Trump campaign had decided not to provide a statement to Oregon’s Online Voter’s Guide, unlike the Harris campaign, which is why the vice president’s name was on the guide.
“Society as a whole is much less equipped to be proactive in the face of election lies,” says Jankowicz.
Similar conspiracy theories about down-ballot races have spread across the country. “It may not be altogether surprising, but it is striking that we have already seen election fraud narratives reminiscent of those we saw four years ago,” Sam Howard, NewsGuard's politics editor, tells WIRED. “A baseless claim about machines switching votes started spreading in Tarrant County, Texas, on the first day of early voting. A similar false narrative about vote-switching took off during the first week of early voting in Georgia. The narrative in Georgia even involved Dominion Voting Systems.”
Last week, a viral video emerged claiming to show election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying mail-in ballots cast for former Trump, the very behavior that pro-Trump networks have spent years claiming happened in 2020.
Days after the video went viral, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and he Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement saying they had determined that the video was part of Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the election.
“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” the agencies said. “In the lead-up to election day and in the weeks and months after, the [intelligence community] expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”
Many of these new conspiracy theories about voter and election fraud have emerged from activists at a local level, whose accounts are then amplified by the coordinated network of election denial groups that have emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. These groups have continued to grow and establish strong connections to other national groups run and supported by some of the powerful figures in the conservative world.
The Election Integrity Network, an election denial group run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, has spent months holding online seminars to push disinformation around voter rolls and the baseless claim that millions of illegal immigrants will vote in the election. In the days ahead of the election, the group has produced a social media posting guide for its members on the best tactics to get these messages to the widest audience possible.
“Be SASSY but don’t say anything on social media you wouldn’t say in front of your grandma,” the guide’s authors write, adding that the best time to post is between 10 am to 4 pm on a weekday. “ALWAYS use graphics—and brains love faces.”
The guide, reviewed by WIRED, points users to mainstream platforms like Facebook and X, as well as fringe pro-Trump networks like Truth Social, Gettr, and Rumble.
True the Vote, an election denial group that pushed the bogus “ballot mules” conspiracy in 2020, even created its own social media platform that is dedicated to sharing election fraud conspiracy theories.
The Heritage Foundation, a group which has been at the forefront of election denial content in recent years, has been paying for ads on X to promote an ebook called 5 Shocking Cases of Election Fraud, which seeks to further undermine trust in elections by citing alleged fraud cases in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, and California.
The proliferation of disinformation has helped create a fragmented information ecosystem where voters can find “proof” for almost any election-related conspiracy. And tech companies and their refusal to adequately moderate their platforms has made the situation much worse.
“This has created an environment where anyone can find content online that proves their beliefs to be true, no matter if it’s rooted in reality or not,” says Nicole Gill, the cofounder and executive director of Accountable Tech. “The public has fewer options to anchor themselves in truth and reality, and there’s no denying that Big Tech absolutely played a role in that.”
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—A little distraction wouldn’t hurt | Hangman Fic 🏖
Top Gun Maverick Au ☀️
Summary: When Jake wants something he gets it, even if it means he has to embarrass himself or the lady he loves a little.
Pairing: Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin x Amber ‘Skysolo’ Kazansky, Hangman x OC
Requested: Yes or no
Fic length: Short.
—-
It was a breezing warm Thursday afternoon in the middle of July. The building was constantly being used up as a way to conduct a way to cool off for the people who worked there the entire week. And today was no different, expect for the fact that the workload wasn’t the best.
Usually Amber Kazansky can get it done, especially with her wingwoman by her side. But today Georgia ‘Peach’ Wells decided it was the best idea to spend a day at the beach instead with their friends. Nor did Jennifer Mitchell stopped by for a quick game. She couldn’t blame them, it was a nice day to stay laying down as the sun kissed your skin. In result, she was left alone with a laptop and paperwork to be hand picked then signed.
Her glasses slipped down her nose every time, she pushed back to the rim of her nose like it was a game. Music softly played from the radio, a random list of summer songs, as she tapped her foot. Amber was so engrossed in her files, she didn’t hear the knock on the door or for it being opened for that matter.
The door slowly swung open gently as the smell of sprinkled oranges and light lemon filled up the room. In came Jake Seresin wearing a brown collared shirt, jeans and sneakers as well as his classic black sunglasses.
He smiled at the lady in question, “Hey.”
“Hey.” She gave a short reply, typing up a email not even glancing up at the man.
“You look cute. New frames?”
“Yup.”
“Wanna take a break?”
“Can’t. Just started getting in line with these emails.”
Jake sighed, the whole time she didn’t even give him a glance or a smile. He thought for a moment asking if she wanted a beer or anything, it was a simple ‘no’ in response. He shrugged saying he’ll be back in half an hour and left for work.
—
Half an hour later she was still at it. Emails, phone calls, note taking for updates on new posts and other messages. Jake tried to distract her by rubbing her shoulder, getting her a glass of water and a snack to share, running his fingers cross her blonde hair and pretending to start organizing the office to catch her attention.
The man even sang along to the lyrics of a song from the radio.
Amber only looked up once or twice with a smile, giving him a sweet reply. Even a laugh came from her lips, which result in Jake laughing whole heartily.
But nothing that truly distracted her writing and or anything majorly strong enough to get her from standing up from her chair. Then Jake smirked. He knew actually how to distract his ladybug and get her blushing in the process, possibly. Honestly he didn’t know how he didn’t think about it earlier today, especially since it wouldn’t be the first time he done this. Well the other times were by accident, but this one would be on pure purpose and full conscious of what he will be doing.
Amber Kazansky was in the middle of a virtual meeting with other recruiters along with officers and captains to discuss plans transfer of planes, aviators and missions.
The women was pacing back and forth behind her desk, was knee deep with a conversation with Captain Wraith and Ark could new transfer students with a smile on her face.
“Ah yes i was thinking we could transfer Lieutenant Sugar Lopez here this week from Chicago over to the Northwest while Lieutenant Summit and the others take over here?” Amber asked glancing up from her paperwork.
Ark nodded from her square box on the computer screen, liking the ideas as she planned to rearrange a few shipments of flyers to California next weekend for work.
Wraith nodded running his fingers crossed his curls and said, “Okay good. Uh, Air Boss Johnson requesting to ship out Maverick and Valkyrie to the eastern side of the bay. How are dealing with this plan? He wants both siblings but Johnson hates Maverick for a reason I don’t care to know.”
Ark came up with a good suggestions onto how the plan could go as Wraith disused the idea, bouncing from one topic to another. A few peoples jumped in, chatting and comment about it all. Amber was half listening, taking notes that will be needed later for Cyclone and the Vice Admirals, adding a simple comment or two.
—-
Amber stood up bend over her desk, writing down notes she gave to the Captains, Officers and Commanders with recruiters who joined in later on during the meeting. She heard her creamy white door swing open softly as the blonde Lieutenant walked in once again. She already figured it was Jake again picking up a forgotten item he must’ve left behind earlier.
