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lousy-old-shrimp · 3 years ago

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The Newsboys Rally of 1899!

The New York Sun

July 25, 1899 - Page 2

* Typed out under the cut *

GREAT MEET OF NEWSBOYS

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5,000 STRIKERS SWARM IN AND AROUND NEW IRVING HALL

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No More Violence, Their Orators Tell Them, and a Voice Responds, “Oh, Soytenly Not!”—East Side Politicians Catch On and Boom the Strike—It’s Broadening Out

The striking newsboys wound up a day of hard campaigning in their fight against the evening editions of the World and the Journal with a meeting last night in New Irving Hall, at Broome and Norfolk streets, which was a remarkable gathering. A citizen unused to the ways of the New York newsboy might have thought it was a riot. Kid Blink and his Strike Committee had sent the call for the meeting from the Bronx to the Battery, and from Brooklyn to Jersey City, and the arriving delegations choked Broome street from Essex to Norfolk and drove the neighborhood indoors. By 8 o’clock there were 5,000 boys on the block. Two thousand came from Broooklyn, led by Racetrack Higgins, and carrying with them a huge floral horseshoe, the gift of the Brooklyn Eagle. Jersey City sent a hundred boys, and the rest came mostly from Manhattan and the Bronx.

Five policemen and rounds man undertook to keep the boys in check until the hall opened, but in fifteen minutes the rounds man had sent for help. Fifteen policemen responded, but they were as helpless as the five had been. It was utterly impossible to handle the boys. They were a shrieking mob, and when the proprietor of the hall refused to open up at 8 because the meeting wasn’t to begin until 8:30 o'clock, they charged on the door and smashed it open.

Two thousand managed to get in, and there wasn’t an inch of room unoccupied in the hall. The outsiders were good-natured and yelled their approval every time the sounds of applause came to them through the open windows.

Nick Meyers of the Mail and Express was Chairman of the meeting, and he struggled for fifteen minutes before he could make himself heard. When the boys quoted down he stayed the object of the meeting, and called on Mr. Joe Bernstein, the pugilist, who used to sell papers himself, and Reiss, the yellow-barrel lemonade man of Printing House Square, to keep order. Messrs. Bernstein and Reiss armed themselves with far-reaching switches and took up positions. They had their hands full for the rest of the evening.

The first speaker of the evening was Leonard A. Suitkin, who was introduced as “a lawyer feller what’s got a message for us.”

Mr. Suitkin stated that he came as the representative of Assemblyman Charley Adler; that Mr. Adler was with the boys heart and soul, and that he sent them his best wishes.

“You’ve made a firm stand, boys,” he said, “and have made a better showing than the motormen either here or in Brooklyn. Hang together and you’ll win”

There was a yell of applause, and then—after Bernstein and Reiss had done some switching—Frank B. Wood, who used to send chills up people’s backs with his “Well, well, well!” at the Polo Grounds, was introduced.

Hooray for the strike!” began Mr. Wood in G below. “You boys have been successful so far, and you must stick it out to the end now.”

Ex-Assemblyman Phil Wissig, The next speaker, said that he was a newsboy himself in 1880 and that he was heart and soul with the newsboys in their strike.

“What right have these fellows got to hold out 10 cents on you?” he said. “Not a bit, and don’t you stand for it. Keep the law, boys, and don’t let me hear of you using an dynamite. You can win peacefully. Just try it and see.”

A large floral horseshoe came into the hall at this juncture, and Nick Meyers announced that a florist had sent it around to be given to the newsboy that made the best speech. There were roars of applause, and in boosting the chances of their favorites about a score of the boys fell to fighting. There was some lively punching among the little fellows, but the larger boys banged a few heads together, and then Dave Simons, the President of the Newsboys’ Union, read a set of resolutions. The last paragraph of the resolutions was addressed to the public and read:

“Please don’t buy the World or Journal, because we refuse to sell these papers until some satisfactory terms can be reached. The World and the Journal demand arbitration for the striking railroad men, but why don’t they arbitrate with the newsboys? If you have any sympathy with us help us boycott these advertisements: as no one sells these papers no one will be able to see them. * * * Youwill find all the news in THE EVENING SUN, Telegram and Daily News. They give us a chance to make a living. Buy them and help us, and we will thank you very kindly. We remain yours humbly, THE NEWSBOYS’ UNION.”

The resolutions were adopted with shouts that could be heard over on the Bowery. When the ardor of the boys had been suppressed by the keepers of the peace, Simons continued:

“We’re goin’ to win this fight, boys, only we must stick together and hold firm. The Journal and World has got the money, but we got the situation in our hands, and they know it. Now, I’m goin’ to ask you not to use no more violence. Let up on the scabs.”

“Oh, soytenly,” came a voice from the rear of the hall.

“Now, I mean it,” continued Simons. “We can’t gain nothing by banging these fellers around. Let’s fight on the level, and see if we can’t win out that way.”

“Who’s been a-talkin’ to yet like that, Dave?” inquired a shock-headed boy about 11 years old.

“It goes, Shorty,” replied the speaker. “an’ you kids are to remember it, see?”

Shorty and the kids around him had a great laugh over the “no-violence” attitude of the leaders, and because orderly again only when they were threatened with instant expulsion. Warhorse Brennan, who had been selling papers at West Broadway and Chambers street for twenty years, and Jack Tietjen, who had a stand at Church street and Park place, reported that the strike was going well n finely in their localities, and that the scabs were getting it in the neck.

Bob the Indian, whose surname is Stone, then rose to make a few remarks. Bob’s friends greeted him effusively.

“Whatcher goin’ ter says Bob?” queried one, and other remarks hurled at him were:

“Speak up, Bob.” “Hello, cigar sign.” “Don’t take no bluffs, Bob, but say what yer wanter.”

“I’m here fer union and nothin’ else,” said Bob. “I want this strike to keep agoin’ until we get these fellers what’s chockin’ us down. Say, what d’yer think Hearst says to-day? He says he can’t afford to sell two fer a cent. Now did yer ever? Say, he says he might cave if the World would give in, but he can’t sink first. Honest, ain’t that sickening? Now, I’m going to tell yer that yer not to soak the drivers any more.”

“Oh, no! soytenly not!” from the rear ranks.

“No, you’re not to soak ‘em. We’re a-goin’ to try to square this thing without violence: so keep cool. I think we’ll win in a walk-on the level I do.”

