#bilke owner name

[hindisink]

What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to the use of software robots or virtual assistants to automate repetitive and rule-based tasks within business processes. RPA technology enables organizations to automate manual tasks, streamline workflows, and improve operational efficiency.

Also Read: बाइक नंबर से मालिक का नाम online

Here are some key aspects and characteristics of Robotic Process Automation:

Task automation: RPA software robots mimic human interactions with digital systems and applications, performing tasks that involve data entry, data manipulation, data extraction, calculations, file management, and more. They can interact with various software systems, including web applications, desktop applications, spreadsheets, databases, and even legacy systems.

Rule-based operations: RPA operates based on predefined rules and instructions. The software robots follow specific guidelines, logic, and decision-making processes to execute tasks accurately and consistently. They can handle structured data and repetitive tasks that follow clear patterns or rules.

User interface interaction: RPA robots interact with the user interfaces of applications and systems, just like humans do. They can click buttons, fill out forms, extract data, copy and paste information, and perform other actions to complete tasks. This ability allows RPA to work with existing systems without requiring major changes or integrations.

Non-invasive integration: RPA does not typically require modifications or changes to underlying systems or applications. It can interact with the user interface layer of existing software systems, making it a flexible and non-disruptive automation solution.

Scalability and flexibility: RPA implementations can be scaled up or down based on business needs. Organizations can deploy multiple software robots to handle a high volume of tasks or redistribute them as needed. RPA can also adapt to process changes and variations, making it suitable for dynamic business environments.

Error reduction and accuracy: RPA robots are designed to perform tasks with high accuracy, minimizing human errors and inconsistencies associated with manual work. They can work 24/7 without fatigue, ensuring consistent performance and improved data quality.

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Robotic Process Automation has a wide range of applications across industries and departments, such as finance, customer service, human resources, supply chain management, and more. It allows organizations to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing up human workers to focus on higher-value activities, improving productivity, and reducing costs.

[parfumieren]

Kouros & Body Kouros (Yves Saint Laurent)

What I'm about to say might cause a platoon of fragrance chauvinists to swallow their tongues. For them, YSL Kouros is the genius loci of an inviolably male precinct, a sacred scent with whom no mere woman may traffic. The idea of me rocking their filthy-dirty stonking wunderfume would be purest anathema-- and yet I'm doing it as we speak, and the words that come most readily to mind are "big ol' cuddlebear".

Cue the falling-upon of swords!

All right, look. I won't emasculate Kouros entirely. This 1981 monolith deserves all the he-manly epithets with which the decades have graced it. It IS raunchy. It IS racy. It's hung like Liam Neeson and has a half-life that rivals vanadium. But everything about it that could be overwhelming (the brisk face-slap of aromatic wormwood, the whiplash sting of civet-soaked leather) is tempered by something remarkably benign (rosy florals, ozonic amber, the scent of Chinese five-spice). Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Like fun. This is no angry deity, but a gentle, downy-cheeked, smiling youth of the sort immortalized in a thousand Tom of Finland illustrations. He knows how much further a soft word will get him than a growl; that macho pose is just the icing on some very, very sweet cake.

So here's to the boy who cleans up nice and plays well with girls. He'll never need to twist my arm. (Hear that, Hugo Boss?)

**********

Now let's talk about who such boys grow up to be... and what they wear. As the child is the father to the man, Kouros set the stage for Body Kouros. An improvement? Let's see.

**********

My first car was a 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle, light blue with one orange door. I named him Henry and loved him like a brother. Who cares if he came without a sun roof? I covered his inside domed ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. Forget the sun; I had an entire galaxy overhead.

How on earth, you rightly ask, will this tie in with YSL Body Kouros? Buckle up and sit tight, passenger. We'll get there when we get there.

From learning to drive stickshift to knowing exactly how high to turn up the heat before one's shins begin to roast, the sense of intimacy one develops with a VW Beetle offers a satisfaction unlike any other in the realm of car ownership. Both my father and my grandfather were "Bug" loyalists; when the latter deeded me his frayed copy of John Muir's 1969 classic How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, I felt as though I had been handed my birthright. From its stained pages, I culled the rudiments of DIY repair-- no despised task, since the boy in me loved to get engine grease all over his hands. I learned how to check my own oil and fluids, strip and reconnect wires, and reset by hand that tiny timing gear that used to cause me to stall coming out of first.

For engine problems I couldn't solve myself, I took Henry to the local VW garage, a dilapidated old structure on a winding back country road. There, the aging hippie mechanics unfailingly called me ma'am even though I was clearly a 22-year-old punk chick in Docs and ripped cargo shorts. Vintage VW mechanics are a unique lot, because they love their subject just as much as their clients do. Where other mechanics might speak condescendingly to a female car owner or even try to bilk her, VW mechanics recognized the engine grease under my fingernails as a sort of fraternity signal. And when they saw my copy of Muir in the back seat, the floodgates opened. They'd stand with me for an hour, speaking honestly and passionately about that quirky little automobile we all adored.

Something about leaving Henry at the garage amidst a yard of other Beetles (red with one blue door, yellow with one purple door, silver with both doors in apple green) made me happy-- as though I was dropping him off for a playdate with his friends. I think it made him happy too, because when I returned to pick him up, he purred. The mechanics would stand outside and wave goodbye as I puttered down the street. In the rearview mirror of hindsight, I still see them clearly: men like my father, like my grandfather; the salt-of-the-earth kind on whom you can "absotively posilutely" rely.

And today -- a bright, cloudless day blessed with cool weather, perfect for a drive -- I'm wearing Body Kouros in their honor.

If you've ever personally been acquainted with an auto mechanic, you know that even when they're off duty and in civilian wear, the faint, discreet odor of engine grease and motor oil hovers over their skin. If you're like me, you find this aroma extremely pleasant-- evoking, as it does, the satisfaction derived from worthwhile labor. To me, Body Kouros says one thing, simply and cleanly: job well done.

It starts off simultaneously tart and soapy, shimmering with a bright overlay of something close to gasoline fumes. (If this doesn't appeal to you, don't worry-- it evaporates quick enough, though not so quickly that it evades the notice of female gearheads.) The clean soapy quality is soon joined by a pleasantly dirty licorice-cedar accord, as if our dream mechanic came home reeking of an honest day's work and is now towelling off after a quick shower. Hints of Lava Pumice Soap and shaving cream still cling to his skin, mingling with his own natural musk and creating the air of a healthy masculine specimen.

As the drydown approaches, a note of mace finally begins to assert itself. Mace and its sibling spice nutmeg share many olfactory traits, but temperature is not one of them. Where nutmeg lends a certain coolness to a fragrance, mace offers a sense of low, steady heat like a lit charcoal pastille-- at first glimmering like an ember in the background, then catching on and increasing by degrees to a fiery red glow. (Perhaps our mechanic is a little sweaty, even after his shower; he's heading out to the shady backyard to relax in the hammock with an ice-cold bottle of beer.)

This mace note is one that I admire immensely. It's everything I love about nutmeg, only more so-- amped up and ramped up, holding firm with no shimmy at fourth gear. It radiates animal contentment and self-confidence, and at the same time, harmonizes with that motor-oil note to keep it nicely in check.

Body Kouros brings new meaning to the word "serviceable". Free of pretensions and frills, it conceals no secret layers. Yet it projects a dependability and steadiness of character that are far more valuable than so-called elegance. Above all, Body Kouros is classless in the best sense of the word-- egalitarian, unconstrained by matters of status or appearance. Wear it as a second skin to feel supremely at home in your own.

Scent Elements: Aldehydes, artemisia, coriander, clary sage, cinnamon, bergamot, carnation, iris, jasmine, geranium, patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, honey, leather, tonka, labdanum, ambergris, musk, civet, vanilla (Kouros); incense, eucalyptus, cedarwood, mace, camphorwood, benzoin (Body Kouros)

[infinitemonkeytheory]

The 2022 Shkreli Awards have been released! Each year, the Lown Institute passes out awards as a way of reporting on dysfunction in the US health care system. Dysfunction in healthcare is one of our foundational pillars here at Healthcare Triage, and these awards highlight some of the worst examples.

2022 Shkreli Awards

VIDEO: The 2022 Shkreli Awards, featuring guest hosts Dr. Uché Blackstock, CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and Amy Holden Jones, Executive Producer and Creator of Thre Resident.

JANUARY 10, 2023 — Welcome to the 6th annual Shkreli Awards, the Lown Institute’s top ten list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare, named for the infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

Nominees for the Shkreli Awards are compiled by Lown Institute staff with input from readers of Lown Weekly. An esteemed panel of patient activists, clinicians, health policy experts, and journalists help determine the winners. (press release | previous winners)

#10

Dentist bags a bundle by breaking patients’ teeth

How did Wisconsin dentist Scott Charmoli go from fixing 434 crowns a year to more than 1,000? By purposely breaking patients’ teeth, according to federal prosecutors. Charmoli allegedly drilled into patients’ teeth unnecessarily and submitted photos of the damage to insurance companies to justify expensive procedures. This move elevated his salary by $1.1 million, according to the Washington Post. The scheme was uncovered when Charmoli sold his practice in 2019 and the new owners reviewed his files, noting the absurdly high rates of crown procedures. Charmoli was convicted of healthcare fraud and sentenced to 54 months imprisonment and over $1 million in fines.

SOURCE: Jonathan Edwards, The Washington Post; U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Wisconsin

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Talk about supplier-induced demand! Oy, pass the laughing gas.

#9

“Dangerous” doctor deemed a star by leadership despite disgraceful malpractice record

Image caption: A February 1999 advertisement for CMC’s New England Heart Institute in the Boston Globe, featuring Baribeau. Source: The Boston Globe

Leaders of Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, NH knew their renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. Yvon Baribeau had one of the worst malpractice records in the country. Yet they continued to support Baribeau, featuring him in hospital advertisements and allowing him to keep operating over the objections of other CMC doctors, the Boston Globe reported. Examples of Baribeau’s alleged harmful behavior include surgical errors that led one patient to require blood transfusions of nearly five times her blood volume, and keeping another patient whose chest cavity had turned “black and necrotic” on life support as a possible ploy to protect his surgical 30-day survival rate.

Throughout Baribeau’s career, he racked up 21 medical malpractice settlements, including 14 related to patient deaths. In a statement provided by his lawyer to the Globe, Baribeau said, “I performed over 10,000 procedures at CMC, always with patient safety as my first priority.”

SOURCE: Rebecca Ostriker, Deirdre Fernandes, Liz Kowalczyk, Jonathan Saltzman, and Patricia Wen, The Boston Globe

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

The protection of doctors who are known to be dangerous is a national scourge that must be exposed and ended.

When a hospital administration puts “heads in beds” ahead of patient safety, it should be called to account—and not just by the media.

#8

Medical labs bilk Medicare for $300 million in elaborate bribery scheme

Three laboratories in North Texas allegedly found a way to score $300 million in extra Medicare reimbursements, the Dallas Morning News reported. In collaboration with two marketing firms, they bribed physicians to order unnecessary drug tests and blood work, according to a federal indictment. Some physicians got as much as $400,000 in kickbacks. In one case, even a physician’s spouse got an illegal bonus. The founders of all three labs pleaded guilty to the fraud in April 2022.

SOURCE: Aria Jones, The Dallas Morning News

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Unnecessary tests and procedures are bankrupting us and harming patients. There is nowhere near enough coverage of this.

Unnecessary “care” is a huge part of the $1 trillion (that’s trillion-with-a-T) the US wastes in healthcare.