Her eyes filled from the notepad and slowly her gaze fell onto the sight in front of her. Hangman had a outfit change. His signature sunglasses were laying perfectly on his face, he was wearing short instead of his dark jeans and his shirt was well…nonexistent.
Amber had to blink twice to make sure she was seeing this right. She must be dreaming right?
Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin, Lieutenant to the Dagger Squad with two air to air kills, add the confidence and audacity to walk down the hallways of a Navy building shirtless?! Like as if it was the beach?!
“OH! Don’t mind me, sweetheart. Just looking for my baseball cap, i think i felt it in your closet.” Jake said in a whisper grinning brightly as he looked around the closet behind the door.
His silly grin. His abs being kissed from the sun rays from the window. His slightly messy hair and nicely framed facial hair from not shaving the last few days. Hangman was known for being a goofy man from time to time, so this was normal. But not today, he was doing this on purpose.
Amber was stuck in a trace and groaned, the curse of the naval aviator during the summer time! Acting like smooth criminals.
Her named was called out by Wraith snapping her out of her trace as a few recruiters asked a couple of things. Amber’s eyes reverted back to her screen and hummed, “Yeah I’m still here..still here.” She went back to her conversation with the others on call.
The whole time Jake stood there pretending to looks for his baseball cap, which he already found but stayed looking like a idiot, still searching for it. His eyes stayed brightly lit with a smirk, pacing around the room pretending to search for something else.
He spoke with a random question, “Hey, i was thinking of buying a new volleyball this summer? You know, before we play me and the guys can do some push-ups too. Get all warmed up.”
She forgot her microphone wasn’t turned down and turned to him, “Honey I’m in the middle of a meeting..”
“But sweetheart, you didn’t answer my question. A new volleyball or football? Oh that sounds way better!”
“Both. And put a shirt on please..”
“Good and no. I’m heading to the gym later and then the beach.”
Jake strutted over with a rather cheeky smile and chuckled seeing the blush slowly rise on her face. Amber tried to look away, glancing at her computer wanting to stay professional as possible.
Hangman stopped himself from looping his finger underneath her chin, fully aware about the cameras on them and just smiles, “And i want you to join us.”
“But I’m working.” She winced with a matching smile blushing embarrassed, due to noticing a few recruiters looking at her from their screen.
“I promise you will have fun, sweetie. Beside you get to hang out with me and the daggers!”
“Stop trying to convince me!”
“Ah, so it’s working!”
“Jake!”
“You can’t resist the aviator charming sweetheart, give up!”
“Jacob Seresin!”
“Hahahaha!”
A few recruiters smiled quietly. Ark smirked, Wraith rolled his eyes and some commanders teased quietly to themself.
Even Sunset was on the call later on and no one notice her appearance until she’s asked, “Honey care to introduce us to him?”
Amber mentally cursed herself and sigh, laughing a bit, “Why yes! This is Lieutenant Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin. Him and his sister are highly respected here at the naval academy.”
Jake grinned brightly giving everyone on the call a two finger salute and said, “Hello there ladies and gentlemen!”
You could notice a few people in the call trying their hardest not to laugh and blush at the sight. The older generation rolled their eyes and laughed hard, they’re very much used it this due to the interrupted meetings.
The conversation between the group kept happening as Hangman gave a nice lighthearted opinion or two on the discussion at hand, listening in and commenting on the matter. Amber took notes tossing her idiot boyfriend a t-shirt to cover up.
Eventually the meeting came to a close as everyone saying goodbye and scheduling the next meeting for the upcoming weekend.
Amber sighed in relief with a smile, “And done! I’mma go change and we can-”
Jake grinned brightly and grabbed her hand, practically dragging them out the door as he yelled, “No need! I have your all stuff in the car.”
“Wait what—?!”
—-
Thank you so much for reading! Tell me, what did you think about it? ✈️
Please remember to like, share and comment.
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A few years ago, during one of California’s steadily worsening wildfire seasons, Nat Friedman’s family home burned down. A few months after that, Friedman was in Covid-19 lockdown in the Bay Area, both freaked out and bored. Like many a middle-aged dad, he turned for healing and guidance to ancient Rome. While some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids’ Legos, he read books about the empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman villas. Instead of sourdough, he learned to bake Panis Quadratus, a Roman loaf pictured in some of the frescoes found in Pompeii. During sleepless pandemic nights, he spent hours trawling the internet for more Rome stuff. That’s how he arrived at the Herculaneum papyri, a fork in the road that led him toward further obsession. He recalls exclaiming: “How the hell has no one ever told me about this?”
The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” says Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, a charity that tries to raise awareness of the scrolls and the villa site. “This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”
The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.
In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.
But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.
After studying the problem for some time and ingratiating himself with the classics community, Friedman, who’s left GitHub to become an AI-focused investor, decided to start a contest. Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”
As the months ticked by, it became clear that Friedman’s hunch was a good one. Contestants from around the world, many of them twentysomethings with computer science backgrounds, developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans and flattening them into more readable sheets. Some appeared to find letters, then words. They swapped messages about their work and progress on a Discord chat, as the often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged off the amateur historians.
On Feb. 5, Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”
Before Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town of Herculaneum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples, the sort of getaway wealthy Romans used to relax and think. Unlike Pompeii, which took a direct hit from the Vesuvian lava flow, Herculaneum was buried gradually by waves of ash, pumice and gases. Although the process was anything but gentle, most inhabitants had time to escape, and much of the town was left intact under the hardening igneous rock. Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century, when some well-diggers found marble statues in the ground. In 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the villa thought to belong to Caesar’s father-in-law, Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, known to historians today as Piso.
During this time, the first excavators who dug tunnels into the villa to map it were mostly after more obviously valuable artifacts, like the statues, paintings and recognizable household objects. Initially, people who ran across the scrolls, some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics, thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire. Eventually, though, somebody noticed the logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms, and realized they were burnt papyrus. Anyone who tried to open one, however, found it crumbling in their hands.
Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.
Today the villa remains mostly buried, unexcavated and off-limits even to the experts. Most of what’s been found there and proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, leading historians to hope there’s a much bigger main library buried elsewhere on-site. A wealthy, educated man like Piso would have had the classics of the day along with more modern works of history, law and philosophy, the thinking goes. “I do believe there’s a much bigger library there,” says Richard Janko, a University of Michigan classical studies professor who’s spent painstaking hours assembling scroll fragments by hand, like a jigsaw puzzle. “I see no reason to think it should not still be there and preserved in the same way.” Even an ordinary citizen from that time could have collections of tens of thousands of scrolls, Janko says. Piso is known to have corresponded often with the Roman statesman Cicero, and the apostle Paul had passed through the region a couple of decades before Vesuvius erupted. There could be writings tied to his visit that comment on Jesus and Christianity. “We have about 800 scrolls from the villa today,” Janko says. “There could be thousands or tens of thousands more.”