“Mr. Kid Blink, our master workman, will now address the meeting.” announced the Chairman. Kid Blink buttoned his shirt, brushed back his hair and walked forward, to be greeted by a storm of applause and a thousand friendly remarks.

“Yer know me, boys!” began the Kid, and there were cries of “yer bet we do.” “Well, I’m here to say if we are goin’ the win this strike we must stick like glue and never give in. Am I right?” Cries of “Yes! yes!”

“Ain’t that 10 cents worth as much to us as it is to Hearst and Pulitzer, who are millionaires? Well, I guess it is. If they can’t spare it, how can we?”

“Soak ’em, Blink,” yelled an enthusiast.

“Soak nothin’,” remarked the Kid. “I’m tellin’ the truth. I’m tryin’ to figure out how 10 cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to a newsboy, an’ I can’t see it. No, boys, I’m goin’ ter say like the rest: No more violence. Let up on the drivers. No more rackets like that one the other night where a Journal and a World wagon was tuned over in Madison street. Say, to tell the truth, I was there myself.”

“You bet yer was, Blink, an’ a-leadin’, too,” came a voice.

“Well, never mind, we’re goin’ to let up on the scabs now and with the strike on the square. Kid Blink’s a talkin’ to yer now. Do yer know him? We won in 1893 and will win in 1899, but stick together like plaster.”

“Boys, the next speaker is one of our old friends,” said the Chairman. “I won’t introduce him, because you all know Crazy Aborn.”

Crazy Aborn related an incident of the day. He said he had run across two tramps hired by the World at $2 a day to sell papers. They were hiding their papers in a dark hallway, he said, and looked so ashamed when he came up that he really felt sorry for them. They both promised not to take papers out again, and showed that they meant it by tearing up the papers they had.

Mr. Fitzgibbons, a delegate from the Tenderloin, was introduced, and was about to begin an eloquent address when there was a tumult in the back of the room. The commotion kept increasing, and those on the platform couldn’t understand it until a shrill young voice yollerd:

“Hey, Annie! Hey, Annie! Hooray for Annie!”

Annie’s arrival was really the event of the evening. Outside the hall and inside the boys cheered her, and it wasn’t until she went up on the platform and bowed three times that the boys consented to allow Mr. Fitzgibbons to resume. The Tenderloin delegate reported all well up his way, and wound up by saying:

“But you all know what you’re up against, and there ain’t no use my knocking the realization of it into your nuts.”

Mr. Fitzgibbons sat down and there were yells for a speech from Annie. Annie blushed and shook her head, but the Chairman went ahead, and after a glowing introduction, in the course of which he referred to the next speaker as the brick of all women and the most faithful of the strikers, called on Annie for a speech. Annie was really rattled. She had to be poked with the gavel before she’d get up, and then she only said:

“Well, boys, you know I’m with yer through thick and thin. Stick together and we’ll win.”

Annie sat down again and it was several minutes before the applause subsided. Racetrack Higgins of Brooklyn was then called upon.

“There’s 2,000 of us here from Brooklyn to-night,” he said, “but I think most of the gang got shut out. Never mind, though: we’re with the New York boys and we’re going to stick with them to the end. We took up a collection last night and got enough money to hire a band to lead us over here. I went up to Chief Devery today to get a permit, and what dy’er think he said? He says: ‘Git out, yer slobs.’ I told him we wasn’t slobs, but honest boys trying to make an honest living, but he wouldn’t give up the permit, so we had to leave the band home. I can only say to you, boys, to stand firm, and I bet we’ll win before Dewey comes home. Say, we struck six of those $2-a-day World and Journal fellers in front of Dennett’s in Brooklyn this afternoon—you know Sinker Dennett’s place—and we shamed them into giving up their jobs. They took their Journals back to Barber Clark and said they wasn’t going to help any paper do up a lot of boys. Now, wasn’t that square? [Applause.] I think we’ll win this fight all right. I ain’t made 20 cents this week, but I can stand a heap of that and so can all the Brooklyn boys. Don’t you touch Worlds or Journals until they give us a decent deal. We’re putting them out of business fast and they know it.”

Hungry Joe Kernan, the newsboy mascot, sang a patheic song about a one-legged newsboy, and then Mickey Myers and one or two others made brief speeches. Then the boys left the hall, yelling like demons, and spent the rest of the evening celebrating the successful strike and their great meeting.

The boys regard yesterday as the most successful day they have had since the strike began, because the boycotted newspapers went to the expense of paying men $2 a day to sell papers, only to have 75 percent of the men quit before they had sold a single paper. The boys had little trouble persuading the Bowervites to join them. The few dozen that remained loyal to their employers sold few papers, and the strikers think they enemy will soon tire of waging this kind of a warfare against them.

The Arbitration Committee, which was to meet Mr. Hearst yesterday to get his answer to the proposition that he reduce the price of Evening Journals from 60 to 50 cents a hundred, went to the Journal office in the afternoon, but say they were “chased out” and that the editor refused to see them. They got no answer, and so decided to keep up the fight and make no more advances to the Journal folks.

The parade that had been planned for yesterday morning had to be given up because Chief Devery refused to issue a permit to the boys. Two World drivers and one Journal driver quit work yesterday, according to the strike leaders, because they didn’t care to combat the boys any longer.

William Reese, a negro, was arrested while distributing circulars for the striking newsboys at Third avenue and Forty-second street yesterday. The negro had a bundle of the circulars under his arm and was handing them to passerby. An agent of the World called upon Policeman Phelan to arrest Reese.

“What for?” asked the policeman.

“Why, don’t you see what he’s doing?”rejoined the World man. “They’re advertisements about the World advising people not to buy the paper. The office sent me out to have any one giving out such things arrested.”

The policeman haled the negro to the Yorkville Police Court, and there the World man wanted to make a charge of conspiracy against the prisoner. The policeman finally made a charge of violating a corporation ordinance. Reese said he was a newsboy and distributed the circulars to help along the other boys who were on strike. He did not think he was breaking any law. Magistrate Zeller warned him not to do it again and discharged him.

At noon 300 of the striking newsboys swooped down on five men who were selling the forbidden papers at 125th street and Third avenue. The boys seized the papers and tore them up, filling the streets with the fragments. They chased the men into trolley cars and the the platforms of the elevated roads. At 125th street and Eighth avenue they chased away six men and destroyed their stock. They found eight men at 116th street and Eighth avenue, tore their papers and chased them off the corner. One of the boys, Edward Rowland, was arrested.