#7

Patients qualified for financial assistance; hospital sends them to debt collection instead

Nonprofit hospitals are required to provide financial assistance to low-income patients. Providence health system, however, did the opposite in many cases. Rather than ensuring that low-income patients received the financial assistance they were due, Providence hounded them to pay and sent debt collectors after them when they didn’t, according to a New York Times investigation. These actions were part of an official campaign to boost revenue called “Rev-Up” developed with help from corporate consultant McKinsey. The “Rev-Up” campaign directed employees to tell patients about financial assistance only as a last resort. The result: more than 55,000 patients were pursued by debt collectors when they should have been given a discount.

In response, a Providence spokesperson told the Times that they stopped sending Medicaid patients to debt collection, and said that they will issue refunds to about 760 patients eligible for assistance who were previously charged for their medical care.

*Note: The Lown Institute provided data to the New York Times about Providence Health System’s tax exemption for this piece.

SOURCE: Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, New York Times

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Large consulting companies like McKinsey are hospitals’ accomplices in revenue maximization.

Catholic hospitals have come a long way since the nuns of the Sisters of Providence provided services to the poor.

#6

When smokers get sick, this tobacco company has the treatment

Philip Morris has spent 175 years selling products that cause heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and other serious health problems. Now the tobacco giant is poised to make more money treating the very conditions it helped create by acquiring companies that develop inhaled therapeutics, according to a STAT News report.

Experts told STAT News they are concerned that Philip Morris could potentially use research on inhalation developed by these newly acquired companies to hook even more people on their products. But don’t worry—a representative from Philip Morris stated they have no plans to do so.

SOURCE: Olivia Goldhill, STAT News

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

When your corporation creates both the problem and the solution to it, you clearly care about one thing: finding and making profits by any means possible.

In the 1980s, the hospital I worked in still used machinery made and branded by Philip Morris to treat lung-cancer patients. This is NOT a novel abuse— it must be stopped.

#5

Pharma giant exploits bankruptcy loophole to avoid legal responsibility for cancer-causing product

Johnson & Johnson had known for decades that asbestos, a deadly carcinogen, could be contaminating their talc baby powder products but continued selling them anyway. Now J&J faces lawsuits from 40,000 cancer patients, many of them Black women, as J&J allegedly marketed its talc-based products specifically to this population. To avoid the lawsuits, J&J created a subsidiary company with all of the baby powder-related liabilities and then declared this shell company bankrupt, NPR reported. Despite this “bankruptcy,” J&J ranked in the top 50 of Fortune’s largest companies last year. The fate of J&J and the lawsuits await appeals. According to the J&J corporate attorney, the bankruptcy will benefit victims by producing a faster settlement.

SOURCE: Brian Mann, NPR; Casey Cep, The New Yorker

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Especially egregious because of delay in acknowledgement at the expense of patients

Big Pharma has become an evil conspiracy against public health.

#4

Hospice CEO allegedly tells employees to hasten patient death to avoid caps on government reimbursements

Bradley Harris, the CEO of Novus Hospice in Frisco, Texas, and a dozen other Novus employees were sentenced to a combined 84 years in prison for committing healthcare fraud, according to D Magazine. The US Department of Justice reported that Novus staff were provided with pre-signed prescription pads and directed to dispense powerful medications like morphine and hydrocodone to patients, without guidance or oversight from physicians.

According to an earlier FBI investigation reported by NBC Dallas, Harris allegedly told employees to dose patients with more than the maximum allowed amount of painkillers to hasten patient death, with the goal of reducing the average patient stay to avoid caps on government reimbursement. The FBI investigation revealed that a Novus employee was allegedly sent a text message by Harris, “You need to make this patient go bye-bye.” It is unclear whether any patients were actually given overdoses or died from Harris’ instructions.

SOURCES: Will Maddox, D Magazine; US Department of Justice

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

This behavior is abhorrent, cold and heartless

Individual and corporate greed, meet well intentioned yet perverse financial incentives.

#3

System keeps community hospital on life support to cash in on drug discount program meant to serve the poor

Image caption: Richmond Community Hospital.

The 340B drug program provides safety net hospitals with deep discounts on medications to ensure access to care for low-income patients. Richmond Community Hospital in Virginia, owned by Bon Secours Health System, has profited heavily off of this program, yet they don’t have an intensive care unit, maternity ward, or even a consistently-working MRI machine. That’s because Bon Secours has been diverting the profits from Richmond Community to its other hospitals in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, according to a New York Times investigation. “Bon Secours was basically laundering money through this poor hospital to its wealthy outposts,” said a former Richmond ER doctor.

A spokeswoman for Bon Secours Mercy Health told the Times the hospital system spent $10 million on improvements to Richmond Community Hospital over the past decade. But that doesn’t seem like much considering the $108 million expansion at neighboring St. Francis Hospital, a nearby Bon Secours hospital.

*Note: The Lown Institute provided data to the New York Times about Providence Health System’s tax exemption for this piece.

SOURCE: Katie Thomas and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, The New York Times

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Skimming profits from the poor is the sleaziest kind of theft.

Care facilities are thin on the ground in low-income areas nationally, which makes this story even more painful.

#2

Private equity-backed firm runs rural hospitals into ground, leaves patients in unsafe conditions and employees without health insurance

When Noble Health, a private equity-backed startup, bought two rural hospitals in Missouri, residents hoped this might offer a lifeline to the struggling institutions. Instead, hospital employees faced shortages in supplies and drugs, leading to unsafe conditions for patients, Kaiser Health News reported. Noble Health also stopped paying for employees’ health insurance despite deducting money out of their paychecks that was supposed to be for premiums. Some staff members now face hundreds of thousands in medical bills because they did not know they were uninsured, according to Kaiser Health News. Noble Health closed the hospitals two years later, after taking $20 million in federal COVID relief funds. The company is currently under federal investigation.

SOURCE: Sarah Jane Tribble, Kaiser Health News

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

Private equity too often puts profits over patients, and is using the proceeds to swallow up the US healthcare system.

Private equity corporations are one of the biggest threats to healthcare quality and justice.

#1

Insurers systematically overbill Medicare Advantage, siphoning billions of taxpayer money

The majority of large Medicare Advantage insurers have been accused of fraud or overbilling by the US government, a New York Times investigation finds. Overpayments to Medicare Advantage insurers were estimated to cost taxpayers as much as $25 billion in 2020. Because the Medicare Advantage program pays private insurers a set amount per patient based on their risk, there is an incentive for insurers to “mine” patients for diagnoses—for example, adding diagnoses for old or resolved conditions.

While Mark Hamelburg, an executive at AHIP, an industry trade group, said to the Times that some coding differences were due to doctors “look[ing] at the same medical record in different ways,” some of the diagnoses were clearly inaccurate. In one case, insurer Independent Health added a diagnosis for prostate cancer to a woman’s record, because “when a married couple has any disease, both were assigned to that disease,” Bloomberg reported.

Among the top 10 Medicare Advantage providers by market share, the following have been accused of fraud or overbilling by the US government or Inspector General and have ongoing lawsuits as of 2022, according to the Times: UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health, Elevance Health, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Cigna, and Highmark. These insurers have disputed the claims.

SOURCE: Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times; John Tozzi, Bloomberg

JUDGES’ COMMENTS:

The overbilling of Medicare Advantage has become nothing but a big game that private insurers play. There are no rules, no morals, no sense of right or wrong.

The “advantage” in Medicare Advantage plans seems to go to the insurers who exploited Medicare for billions.

Weekly news for people who want a radically better health system

Judges for Shkreli Awards

Carole Allen, MD, MBA, FAAP

Immediate Past President

Massachusetts Medical Society (follow)

Special advisor to the president of the Lown Institute and lecturer at the George Washington University School of Public Health (follow)

Director of the Centre for Health Policy at University of Melbourne and senior fellow at the Lown Institute (follow)

Professor and chair emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine (follow)

Chair of the Lown Institute board of directors, former CEO of Denver Health

Assistant professor, NYU School of Medicine (follow)

Associate professor at Yale School of Public Health (follow)

Creator and showrunner,

“The Resident” (follow)

President of Physicians for a National Health Program and retired internist at Cook County Hospital (follow)

President of the Minority Health Institute, Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCLA School of Medicine, author of Blacks in Medicine (follow)

[popsunner]

The (Incomplete) List of Queer Movies With Actual Happy Endings

Disclaimer- I am a white lesbian, so while I have seen and enjoyed all of these movies, I do not have capital knowledge on what is and isn’t problematic or inaccurate

Gods Own Country (mlm)

A young farmer numbs his frustrations with drinking and casual sex until a Romanian migrant worker sets him on a new path.

Laurence Anyways (trans mtf, wlw)

In the '90s, Laurence tells his girlfriend, Fred, that he wants to become a woman; they confront the prejudices of their friends, ignore the council of their families and brave the phobias of the society they offend.

Were The World Mine (mlm)

A gay teen (Tanner Cohen) uses a love potion to turn close-minded townspeople into homosexuals, including the handsome jock with whom he is secretly in love.

The Birdcage (mlm)

In this remake of the classic French farce "La Cage aux Folles," engaged couple Val Goldman (Dan Futterman) and Barbara Keeley (Calista Flockhart) shakily introduce their future in-laws. Val's father, Armand (Robin Williams), a gay Miami drag club owner, pretends to be straight and attempts to hide his relationship with Albert (Nathan Lane), his life partner and the club's flamboyant star attraction, so as to please Barbara's father, controversial Republican Sen. Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman).

Kiss Me (wlw)

A young woman engaged to be married finds herself in an affair with her soon-to-be stepmother's lesbian daughter.

Handsome Devil (mlm)

Two opposites, a loner and the top athlete become friends at a rugby-obsessed boarding school, and the authorities test their friendship.

Pride (mixed)

Realising that they share common foes in Margaret Thatcher, the police and the conservative press, London-based gay and lesbian activists lend their support to striking miners in 1984 Wales.

Boy Meets Girl (trans mtf)

Ricky, a 21-year-old transgender young woman living in Virginia, dreams of becoming a designer in New York.

Moonlight (mlm, poc)

A look at three defining chapters in the life of Chiron, a young black man growing up in Miami. His epic journey to manhood is guided by the kindness, support and love of the community that helps raise him.

The Handmaiden (wlw, poc)

With help from an orphaned pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), a Korean con man (Ha Jung-woo) devises an elaborate plot to seduce and bilk a Japanese woman (Kim Min-hee) out of her inheritance.

North Sea Texas (mlm)

A teenager searching for love finds it in the boy next door.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (poc)

Three drag queens travel cross-country until their car breaks down, leaving them stranded in a small town.

Saving Face (wlw, poc)

Wil (Michelle Krusiec) is a lesbian, but she not dare tell her widowed mother, Hwei-lan (Joan Chen), or her very traditional grandparents. She's shocked, however, to find out she's not the only one in her family with romantic secrets when she learns that her 48-year-old mother is pregnant. Unwilling to reveal who the father is, Hwei-lan is kicked out of her parents' home and must move in with Wil, which puts a strain on Wil's budding relationship with openly gay Vivian (Lynn Chen).

4th Man Out (mlm)

After celebrating his 24th birthday, a mechanic (Evan Todd) decides to tell his three buddies (Parker Young, Chord Overstreet) that he is gay.

The Danish Girl (trans mtf, wlw)

With support from his loving wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) prepares to undergo one of the first sex-change operations.

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (trans mtf)

When drag queen Anthony (Hugo Weaving) agrees to take his act on the road, he invites fellow cross-dresser Adam (Guy Pearce) and transsexual Bernadette (Terence Stamp) to come along. In their colorful bus, named Priscilla, the three performers travel across the Australian desert performing for enthusiastic crowds and homophobic locals. But when the other two performers learn the truth about why Anthony took the job, it threatens their act and their friendship.

Romeos (trans ftm, mlm)

Lucas, a transgendered woman becoming a man, is stuck in a female residential hall.

52 Tuesdays (trans ftm)

A teenage girl's road to adulthood and independence is accelerated when her mum says he wants to become a man, and limits their time together to Tuesday afternoons.