In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”
Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”
By 2016 he and his students had managed to read the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred ancient Hebrew text, by programming their specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it. The software made the letters light up against a darker background. Seales’ team had high hopes to apply this technique to the Herculaneum papyri, but those were written with a different, carbon-based ink that their imaging gear couldn’t illuminate in the same way.
Over the past few years, Seales has begun experimenting with AI. He and his team have scanned the scrolls with more powerful imaging machines, examined portions of the papyrus where ink was visible and trained algorithms on what those patterns looked like. The hope was that the AI would start picking up on details that the human eye missed and could apply what it learned to more obfuscated scroll chunks. This approach proved fruitful, though it remained a battle of inches. Seales’ technology uncovered bits and pieces of the scrolls, but they were mostly unreadable. He needed another breakthrough.
Friedman set up Google alerts for Seales and the papyri in 2020, while still early in his Rome obsession. After a year passed with no news, he started watching YouTube videos of Seales discussing the underlying challenges. Among other things, he needed money. By 2022, Friedman was convinced he could help. He invited Seales out to California for an event where Silicon Valley types get together and share big ideas. Seales gave a short presentation on the scrolls to the group, but no one bit. “I felt very, very guilty about this and embarrassed because he’d come out to California, and California had failed him,” Friedman says.
On a whim, Friedman proposed the idea of a contest to Seales. He said he’d put up some of his own money to fund it, and his investing partner Daniel Gross offered to match it.
Seales says he was mindful of the trade-offs. The Herculaneum papyri had turned into his life’s work, and he wanted to be the one to decode them. More than a few of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and planned to publish papers about their efforts. Now, suddenly, a couple of rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet randos could deliver the breakthroughs that had eluded the experts.
More than glory, though, Seales really just hoped the scrolls would be read, and he agreed to hear Friedman out and help design the AI contest. They kicked off the Vesuvius Challenge last year on the Ides of March. Friedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember as Twitter, and many of his tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig into the task at hand. After a couple of days, Friedman had amassed enough money to offer $1 million in prizes, along with some extra money to throw at some of the more time-intensive basics.
Friedman hired people online to gather the existing scroll imagery, catalog it and create software tools that made it easier to chop the scrolls into segments and to flatten the images out into something that was readable on a computer screen. After finding a handful of people who were particularly good at this, he made them full members of his scroll contest team, paying them $40 an hour. His hobby was turning into a lifestyle.
The initial splash of attention helped open new doors. Seales had lobbied Italian and British collectors for years to scan his first scrolls. Suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data. With Friedman’s backing, a team set to work building precision-fitting, 3D-printed cases to protect the new scrolls on their private jet flight from Italy to a particle accelerator in England. There they were scanned for three days straight at a cost of about $70,000.
Seeing the imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest. One of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner, for example, wasn’t much bigger than a fat finger. It was peppered by high-energy X-rays, much like a human going through a CT scan, except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution. (For the real nerds: about 8 micrometers.) These images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices too numerous for a person to count. Along each slice, the scanner picked up infinitesimal changes in density and thickness. Software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices, and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of papyrus, the writing on them hidden.
The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.
Luke Farritor was hooked from the start. Farritor—a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims, “Oh, my goodness!”—heard Friedman describe the contest on a podcast in March. “I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year,” Friedman said on the show. Farritor thought, “That could be me.”
The early months were a slog of splotchy images. Then Casey Handmer, an Australian mathematician, physicist and polymath, scored a point for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough. Handmer took a few stabs at writing scroll-reading code, but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time. Eventually he began to notice what he and the other contestants have come to call “crackle,” a faint pattern of cracks and lines on the page that resembles what you might see in the mud of a dried-out lakebed. To Handmer’s eyes, the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink. He says he believes it to be dried-out ink that’s lifted up from the surface of the page.
The crackle discovery led Handmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image. In the spirit of the contest, he posted his findings to the Vesuvius Challenge’s Discord channel in June. At the time, Farritor was a summer intern at SpaceX. He was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the post, and his initial disbelief didn’t last long. Over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other image files: one letter here, another couple there. Most of the letters were invisible to the human eye, but 1% or 2% had the crackle. Armed with those few letters, he trained a model to recognize hidden ink, revealing a few more letters. Then Farritor added those letters to the model’s training data and ran it again and again and again. The model starts with something only a human can see—the crackle pattern—then learns to see ink we can’t.
Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.
In early August, Farritor received an opportunity to put his software to the test. He’d returned to Nebraska to finish out the summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new, crackle-rich image popped up in the contest’s Discord channel. As the people around him danced and drank, Farritor hopped on his phone, connected remotely to his dorm computer, threw the image into his machine-learning system, then put his phone away. “An hour later, I drive all my drunk friends home, and then I’m walking out of the parking garage, and I take my phone out not expecting to see anything,” he says. “But when I open it up, there’s three Greek letters on the screen.”
Around 2 a.m., Farritor texted his mom and then Friedman and the other contestants about what he’d found, fighting back tears of joy. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually going to work. We’re going to read the scrolls.’”
Soon enough, Farritor found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest’s progress prizes. The classicists reviewed his work and said he’d found the Greek word for “purple.”
Farritor continued to train his machine-learning model on crackle data and to post his progress on Discord and Twitter. The discoveries he and Handmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants, and some began to employ similar techniques. In the latter part of 2023, Farritor formed an alliance with two other contestants, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money.
In the end, the Vesuvius Challenge received 18 entries for its grand prize. Some submissions were ho-hum, but a handful showed that Friedman’s gamble had paid off. The scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letters lighting up across them. The AI systems had brought the past to life. “It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” says Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford. “You mostly look at texts that have been looked at by someone before. The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”
A group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did, in fact, deem Farritor’s team the winners. They were able to stitch together more than a dozen columns of text with entire paragraphs all over their entry. Still translating, the scholars believe the text to be another work by Philodemus, one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses. “Peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand-new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience,” says Janko, one of the reviewers. While these passages aren’t particularly revelatory about ancient Rome, most classics scholars have their hopes for what might be next.
There’s a chance that the villa is tapped out—that there are no more libraries of thousands of scrolls waiting to be discovered—or that the rest have nothing mind-blowing to offer. Then again, there’s the chance they contain valuable lessons for the modern world.
That world, of course, includes Ercolano, the modern town of about 50,000 built on top of ancient Herculaneum. More than a few residents own property and buildings atop the villa site. “They would have to kick people out of Ercolano and destroy everything to uncover the ancient city,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II.
Barring a mass relocation, Friedman is working to refine what he’s got. There’s plenty left to do; the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll. A new set of contestants, he says, might be able to reach 85%. He also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the processes of scanning and digital smoothing. He’s now one of the few living souls who’s roamed the villa tunnels, and he says he’s also contemplating buying scanners that can be placed right at the villa and used in parallel to scan tons of scrolls per day. “Even if there’s just one dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful lost Homeric poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this Jesus Christ guy who’s roaming around,” he says, “all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it.”