Mikki Fischler, 12 years old, and a crowd of other boys were casually clubbing some non-union boys who were selling the boycotted papers at Fifth avenue and Twenty-third street. A policeman caught Mikki and Magistrate Crane fined him $1. Mikki paid the dollar and retired weeping. John Falk, a negro newsboy, was caught belaboring with a club two men who were selling the papers on the Rialto. Magistrate Crane fined him $3.

One of a crowd of parading newsboys jumped on a Third avenue car at Fifth street and snatched a paper from the hand of an old man. The old man grabbed the boy. The boy explained. The old man apologized and contributed a dime to the strike fund.

A crowd of several hundred striking newsboys and their sympathizers discovered two piles of Worlds and Journals on a newsstand at the northeast corner of Second avenue and Forty-second street yesterday afternoon. They charged on the stand, tipped it over, grabbed the papers and had reduced them to strips before the newsdealer knew it. Then they went parading through the streets, yelling in triumph and threatening to to do up anybody they found either selling or buying Worlds and Journals. Policeman Zuck of the East Fifty-first street station attempted to disperse the boys. They attacked Zuck, hurling sticks, stones and old cans at him. Zuck stood it as long as he could and then retired to a nearby store. Among the things hurled at him was a bar of iron six inches long.

The Staten Island newsboys refused yesterday to buy the boycotted papers, and in Tompkinsville, Stapleton and Clifton, they held up the newspaper delivery wagons, pelted the drivers and discouraged would-be customers.

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y., July 24—Two hundred newsboys of this city, who decided to join the strike against the evening editions of the World and Journal, went out to-day. This morning the strikers assembled early at the railroad stations. Nearly every one of them carried a club of some description. At the Harlem station a mob surrounded Walter Gulliver, a dealer, who was on hand to sell the Worlds, and by threats of violence compelled him to join their ranks. The boy afterward became one of the most enthusiastic strikers, proving his fealty to the union by getting arrested for assaulting another agent of the World. A large crowd of strikers gathered at the New Haven Railroad station to await the earlier editions of the World and Journal. They had made all arrangements when the first train pulled in to seize the papers and tear them up, but the police drove the boys away. Later they attacked Arthur and Solomon Loevine, the World wholesale agents, and tore up their papers. P. T. Barguet, the wholesale agent for the Journal, armed a boy with a club and put him out on the corner of the leading business street to take the trade of the strikers. They boy had been on the street only a few minutes when a mob of strikers surrounded him and snatched his papers. Mr. Barguet, who had been watching the proceedings from his store, ran after the boys. Just as he was about to close in on them and recapture his property an outside stepped between him and the fugitives and shut off further pursuit. Barguet returned to his store and made no further attempt to sell Journals.

In the afternoon nearly fifty newsboys surrounded the Loevine brothers, and, after giving them a terrible beating, demolished their wagon and sent the horse off at a dead gallop down the street. About twenty boys threw the Loevines into the gutter and hammered and kicked them, while others broke the wagon into splinters and tore up the papers. The horse was beaten until he tore loose from the wagon and ran off down the street. The police arrested Thomas Madden, an outsider, and John Charge, a newsboy, and took them to the police station, followed by a crowd of about 1,000 people.

To-morrow, it is said, strikes will be declared by the newsboys in Yonkers, New Rochelle, and other towns in Westchester county.

PLAINSFIELD, N.J., July 24.—The strike among the local newsboys against handling or selling evening editions of the World and Journal reached an exciting point this afternoon. The boys gathered at the North avenue railroad station and met the various New York trains that carried the papers. In every instance they successfully prevented the sale of the papers, and in most cases they secured the package of papers and destroyed them. Philip Vanarsdale, the local agent for the Journal, was riding from the station on his wheel, carrying about eighty papers. The boys succeeded in knocking the papers from under his arm, and before he could do anything had them completely destroyed. Thomas Timbo, the agent for the World, did not send any papers on the streets. The police seemed inclined to favor the newsboys. During the afternoon and evening it was almost impossible to purchase a copy of either of the boycotted papers. There are about fifty boys on strike, and they declare they will neither sell nor handle the two papers until the publishers return to the former price.

TRENTON, N.J., July 24.—The newsboys of Trenton, about a hundred in number, who sell the evening editions of the World and Journal, held a meeting to-day and decided not to handle those papers again until their price is reduced from 60 cents to 50 cents a hundred. Tob Duck is the leader of the movement. he, Johnny Driscoll, Scadsy McGuidre and Joh Lipman called at the local newspaper offices to-night to say the strike would begin to-morrow and that any boy found selling the papers would get a slugging and maybe something worse. They declared further that the agents from whom they get their supply of Worlds and Journals would be rotten-egged on their wagons if they made any attempt to distribute the red-headed extras. The leading newsdealers declare that the boys have their sympathy and that they also will refrain from handling the papers while the strike lasts.

ELIZABETH, N.J., July 24.—The strike of the newsboys against the Evening World and Journal has spread to this city, and to-day the papers were handled by only a few newsdealers. The newsboys organized on Saturday night and they refused to take copies of the boycotted journals. Agents of the yellow journals distributed papers free, but the few “scabs” who accepted them were help up by the other boys and forced off the streets.

NEW HAVEN, Conn., July 24.—The newsboys of this city have joined in the strike against the evening editions of the World and Journal and to-day they asked Mayor Driscoll for permission to hold a massmeeting on the New Haven Green on Saturday night next to protest against their treatment by these two papers. They have decided that they will no longer pay war prices for these papers. Their leader is named McCarthy, and he went to New York on Saturday night to confer with the leaders of the newsboys’ strike there.

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TROY NEWSBOYS IN THE FIGHT

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They Boycott the World and Journal, and Try to Prevent Others from Selling Them.

TROY, July 24–The newsboys of this city have caught the strike fever. This afternoon, upon the arrival of the New York papers, nearly every newsboy in town declared his intention to boycott the World and Journal, and accordingly arranged to prevent the sale of these papers by other boys. Dealers who have been accustomed to handling the papers found that none of the boys would accept them.

A meeting of the newsboys has been called for to-morrow night, when plans will be arranged whereby all boys will be prevented from handling the boycotted papers.

Several fights occurred between newsboys this afternoon, and in one of them a boy named Perry was struck on the head with a stone, rendering him unconscious. Several agents for the boycotted papers have been threatened, and according to a sta’ement of one of the aggrieved newsboys the newsstands selling the boycotted papers will be stormed. The newsboys made a demonstration this afternoon, parading the principal streets of the city with banners inscribed: “Boycott the World and Journal.”