Esteros (mlm, poc)

Matias and Jeronimo's friendship takes a new turn during the holiday before starting high school, when they both experience their sexual awakening.

The Half of It (wlw, poc)

A shy, introverted student helps the school jock woo a girl whom, secretly, they both want.

Pariah (wlw, poc)

Teenage Alike (Adepero Oduye) lives in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood with her parents (Charles Parnell, Kim Wayans) and younger sister (Sahra Mellesse). A lesbian, Alike quietly embraces her identity and is looking for her first lover, but she wonders how much she can truly confide in her family, especially with her parents' marriage already strained. When Alike's mother presses her to befriend a colleague's daughter (Aasha Davis), Alike finds the gal to be a pleasant companion.

Big Eden (mlm)

Henry Hart (Arye Gross) is a young gay artist living in New York City. When his grandfather has a stroke, Henry puts his career on hold and returns home to the small town of Big Eden, Montana, to care for him. While there, Henry hopes to strike up a romance with Dean Stewart (Tim DeKay), his high-school best friend for whom he still has feelings. But he's surprised when he finds that Pike (Eric Schweig), a quiet Native American who owns the local general store, may have a crush on him.

[frangelic999]

Villains of All Nations

     I'm reading a really interesting book about pirates, Villains of All Nations, by Marcus Rediker, and I just want to share some excerpts because it's extremely good. It explains that the terror of piracy was born from a different kind of terror, "practiced by … ministers, royal officials, wealthy men; in short, rulers – as they sought to eliminate piracy as a crime against mercantile property … in truth, the keepers of the state in this era were themselves terrorists of a sort, decades before the word terrorist would acquire its modern meaning … they have become, over the years, cultural heroes, even founding fathers of a sort. Theirs was a terror of the strong against the weak." Pirates, in response, "consciously used terror to accomplish their aims … This they did in the name of a different social order … In truth, pirates were terrorists of a sort. And yet we do not think of them in this way. They have become, over the years, cultural heroes, perhaps antiheroes, and at the very least romantic and powerful figures in an American and increasingly global popular culture. Theirs was a terror of the weak against the strong. It formed one essential part of a dialectic of terror, which was summarized in the decision of the authorities to raise the Jolly Roger above the gallows when hanging pirates: one terror trumped the other." Long post about pirates ahead. Henceforth all bolded text is mine, the rest is from the book:

On the hanging of the pirate William Fly in 1726: Fly, however, did not ask for forgiveness, did not praise the authorities, and did not affirm the values of Christianity, as he was supposed to do, but he did issue a warning … he proclaimed his final, fondest wish: that "all Masters of Vessels might take Warning by the Fate of the Captain (meaning Captain Green) the he had murder'd, and to pay Sailors their Wages when due, and to treat them better; saying, that their Barbarity to them made so many turn Pyrates." Fly thus used his last breath to protest the conditions of work at sea, what he called "Bad Usage." He would be launched into eternity with the brash threat of mutiny on his lips.

 As we will see, poor seamen who turned pirate dramatized concerns of class. Formerly enslaved Africans or African Americans who turned pirate posed questions of race. Women who turned pirate called attention to the conventions of gender. And all people who turned pirate and sailed under "their own dark flag," the Jolly Roger, enacted a highly political play about the nation … When pirates stitched together the black flag, the antinational symbol of a gang of proletarian outlaws, they "declared war against the world."

 The multiethnic freebooters of 1716-26 numbered around four thousand over the decade. They wreaked havoc in the Atlantic system by capturing hundreds of merchant ships, many of which they burned or sank, and all  of which they plundered of valuable cargo. They disrupted trade in strategic zones of capital accumulation – the West Indies, North America, and West Africa – at a time when the recently stabilized and expanding Atlantic economy was the source of enormous profits and renewed imperial power. Usually sailors joined pirate ships after working on merchant and naval ships, where they suffered cramped quarters, poor victuals, brutal discipline, low wages, devastating diseases, disabling accidents, and premature death. Piracy, as we will see, offered the prospect of plunder and "ready money," abundant food and drink, the election of officers, the equal distribution of resources, care for the injured, and joyous camaraderie, all as expressions of an ethic of justice … Piracy may have held out hope for a good life, but it was not to be a long one.

 Many pirates, like Fly ... used the occasion for one last act of subversion. An endless train of pirates walked defiantly to the gallows and taunted the higher powers when they got there. Facing the steps and the rope in the Bahamas in 1718, pirate Thomas Morris expressed a simple wish: to have been "a greater plague to these islands." John Gow, who was a very strong man, broke the gallows rope at his hanging in 1726. He went to "ascend the ladder a second time, which he did with very little concern, dying with the same brutal ferocity which animated all his actions while alive."

 In 1720, when eight members of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts were captured and tried in Virginia, they were rowdy and outrageous ...They went to their deaths bidding defiance to mercy … "When they came to the Place of Execution one of them called for a bottle of wine, and taking a glass of it, he drank Damnation to the Governour and Confusion to the Colony, which the rest pledged."

 The drama played out again and again. When the fifty-two members of Roberts's crew were hanged at Cape Coast Castle in 1722 before a concourse of Europeans and Africans, a group of pirates explained: "They were poor rogues, and so must be hanged while others, no less guilty in another way, escaped." They referred to the wealthy rogues who bilked sailors of their rightful wages and proper food and thereby turned many of them toward piracy.

 When Bartholomew Roberts and his men learned that the governor and council of Nevis had executed some pirates in 1720, they were so outraged that they sailed into Basseterre's harbor, set several vessels on fire, and offered a big bounty to anyone who would deliver the responsible officials to their clutches so that justice could be served … They made good on such bluster when they happened to take a French vessel carrying the governor of Martinique, who had also hanged some members of "the brotherhood." Roberts took revenge by hanging the poor governor from his own yardarm. Thus did the pirates practice terror against the state terrorists. It was a war of nerves – one hanging for another – and constituted a cycle of violence.

On the use of terror by pirates:

Pirates used terror for several reasons: to avoid fighting; to force disclosure of information about where booty was hidden; and to punish ship captains. The first point to be emphasized is that pirates did not want to fight, no matter how bloodthirsty their image was in their own day and in ours. As Stanley Richards has written, "It was their ambition to acquire plunder and live to enjoy the pleasures that it brought them. A battle might deprive them of that ease of life. Hence on the chance occasion when they had to go into action against another ship, it was looked upon by them as almost a repulsive necessity. They were after booty, not blood." … Harsh treatment of those who resist, announced the Boston News-Letter in June 1718, "so intimidates the sailors that they refuse to fight when the pirates attack them." After all, the pirates would ask: why are you risking your life to protect the property of merchants and ship captains who treat you so poorly? … In this practice of violence, pirates were no different from naval or privateering ships, who practiced the same methods. Indeed, a portion of pirate terror was the standard issue of war making, which pirates undertook without the approval of any nation-state … Pirates also practiced violence against the prize ship's cargo, destroying massive amounts of property in the most furious and wanton ways … They descended into the holds of ships like "a Parcel of Furies," slashing boxes and bales of goods with their cutlasses, throwing valuable goods overboard, and laughing uproariously as they did so. They also destroyed a large number of ships … They practiced indirect terror against the owners of mercantile property.

On the pirate social order:

We will see that the early-eighteenth-century pirate ship was a world turned upside down, made so by the articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates' alternative social order. Pirates "distributed justice," elected their officers, divided their loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, and multinational social order. They demonstrated quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.

 For, as it happened, there were not merely two kinds of terror, the terror of the gallows and the terror of the Jolly Roger, but three. To understand William Fly and his dispute with the ministers of Boston, to understand the gallows drama repeated in one Atlantic port after another, and, most important, to understand the very explosion of piracy in the eighteenth century, we must attend to what Fly said of “Bad Usage,” of how his captain and mate used and abused him and his brother tars, treating them “barbarously,” as if they were “dogs.” He was talking about the violent disciplinary regime of the eighteenth-century deep-sea sailing ship, the ordinary and pervasive violence of labor discipline as practiced by the ship captain as he moved the commodities that were the lifeblood of the capitalist world economy. Even though there is no surviving evidence to show exactly what Captain Green did to Fly and the other sailors aboard the Elizabeth to produce the rage, the mutiny, the murder, and the decision to turn pirate, it is not hard to imagine. The High Court of Admiralty records for this period are replete with bloody accounts of lashings, tortures, and killings. Fly was talking about the ship captain as terrorist.

 On the necessity of labor for imperial designs:

The sailor knew that thousands of people were moving and laboring around the Atlantic, some willingly, some unwillingly, with many of them, like himself, subjected to violence. By 1716 a worldwide process of expropriation, called primitive accumulation, had already torn millions of people from their ancestral lands in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. … The enclosure movement and other mechanisms of dispossession had set thousands in motion on the roads and ways of England in particular and Europe in general. Masses of people flocked to the cities, where they found work, frequently as waged laborers, in manufacturing and especially in armies and navies, as war required vast amounts of labor. Hundreds of thousands more would embark for colonial plantations as laborers, whether free or unfree. Expropriation had “freed” millions of workers for redeployment to the far-flung edges of empire, often as indentured servants or slaves, on plantations that would produce what may have been the largest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen. It was said that sugar, the leading and most lucrative Atlantic commodity of the eighteenth century, was made with blood. By 1716 big planters drove armies of servants and slaves as they expanded their power from their own lands to colonial and finally national legislatures. Atlantic empires mobilized labor power on a new and unprecedented scale, largely through the strategic use of violence—the violence of land seizure, of expropriating agrarian workers, of the Middle Passage, of exploitation through labor discipline, and of punishment (often in the form of death) against those who dared to resist the colonial order of things. By all accounts, by 1713 the Atlantic economy had reached a new stage of maturity, stability, and profitability. The growing riches of the few depended on the growing misery of the many.

On the shift in attitude toward pirates:

The sailor knew that the rulers of the Atlantic empires had taken a harsh new view of pirates as the enemies of imperial designs rather than as allies who might help to accomplish them. For much of the seventeenth century, pirates had been indirectly employed by the Netherlands, France, and England to harass Portugal and especially Spain in the New World, as well as to capture a portion of their glittering wealth. Operating largely from Caribbean islands, especially Jamaica, the sea rovers sacked Spanish American ports such as Veracruz and Panama City, repeatedly trashing Catholic churches and in many instances toting back to their ships as much silver plate as they could carry. But by the 1680s ruling-class attitudes had changed. Jamaica’s bigwigs could make more money, more predictable money, by cultivating sugar, and members of Parliament in England sought a more stable and reliable system of international trade. Pirates, who disrupted both projects, began to be hanged in significant numbers in the 1690s. According to historian Max Savelle, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 ���was thought of, both in Europe and in America, as a settlement that would establish a lasting peace in America, based on the principle of the balance of colonial power.” Britain in particular hoped so because its traders, at home and in the colonies (especially Jamaica), had won the Asiento, an agreement with the Spanish government that allowed them officially to import 4,800 slaves per year and to smuggle a huge number more. The “Returns of the Assiento and private Slave-Trade” proved a more dependable way to exploit Spanish wealth. Pirates now stood squarely in the way of the hoped-for stability and profits.