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*Norton sighed as he walked into the debriefing room, it wasn't like he was allowed on field missions anymore but as head of the files department it was required for him to go at least once a week. He normally went every time, simply to get a notion of how much rush of reports he'd get in the next week. Besides, he had things to discuss on the subject of the files back at HQ, so it was fairly necessary this time.
He glanced around the room, only a few people being there considering he was a couple minutes early. He blinked tiredly, silently wondering if he could get Giovanni to go next time and put him to work taking notes. He took his seat at the table, quickly logging in to the laptop he'd brought in with him to discuss the intake and destruction of older, unimportant files for physical storage issues.
He looked up from where he started pulling up his spread and data sheets as the General walked in, standing up to attention with everyone else.*
Good morning, Sir.
*He gave John a soft nod, a couple others following suit, but staying silent. It never really made sense to Norton to wait until his commanding officer addressed him unless there was an obvious tone shift in the room leaning towards it, so it didn't really bother him that he was the only one to speak upon his entry.*
@peip-agent-no-5
Hello, agent.
[John waits for the remainder of his people to file in before he begins, alongside some attending virtually on the screen behind him.]
Luckily for us, we haven’t gotten many reports this week. But of the few we have, they’re fairly intensive.
Vanderbilt, I need your crew on cleanup in Fair Banks, Missouri. Our extermination of the carnivorous gnome population left more damage —and witnesses— than intended. Pay off those who saw, and make sure no one else does. I’ll wire you whatever’s necessary.
I also need a reconnaissance squad to circle Lake Tahoe. There have been rumors of kelp monsters in the lake, presumably they got there from the ocean. Colonel Sanders, gather your best people from the California area and send them out with two weeks worth of rations.
As for the recent incident by the Gulf, we still need a few people to track down remnants the cult Carvour previously dealt with. I’ve calculated their most likely positions, and I want two agents sent to each. Alongside multiple squadrons purveying the coastline. They’re water based and likely trying to find a new idol of worship. Lieutenant Bellview, collecting people for that will be your job.
[He takes a deep breath, having finished with the most pressing matters. The remainder of the meeting is spent on logistics, the less glamorous side of secret military organizations. Who needs to be paid off, who needs to be silenced, how to get further funding, etcetera.]
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Sam Levin at The Guardian:
A group of leading Democratic governors offered words of support for Joe Biden on Wednesday as pressure mounted on the president to leave the race. The governors, including Tim Walz of Minnesota, Wes Moore of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California and Kathy Hochul of New York, held a closed-door meeting with Biden in Washington as he sought to reassure his party – and the public – that he is up to the job after a shaky debate performance. Biden met for more than an hour at the White House in person and virtually with more than 20 governors from his party. The governors told reporters afterward that the conversation was “candid” and said they expressed concerns about Biden’s debate performance last week. They reiterated that defeating Donald Trump in November was the priority, but said they were still standing behind Biden and did not join other Democrats who have been urging him to withdraw his candidacy.
“We, like many Americans, are worried,” Walz of Minnesota said. “We are all looking for the path to win – all the governors agree with that. President Biden agrees with that. He has had our backs through Covid … the governors have his back. We’re working together just to make very, very clear that a path to victory in November is the No 1 priority and that’s the No 1 priority of the president … The feedback was good. The conversation was honest.” “The president is our nominee. The president is our party leader,” added Moore of Maryland. He said Biden “was very clear that he’s in this to win it”. “We were honest about the feedback we’re getting … and the concerns we’re hearing from people,” Moore said. “We’re going to have his back … the results we’ve been able to see under this administration have been undeniable.”
The meeting capped a tumultuous day for Biden as members of his own party, and a major democratic donor, urged him to step aside amid questions over his fitness for office. Two Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to exit the race, and a third Congressman said he had “grave concerns” about Biden’s ability to beat Trump. The White House, meanwhile, was forced to deny reports that Biden is weighing whether his candidacy is still viable. Biden, for his part, has forcefully insisted that he is staying in the race. “Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can, as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Biden said on a call with staffers from his re-election campaign. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”
Kamala Harris has also stood by his side, despite some insiders reportedly rallying around her as a possible replacement. “We will not back down. We will follow our president’s lead,” the vice-president reportedly told staffers on Wednesday.
At yesterday’s hybrid conference with Democratic governors with President Joe Biden, governors are largely rallying behind the incumbent President even as they have expressed worries.
#2024 Presidential Election#2024 Elections#2024 Dems#2024 Veepstakes#Joe Biden#Gretchen Whitmer#Tim Walz#Gavin Newsom#J.B. Pritzker#Kamala Harris#Wes Moore#Kathy Hochul
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“In theory, group counseling to address the root causes of abusive behavior sounds promising. If batterer intervention programs make abusers less violent and, as a result, victims safer, why wouldn’t it be a preferable alternative to sentencing someone to, say, a year in jail, as Majors faced? But decades after the first programs were established, we have limited and highly contradictory research on how well they work. Some studies have found batterer intervention programs reduce future violence; others conclude they have little to no impact. The National Institute of Justice says results are “mixed.” Complicating matters, batterer intervention programs aren’t a monolith, and curriculum and quality varies wildly from one to another…
But while batterer intervention programs may prove effective when abusers attend, a huge portion of participants simply don’t. Anywhere from 15 to 58 percent of participants fail to complete treatment, often with few consequences. A 2022 state audit of California batterer intervention programs, including those in L.A. County, where Majors is expected to attend, found that probation officers and program providers frequently failed to inform the court about absences and other probation violations, including serious ones, such as contacting a victim under a protective order. In California, like in Massachusetts, those who completed the programs had a lower rate of reoffending than those who dropped out — 20 percent compared to 65 percent — but notably, nearly half of the domestic-violence offenders reviewed by the state did not complete the program. The “system has not adequately held offenders accountable,” the audit concluded, adding that these issues “have plagued the batterer intervention system for at least three decades, creating a critical need for statewide guidance and oversight.” Without proper supervision, these programs can end up functioning as literal get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
One evening last summer, I logged onto Zoom to observe a virtual counseling program for men who perpetrated domestic violence, run by a Boston-based group called Emerge. There were nine men of various ages and ethnicities and backgrounds on the call. Some were at home, video-conferencing from their bedrooms, one was in the car, and another was taking a leisurely walk outdoors, his sunglasses blocking his eyes from view. Emerge has a set format for these classes, which run weekly for 40 weeks and are generally populated by men court-mandated to attend by a judge. Participants begin by identifying themselves and the name of the person they abused, serving, it seemed to me, a dual purpose—centering the victim at the onset of the session and promoting responsibility. At Alcoholics Anonymous, it’s Hi, I’m John and I’m an alcoholic. At Emerge, it’s Hi, I’m John and I’m an abuser.