#newsies #newsies 1992 #newsies live #historical #newsboys strike of 1899 #the newsies rally #newspapers #i was informed this was all online when i was already a column through #and just kept with it #tw racial slurs #because 1899

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platypanthewriter · 4 years ago

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The Prince and the Pauper (who drives an Uber) Ch. 6

(Prince Steve flees his wedding, and asks his Uber driver to take him bowling...and on a date. WIP) Part One | Two | Three | Four | Five

Billy’s phone rang seconds after the bell did, and he sat his books back down, checking to see whether it was Max’s school, and she’d finally decked that one kid that kept—but it wasn’t, it was Steve’s bowling picture, and Billy grabbed his books awkwardly and ducked around the people coming in for the next class, tucking his phone against his shoulder. “Steve,” he said.

“Tell me I’m not a moron,” Steve said. He sounded like he’d been running.

“You are a moron,” Billy said absently, crouching against the corridor wall to stuff his notebook and textbook into his bag. There was silence on the other end, and he bit his lip, considering. “I mean, uh.”

“...you’re such a help,” Steve said dryly.

“You’re into me,” Billy told him, and Steve groaned.

“No, that’s smart.”

“Then you’re smart! Ha,” Billy said, smirking, and Steve laughed, and blew air through his cheeks.

“...I have to sign a treaty today,” he said softly. “I had everyone else read it, all the smart people, but—but if it’s wrong, it’s still my fault.”

“Hey, hey,” Billy said, frowning. Somebody banged into him from behind, and he realized he’d stopped dead in the middle of the hallway. “Your Royalship—”

“This is why the people should elect their leaders,” Steve groaned, his voice hoarse. “I failed debate class! I—I’ve been reading so much about taxes, and—and water rights—the letters are blurring, and I don’t think I know any more than I did yesterd—”

“Breathe,” Billy told him, walking as fast as he could to the open balcony, and a blast of heat. “Babe. Breathe for me.” Steve took a shaky breath, and Billy bit his lips together hard against the need to curse himself for being such a fucking cunt. “Shit,” Billy whispered, and Steve started snickering. “You—you’re not a moron,” Billy admitted.

“I’m trying not to be,” Steve said softly. “Y’know they say royalty’s all inbred. Maybe that’s my problem, I probably have dumb royal braincells—”

Billy rolled his eyes. His skin shone with sweat already, and he let his eyes close against the glare. “Shut up, you’re not a moron. Did somebody say something shitty to you? ‘Cause I’ll fight ‘em.”

“I think if you punched the Minister of Agriculture, he’d die,” Steve said, laughing, with a sniffle. “He’s like a hundred years old.”

“Sounds like it’s time for me to punch him,” Billy growled, and smiled, listening to Steve giggle. “You tell me and I’m on a plane.”

“Maybe I should,” Steve said. “I’d get to see you.”

Billy shut his eyes tightly against the burst of fondness that rose and heated his cheeks, and when he could, laughed. “If you need me, I’ll figure it out,” he promised.

“I’ll be all right,” Steve said. “I just—” he sighed. “There just—there are some regulations that...somebody’s telling me they’re for safety, and we can’t let the corporations get away with, you know, giving people botulism—”

“Sounds pretty legit,” Billy nodded, biting his lip.

“But I’ve got somebody else saying it’s actually this new unnecessary process that wastes a bunch of food, and it’s just a way to drive the smaller growers out by making them adopt all this mechanical stuff—”

“...which one does that guy say?” Billy asked, leaning his elbows on the cement edge of the balcony. “The one that called you a moron.”

“Oh, he didn’t, he wouldn’t say it,” Steve laughed, sounding disheartened. “He just—”

“Do whatever he doesn’t want,” Billy hissed, and Steve’s laugh turned more genuine.

“No, no, he’s, uh, he is conservative, but he...he means well,” Steve sighed. “I don’t—”

“Okay,” Billy considered. “Who’s the most onboard with your unionizing?”

“What?”

“That isn’t patronizing at all. There somebody like that?”

“Ah,” Steve was quiet for a long moment, and Billy watched a lady down below unlock her car, climb in and roll down the windows, burn herself on the steering wheel, and scramble out to stand in the shade. “Maybe,” Steve said in a small voice. “But that’s got nothing to do with—”

“Go see what they think. They might at least know who’s in it for profits.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve said. “I lo—” he cut off, clearing his throat. “I’m so glad I met you, Billy Hargrove.”

Billy’s heart was pounding with what he’d thought Steve was about to say, and he drew a slow breath, wide-eyed. “I’m pretty fucking happy I met you too,” he said back, feeling a little choked.

“Miss you,” Steve whispered, and Billy laughed, wanting to cry.

“Get your posh ass back here then,” he said.

The next day when he got home there were no lights on in any of the windows in the whole complex, and no porch lights. In the light of the street lamps over the parking area, he could see extension cords going in through the windows in half the apartments, like they’d all suddenly forgotten about fire hazards, and blankets stuffed in the gaps. He usually sat in the car for a minute, finishing out a song, and soaking in the last of the AC before he had to walk through the late night heat to their apartment building, but he slammed the door and stumbled in the darkness of the street door to the apartment stairs. When he ran around and up, there were no lights on in the hallways, and the heat was so thick it had weight. He unlocked the door by the light of his phone, and yelled for his sister, walking into what felt like a refrigerator.

“It’s fine,” came her voice, shouting through a door, and then closer. “The landlord didn’t pay the electricity bill,” she said, in a familiar voice that meant she was grimacing. “I, uh, I got some dry ice like the um, like, uh, it’s in the freezer and fridge.”

“What,” said Billy, finding her in the dim light from the digital display on the A/C unit plugged in in the middle of the kitchen, and awkwardly touching her shoulder. “Where’d this thing come from? Max. Tell me what’s going on. How long has the power been off.”

“Uh,” she said again, making a face, and then folding her arms. “I thought...you were working late tonight.”

“...did you think I wouldn’t notice there were no lights when I came in?!” he hissed, stalking away to sit wrong-way-round on a kitchen chair, and lean his head on his arms.