 On sailors' methods of resistance:

The sailor who embraced the Jolly Roger after 1716 came from a potent experience of life and labor in a wooden world. The sailor’s workplace, the deep-sea sailing ship, was something of a factory in those days, a place where “hands”—those who owned no property and who therefore sold their labor for a money wage—cooperated to make the machine go. Sailing these small, brittle wooden vessels over the forbidding oceans of the globe, the seaman took part in a profoundly collective work experience, one that required carefully synchronized cooperation with other maritime workers for the sake of survival. Facing a ship captain of almost unlimited disciplinary power and an ever readiness to use the cat-o’-nine-tails, the sailor developed an array of resistances against such concentrated authority that featured desertion, work stoppages, mutinies, and strikes. Indeed, the sailor would invent the strike during a wage dispute in London in 1768 when he and his mates went from ship to ship, striking—lowering—the sails in an effort to make merchants grant their demands. Facing such natural and man-made dangers, which included a chronic scarcity of food and drink and a galling system of hierarchy and privilege, the sailor learned the importance of equality: his painfully acquired experience told him that a fair distribution of risks would improve everyone’s chances for survival. Separated from loved ones and the rest of society for extended periods, the sailor developed a distinctive work culture with its own language, songs, rituals, and sense of brotherhood. Its core values were collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, all of which were summarized in the sentence frequently uttered by rebellious sailors: “they were one & all resolved to stand by one another.” All of these cultural traits flowed from the work experience, and all would influence both the decision to turn pirate and how pirates would conduct themselves thereafter, as we will see in subsequent chapters.

[karandeepseojob]

What to know before buying cryptocurrency in 2021

A cryptocurrency (or “crypto”) may be a digital currency which will be wont to buy goods and services, but uses a web ledger with strong cryptography to secure online transactions. Much of the interest in these unregulated currencies is to trade for profit, with speculators sometimes driving prices skyward.

Here are seven things to ask about cryptocurrency, and what to observe out for.

What's cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency may be a sort of payment which will be exchanged online for goods and services. Many companies have issued their own currencies, often called tokens, and these are often traded specifically for the great or service that the corporation provides. consider them as you'd arcade tokens or casino chips. You’ll got to exchange real currency for the cryptocurrency to access the great or service.

Cryptocurrencies work employing a technology called blockchain. Blockchain may be a decentralized technology spread across many computers that manages and records transactions. a part of the appeal of this technology is its security.

1. How do I buy cryptocurrency?

While some cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, are available for purchase with U.S. dollars, others require that you simply pay with bitcoins or another cryptocurrency.

To buy cryptocurrencies, you’ll need a “wallet,” a web app which will hold your currency. Generally, you create an account on an exchange, then you'll transfer real money to shop for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Here's more on the way to invest in Bitcoin.

Coinbase is one popular cryptocurrency trading exchange where you'll create both a wallet and buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Also, a growing number of online brokers offer cryptocurrencies, like eToro, Tradestation, and Sofi Active Investing. Robinhood offers free cryptocurrency trades (Robinhood Crypto is out there in most, but not all, U.S. states).

2. Are cryptocurrencies legal?

There’s no doubt that they’re legal within the US , though China has essentially banned their use, and ultimately whether they’re legal depends on each individual country. Also, make certain to think about the way to protect yourself from fraudsters who see cryptocurrencies as a chance to bilk investors. As always, buyer beware.

Read more:-  Best Cryptocurrencies You Can Gift Your Loved Ones

3. How do I protect myself?

If you’re looking to shop for a cryptocurrency in an ICO, read the fine print within the company’s prospectus for this information:

Who owns the company? An identifiable and well-known owner may be a positive sign.

Are there other major investors who are investing in it? It’s an honest sign if other well-known investors need a piece of the currency.

Will you own a stake within the company or simply currency or tokens? This distinction is vital . Owning a stake means you get to participate in its earnings (you’re an owner) while buying tokens simply means you're entitled to use them, like chips during a casino.

Is the currency already developed, or is that the company looking to boost money to develop it? The further alongside the merchandise , the less risky it's .

It can take tons of labor to comb through a prospectus; the more detail it's , the higher your chances it’s legitimate. But even legitimacy doesn’t mean the currency will succeed. That’s a completely separate question, which requires tons of market savvy.

But beyond those concerns, just having cryptocurrency exposes you to the danger of theft, as hackers attempt to penetrate the pc networks that maintain your assets. One high-profile exchange declared bankruptcy in 2014 after hackers stole many many dollars in bitcoins. Those aren’t typical risks for investing in stocks and funds on major U.S. exchanges.

Should you buy cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is an incredibly speculative and volatile buy. Stock trading of established companies is usually less risky than investing in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

What online brokers offer cryptocurrencies?

Of the web brokerages and cryptocurrency exchanges that NerdWallet reviews, the subsequent current offer cryptocurrencies.

Crypto Wallet Name

Coinbase: Allows to buy and sell more than 30 cryptocurrencies.

eToro: Trade more than 15 cryptocurrencies

Robinhood: Allows 7 cryptocurrencies including BTC and BTC Cash.

SoFi Active Investing: Only 3 cryptocurrencies are available to trade

TradeStation: Offers 5 cryptocurrencies to trade

WeBull: Offers 4 cryptocurrencies to trade

[chiseler]

JOAN BLONDELL: The Honest Con

Every carny is the same: the same hicks milling around in overalls and print dresses, as trusting as cows; the same stalls and banners emblazoned with fat ladies and fire-eaters; the same bored cooch dancers listlessly gyrating their hips; the same pickpockets working the packed, sweaty crowd; the same atmosphere of hucksterism pervading everything as thickly as the smells of grease and popcorn and sawdust and cotton candy. The cacophony of spielers: Step right up! Move in closer, folks. The show is about to begin! Try your luck. Everybody wins a prize. Only a dime, ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar…

Every movie set in a carny opens the same way, with the camera elbowing through the midway, taking in the sights with a knowing eye. Sinner’s Holiday (1930), Joan Blondell’s first feature film, began this way, and so does the masterpiece of her later years, Nightmare Alley (1947). Here the camera glides over the crowd to find Blondell standing in the shadows at the back of her booth, surveying the scene. Her flowing robe, poised stillness and grave expression give her a hieratic air. Her eye is fixed on a handsome young roustabout in his undershirt, but her look is pensive rather than lustful. The wary, contained way she observes the world, and her calm unmannered presence, were with her from the beginning of her career, but here they have aged and deepened and mellowed like spirits.

She’s come a long way from Myrtle, the brassy photographer’s model of Sinner’s Holiday. Now she’s Zeena, a mind-reader, “the miracle woman of the ages” as her barker tells the gullible throng. Zeena’s act is pure hokum (she gathers questions from the audience, pretends to destroy them, and reads cues supplied by a hidden accomplice), presented with good-natured flim-flam that would fool only the most naïve. Off-stage, though, Zeena is a true believer in the Tarot, a woman of much deeper intuition and understanding than her gimcrack act suggests. Here Joan Blondell pulls off the same paradox that defined her greatest early roles in Blonde Crazy (1931) and Blondie Johnson (1932): in all these films she’s a con artist who makes her living off scams of one kind of another, yet who somehow remains fundamentally decent and even honest.

One of the links between pre-Code and film noir is their mutual obsession with dividing the world into chiselers and suckers, the wised-up and the chumps. Pre-Code movies, made at a time of mass disillusionment courtesy of the Depression, reveled in the exploits of con men, sharpies, hustlers, and maestros of ballyhoo. Films like the exhilarating James Cagney vehicle Hard to Handle (1933) depict a country where everyone is either on the make or being taken. “The public is like a cow, bellowing, bellowing to be milked,” Cagney declares, echoing his speech to Blondell in Blonde Crazy about the “age of chiselry” in which “everyone has larceny in his heart.” In the first scene of Nightmare Alley, Blondell’s Zeena listens to Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as he explains why he loves the carny racket: how looking at the rubes out there gives him a feeling of superiority, a sense of being in the know, being on the inside while they’re on the outside.

She’s heard it all before. At 41, Blondell is seasoned and wise, yet still vulnerable and open-hearted—just like she was at 25. What she brought to all these movies about rackets, about schemers and saps, was the ability to put over a con and let us enjoy her triumph, yet also to express, without sanctimony, the melancholy weight of too much knowledge. As she listens to Power’s speech, all this is in her eyes and in her silence. The oily Stan is an homme fatale who shamelessly uses his wiles on the older woman, making love to her because he wants her to reveal the secret of a verbal code she and her former partner used in a successful vaudeville act. Blondell’s role could easily have been a humiliating one—as soon as Stan gets what he wants from Zeena, he cheats on her with the pretty, innocent young Molly (Colleen Gray)—but Blondell makes Zeena’s susceptibility appealing rather than pathetic. When Stan tells her she’s a “real woman” (praising her generosity to her washed-up, alcoholic partner Pete), it’s with his usual slick insincerity, but she can turn this smarmy compliment into simple truth. Zeena blames herself for her Pete’s drinking, since he hit the bottle after she cheated on him. It was Pete who said she had a heart like an artichoke, “with a leaf for everybody.” She ruefully quotes this to Stan as they drive through the night with Pete sleeping drunkenly in the back of the truck.

Wanting to pick Pete’s brains about his past success, Stan plies him with liquor, but what he learns is that even he can be suckered by a spiel. Gazing into the bottle of moonshine as though it were a crystal ball, Pete summons a vision of a barefoot boy running through rolling green hills, a dog at his side. “Yes, his name was Gyp!” Stan eagerly confirms, at which Pete reveals that it’s a stock reading that fits anyone. “Every boy has a dog!” he laughs. Much later, when Stan has followed in Pete’s alcoholic footsteps, he pulls the same trick on his fellow bums in a hobo jungle. The mind-reading racket depends on the fact that people’s memories and feelings are all pretty much the same, and nothing is more universal than the belief that one is unique.

In pre-Code, con games exploit the simplest appetites—chiefly greed—and their elaborate mechanisms rely on no profound psychology. In Nightmare Alley, Stan plays with more volatile elements: with people’s insecurities, guilt, regrets, memories, and desires. The film lays bare the irony of the mind-reading scam, in which the appearance of uncanny sympathetic understanding, a luminous glimpse into the human heart, is just a ruse to bilk money out of suckers. Stan eventually teams up with a cruel, manipulative psychiatrist, who practices the same sort of racket under the cover of science. In the book by William Lindsay Gresham from which the film was adapted, the key to Stan’s character turns out to be a textbook Freudian revelation, his sexual desire for his mother. Forced by the Production Code to drop this, the film actually improves matters by replacing it with an account of his childhood in orphanages, during which he learned to cynically manipulate authority by feigning conversion and repentance. All this pretense of empathy and communication only accentuates the alienation at the heart of the story: Stan’s destiny is to become a geek, an isolated freak who has traded his humanity for a bottle a day.

The movie’s tacked-on, studio-imposed ending not only rescues Stan from his proper fate as a geek, but adds a pat moral to the story: he fell so low, a carny-owner opines, because he reached too high. What really happened was that Stan finally encountered someone who was even more skilled and ruthless than he as a manipulator of minds. But although it’s trite, the moral accords with noir’s foundational pessimism: an un-American distrust of ambition, a certainty that those who crave more, who want to make it to the “top of the world” are courting failure, destruction and death. When Zeena reads Stan’s fortune with the Tarot, his card is the Hanged Man, a figure derived from Odin, who hung upside-down from the world-tree and sacrificed an eye to gain knowledge that would make him supreme.

Movie stars are, by and large, people driven by the burning need to be “somebody,” the same drive that Robert Warshow pinpointed in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”: to be separate from the crowd, to be “way up high where it’s always balmy,” as Sidney Falco says in Sweet Smell of Success. One reason, perhaps, why Hollywood was so good at making movies about confidence tricksters is that so many of its great stars were self-invented, bearing names that weren’t their own, inhabiting personas that were nothing like their real selves. Joan Blondell belonged to a smaller group of stars whose air of authenticity was not an act; and that burning drive to get ahead and be the best that defined the personae of actresses like Crawford and Stanwyck was not part of her make-up. Her screen persona (like the off-screen Joan) knows poverty and will do what it takes to stay off the pavements, but she’s not naturally aggressive or afflicted by restless hunger. She is, for this reason, not really a noir type, and Nightmare Alley proved to be her only stroll down noir’s dark alleys.