The walker, whom I’ll call Jeremy, was doing his weekly check-in with the group when David Adams, the co-founder of Emerge and one of two facilitators on the call, asked him a direct question: What was the abuse he committed that landed him in the program? Emerge encourages men to talk candidly and in detail about their abuse — what preceded it, what they did, how it impacted their partner — and accept feedback from the rest of the group about their behavior. The hope is that participants will begin to recognize and interrogate their own patterns of abuse and, over time, undergo the slow and uncomfortable process of change. To be successful, this intervention model requires active, incisive coaching by group leaders, Adams explained in a paper describing the program, as left on their own, “abusive men tend to give superficial or highly skewed reports of their interactions with their partners.”
Jeremy, still walking, began describing his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. They both struggled with insecurity, he said, leading to arguments over stupid things. “We were both wounded birds, just trying to soar through the sky, and we just, kind of like, we didn’t have very good communicative skills,” he said. Adams stopped his digressive answer there. The question, he reminded Jeremy, was how exactly did he abuse his partner? Now, Jeremy’s voice sped up. “Just like … pushing … I like, pulled her down the stairs, but like two … two stairs, you know?” he replied. “It wasn’t like I dragged her down a flight of stairs and she was all beat up or nothing crazy like that.” He went on: “I don’t want to reflect on my past because I am accountable for my actions, and stuff like that. But it was again, like I said, based upon our insecurities and not having good communicative skills.”
In Jeremy’s telling, his physical violence toward his girlfriend was caused by their mutual insecurity. It was only a few stairs. Nothing crazy. It is exactly this type of thinking that batterer intervention programs, as they are called, are designed to combat. Emerge, circa 1977, was the first such program in the U.S., born at a time when feminist activists were demanding national attention to the neglected issue of domestic violence. As hotlines and shelters sprung up for victims, Adams said, the natural next question within the movement was what to do with the men causing harm?
In the years since, programs have proliferated (over 2,500 exist, according to one count) and are now fully integrated into the criminal-justice system. These days, if you are convicted of a domestic-violence offense, it is likely you’ll be mandated to go to one. Millions of men have attended, including celebrities such as Mel Gibson, Christian Slater, and Chris Brown, who bragged about completing the class on Twitter: “Boyz run from there [sic] mistakes.. Men learn from them!!!” he wrote. (Four years later, a judge granted another woman, Karrueche Tran, a five-year restraining order against Brown, who she said he threatened to kill her.) And earlier this month, Jonathan Majors was sentenced to a 52-week batterer intervention program in California after being convicted of assaulting and harassing his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari.
In theory, group counseling to address the root causes of abusive behavior sounds promising. If batterer intervention programs make abusers less violent and, as a result, victims safer, why wouldn’t it be a preferable alternative to sentencing someone to, say, a year in jail, as Majors faced? But decades after the first programs were established, we have limited and highly contradictory research on how well they work. Some studies have found batterer intervention programs reduce future violence; others conclude they have little to no impact. The National Institute of Justice says results are “mixed.” Complicating matters, batterer intervention programs aren’t a monolith, and curriculum and quality varies wildly from one to another.
Most states have legal standards that regulate programs, but oversight falls to different departments with distinct goals. In California, for example, the Probation Department is in charge. In Massachusetts, it’s the Department of Public Health. Generally, participants are mandated to attend once a week for anywhere from 8 to 52 weeks (the longer the better for real change, Adams says). While models range, most programs are a mix of therapy and education, covering topics such as conflict-resolution skills, effects of abuse on partners and children, and how to take accountability. With victims’ consent, Emerge checks in with them throughout the 40 weeks to see if there has been any additional violence or threats and assess victims’ sense of safety. If a perpetrator refuses to own up to his actions or suggests he might commit more violence or stops attending, programs are typically supposed to communicate with probation, courts, and even the partner in question. “If we get somebody 12 weeks into our program who’s still blaming his partner, then we put that in a letter,” Adams said, which can be helpful to partners who are trying to make a decision about whether to stay in the relationship.
Adams, a psychologist who grew up with an abusive father, is a true believer in the power of these programs to save lives. When I asked him about the dismal research on effectiveness, he said studies often lump together participants who quit with those who complete it. Truly changing someone’s deep-seated and long-held thought patterns and beliefs takes time, he explained. “Many of the studies look at somebody who dropped out after one session and reoffend and count that as a program failure,” he said. “If substance-abuse programs were evaluated that way, they would all be considered to be failures.” He directed me to a 2015 pilot study conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School that assessed three batterer intervention programs in Massachusetts, including Emerge. It found that participants who completed such a program were 28 percent less likely to recidivate — measured as an arrest for a future domestic-violence-related crime — than those who failed to complete the program. Stated another way, those who dropped out were three times more likely to be arrested for domestic violence again than those who completed the work. (Of course, evaluating a program’s success using future arrests reveals only the tip of the iceberg, as domestic violence is chronically underreported to police.)
But while batterer intervention programs may prove effective when abusers attend, a huge portion of participants simply don’t. Anywhere from 15 to 58 percent of participants fail to complete treatment, often with few consequences. A 2022 state audit of California batterer intervention programs, including those in L.A. County, where Majors is expected to attend, found that probation officers and program providers frequently failed to inform the court about absences and other probation violations, including serious ones, such as contacting a victim under a protective order. In California, like in Massachusetts, those who completed the programs had a lower rate of reoffending than those who dropped out — 20 percent compared to 65 percent — but notably, nearly half of the domestic-violence offenders reviewed by the state did not complete the program. The “system has not adequately held offenders accountable,” the audit concluded, adding that these issues “have plagued the batterer intervention system for at least three decades, creating a critical need for statewide guidance and oversight.” Without proper supervision, these programs can end up functioning as literal get-out-of-jail-free cards.
In 2016, I was invited to attend a conference on batterer intervention in Dearborn, Michigan. For three days, I listened as leaders in the field, many of whom had been working on this issue since the ’80s, described what they’d learned. Session titles, such as “Real Change, Real Challenges: Moving Forward Through the Backlash” and “Let’s Set the Record Straight!” reflected a sense of frustration with how outsiders perceive the work. I left with the impression that many batterer intervention practitioners genuinely believe that reforming abusers is a critical step — maybe even the critical step — to reducing domestic violence yet is chronically underfunded, the ugly duckling of the movement to stop violence against women. Few advocacy groups are interested in raising money for programs that help abusers, especially if it seems like it might divert resources from victims.
Bringing us back to Jeremy, the Emerge participant. After he finally acknowledged to the group that he pushed his girlfriend down “two” stairs, Adams called him out. He noted that Jeremy kept referring to the core problem as “our” insecurities, as if his girlfriend’s insecurity played a role in the violence. “You’re taking responsibility for your abusive behavior means it’s 100 percent a choice that you’re making. Regardless of how insecure or whatever the other person’s feelings are, right? It has no relevance.”