“No!” She waved her hands, an orangey grey blur in the darkness. “No, no, uh—it’s—um. I just—”

The power came on in a chorus of hums from the fridge and the overhead fluorescent lights, and the usual AC clicked on over the window with a wheeze. “...they got it back on,” he breathed, his shoulders dropping. “Do—do we have to pay the—is the money just gone, the money we paid for utilities? I can’t afford to—”

“Legally,” Max said, stepping forward to touch his elbow, “—it’s on him. It’s not on us. We won’t have to move, unless he pays for us to move.”

“What?” Billy asked, lifting his head, but Max’s phone rang, and she waved him away as she answered.

“...yeah, it’s back on,” she said, glancing back at Billy, and grimacing again. “Um, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that’s all—no, we’re okay. It’s only been off a few hours! No, we’re—we’re really—thank you. Oh, really?” She snorted. “What happens to people who live in her buildings, then? Oh. Haha, sounds like she deserves it. Thank you. Wha—?” She listened for a few minutes, as Billy’s suspicions heightened, and then laughed again, sounding a little disbelieving. “Oh. Oh, no, um, the air conditioner’s great, I can box it back up for—oh. Uh, really?” Her brows drew together as she stared at it, and Billy registered the box it had come in, sitting to the side.

“Shit,” he whispered, quietly, into his sleeves, and waited for his step-sister to get off the phone. She bit her lips together, avoiding his eyes, and he cleared his throat. “They turned the power off,” he prompted her, and she nodded. “...and you called Steve.”

She nodded again, hunching her shoulders.

“He’s in charge of a country—”

“Yeah, I thought maybe he knew some lawyers,” she hissed back, and Billy's stomach went into freefall.

“You asked him to hire lawyers,” he whispered, registering that as a kid, she’d thrown down the only defense she had access to. “—and he sent over an AC unit, jesus. ...why didn’t you let me handle it? Why didn’t—you didn’t even call me—”

“You were working!” she yelled. “You were working all last night—"

"The power was off yesterday?!" he shouted back, "—there's a heat advisory—there are people collapsing out there—"

"You were at school all morning," she screamed back. "—I thought—I thought you’d be gone all night—”

Billy flinched at her volume, his eyes burning. “Sorry! Jesus, Max, I’m—I’m fucking sorry, okay, but you can’t just—”

“I couldn’t even make cup noodles,” she shouted, sounding like she wanted to cry herself, and Billy clenched his fists around the back of the chair, instead of running back downstairs to work more hours, or stomping off to sleep in his room.

“I have to work!” he yelled back. “I could have brought you some food, you didn’t even call me—”

“You said you trusted him!” she said, a little more quietly, her clenched fists shaking, and Billy remembered the look she had, her jaw set, too wary to look at him. He remembered it from living at home, and felt worse.

“I did say that,” he said numbly. “...fine.” She flinched back as he stood, and he froze, his eyes blurring with tears. “Sorry you had to...do that,” he said through gritted teeth. “I—I’ll call the—them, so next bullshit she tries, you don’t have to...deal with it.”

“I dealt with it fine,” she muttered, and Billy’s hands strained on the back of the chair until it creaked.

“...sorry,” he whispered, turning away to his room.

“Shut up!” she yelled after him, and Billy shouted back a “You shut up!” before he slammed the door, and sank down against it, and fumbled his phone out. He’d dialed before he realized it was two am in Greece, and he frantically shut it off, letting his head thump back against the door, and then thumping it harder a second and third time.

He stopped as his phone rang with Prince Charming’s song from Snow White.

“Sorry,” he answered, in a weird uneven hiss, and cleared his throat. “I’m so fucking sorry, now I fucking woke you up, I’m such a fucking moron—useless—asshole—”

“Billy,” Steve said, authoritative, and Billy sat up straighter, closing his eyes and clenching his fingers in his jeans.

“Y-yeah,” he whispered. He wondered whether it was worth apologizing again, and tried not to sniffle as he felt his tears spill over down his cheeks.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked, and Billy let out a sob before he buried it in his sleeves.

“Of-of course I’m okay,” he laughed hoarsely. “My sister called my boyfriend ‘cause she knew I was useless, and he—he probably skipped a fucking—UN meeting or some shit—probably peace-talking with Iran right now and we’ll go to war because my air conditioning got turned off, and I’m so fucking useless my sister called you—”

“Billy. Billy,” Steve said again, in the calm voice Billy associated with his kinder teachers. “It was forty-nine degrees there, malaka, I checked online. And it took like thirty seconds, I just told my PA to make a call—”

“Shit, I probably owe you a million dollars in—in legal fees,” Billy realized aloud, letting his head thud back against the door again as he turned the number 49 in his head. He couldn’t make sense of it until he remembered with a shaky huff of laughter that Steve was a prince where they used celsius. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“You—no you don’t,” Steve huffed. “What the hell are you—Billy.” He sighed, and Billy pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, sighing into the warm fabric of his sleeves. “You don’t owe me anything, you don’t—” Steve started again, sounding annoyed, and Billy waited, shutting his eyes tighter. “I’m not that important, love, you’re not going to cause a war.”

“What,” Billy breathed, his comprehension stalling out in the middle.

“You can always call me,” Steve told him, breathing a little faster, and Billy pictured him pacing around his gold-and-marble room, walking over his bed in huge steps like it was steep terrain, and scrabbling at his hair. Billy took a slow breath, listening, as Steve repeated. “I love you. You can always call me.”

“Shit. I thought—” Billy took another deep, shaky breath, trying to focus his thoughts as he wiped more tears off his cheeks and relaxed, sliding sideways to curl up on his side against the foot of the door. “I get another chance still, huh?”

“...you thought I’d...dump you,” Steve said slowly.

“But you didn’t,” Billy laughed, giggling with relief. “Shit. God. You don’t—you don’t have to say shit like that, I’m not—I’m fine, jesus. Jesus.”

“Why’re you laughing?” Steve asked, and Billy laughed harder, wiping his eyes.

“Can’t believe you’re okay with this,” Billy whispered. “I figured—”

“You can ask for help,” Steve interrupted, and Billy smiled wider, curling around his phone.

“You just wanna strip show later, right?” he whispered, keeping his voice flirty when he wanted to snicker.

“...I seriously don’t know whether you’re kidding,” Steve said, and Billy sighed, pushing himself to your feet.

“...d’you want me to be?”

“I flubbed it and told you I loved you because you sounded upset, and you haven’t said anything, and now you’re laughing at me,” Steve growled, but he sounded a little whiny, and Billy wanted to wrap him in a soft sweatshirt again, and then unwrap him entirely, and kiss every square inch of his body.