It’s part of Blondell’s mystery that she is compelling on-screen despite lacking that fierce need to be the center of attention. How many genuine movie stars could be plausible in the role of a stand-in, as Blondell is in Stand-in (1937)? One of the better offerings from the mass of her post-Code films, this is an off-beat movie about Hollywood that focuses on the “little people” who labor in the film industry. In the title role, Blondell plays former child-star Lester Plum (she had, in real life, started in vaudeville as Baby Rosebud), and performs a hilarious, squeaky-voiced impersonation of Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Having failed to establish herself as a grown-up star, Lester uncomplainingly does the standing around and sweating for a bitchy, temperamental actress, and lives in a boarding house inhabited by trained seals, their keepers, and other show-biz oddities. Her task in the film is to awaken the heart and humanity of an Asperger’s-stricken mathematician played by Leslie Howard, who has been sent west by the New York money men to assess the financial viability of the studio where she works. Directed by the underrated Tay Garnett, the film features an array of eccentric character turns, including Humphrey Bogart as a director who goes through the film toting a Scottie dog under one arm.

It’s a cut above most of her post-Code films, which took on a drearily routine quality. The problem with the movies she cranked out during the remainder of the thirties is their relentless lightweightness. They try for the dizzy comic tone of her pre-Code films, but have none of the edge or the ballast, the dark shadows under their eyes that gave those early-thirties gems their bite. The pre-Code films had a delirious exhaustion that made them tremble on the verge of hysterical laughter or sobs; the post-Code B comedies merely feel tired. In movies like Topper Returns, or her many pairings with the deliciously acerbic Glenda Farrell, Blondell is all round eyes and pearly teeth, but the scripts deny her the wounded reserve that was, paradoxically, essential to her comic presence. There’s often plenty to enjoy, and the constant stream of wisecracks in Kansas City Princess (“Your grammar ain’t fit to eat!”) is almost enough to disguise its basic insubstantiality. But something was lost, as it was for other stars like Warren William and Mae Clarke whose careers declined after the Code sanded off their edges.

Blondell struggled to find work in her middle years, partly due to her age and partly to the personal turmoil of her third marriage to Mike Todd. Strangely, she never got many of the mother roles that subsumed actresses like Mary Astor (though off-screen she was the devoted mother of two children.) Her best-known later part was as the free-spirited, scandalous Aunt Sissy in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Rather than matrons she tended to play older, single working women: she was Jayne Mansfield’s secretary in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and in Desk Set (1957) she shares a surprising rapport with Katharine Hepburn, who never seemed more relaxed or likeable than when she and Blondell get drunk on champagne together at an office Christmas party. A work-horse to the end, Blondell put in a lot of time on television and returned to the stage, often in stock. In 1972 she published an autobiographical novel, Center Door Fancy, about her life in show business.

She had that brand of level-headedness that seems common to people who started in show biz as children, those lifers who see through every illusion yet understand better than anyone the value of illusions. Throughout her career, Blondell exemplified one definition of what good acting is: an honest con.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[creepingsharia]

Virginia: Pharmacy Owner Gets 4 Years in $500K Prescription Medication Fraud

Latif Mohamed Chowdhury fraudulently billed at least $500,000 to health insurance programs for prescriptions that were never filled.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A former pharmacy owner was sentenced today to four years in prison for fraudulently filling and dispensing thousands of prescription medications, including opioids, outside the usual course of professional practice.

“Chowdhury blithely violated his position of trust,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “Chowdhury’s warped business philosophy led him to illegally distribute a significant number of prescription medications, including dangerous, addictive opioids. Moreover, his reckless actions add to the financial cost of health care as he fraudulently billed at least $500,000 to health insurance programs for prescriptions that were never filled.”

According to court documents, Latif Mohamed Chowdhury, aka Gulam Latif Chaudhury, 29, operated and controlled two now-defunct pharmacies known as Alexandria Care Pharmacy LLC (ACP-1) and Alexandria Care Pharmacy Store #2 LLC (ACP-2). Chowdhury has never been a licensed pharmacist and has no medical qualifications. Nonetheless, between August 2015 and February 2016, Chowdhury fraudulently operated ACP-1 and ACP-2 by personally filling and dispensing thousands of dosage units of medications, including opioids, without a licensed pharmacist on-site. Chowdhury used the identities of licensed pharmacists, without their permission, to carry out his scheme.

“Chowdhury used his trusted position to enrich himself at the expense of others," said Timothy M. Dunham, Special Agent in Charge, Criminal Division, FBI Washington Field Office. “Today's sentencing makes it clear that the illegal distribution of opioids will not be tolerated. The FBI will work closely with our partners to continue to investigate allegations of healthcare fraud.”

Chowdhury admitted to fraudulently billing health insurance benefit programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, for refills of prescription medications that were not delivered to customers even though his pharmacies received payment for these prescriptions. Chowdhury also submitted fraudulent health insurance claims in the names of pharmacy customers for medications that were not authorized by any physician, and were not dispensed to any of the customers, in order to enrich himself through illicit profits generated by ACP-1 and ACP-2. 

In addition, Chowdhury dispensed Schedule II controlled substances in the names of minors, including children as young as 7 and 8-years-old, outside the usual course of professional practice. During the execution of a search warrant, a loaded Colt .38-caliber firearm that belonged to Chowdhury was located in plain view on the pharmacy department shelves.

---------------------------------------

h/t Frauds, Crooks & Criminals, who asks valid questions the media won’t:

My first question is how does a 29-year-old, Latif Mohamed Chowdhury, aka Gulam Latif Chaudhury, who is not a Pharmacist, come to own two pharmacies and set up this elaborate scheme to get his hands on dangerous drugs and bilk insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars?  A 29-year-old!  Clearly there is something more.

Indeed I wonder how he managed such a light sentence—4 years—when he could have gotten twenty as noted here in an earlier article about his arrest.

[ferociousqueak]

I’ve done a Fictober! Be warned that it’s kinda . . . upsetting? Upsetting. Anyway, blame @pagerunner.

“I know you didn’t ask for this”

At one week, Sana had grown used to the smell on Omega.

At one month, she’d learned to keep her omni-tool safe from pedestrian hacking attempts—not the dedicated thieves, just the everyday grifters looking for easy, unguarded data.

At three months, she knew the slight body language the gangs used to communicate their targets.

At six months . . . why was she living somewhere that required her to keep her guard up at all hours and to learn more and subtler signs of danger all the time?

On the bright side, she’d found a building that would let her run her clinic and also live in a connected residence for the low, low price of squatting. After the upfront cost of updating the dilapidated rooms to be fit for treating patients, however, it wasn’t quite the money-saving venture she’d thought it be when she first found the abandoned unit.

Between the renovations, the bribes, the protection fees, and just daily costs like eating, Sana’s savings had taken a significant hit over the last six months. Despite offering her services for nearly free, the locals were still—perhaps especially—wary. Sana could hardly blame them, given the way the rest of Omega seemed to lure in victims in need only to bilk and bamboozle them at the first opportunity, but she would need a more consistent clientele if she was going to break even anytime soon.

“You need a sponsorship,” Raegor advised her one particularly slow day as they hunched over their ‘tool, “upgrading” it with hardware Sana was sure was stolen. “Get in with one of the gangs and they’ll send all their people to you. You can ride that wave to a pretty hefty profit.”

Sana rolled her eyes, wondering not for the first time why Raegor had chosen her to annoy. Their krogan were a nice bit of security, but at what cost?

“Shouldn’t you be dead right about now?” she said, returning her attention to her patients’ charts, the few of them there were. “I thought salarians only lived a few years. I could’ve sworn it’s been decades since you lodged yourself here.”

Raegor’s chuckle was warm and jovial, and Sana hated it. Why were they still there?

“I’m just saying your financial troubles would be over,” they said. They looked up, considering. “You’d be a target for all the other gangs, but that’s a trouble to consider another day.”

Sana closed her ‘tool’s interface in a huff. “I’m not here to—”

A noise from outside drew their attention and the soft whisper of Raegor’s bodyguards’ weapons readying turned the atmosphere cold and crisp. Only a moment later, a batarian in yellow and black heavy armor barged through the front doors, cursing loudly and wrestling with a blue blur. Following close on his heels, was another batarian in civilian clothes with her hands outstretched in supplication. Between his swearing, her garbled words, and the blue blur’s unintelligible squeaking, it was difficult for Sana to make any accurate first impressions of what was coming into her waiting room.

“Shut up already, for fuck’s sake!” the Eclipse mercenary said. “We’re here aren’t we?—FUCK! Fucking thing!”

The blue blur—a pyjack, Sana could now see—had paused long enough to clench its flat teeth around the batarian’s exposed wrist and hung there now in what looked like defiance.

Sana reached for the pyjack softly and caressed the back of its neck until its eyes glazed and then closed and the rest of it, including its jaws went limp. From there, Sana pulled it off the batarian’s arm and handed it, still dazed, to Raegor. The batarian merc started to step forward, but his partner stepped in front of him and put a hand on his chest to stop him.

“You better kill that fucking thing,” he said through clenched teeth and pushed his companion aside. “I held up my end and look what I fucking get.”

Sana reached for the batarian’s arm and began to inspect it for any incisions. “Sir, are you allergic to pyjacks?”

He pulled his wrist away from Sana and crossed his arms. “Of course not. I just don’t fucking like the fucking things. They piss and shit everywhere. Disgusting creatures.”

“I understand your frustration, sir,” Sana said, adopting her most calming tones. “Would you like me to inspect your wrist for injury?”

“And pay you out the ass for a scratch? No fucking thanks. Just kill the fucking thing and end my misery,” he said and started to head toward the door. “Get your ass out here, Rhea’kal. I held up my end, now you hold up yours.”

“My pet!” Rhea’kal called after his retreating figure.

“It’s not a pet, bitch,” he said without turning around. “It’s a fucking pest.”

Rhea’kal hesitated, looking between Sana and the other batarian. When the doors closed behind him, she reached for Sana’s hands and held them tightly. “Please,” she said quietly, her eyes watering. “No damage. New home.”

Sana looked on instinct at Raegor. “I’m not sure what she’s saying.”

Raegor sat with the pyjack, massaging its neck and keeping it in a malleable state. “Her translator is probably broken. Her friend probably deleted the program on her ‘tool. She’s speaking so you’ll understand.”

Rhea’kal squinted at Raegor and took two steps toward him, reaching for the pyjack. “No hurt. No kill.”

Sana put a gentle hand on her shoulder to stop her, but Rhea’kal hit away her hands. “No touch.” She returned her attention to the pyjack now purring softly in Raegor’s arms. “Please,” she said, her voice now watery. “No hurt. No kill. Good.”

Raegor stood, stroking the pyjack’s cheek and neck and nodded at Rhea’kal. “No kill.”

A great weight seemed to lift from the batarian, and she turned, hitting away the streams of tears starting to run from her eyes.

Once she was gone through the doors, Raegor shook their head and clicked their tongue. “Poor thing. Who knows how long she held on to this guy before that asshole found out.”

Sana furrowed her brows and crossed her arms, still trying to process the whirlwind that just happened in front of her. “What do you mean? We didn’t even get a chance to question them.”

Raegor glanced at her with a smug grin and said, “We?”

Sana took a breath to argue, but Raegor stopped her. “I’ve seen it before. She’s more than likely a house slave. This guy,” they held up the now sleeping pyjack, “was probably a stray. She fed him. He stuck around. He probably peed on something. And her owner found out about it. A hundred credits says he doesn’t even care about pyjacks. He just doesn’t want her having something that makes her happy.”