“I comprehend everything you’re saying,” Jeremy responded guardedly.
Adams continued. “I’m just recommending that you think differently about it, because if that’s the way you continue to think about it, then you’re not responsible. You’re saying, ‘Well, if I get into another situation where both people are insecure, then of course I’m going to be abusive,’ as if one follows naturally from the other.” At this, Jeremy squirmed and frowned. The audio cut out for a few seconds.
Once he was reconnected, he conceded the point. “I should have said ‘my insecurity,’” he said. “I absolutely agree to what you’re trying to say. And my mind-set changes in each group that I come into.”
When asked what Jeremy hoped to get from the program, he said he wanted to learn from his mistakes. “I want this lesson to have an effect, a very big impact in my behavior, my lifestyle and everything.” Of course, it’s easy to say that, whether you really mean it, and some men do fake their way through the classes without genuinely engaging with the content. Regardless, Adams said, “fake it ’til you make it” can still produce an impact.
I asked Adams how Jeremy was doing, nine months after I observed him in class. He’s still attending, Adams said, which is something. He’s taking somewhat more responsibility, but he still deflects from time to time. There’s still more work to be done.
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Virtual Offices in California - Flexy Virtual offices in California provide a professional user experience and secure environment, as well as a comprehensive range of services with no contracts. Each office space is designed to suit the needs of your business and offer flexible work options to suit your lifestyle.
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Flesh and Blood [The Masterlist]
Hey hi howdy.
here's a list of absolutely everyone ever that is going to be taking part in this story
[warning. looooong post ahead]
For reference:
Ghouls are ranked C - SS: C is the lowest, SS is borderline godlike.
Doves (not canon to tg) are ranked Tier's 1 - 4: 1 is the lowest, 4 is virtually unstoppable.
Disclaimer: we will not be using the hermits'/others' irl names. decided if it was funnier to make fake names for all of them based on usernames.
(in the actual story we will be using the names in quotation marks lol)
Buford "Bdubs" O'Hunred [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Machete Quinque - Wears a ghillie suit and thinks it looks cool
Bos "Beef" Vintage [Ghoul :: B Class - "The Butcher" Kokaku: Horns + Six legged Bull Kakuja - Dude wash your apron
Ben "Bigb" Biggie [Ghoul] :: B Class - "The Frog" Triple orange rinkaku tails - Teenage Mutant Ninja . . . froggie grown man!
Cub Goodfan [Ghoul] :: C Class - "The Magician" Ukaku vex wings - Of the two of them, really you'd think this one would be the crazy one
Cleo Zombie [Ghoul] :: A Class - "The Gorgon" Tiny wings + six snake tails - Her name could have led to some good brand opportunities
Dr. Maddox Sevensven "Doc" [Ghoul] :: A Class - "The Goat" Bone kokaku + Goatskull kakuja - The career change really made things complicated
Ethos "Etho" Lab [Dove] :: Tier 3 - Sniper quinque with high caliber Q bullets. - y'know what they call me? call me ladders. cuz i go up real high...
Fals "False" Symmetria [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Sword quinque, morphs into winged broadsword. - Oh her and Wels go waaaay back!
Fhwip "Fwip" Taylor [Dove] :: Tier 3 - Sickle quinque - Y'know what they say about younger siblings growing up to replace you? Yeah. That.
Gemini "Gem" Taylor [Dove] :: Tier 3 - Whipsword quinque. - Youngins these days kick butt way harder than they used to
Grian Spurman [Human] :: S Class* - Red wings quinque backpack - Some would say that's cannibalism O-o
Haech "Hbomb" Bomber [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Yknow back in my day
Hels Gnitte [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Spiderman pointing meme
Hypnos "Hypno" Tizzede [Human] :: n/a - Going once, going twice, sold to the man with no front teeth!
I Jevin Aquamarine Gaimen "Jevin" [Ghoul] :: A Class - Two bright blue bikaku tails - They say surfing is a sport in California. Don't know where the couches came from.
Impulse Essve [Human] :: n/a - Occupational hazard or not, he's getting his goddamn coffee
Iskall Eigh Fivva [Dove] :: Tier 1 - Non Newtonian bikaku blade quinque - (floppy)HAMMERTIME
Joel Beans Smallish [Human] :: n/a - Cast iron pans work wonders
Joseph "Joe" Hills [Human] :: n/a - Journalism just got way more dangerous
Kera Liss "Keralis" [Human*] :: n/a - Hmm, how'd you get there?
Lizzie D Shadowlady [Ghoul] :: C class - "Housecat" 3 toed talons kokaku - No officer, there's no one here, just this very cat like cat...
Martyn LilWood [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Standard sword quinque. Possibly with a rocket on the end. - Not quite taking the lone wolf schtick to heart
Mumbo K. Jumbo [Ghoul] :: B Class - "The Suit" Double kokaku claws - Mondays amiright
Pearl Escentmoon [Human] :: n/a - Worst. Field trip. Ever.
Pix Elrif [Ghoul] :: C class - "Automaton" Single tail bikaku - The cat distribution system but he is the cat
Ren Thedog [Ghoul] :: S class - "The Red Wolf" Single tail Rinkaku + wolf head kakuja - oh hey how you doing nice to meet- SQUIRREL???
Saus "Sausage" J Mythica [Human] :: n/a - The world's best chewy stress toy
Scar Goodfan [Ghoul] :: SS class -"The Vex" Ukaku vex wings + 2 bikaku tails + Perfect Kakuja - no chill having, no leg having, no craps given, no fear having ass
Scott Dangtha Longie Major [Dove] :: Tier 1 - Spear quinque - Doing his best ;w;
Skizz LeMann [Ghoul] :: C class - "Lucifer" 4 feathered rinkaku tails - One beer away from getting in the maid outfit
Tress "Stress" Monstre [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Warhammer quinque - Holds all of the tea. And yeah, that's a lot.
Tango Tekk [Ghoul] :: C class - "Helios" Single wing, combustible, ukaku - Is absolutely not compensating for anything
Tin Foilchef "TFC" [Dove] :: Tier 4 - Double edged scythe, polymorph, quinque - Judge, Justice and Executioner
Timothy "Jimmy" Solidarity [Ghoul] :: C class - "Canary" Deformed wing Ukaku - The vibe is strong with this one. That vibe was wet cat.
Wels K. Nite [Ghoul] :: B Class - "The Knight" Reptilian wing Ukaku - huh, well that's awkward
Xb Crafheld [Ghoul] :: A Class - "Guardian" Fused double tail bikaku - If he had a nickel every time he was friends with a suspicious man, he would have two nickels.
Xisuma "X" Vhoide [Dove] :: Tier 3 - Multiple quinques - Has one and a half eyeballs
Amusix "eX" Vhoide* [Dove] :: Tier 2 - Crossbow quinque - There's a crime here about to be committed...