“Uhhh,” he said to break the silence, his face heating as he thought of humiliating ways to reply.

“I’m going back to bed,” Steve sighed, and Billy spun to pace in his little room, hoping—like an idiot—that they were pacing in synch.

“No, no, wait,” he mumbled, then groaned. “I—I heard you, I thought—” he trailed off, and the silence lengthened. Finally, Billy forced out “What did you mean?”

“What?!” Steve laughed.

“What does that even—”

“Billy—”

“No, look, we—we fucked, right,” Billy said, waving his hand in a decisive chopping motion.

“...we fucked,” Steve said, real quiet, and Billy dropped to lay across his bed, staring at the ceiling.

“We fucked. A couple times. And—and now I call you sometimes when you’re flipping your shit—”

“Or when you are,” Steve put in, and Billy pulled the blanket over his head, groaning.

“I don’t—I didn’t that much, jesus. I flipped out a couple times, you—” Billy spoke louder, over Steve’s sputtering, “—you call me when I’m freaking out, asshole, you know you do that, Max fucking tells you, I didn’t ask for that, I don’t—”

“Why does this sound like I’m accused of a crime,” Steve muttered, and Billy stopped with his mouth still open, then closed it.

“No,” he said, thinking. “No, I didn’t—I don’t mean that, I mean...I just mean—you can’t—”

“I can’t what?” Steve asked.

“You can’t fall in love with a hot Uber driver you meet for like...a week,” Billy sighed. “Just because I told you some like...jokes. A couple times.”

“Billy. I have known you for months,” Steve told him, with the carefully articulated syllables of someone trying to sound patient.

“We haven’t even been able to talk much—”

“We talk nearly every day!” Steve laughed, sounding upset, and Billy’s eyes widened as he bit his lips, considering.

“...no,” he said quietly, laughing. “No fucking way.”

“...I’m going to hang up,” Steve said, and Billy sat up under the blanket.

“No, no, wait, you can’t—I’m not—it’s just—”

“I’m tired,” Steve told him, sounding kind of sad, and Billy scrambled for something to say.

“No, there hasn’t been a musical number,” he said, curling around his phone again to concentrate on Steve’s voice as he waited to see whether his prince would laugh.

“...what?!” Steve asked. “The hell are you—”

“I can fall for you,” Billy told him, feeling like the five short words took all his oxygen. “I—I can. F-fall in...but y-you’re a prince. Th-there hasn’t been a musical number.”

“...you saying you’re in love with me?” Steve asked, and Billy wanted to hide, his pounding heart telling him to say it, or Steve would be hurt, but also not to, because Billy Hargrove’s love wasn’t valuable enough to take up somebody’s time.

“...you tromped right the fuck into my—my heart when you tried to buy a plush winged buffalo,” Billy admitted, realizing he sounded a little pissed, which was truthful enough. “And I don’t need a fucking musical number. Even—even if you hadn’t called, y’know. Gotten in touch. Every time I hear your voice you’re a little more in here. I—I wake up thinking maybe I’ll hear from my prince today, try to—try to think of funny shit to say so you’ll keep calling…”

Steve made a noise like he was trying to laugh underwater.

“I reread your texts all the time when I need…” Billy trailed off, and took another deep breath. “You’re like a—a goddamn air freshener, I look at you and I—I listen to your dumb voice and it—everything’s—better,” he forced out. “Had to stop calling just to listen to your voicemail,” he admitted quietly. “‘Cause you kept calling me back. No matter what time it was, you’d call me back, and—and asking what—I-I there wasn’t anything I wanted, I just wanted...you.”

“Please keep calling my voicemail,” Steve laughed, sniffling. “I thought I scared you off, or—or maybe you were trying to leave bad news. How come you only call when you think I won’t answer?! I’ll always answer—”

“Don’t tell me this shit,” Billy hissed, “—I’ll take you up on this crap, I will, you’ll get fifty calls a day because I had to leave class—I was thinking about your dumb face today and I kept smiling at the professor and she thought I was high—”

“No!” Steve shouted back, laughing. “No, keep doing it! I want you thinking about me, you can—you can always—just call and tell me—”

Billy stuck out his tongue and blew loudly. “Oh, yeah,” he snorted. “Prince Steven, I’m horny. Ignore that—that ambassador, and watch me take my shirt off, your majesty—”

“Let me get somewhere I can unzip my slacks,” Steve laughed, and Billy snorted so hard he choked, coughing. “Make some requests, maybe.”

“What d’you wanna request?” Billy asked, letting his voice come out husky. “I’m in bed, by the way. Bring it on.”

“You got time?” Steve asked, and Billy could hear his smile. “I want video of you saying you love me.”

“Fuck you,” Billy mumbled, wide-eyed. “What the shit—”

“I’ll call you from somewhere public,” Steve whispered. “Somewhere nobody can hear me, but everyone can see me, and I’ll talk you off.”

“Holy shit,” Billy breathed.

“Send me video of you in a hoodie,” Steve said. “Tell me you love me,” and Billy’s face heated enough to be the sole cause of the current heat advisory.

“No!” he hissed back, muffled, because he’d buried his face in the pillow. He was fairly sure it’d combust. “Fuck you! No!”

“Don’t you want me telling you how to touch yourself in my sash and uniform,” Steve whispered, snickering. “I’ll wear my crown. You know you want me to—”

“Oh my god,” Billy wheezed. “Now I do. What fucking kink even is that?!”

“I’ll go out on some palace balcony,” Steve said. “Maybe I’ll wave. While you’re squirming around with your hand on your dick. I’ll say stuff like ‘god, you sound amazing, babe,’ and ‘good job’.”

“...you motivational speaker,” Billy muttered, meaning it to insult.

“Do I get my video?”

“I don’t know, how good a job d’I have to do to hear it,” Billy shot back, then realized what he said, and buried his face again.

“...you wanna hear you did a good job?” Steve asked, and Billy mumbled ‘damn it, damn it, damn it’ into his pillow. “I can’t tell you you did a good job on my video until I get it, but I know you will,” he said, and Billy shivered.

“I was just kidding—” he tried to interrupt, but Steve just got louder.

“—you do such a good job with your sister, you’re amazing, taking classes and working, you’re not even twenty years old—” Billy groaned incoherently into his pillow, but Steve didn’t stop. “You always know what to say because you listen to me, like you listen to Max, you’re so good at that, you’re so good for me—”

Billy squirmed, shifting in his jeans, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, wishing his eyes would stop burning.