The pyjack stirred in Raegor’s arms and put its chin on their shoulder, letting out a loud breath before settling in again. Raegor frowned and scratched gently under the pyjack’s chin. “I know you didn’t ask for this, buddy. You’re in good hands.”

With that, Raegor held out the pyjack to Sana, and she reached out on instinct before she could object.

“I can’t take care of a pyjack,” she said. “They’re . . . dirty, and . . . I can’t take of a pyjack, Raegor!”

They shrugged. “Okay, but she’s gonna be back. She’s gonna look for him. How do you think she’s gonna feel when he’s not here.”

“Oh, varren shit,” Sana said, while simultaneously scratching the pyjack’s chin. “I never said I was going to take care of this thing. I don’t even know how.”

Raegor was already collecting the bits of ‘tool they’d disassembled. “Okay? Figure it out, I guess. She needs you to keep him safe. Either do that and help her. Or don’t. See how that works. Doctor.”

Sana frowned. “I don’t like you, Raegor.”

They grinned. “So you’ve said. Good luck with your new pyjack! See you tomorrow.”

When Raegor and their bodyguards were gone, Sana held up the pyjack, now stirring from the daze he’d been in with all the neck rubs, and frowned at him. “If you’re going to stick around, you need . . . a name, I guess. Like . . .” She paused, trying to think of something appropriate. “Lucky.”

[political-fluffle]

The judge blasted the would-be real estate developer as a serial scammer whose “horrific” crimes posed a significant threat to the public.

Paul Manafort’s former son-in-law was sentenced to more than nine years in prison Friday for a wide-ranging series of fraud schemes the court said bilked victims out of more than $6 million.

As District Judge André Birotte Jr. imposed the sentence of nine years and two months on Jeffrey Yohai, the judge blasted the would-be real estate developer as a serial scammer whose “horrific” crimes posed a significant threat to the public, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said.

Birotte said Yohai’s fraud spree demonstrated “sophistication,” an “evil mind,” and a belief that he “could do anything he wanted,” the spokesman said.

Yohai pleaded guilty to a array of brazen frauds, including renting out luxury homes without the permission of their owners, selling nonexistent backstage passes for the Coachella music festival, and pawning band equipment that belonged to someone else. (...)

“Defendant has done tremendous damage to a huge number of victims,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Brown wrote in a September court filing. Yohai “has shown an almost unbelievable compulsion to defraud others, to the point that he could not stop even while awaiting this court’s judgment on him in the first case, which strongly suggests that he will continue on his criminal path despite having been blessed with so many advantages.

“Worse, he seems to enjoy committing fraud and revels in cheating others out of their hard-earned money, as though he thought real work was only for patsies,” Brown added.

Prosecutors, who charged that Yohai’s scams totaled more than $13 million, asked that he receive a 15-year prison term. The sentence the judge imposed was substantially shorter but still lengthy for a financial fraud. He ordered a total of $6.7 million in restitution. (...)

Manafort and Yohai were involved in several real estate projects involving efforts to build and flip luxury homes in Los Angeles. One of the longtime Republican lobbyist and political consultant's bank fraud crimes involved providing fraudulent information to secure a loan from the Banc of California on properties in which he invested with Yohai. (...)

Yohai and Manafort’s daughter Jessica married in 2013. She filed for divorce in 2017 and last year formally changed her last name from Manafort to Bond — her mother’s maiden name.

[rockislandadultreads]

Mysteries for Foodies: Book Recs

Honey Roasted by Cleo Coyle

While struggling to find a romantic (and affordable) destination for her upcoming honeymoon, coffeehouse manager Clare Cosi whips up a honey of a drink made from honey-processed coffee. Clare plans to serve her outstanding new Honey-Cinnamon Latte at her spring wedding to her longtime honey, NYPD Detective Mike Quinn. The culinary world is also abuzz about the amazing honey that Clare was lucky enough to source for her shop's new latte. Produced by Madame's old friend Queen Bea Hastings, the rare, prize-winning nectar from Bea's rooftop hives commands a premium price, and top chefs compete for a chance to use it in their signature seasonal dishes. One night, a swarm of escaped bees blanket the Village Blend's chimney, and Clare discovers Bea's unconscious body after she seemingly fell from her high-rise rooftop-hive setup. The police want to rule it as a tragic accident or possible attempted suicide. But Clare doesn't believe either theory. Like Madame, she knows this Queen would never abandon her hive. To sort out this mystery, Clare investigates a world of cutthroat chefs, culinary startups, and competitive urban beekeepers. But can she uncover the truth without getting stung?

Puddin' on the Blitz by Tamar Myers

Although the culinary fare at Magdalena Yoder's new restaurant, Asian Sensations - a unique combination of Asian and Amish cuisine - is not to everyone's taste, the good citizens of Hernia are unanimously agreed that the desserts concocted by the restaurant chef, Barbara Hostetler, are to die for. Not literally however. When a guest at the PennDutch Inn drops dead shortly after consuming a slice of Barbara's delicious Blitz torte, Magdalena finds herself arrested for murder. Did someone deliberately set her up? In order to clear her name and protect her nearest and dearest, Magdalena must identify a ruthless killer - before they strike again.

The Big Chili by Julia Buckley

After dreaming for years of owning her own catering company, Lilah has made a start into the food world through her Covered Dish business, covertly cooking for her neighbors who don’t have the time or skill to do so themselves, and allowing them to claim her culinary creations as their own. While her clientele is strong, their continued happiness depends on no one finding out who’s really behind the apron. So when someone drops dead at a church Bingo night moments after eating chili that Lilah made for a client, the anonymous chef finds herself getting stirred into a cauldron of secrets, lies, and murder—and going toe to toe with a very determined and very attractive detective. To keep her clients coming back and her business under wraps, Lilah will have to chop down the list of suspects fast, because this spicy killer has acquired a taste for homicide…

Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle by Sarah Graves

Jake Tiptree and Ellie White are fired up for Eastport, Maine’s Great Downeast Snickerdoodle Bake-Off, but when a cunning killer and a devastating fire threaten to ravage the quaint island town, Jake and Ellie must dip into another homemade homicide investigation before all they love goes up in smoke . . . As co-owners of Eastport’s beloved waterfront bakery, The Chocolate Moose, Jake and Ellie know their customers expect them to cream the competition. But they’re really just in it for fun, hoping to get Jake’s daughter-in-law baking again. Those plans collapse when fearsome local curmudgeon Alvin Brown is murdered, and every crumb of evidence points to Tiptree family friend—and all-around sweet guy—Billy Sewell. Billy’s sisters beg Jake and Ellie to prove his innocence. After all, lots of folks had gone sour on Alvin--the only thing the retired lawyer liked better than bilking widows was swindling orphans, and several victims of his long-ago schemes still lived in Eastport. But just as the ladies begin sifting through the suspects, a series of grassfires blaze across the island, cutting off access to the mainland. Could someone be trying to hide the truth about Alvin’s murder? Now, Jake and Ellie will need all their courage—and an extra dash of that down-east Maine stubbornness—to sniff out the real killer before anyone else gets burned . . .

[architectnews]

Place Carmin Restaurant, Montréal

Place Carmin Restaurant, Canada, Montréal Commercial Interior, Canadian Bar Architecture, QC Building Project, Images

Place Carmin Restaurant in Montréal

21 Sep 2021

Design: Clairoux

Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Place Carmin Restaurant

Restauranteurs Mélanie Blanchette and François Nadon, owners of Bouillon Bilk and Cadet, are the duo behind this new French brasserie. In the Place Carmin Restaurant project, Clairoux was entrusted with designing an intimate dining room, a bar space with two private dining rooms for groups, and a terrasse.

Distinctive interior design For this commercial project, Clairoux transformed its clients’ vision into a new modern space with timeless charm. The designers, who brought this new take on the French brasserie to life, opted for sleek design, with every detail carefully thought out.

Natural light reflects off the soft shades of the walls, harmonizing with honey-coloured cabinets to warm the space.

More about the design: striking ceramics in the mezzanine washrooms, natural tones, light natural wood, brass set off by brick.

Furniture: comfortable chairs with rounded forms, and select fabrics such as leather in tawny hues.

Artistic collaboration Enthusiastic restauranteurs, Mélanie Blanchette and François Nadon, worked with local creators and a large team to make this project a reality. The unique wallpapering, bespoke lighting, and neon sculptures were all crafted by local companies under the supervision of Les Deux Marteaux.

The interior design firm and its collaborators have created a tranquil, vibrant, and welcoming space.

Women were key to the project design: Mélanie Blanchette: restauranteur/owner responsible for patron experience Fany Jane: tattoo artist behind the neon sculptures Esther Pichette: wallpaper creator Maude Rondeau: lighting creator

The clientele: a deciding factor In response to significant demand from Quartier International patrons, Clairoux designed Place Carmin to accommodate groups, especially from the business community. The restaurant, which seats up to one hundred, is divided into distinct areas, each with its own ambiance: a livelier section near the bar, a more intimate bistro space near the kitchen, and a private room that can be reserved for events.

After eight months of work, and a year and a half in a pandemic, Clairoux succeeded in creating Place Carmin, a warm brasserie-style restaurant that is perfect for sharing good food and good company. Building on the success of Perles & Paddock, Clairoux continues to make its mark in restaurant interior design.

Place Carmin Restaurant in Montréal, QC – Project Information

Architects: Clairoux

Official project name: Place Carmin Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada Project district: Quartier International (Downtown) Client: Mélanie Blanchette and François Nadon Designers: Roxane Legeay and Frédric Clairoux – Julie Lafontaine Collaborators: Les Deux Marteaux Lighting designer: Luminaires Authentik Wallpaper: NumérArt Project end date: March 2021

About Clairoux Clairoux offers residential, real estate, commercial, and branding interior design services, as well as its ‘Prêt à vivre’ and ‘Choix de finis’ products. Driven by the need to shape, mould, and transform interior spaces into enjoyable experiences, the Montreal firm’s work is based on the concept of intelligent design.

Photographer: Julien Perron-Gagné

Place Carmin Restaurant, Montréal images / information received 210921 from v2com newswire

Location: Montreal, Québec, Canada

Montreal Architecture

Québec Architecture Designs – architectural selection below:

Montreal Architecture Designs – chronological list

Montreal Architecture Walking Tours

Montreal Architecture News

Montreal Houses

Castor Des Érables Development, Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, Montréal, QC Architects: Parkhouse photographer : Parkhouse/Bardagi The Castor Des Érables Development in Montréal

Charlebois Lake House, Ste-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, north of Montreal, Québec Architects: Paul Bernier Architecte photographer : James Brittain House in Ste-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson

Canadian Architecture

Canadian Architects

Comments / photos for the Place Carmin Restaurant, Montréal page welcome

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[junker-town]

‘It’s just business’

How MLB became a microcosm of capitalism’s failure.

“It’s just business.” You hear it whenever some marginalized community loses a necessary service, or when a sick person is denied sorely needed coverage for their health, or when a laborer’s basic humanity is impugned, all in the name of the almighty dollar.

It’s a phrase spring-loaded with the connotation that “businesses” are in the business of doing anything and everything to make money, and that their mere existence justifies the collateral damage they cause. On some level, it’s difficult to blame people if they default to “it’s just business” when they encounter a wrong being done by a company that manufactures their steel cut oats or designer toothbrushes — if only because, hell, we all need to get on with our day.

We’ve been told “it’s just business” so often in our lives that we accept it as easily as air. It has become a state of existence, perpetuated by economic titans such as Milton Friedman, who declared “there is one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Plenty of people disagree with this worldview, but there’s no denying the rules of the game are ill-defined, malleable, unenforced and yet somehow ubiquitous. What they are not is equitable or ethical.

Major League Baseball is a prime example, having emphasized its bottom line at the expense of both players and fans by constantly changing the rules of the game. It has done so despite having already bilked cities, counties and states for tax breaks and public dollars for stadiums, despite an antitrust exemption upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and despite the foundational importance of fans as stakeholders in its individual organizations and the league.