Zed Aphlays [Ghoul] :: C class - "The Ram" Bikaku Sheep's foot - One good day away from committing arson
Zloy Exphee [Human] :: n/a - These journalists seriously need to chill.
#hermitcraft#hermitcraft au#tokyo ghoul au#prey&hunters#theghoulera#phau#the ghoul era#hope u enjoyed the long reading >:3#id tag every character but then we'd be here for another week#any questions are welcome to be asked#please ask me about them#im insane and i need to talk about them#mod box#character art coming soon
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
August 20, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Aug 21, 2024
At Chicago’s United Center today, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top.
When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for her nomination.
He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”
Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan.
It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27, 2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to the presidency.
Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in 2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of Independence.
“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t's not enough for just some of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.”
He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”
Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”
Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.
When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008, Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY) became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote.
In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting their states after the 2010 census. Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to win previously Democratic House seats.
In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to protect Democratic voters.
As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme challengers. So they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy altogether.
Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s “central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said.
And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and hard work.
They wanted their children to “do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that in our lives:... good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.”
If President Obama emphasized tonight that the nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.
In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”
Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don't go our way, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don't get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something."
And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.”
It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said. She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect. Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”
“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
#Letters From An American#Heather Cox Richardson#politcal history#grace#poetry#Democratic National Convention#The Obamas#history#American History#Citizens United
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Whether you call it “tattleware,” “bossware,” or “surveillance capitalism,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has had enough of exploitative workplace monitoring technologies. Late last week, Casey and a handful of other Senate Democrats introduced the Stop Spying Bosses Act, which would help protect workers from intrusive employer surveillance both on and off the clock.
The legislation would require “timely and public” disclosures by companies about the data they’re collecting on employees, prohibit businesses from using surveillance practices that obstruct union organizing or monitor workers while they’re off the clock, and create a new division of the Department of Labor to regulate workplace surveillance. Sens. Cory Booker, John Fetterman, Elizabeth Warren, and Brian Schatz are cosponsoring the bill, which has also garnered support from some major labor groups.
Workplace surveillance has been a growing area of concern for Democrats in the past few years, as the shift to remote work during the pandemic has prompted increased use of employee monitoring technologies. Since the onset of the pandemic, the percentage of large companies that digitally monitor their workers has doubled, to more than 60%. At a time when managers can no longer keep an eye on workers in the office, they’ve increasingly relied on technologies such as keylogger software, geolocation tools that track workers’ physical movements, and even software that monitors worker attentiveness with webcams, using biometric data to scrutinize minute body movements and facial expressions.
Currently, federal law gives workers few protections from these kinds of surveillance practices. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 does have some safeguards against workplace monitoring, but it has wide-ranging exceptions that allow employers to keep tabs on virtually all communications for “legitimate business purposes.” Currently, no federal law requires employers to disclose that they are monitoring workers, though individual states are increasingly taking steps to protect workers’ rights. In May 2022, for example, New York passed a law requiring private companies to publicly disclose whether employees will be electronically monitored, following similar legislation in Delaware and Connecticut. In California, a bill introduced last year would eliminate tools like facial recognition and emotion recognition technologies from the workplace.
The National Labor Relations Board is beginning to address the issue at the federal level, too. Last fall, the agency’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, issued a memo indicating that companies have overreached with their aggressive surveillance. She recommended that the NLRB impose a requirement that employers tell workers about the surveillance tools they use to monitor them, the justifications for those tools, and how they use the information they collect from workers.
In the memo, Abruzzo also acknowledged “abusive electronic monitoring” could interfere with employees’ right to organize a union or engage in other protected labor activities. As I’ve written before, unions around the country are currently in the middle of negotiating how data collected on workers can be used by employers. At companies like Amazon, unionization efforts are being driven partly by a culture of relentless workplace surveillance—and in some cases employers are responding to unionization efforts by doubling down on digital monitoring. Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, used heat maps to identify its stores at risk of unionization, according to Insider.
While the bill isn’t likely to pass in a divided Congress, it’s a sign that the proliferation of workplace surveillance during the pandemic is finally getting more national attention. “As the power imbalance in workplaces continues to grow, employers are increasingly using invasive surveillance technologies that allow them to track their workers like pieces of equipment,” Casey said in a statement introducing the legislation. “The Stop Spying Bosses Act is a first step to level the playing field for workers by holding their bosses accountable.”
#us politics#news#mother jones#2023#Sen. Bob Casey#Stop Spying Bosses Act#Department of Labor#workplace surveillance#sen. cory booker#sen. John Fetterman#sen. elizabeth warren#sen. Brian Schatz#keylogger software#geolocation#biometric data#Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986#National Labor Relations Board#Jennifer Abruzzo#Democrats
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1976. They could’ve gone faster, but for security reasons, they didn’t want to show off their actual speed . The record still holds when the SR 71 took the title away from the YF 12 as the fastest manned aircraft in the world !🇺🇸
Spirits were high at California’s Beale Air Force Base on July 28, 1976, as the ground crew buckled Joersz and Morgan into their seats — Joersz, the pilot, in front; Morgan, the reconnaissance officer in charge of surveillance equipment, sitting in a separate cockpit, behind.
They looked like astronauts in their helmets and pressurized flight suits, which were required because the plane flies so high. Joersz recalls that the tanks were almost full — filled with a unique fuel developed especially for the plane’s two huge, powerful engines.
After making final checks of their equipment, Joersz lined up the long, black, ominous aircraft at the end of the runway. Ground crews signaled a green light for departure. Then Joersz put his left hand on the throttle, pushed it forward and aircraft Number 17958 took off.
“We climbed directly to our target altitude right from brake release,” Joersz remembered. Soon they were soaring at 80,600 feet — more than twice the altitude of passenger jets — so high that Joersz remembers seeing the curvature of the Earth.
After leveling off, he shot the plane at full throttle across most of the first pass of the 15 kilometer straight-line course.
In the seat behind him, Morgan helped Joersz follow the mission checklist and made sure they remained on track. “I was watching very closely to make sure we were right on the money,” Morgan said. “And we were.”
To break the record, the rules called for Joersz to turn the plane around and repeat the same path at virtually the same altitude. Morgan fed Joersz audio cues alerting him when to change course.
“I powered back … and began the turn — 90 degrees to the left, then a 270-degree turn to the right,” Joersz said. The jet re-entered the course at precisely 80,600 feet. That’s about 15 miles high.
Morgan and Joersz encouraged each other over their headsets, Morgan recalled.” ‘What do you think? Are we gonna make this thing? Oh, yeah, piece of cake!’ “
As Joersz remembers, after flying over four states, they landed safely back at Beale about 55 minutes after they took off.
The plane came to a stop. Joersz and Morgan climbed out of their cockpits and were met by a crowd of VIPs saluting, shaking hands and back-slapping. The celebration included generals, Lockheed executives and a congratulatory phone call with the commander in chief of the Air Force Strategic Air Command.