“I could have ended up in anyone’s car,” said Steve, “—I was—I was upset, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and—you—you were really good to me,” he mumbled, starting to sound embarrassed himself. “Say something.”

Billy took a deep, slow breath. “—walked in today and I thought—I realized Max got you to call us lawyers and I…” his breath gave out, and he shut his eyes tightly, pressing his lips together. Steve took a breath, but stayed quiet. “Thought you—thought you’d leave me hangin’,” Billy whispered, laughing. “Last, uh, last straw, this American slut dickhead who keeps taking you for more money.”

“I want to help,” Steve told him, hoarsely. “Billy. I want to help you.”

“You don’t have to!” Billy said, smiling into the middle distance, his eyes stinging with tears. “It’s not—that’s not what you’re for, your highness, you don’t always have to help.”

“I want to,” Steve huffed.

“You’d be perfect already if you were poor and stingy,” Billy told him, narrowing his eyes. “Stop overachieving. The hell am I supposed to say ‘love you’ to somebody like you. Whole universe just popped up an error window.”

“No, it didn’t,” Steve breathed, and Billy could hear him beaming through the phone. “Fuck do you mean musical number. You saying I have to write you a song? Because I—”

“No,” Billy interrupted, his eyes widening in horror. “No, I’m giving you shit, because you’re a prince—”

“Perform in karaoke? Should I rent some big venue, Billy?”

“No, no, no no no,” Billy sat up in bed, staring at the wall. “What?! No!”

“Tough crowd,” Steve said, laughing like a shithead, and Billy tried to resist snickering, his eyes widening in dread.

“No, no, it was a joke, you dumb fuck—”

“I’ll have to do both—”

“How do you even—” Billy roared, and Steve snickered.

“I better go get started,” he said, sing-songing it. “Did you know I can play the guitar?”

“Of course you fucking can,” Billy breathed. “You’re amazing. Stop, stop this right now—”

“Gonna write you a love song—” Steve sang, and to Billy’s horrified and charmed embarrassment, it sounded good.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

Steve made a kissy noise into the phone. “Love you too, babe. That’s just for practise, of course, ‘til I get that song done! Just keep saying I love you. Gotta get it right. Love you, love you, love you! Am I saying it right? It’s hard for princes to say these things without singing—”

“Shut up,” Billy croaked, like a frog.

“I need a rhyming dictionary for our musical number,” Steve sang, snickering, and Billy growled. “Maybe I’ll work my way up from limericks. Dick limericks. To dick sonnets. To dick epics—”

Billy hung up on him.

My other Harringrove stuff

#Harringrove #Billy helps his prince #Steve helps his Billy #They talk through some things #Fluff and angst #gooey idiots

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patriotsnet · 4 years ago

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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents�� Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

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ramrodd · 4 years ago

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Is Confederate Memorial Day a thing?

COMMENTARY:

Yes.

Southerners I consider Patriots include those who took orders from Robert E. Lee during the war and followed his example religously, after the war, in terms of citizenship and patriotism as it is defined by Socrates and Romans 13:1 - 7. They are all dead, now, but they continue to be represented in the US military and as Civil War Re-enactors with uniforms from both armies in his/her costume department.

The South took a stupid bet but the soldiers who underwrote it acted with republican virtue and unsurpassed valor. The theory they defended turned out to be not just fallacy but deliberately fraudulent, like the Big Lie. Slavery was the Big Lie that depended upon a heretical understanding of the Torah in the light of Resurrection.

But the Southern comrades-in-arms were as American as their Union opponents and those who took orders from Grant during the battle and endorsed his example of mercy in the terms and spirit of the surrender. And they would celebrate their common patriotism without much ceremony, except at occassions like the 50th Anniversy of Gettysburg at Gettysburg, The Colored Troops of the Union were something of the step-children of Memorial Day until Colin Powell got that Buffaloo Soldiers memorial put up.

And, of course, the US Army was a Southern instiution when I was growing up: consider the barracks culture of From Here to Eternity. I mean, can you name a WWII Navy war movier where a white Southern drawl doesn’t present itself as comic relief even when it’s Patton. Or adult leadership when it’s a Marine DI of African pursuasion, as genteel white ladies would say.

The people who are Confederate stolen valor are the white supremacists who employ St. Adrew’s Cross as an instrument of domestic terrorism, to wit:

This is an American Jihadist. PBS had a segment about Jarole of ISIS last night and all Jihadis are in it for the money and the power, just like Texas Republicans. This is empirical evidence of the GOP Shadow Agenda aka Deep State. You can trace this guy back to Newt Gingrich, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Donald T. Regan in terms of cash flows and Citizens United. It’s a Free Market Mercenary agenda to implement the insurgent agenda of the Powell Memo. This guy wants to be able to ride around in a pick-up truck with 7 or 8 other open carry ammosexuals with a huge Confederate battle flag and/or Trump banner streaming from their mounts behind the driver and shotgun enforcing the NRA version of the 2nd Amendment and Oath Keepers version of SS mythology.

They talk Memorial Day patriotism sitting on the john, but they are in it for the money and mayhem.

In terms of Memorial Day for the republican patriot, Robert E. Lee defines George Washington relative to Socrates and Romans 13:1 - 7.

Plato’s “Republic” is based on the sociology of Sparta. Socrates was a big fan of Sparta for reasons that elude me, except that he was a combat veteran and that experience soured him on democracy. I don’t know if Plato was influenced by the Roman Republic in his portrait, but the example of Rome becoming a functional empire doesn’t seem to be understood by Plato. He seems to misunderstand the Philosopher King as the natural Emperor role, but the Roman emperor was an executive function for the bureaucratic structures that emerged from the secular rule of law. The actual Roman Philosopher King in the Roman commonwealth is SPQR: the Senate and the People of Rome and the Emperor represented a Servant Leader function like our federal government.

In our constitutional form of government, We, the People, are the Philospher Kings and represent an organic Athenian democracy inclusive of everyone within our boarders. We, the People, hire the emperor role to run the bureacracy of the Republic, aka, the federal government. Congress has a Ways and Means relationship to the republican servant leaders and, are themselves, Servant Leaders who are hired by We, the People, to get the biggest bang for the tax payers buck practical. Neither Plato’s Republic nor the Roman Republic have these mechanism, which originated with John Knox Book of Discipline and conveyed by Federalist 10.