There isn’t (yet) a salary cap, but front offices — likely due to pressure from ownership — have begun to treat the aptly named Competitive Balance Tax as a line in the sand. In 2012, MLB placed a heavy tax on spending more than five percent of one’s draft allotment that no team has yet to breach. Once the ability to spend freely in the draft was eliminated, teams used the international free agent market to build teams cheaply relative to the free agent market, proper. The most recent CBA tried to put a stop to that by implementing a hard cap on international spending, but regular free agency spending never bounced back. And despite these supposed great competitive balance measures, MLB has experienced record talent disparity over the last two offseasons.

The words “competitive balance” and “parity” often get used in sports, the idea being that leagues should strive for an environment where some combination of talent, intelligence, stamina and plain old luck decides champions, and not budgetary advantages. To that end, leagues and owners pursued options like salary caps, the draft, the reserve clause, international spending caps, luxury taxes, draft pick compensation, restricted free agency … the list goes on.

And conveniently, all of these measures come at the expense of labor. It’s not just salary caps, which are a transfer of wealth from players (labor) to owners, but the draft, too, which eliminates the ability of draftees to leverage teams against each other. Competitive balancing is always about limiting the top spenders rather than prodding the cheapskates.

As consumers, we’ve gotten used to rationalizing upcharges or degraded service, like the collective action of major American airlines which started offering a “basic economy” class that is helpful only to people who are traveling long distances on airplanes without bags (as we all love to do). We come to believe our inconvenience is helping a company stay afloat and continue to provide a service we otherwise wouldn’t have. Too often, though, we are being underserved and oversold in the pursuit of a temporarily attractive bottom line that will boost a stock price just long enough for that company to sell itself to another corporation, leaving them, and us, to hold the bag.

It doesn’t have to work this way though, mostly because this way isn’t working out for the vast majority. As Anu Aga, ex-chairperson of the giant engineering firm Thermax Limited, said “we survive by breathing but we can’t say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist.”

Baseball isn’t a vital industry to humanity, but it is a good study in how capitalism corrupts itself. In theory, a baseball team’s goals are simple: win games and entertain fans. By pursuing profit, it can also aim higher, building community spirit in the process. But in practice, baseball has become cheap and callous. After decades of spiritual degradation, MLB has come to epitomize the clash between society and late capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism is winning.

It’s strange that shareholder-first ideology has become so prevalent in sports. Efficiency uber-alles, especially in baseball, is orthodoxy these days, but that certainly wasn’t always the case. The late-era George Steinbrenner Yankees were built upon the Core Four, and supplemented by mercenary free agents who helped bring World Series titles to the Bronx.

And yet, after a pair of frosty offseasons, MLB now presides over organizations that routinely pass over premium talent at prices that are more than justifiable by public advanced metrics.

For a long time, $/WAR was the default framework by which free agent signings or trades were evaluated. This inevitably led to teams to lean on quality, young talent that was — and this is crucial — under team control for long periods of time. That control, which gives teams unilateral ability to decide salary for the first three years of any player’s career, became an end unto itself. It wasn’t rare to read something along the lines of “yes, Team A dealt away Superstar X to Team B for a smattering of players you haven’t heard of, but Team B will receive 15 controllable seasons in return, while Team A will receive only a year.”

Efficiency was, and is, the name of the game. It’s not enough to win, but you also have to appear smart while doing so. This is, in part, why teams don’t simply promote their prospects to the majors when they’re ready. Instead, they wait until after they’ve manipulated those players’ service time to gain an additional year of control.

As on-field optimization became de rigeur, baseball teams began using the same heartlessly efficient principles in other decision-making areas of their organizations. It isn’t enough to sell out a crowd, teams must maximize dollars per customer. That means ceding traditional fan seating to luxury boxes, raising ticket and concession prices, and generally just making it more difficult to attend a baseball game. This shift was aptly summed up by Robert Alvarado, the Los Angeles Angels’ then-VP of marketing and ticket sales, to Pedro Moura in this 2015 OC Register piece:

“We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,” Alvarado said. “In doing so, the ticket price that we’re offering those people, it’s not like I can segregate them, because I’m offering it up to the public, and I’m basically downselling everybody else in order to accommodate them.”

How one perceives that statement depends a lot on their views of why a business, and why a baseball team, exists. If the goal is to make money, then optimizing “per-cap” conversions is a reasonable place to start (even if one could also argue quite convincingly that it’s short-sighted). If one happens to think a baseball team exists to serve its community, as a municipal staple and entertainment option, then the statement is outrageous. Choosing empty seats — to intentionally not serve a significant portion of the fan base, to ensure upper-class patrons don’t see their perceived value impacted — is blasphemy.

Owning a sports franchise means shepherding a sacred member of the community that has existed for generations. It means benefitting from decades of handed-down fandom. To be unwilling to invest in a team should be considered sacrilege.

If, according to Aga, money alone cannot be the reason for a business to exist, then what is? There may not be one reason, exactly, but if there were, serving the community, be it locally, nationally or globally, seems as good a place to start as any. To look at the people and environments that compose those communities and think first of them, to think of returns on objectives rather than returns on investments. The rules of the game work a lot better when they’re geared towards the consumers they purport to serve rather than the bottom line.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of people decided prioritizing shareholders above success and fan experience was just the way things ought to be. That making an extra buck at everyone else’s expense was the cost of doing business. That because a company or a corporation was incentivized to do something — or more accurately, was not incentivized not to do something — they bore no responsibility for their actions. None of this holds objective truth. We have agency and responsibility that extends beyond our incentives, or else they would be called mandates. We can hold people responsible for the communities they leave in ruins in the reckless pursuit of the bottom line. We can choose differently.

For sports franchises, that entails a commitment to winning more than efficiency. No matter what people implore you to believe, sports franchises aren’t like other businesses. They inspire fierce allegiance like few brands can, sworn lifelong fealty merely by virtue of being born in their general vicinity. They trade in cultural value, and thus have an obligation to provide for that culture.

Other brands sometimes create those loyalties, sure, but that’s often thanks to a period of time when the product was best in class, before marketing took over. When it comes to other businesses we tend to, eventually, update our priors based on quality, price, convenience or some other service standard. Yet, when’s the last time someone changed their favorite baseball team due to ticket prices? They might show up less often, but their allegiances — who they root for — tend to be entrenched. This means the only way for a team to adequately serve its “customers” is through good-faith competition. Rebuilds are acceptable when they’re not also (read: actually) an effort to line ownership’s pockets, and they’re even more acceptable when the team later spends to win.

That puts sports teams in a unique relationship with their customers. They are highly incentivized to do right by their fans, and yet they can also easily abuse that relationship if they want. Essentially, they are free to choose either Friedman’s or Aga’s view of capitalism.

Sports franchises are an obvious, and potentially powerful, tool to build community, and yet so often, and seemingly increasingly, they take the path of least resistance. My argument, my plea, extends to businesses of all stripes: Focus first on serving your customers and employees, and allow profit to serve as a guideline within that endeavor. Justify your existence. If as a company you’re already profitable, but can further increase profits by slashing essential services or making them worse, do you do it? A commitment to profit maximization provides an easy answer. But so does a commitment to your community.

Sadly, this time of global crisis has dampened hope that teams can put others first. We’ve seen athletes come to the fore, offering to cover the salaries of stadium workers who are suffering in the absence of sports, and deepen their bonds to the people and places they represent. And while many organizations have pledged to do the same, too often they’ve led from behind, waiting until they’ve been shamed to support employees rather than lay them off.

Rarely have corporations been forced to so distinctly choose between rededicating themselves to communities or continuing to plunder as they see fit. The pandemic gave baseball a test in this regard. They’ve clearly flunked it.

[chiseler]

JOAN BLONDELL: The Honest Con

Every carny is the same: the same hicks milling around in overalls and print dresses, as trusting as cows; the same stalls and banners emblazoned with fat ladies and fire-eaters; the same bored cooch dancers listlessly gyrating their hips; the same pickpockets working the packed, sweaty crowd; the same atmosphere of hucksterism pervading everything as thickly as the smells of grease and popcorn and sawdust and cotton candy. The cacophony of spielers: Step right up! Move in closer, folks. The show is about to begin! Try your luck. Everybody wins a prize. Only a dime, ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar…

Every movie set in a carny opens the same way, with the camera elbowing through the midway, taking in the sights with a knowing eye. Sinner’s Holiday (1930), Joan Blondell’s first feature film, began this way, and so does the masterpiece of her later years, Nightmare Alley (1947). Here the camera glides over the crowd to find Blondell standing in the shadows at the back of her booth, surveying the scene. Her flowing robe, poised stillness and grave expression give her a hieratic air. Her eye is fixed on a handsome young roustabout in his undershirt, but her look is pensive rather than lustful. The wary, contained way she observes the world, and her calm unmannered presence, were with her from the beginning of her career, but here they have aged and deepened and mellowed like spirits.

She’s come a long way from Myrtle, the brassy photographer’s model of Sinner’s Holiday. Now she’s Zeena, a mind-reader, “the miracle woman of the ages” as her barker tells the gullible throng. Zeena’s act is pure hokum (she gathers questions from the audience, pretends to destroy them, and reads cues supplied by a hidden accomplice), presented with good-natured flim-flam that would fool only the most naïve. Off-stage, though, Zeena is a true believer in the Tarot, a woman of much deeper intuition and understanding than her gimcrack act suggests. Here Joan Blondell pulls off the same paradox that defined her greatest early roles in Blonde Crazy (1931) and Blondie Johnson (1932): in all these films she’s a con artist who makes her living off scams of one kind of another, yet who somehow remains fundamentally decent and even honest.

One of the links between pre-Code and film noir is their mutual obsession with dividing the world into chiselers and suckers, the wised-up and the chumps. Pre-Code movies, made at a time of mass disillusionment courtesy of the Depression, reveled in the exploits of con men, sharpies, hustlers, and maestros of ballyhoo. Films like the exhilarating James Cagney vehicle Hard to Handle (1933) depict a country where everyone is either on the make or being taken. “The public is like a cow, bellowing, bellowing to be milked,” Cagney declares, echoing his speech to Blondell in Blonde Crazy about the “age of chiselry” in which “everyone has larceny in his heart.” In the first scene of Nightmare Alley, Blondell’s Zeena listens to Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as he explains why he loves the carny racket: how looking at the rubes out there gives him a feeling of superiority, a sense of being in the know, being on the inside while they’re on the outside.

She’s heard it all before. At 41, Blondell is seasoned and wise, yet still vulnerable and open-hearted—just like she was at 25. What she brought to all these movies about rackets, about schemers and saps, was the ability to put over a con and let us enjoy her triumph, yet also to express, without sanctimony, the melancholy weight of too much knowledge. As she listens to Power’s speech, all this is in her eyes and in her silence. The oily Stan is an homme fatale who shamelessly uses his wiles on the older woman, making love to her because he wants her to reveal the secret of a verbal code she and her former partner used in a successful vaudeville act. Blondell’s role could easily have been a humiliating one—as soon as Stan gets what he wants from Zeena, he cheats on her with the pretty, innocent young Molly (Colleen Gray)—but Blondell makes Zeena’s susceptibility appealing rather than pathetic. When Stan tells her she’s a “real woman” (praising her generosity to her washed-up, alcoholic partner Pete), it’s with his usual slick insincerity, but she can turn this smarmy compliment into simple truth. Zeena blames herself for her Pete’s drinking, since he hit the bottle after she cheated on him. It was Pete who said she had a heart like an artichoke, “with a leaf for everybody.” She ruefully quotes this to Stan as they drive through the night with Pete sleeping drunkenly in the back of the truck.