Per the rules, the official speed was an average of both legs. Final calculations showed that Joersz and Morgan had broken the previous record by 123 mph – set by a similar Air Force spy plane, the YF-12A, in the ’60s.
They actually thought they could do better, hoping for 2,200 mph, said Joersz. “We got pretty close — within 7 mph.” With George Morgan
Photograph with the same flag shows the crew in 1976 and then 40 years later 2016
Original article CNN, 1976
@Habubrats71 via X
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𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧
At Chicago’s United Center today, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top.
When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for her nomination.
He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”
Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan.
It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27, 2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to the presidency.
Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in 2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of Independence.
“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t's not enough for just some of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.”
He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”
Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”
Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.
When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008, Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY) became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote.
In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting their states after the 2010 census. Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to win previously Democratic House seats.
In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and
a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to protect Democratic voters.
As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme challengers. So they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy altogether.
Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s “central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said.
And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and hard work.
They wanted their children to “do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that in our lives:... good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.”
If President Obama emphasized tonight that the nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.
In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”
Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don't go our way, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don't get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something."
And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.”
It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said. She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect. Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”
“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”
— 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟎, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐱 𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬𝐨𝐧
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For every new star on the recording scene, there is at least one unheralded industry drone without whom that star might never have shone. In the case of Blake Shelton, who is about to receive his well-deserved Hollywood Walk of Fame star after more than two decades as one of country music’s best, there are probably more like a dozen heroes who made Blake’s incredible career possible.
One of those heroes is your humble Nashville correspondent, me. No, that’s the truth. Once or twice in your life the impossible hits you between the eyes and you need to be prepared if you want to turn it into pure sunshine before the inevitable eclipse drifts in.
One day in 1995 or 1996 I got a call from Jim Sharpe, then publisher of American Songwriter magazine. He had found this big kid from Oklahoma, best singer he’d ever heard, would I like to come by the office to hear him sing? “Why?” I asked. You see, I was trying to dodge what the gods were hurling at me. I was done with the music business. I would just be a waste of this kid’s time.
But a week or two later found me in Sharpe’s office shaking hands with this kid, six-foot-four, great looking, with a big, black cowboy hat, big black Takamine guitar, a voice so huge it shook the walls of Sharpe’s office, and a laugh to match.
I was hooked, and soon we were writing songs together every Tuesday.
But nothing further happened until a couple from California hired me to run their music publishing company. We signed Shelton to a publishing deal. And then nothing more happened. I learned that he’d already been turned down by labels all over Music Row, talent be damned.
Now comes the big twist in the story.
I’m not the hero, after all. The hero is a guy I’m about to call. Bobby Braddock has written or co-written many of country music’s biggest hits, including “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “I Wanna Talk About Me,” “People Are Crazy,” “Golden Ring,” “Time Marches On” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” He also produces terrific demos and he’s always wanted to produce records.
The call goes like this:
“Hello, Homer (his phone name is Homer, and mine is Jethro). I’ve got something I want you to hear.” I’m holding an old microcassette tape recorder in my right hand, and a telephone receiver in my left. This phone call is high-tech. I push the recorder flush against my telephone mouthpiece and press the start button. Homer listens to Blake sing for a little more than two minutes. When the tape has finished playing, Bobby speaks.
“The song is OK, but who’s that singer?”
“He’s 20 years old and we signed him a couple of months ago,” I reply.
“He sounds like a young Hank Jr. Can I meet him?”
The three of us met at Braddock’s house and Braddock and Shelton hit it off immediately. Braddock agreed to produce Shelton, and Braddock persuaded his publishing company, Sony/ATV Music, to pay for the session. That’s a big deal, to get a producer and publisher to put time and money into a session. But the hard part is not cutting the session — it’s getting a record company to love the session and sign the artist.
Armed with the fresh recording, Braddock hit the pavement. One label at a time. Fortunately, in 1998, there were still a lot of record labels left in Nashville.
“I took Blake’s CD all over town,” says Braddock. “RCA showed some interest, but they passed. Arista Records showed enough interest to request a showcase, and we gave it to them, then they passed. I was running out of record labels. The last label I went to was Giant Records, an affiliate of Warner Bros. Doug Johnson listened hard. And he said yes.”
Now life got tougher. Braddock produced an album by Shelton. Virtually everybody at the label loved it. Braddock, Shelton and a whole lot of other people waited for the album to be released. And they waited. People wondered why they waited.
Then Debbie Zavitson, a stalwart of Giant Records’ A&R department, received a CD from publisher Jana Talbot of a special song called “Austin,” written by David Kent and Kirsti Manna. Braddock, Shelton and a handful of great session players went to Sound Stage recording studio on Music Circle South and cut “Austin” and two other songs. Braddock recalls that the label had picked another song for the first single, but he had sent copies of the session to several friends and they felt that “Austin” was the hit. He took this new information from “the people,” and, he says, convinced the label to go with “Austin” instead. Then they waited, and while they waited, rumors circulated that Giant Records might soon be closing down.
“It took Giant three years to put out Blake’s record,” says Braddock, his brow furrowed in puzzlement over the memory. “And it never would have gotten out at all, if it hadn’t been for Fritz Kuhlman!”
Braddock would later refer to Kuhlman as “the promotion man who committed mutiny.” Kuhlman had heard the rumors about Giant, and while he was not a powerful executive at the label, he did have the ability to send out copies of “Austin” to country radio stations all over the country. And that’s just what he did, because he believed in “Austin.”
Stations began to play “Austin,” but Giant closed its doors anyway. By this time it didn’t matter. “Austin” was hot with or without a label. Giant’s parent company, Warner Bros., picked up the record and ran with it, and thanks to Kuhlman, “Austin” became a multi-week No. 1 country smash.
Country music had a brand new star. Over the next two decades, Shelton would pump out hit after hit, and become a national TV icon on the worldwide hit show “The Voice,” as well as a member of the venerable Grand Ole Opry. I can’t help but think of the many heroes it took to make it happen for Blake Shelton.
Of course there’s Shelton, with all that talent, heart and personality. Then there’s Bobby Braddock, one of Nashville’s greatest songwriters, listening to hundreds of other people’s songs in search of that special one for Shelton. And Braddock in the studio, hour after hour, with some of the world’s best studio musicians, background singers and studio engineers, pursuing the perfect record. Then cruising from label to label, determined to find a yes among all the inevitable no answers. And then there’s me, playing a cassette over the phone to my friend Braddock, who I thought was a genius in a recording studio.
And gutsy Kuhlman, on his own, mailing out CDs on a wing and a prayer.
Lots of other heroes, too, braving the stiff competition: promoters, publicists, A&R people, bookers, roadies, managers — and nobody outside the business knows their names. It took a lot of skill and experience to make a music industry in those days, and I like to think it still does.
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