Wanting to pick Pete’s brains about his past success, Stan plies him with liquor, but what he learns is that even he can be suckered by a spiel. Gazing into the bottle of moonshine as though it were a crystal ball, Pete summons a vision of a barefoot boy running through rolling green hills, a dog at his side. “Yes, his name was Gyp!” Stan eagerly confirms, at which Pete reveals that it’s a stock reading that fits anyone. “Every boy has a dog!” he laughs. Much later, when Stan has followed in Pete’s alcoholic footsteps, he pulls the same trick on his fellow bums in a hobo jungle. The mind-reading racket depends on the fact that people’s memories and feelings are all pretty much the same, and nothing is more universal than the belief that one is unique.

In pre-Code, con games exploit the simplest appetites—chiefly greed—and their elaborate mechanisms rely on no profound psychology. In Nightmare Alley, Stan plays with more volatile elements: with people’s insecurities, guilt, regrets, memories, and desires. The film lays bare the irony of the mind-reading scam, in which the appearance of uncanny sympathetic understanding, a luminous glimpse into the human heart, is just a ruse to bilk money out of suckers. Stan eventually teams up with a cruel, manipulative psychiatrist, who practices the same sort of racket under the cover of science. In the book by William Lindsay Gresham from which the film was adapted, the key to Stan’s character turns out to be a textbook Freudian revelation, his sexual desire for his mother. Forced by the Production Code to drop this, the film actually improves matters by replacing it with an account of his childhood in orphanages, during which he learned to cynically manipulate authority by feigning conversion and repentance. All this pretense of empathy and communication only accentuates the alienation at the heart of the story: Stan’s destiny is to become a geek, an isolated freak who has traded his humanity for a bottle a day.

The movie’s tacked-on, studio-imposed ending not only rescues Stan from his proper fate as a geek, but adds a pat moral to the story: he fell so low, a carny-owner opines, because he reached too high. What really happened was that Stan finally encountered someone who was even more skilled and ruthless than he as a manipulator of minds. But although it’s trite, the moral accords with noir’s foundational pessimism: an un-American distrust of ambition, a certainty that those who crave more, who want to make it to the “top of the world” are courting failure, destruction and death. When Zeena reads Stan’s fortune with the Tarot, his card is the Hanged Man, a figure derived from Odin, who hung upside-down from the world-tree and sacrificed an eye to gain knowledge that would make him supreme.

Movie stars are, by and large, people driven by the burning need to be “somebody,” the same drive that Robert Warshow pinpointed in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”: to be separate from the crowd, to be “way up high where it’s always balmy,” as Sidney Falco says in Sweet Smell of Success. One reason, perhaps, why Hollywood was so good at making movies about confidence tricksters is that so many of its great stars were self-invented, bearing names that weren’t their own, inhabiting personas that were nothing like their real selves. Joan Blondell belonged to a smaller group of stars whose air of authenticity was not an act; and that burning drive to get ahead and be the best that defined the personae of actresses like Crawford and Stanwyck was not part of her make-up. Her screen persona (like the off-screen Joan) knows poverty and will do what it takes to stay off the pavements, but she’s not naturally aggressive or afflicted by restless hunger. She is, for this reason, not really a noir type, and Nightmare Alley proved to be her only stroll down noir’s dark alleys.

It’s part of Blondell’s mystery that she is compelling on-screen despite lacking that fierce need to be the center of attention. How many genuine movie stars could be plausible in the role of a stand-in, as Blondell is in Stand-in (1937)? One of the better offerings from the mass of her post-Code films, this is an off-beat movie about Hollywood that focuses on the “little people” who labor in the film industry. In the title role, Blondell plays former child-star Lester Plum (she had, in real life, started in vaudeville as Baby Rosebud), and performs a hilarious, squeaky-voiced impersonation of Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Having failed to establish herself as a grown-up star, Lester uncomplainingly does the standing around and sweating for a bitchy, temperamental actress, and lives in a boarding house inhabited by trained seals, their keepers, and other show-biz oddities. Her task in the film is to awaken the heart and humanity of an Asperger’s-stricken mathematician played by Leslie Howard, who has been sent west by the New York money men to assess the financial viability of the studio where she works. Directed by the underrated Tay Garnett, the film features an array of eccentric character turns, including Humphrey Bogart as a director who goes through the film toting a Scottie dog under one arm.

It’s a cut above most of her post-Code films, which took on a drearily routine quality. The problem with the movies she cranked out during the remainder of the thirties is their relentless lightweightness. They try for the dizzy comic tone of her pre-Code films, but have none of the edge or the ballast, the dark shadows under their eyes that gave those early-thirties gems their bite. The pre-Code films had a delirious exhaustion that made them tremble on the verge of hysterical laughter or sobs; the post-Code B comedies merely feel tired. In movies like Topper Returns, or her many pairings with the deliciously acerbic Glenda Farrell, Blondell is all round eyes and pearly teeth, but the scripts deny her the wounded reserve that was, paradoxically, essential to her comic presence. There’s often plenty to enjoy, and the constant stream of wisecracks in Kansas City Princess (“Your grammar ain’t fit to eat!”) is almost enough to disguise its basic insubstantiality. But something was lost, as it was for other stars like Warren William and Mae Clarke whose careers declined after the Code sanded off their edges.

Blondell struggled to find work in her middle years, partly due to her age and partly to the personal turmoil of her third marriage to Mike Todd. Strangely, she never got many of the mother roles that subsumed actresses like Mary Astor (though off-screen she was the devoted mother of two children.) Her best-known later part was as the free-spirited, scandalous Aunt Sissy in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Rather than matrons she tended to play older, single working women: she was Jayne Mansfield’s secretary in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and in Desk Set (1957) she shares a surprising rapport with Katharine Hepburn, who never seemed more relaxed or likeable than when she and Blondell get drunk on champagne together at an office Christmas party. A work-horse to the end, Blondell put in a lot of time on television and returned to the stage, often in stock. In 1972 she published an autobiographical novel, Center Door Fancy, about her life in show business.

She had that brand of level-headedness that seems common to people who started in show biz as children, those lifers who see through every illusion yet understand better than anyone the value of illusions. Throughout her career, Blondell exemplified one definition of what good acting is: an honest con.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[kurokamikye-blog]

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What the Black British’s ADOS Not Telling Your Dumb Black Assess…..

The fact of the matter that Caucasians (ADOS) were the first Slaves of the 13 Black British Colonies, and many of these so-called African-Americans calling themselves ADOS, are really Aborigines of North America (Western Hemisphere), is beside the point.

What are these "REPARATIONS" being paid out with?

With Federal Reserve Notes, or checks, which transfer digits in a bank ledger, which are merely "representations" of Federal Reserve Notes called "Money of Account".

And what are Federal Reserve Notes?

Federal I.O.U.'s

So, you've got an I.O.U. ---- or a "representation" of an I.O.U., issued by the 13 Black British Colonies aka British Territorial United States....

What are these I.O.U.'s based on?

Your own assets.

So?

You are taxing yourself and putting yourself deeper in debt by accepting the "benefit" of your own credit.

Well, it is your own credit, and you should be able to access it when need arises --- but wait.... these guys are forcing you to identify yourself as a United States Citizen before they let you dig yourself and your own country deeper into debt.

And what does that do, in addition to digging yourself and your country deeper into debt? It gives away your actual underlying assets --- your land, your soil, your labor, your Good Name, everything --- to the British Queen, and then, she sells your assets to the Pope. Oh, lovely.

Now you have gone from being a free Negro and the lawful owner of great actual material wealth, to being a landless, penniless, deeply-in-debt Pauper, a subject of the Queen and a slave for the Pope.

In exchange for some paper casino chips, whose only value is based on your own assets... you are being robbed of your inheritance...

And all by your own hand.

All "voluntarily".

You just ran to that trough as fast as you could go, and drank your own blood, and you still think you got a free lunch.

You are mistaking your own credit as a "remedy" for their debt to you. They are laughing at you.

They are thinking, "Geez, these Negros are stupid! Come on, Fiona, keep those printing presses rolling...."

Truly, my people are being destroyed for lack of knowledge. And the whole world is being bilked. Let's take another instance, for all the Gold Bugs out there, the True Believers who think that gold is "the answer".

Remember Jekyll Island?

Remember the Hundred Year Plan that was discussed there, back in the early 1900's? What did that Hundred Year Plan call for?

The substitution of fiat currency for actual money.

The collection and consolidation of all the gold supplies on Earth, to the extent possible. Gradual but continuous devaluation of the fiat currency, so that it becomes worthless.

Return to the gold standard under emergency conditions, thus solving the problem you created by going to fiat currency in the first place.

Classic Hegelian Dialectic --- or, as I prefer to call it, Tricky Bullshit.

Oh, and, by the way, charge the Black Aboriginal’s great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of all the man and women you stole the gold from in the first place, up the wazoo to buy back what should have been their inheritance---except for criminal confiscations of private property and an enforced side trip through the Land of Oz in 1907 and again in 1933.... and 2015....

Nobody will be alive long enough to remember the details after a hundred years.

Or so the bankers think.

Gold is only nominally better than paper.

Used as money, both are just "symbols" of value.

Both are subject to manipulation.

Both are held captive by the commodity-rigging bankers.

It's all just a shell game and sleight of hand.

A game of sticky-fingers.

Neither paper nor gold have any great intrinsic value.

That was true when the Black Incas ruled. It's still true now.

And the difference between gold and paper is akin to the difference between Republican and Democrat----chocolate feces or raspberry, Ma'am?

Put no faith in the vanities and idols of men.

Turn your faces away and use your brains. Think.

"Money" is a commodity like green grapes (stocks, bonds, notes) or red grapes (gold, silver, jewels).

Is it any Big Change, when both kinds of grapes are for sale, and the supply is still controlled by the same vendors?

Think. If there's not enough "money" or enough "credit" ---whose fault is it?

It has to be either the vendors or the producers of the commodity---possibly both.

If you need more wheat, you need more wheat farmers, right?

Or, you need to shake loose wheat hoarders who are holding back supplies that already exist, in order to spike prices.

It's one way or the other, because guess what? Money in all forms is just another commodity, like pork bellies and peas.

It's manufactured, produced, moved around, delivered, transferred, bought, sold, manipulated, speculated on.....like rice and soybeans, GM and GE.

So, if you need more money, you need more and better bankers.

Can you build a better casino token? Produce bitcoins or buffalo chips? (Plastic ones, of course.) Or find something better to found your "values" on.

That's how stupid all this really is. That's how brainless we have all been.

Taken in. And to the cleaners. Time and time again.

Generation after generation.

And because the bankers’ function on a long calendar of a hundred years or more, nobody recognizes it when the same-old-same-old rolls around again.

Well, almost nobody.

Until now.

On that note, the 13-Black British Colonies, was never granted Independence nor Sovereignty, however, annexed under the Black Aboriginals of North America’s Five Sovereign Nations, collectively, the Sovereign General Government of The United States of North America – The Republic of North America, in the Family of Nations, in accord with “The Law of Nations” (so written in the original Contract/Constitutions/Treaties). Unfortunately, in Law, you can’t sue a sovereign government, both US and USA are not sovereign governments, rather foreign corporations, owned by the Vatican, mirroring and disguised as governments.

SideBar:  The Black Aborigine’s North America’s General Congress Assembled ("The Congress") included in the Contracts that the 13-Black British Governors of the Colonies agree to terminate White Slavery by 1807-08 {Article 1, § 9, Clause 1]. Further, the leaders of ADOS, don’t represent, nor speak  nor qualified to negotiate on behalf of the Aboriginal Black, Brown, Coppertone People, We The People.

Again, nice try, in another attempt, to overthrow, the de jure government. 

Sincerely,

Ernest Rauthschild

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=293&v=BN-gY3ljDy8