It all has to do with Romans 13:1 - 7 and how the American Jihanist are in violation of that core principle of which guarantees our freedoms and liberties free of charge and a human right.

I’m an Army brat and I have absolutely no problem honoring the Confederat Soldier on Memorial Day and, as a combat veteran, I can extend that sentiment to foreign soldiers, such as the NVA I faced in Vietnam.

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers don’t fall into that catagory. They acted like they were Soviet soldiers hanging a flag from the Reischtag. That’s exactly what Robert E. Lee asked his veterans not to do, but to renew their relationship as citizens and patriots with the US Constituion and to serve it as dutifully as they had him.

The fighting spirit of the Confederate Soldier went ashore on Omaha Beach with the 29th Infantry. That’s why there is a Memorial Day for Confederat Soldiers.

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blackkudos · 5 years ago

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Don Shirley

Donald Walbridge Shirley (January 29, 1927 – April 6, 2013) was an American classical and jazz pianist and composer. He recorded many albums for Cadence Records during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. He wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of "Variations" on the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld.

Born in Pensacola, Florida, Shirley was a promising young student of classical piano. Although he did not achieve recognition in his early career playing traditional classical music, he found success with his blending of various musical traditions.

During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Deep South states. For a time, he hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. Their story was dramatized in the 2018 film Green Book.

Biography

Early life

Donald Walbridge Shirley was born on January 29, 1927, in Pensacola, Florida, to Jamaican immigrants, Stella Gertrude (1903–1936), a teacher, and Edwin S. Shirley (1885–1982), an Episcopal priest.

Shirley started to learn piano when he was two years old. He briefly enrolled at Virginia State University and Prairie View College, then studied with Conrad Bernier and Thaddeus Jones at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he received his bachelor's degree in music in 1953.

Known as "Dr. Shirley," he had two honorary doctorates.

His birthplace was sometimes incorrectly given as Kingston, Jamaica, because his label advertised him as being Jamaican-born. According to some sources, Shirley traveled to the Soviet Union to study piano and music theory at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music. According to his nephew, Edwin, his record label falsely claimed that he studied music in Europe to "make him acceptable in areas where a Black man from a Black school wouldn’t have got any recognition at all."

Career: 1945–1953

In 1945, at the age of 18, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A year later, Shirley performed one of his compositions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1949, he received an invitation from the Haitian government to play at the Exposition Internationale du Bi-Centenaire de Port-au-Prince, followed by a request from President Estimé and Archbishop Joseph-Marie Le Gouaze for a repeat performance the next week.

Shirley was married to Jean C. Hill in Cook County, Illinois on December 23, 1952, but they later divorced.

Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for classical black musicians, Shirley abandoned the piano as a career for a time. He studied psychology at the University of Chicago and began work in Chicago as a psychologist. There he returned to music. He was given a grant to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime, which had broken out in the postwar era of the early 1950s. Playing in a small club, he experimented with sound to determine how the audience responded. The audience was unaware of his experiments and that students had been planted to gauge their reactions.

Career: 1954–2013

At Arthur Fiedler's invitation, Shirley appeared with the Boston Pops in Chicago in June 1954. In 1955, he performed with the NBC Symphony at the premiere of Ellington's Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. He also appeared on TV on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Shirley recorded many albums for Cadence Records, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. In 1961, his single "Water Boy" reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 14 weeks. He performed in New York City at Basin Street East, where Duke Ellington heard him and they started a friendship.

During the 1960s, Shirley went on a number of concert tours, some in Southern states, believing that he could change some minds with his performances. For his initial tour, in 1962, he hired New York nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. Their story is dramatized in the 2018 film Green Book, the name of a travel guide for black motorists in the segregated United States. In the fictionalized account, despite some early friction with their differing personalities, the two became good friends. This has been questioned by Don's brother Maurice Shirley, who said, "My brother never considered Tony to be his 'friend'; he was an employee, his chauffeur (who resented wearing a uniform and cap). This is why context and nuance are so important. The fact that a successful, well-to-do Black artist would employ domestics that did not look like him, should not be lost in translation."

However, in a January 2019 interview with Variety, Tony's son Nick Vallelonga explained that: "They were together a year and a half and they did remain friends". He also explained that Shirley, before his death, asked him not to speak to anyone else while writing the story. He went on to explain: "Don Shirley himself told me not to speak to anyone. And he only wanted certain parts of his life. He only allowed me to tell what happened on the trip. Since [the family] were not on the trip—this is right out of his mouth—he said, 'No one else was there but your father and I. We've told you.' And he approved what I put in and didn't put in. So obviously, to say I didn't contact them, that was hard for me because I didn't want to betray what I promised him."

The film controversially depicts Shirley as estranged from his family and alienated from other African Americans. Shirley's surviving family members disputed this, stating that he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, attended the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and had many friends among other African American artists and leaders. He had three brothers, and according to his family kept in contact with them. Author David Hajdu, who met and befriended Shirley in the 1990s through composer Luther Henderson, wrote: "the man I knew was considerably different from the character Ali portrayed with meticulous elegance [in Green Book]. [Shirley was] cerebral but disarmingly earthy, mercurial, self-protective, and intolerant of imperfections in all things, particularly music, he was as complex and uncategorizable as his sui generis music."

In late 1968, Shirley performed the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Detroit Symphony. He also worked with the Chicago Symphony and the National Symphony Orchestra. He wrote symphonies for the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. He played as soloist with the orchestra at Milan's La Scala opera house in a program dedicated to George Gershwin's music. Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, who was a contemporary of Shirley's, said of him, "His virtuosity is worthy of Gods."

Death

Shirley died of heart disease on April 6, 2013, at the age of 86.

Discography

Tonal Expressions (Cadence, 1955)

Orpheus in the Underworld (Cadence, 1956)

Piano Perspectives (Cadence, 1956)

Don Shirley Duo (Cadence, 1956)

Don Shirley with Two Basses (Cadence, 1957)

Improvisations (Cadence, 1957)

Don Shirley (Audio Fidelity, 1959)

Don Shirley Solos (Cadence, 1959)

Don Shirley Plays Love Songs (Cadence, 1960)

Don Shirley Plays Gershwin (Cadence, 1960)

Don Shirley Plays Standards (Cadence, 1960)

Don Shirley Plays Birdland Lullabies (Cadence, 1960)

Don Shirley Plays Showtunes (Cadence, 1960)

Don Shirley Trio (Cadence, 1961)

Piano Arrangements of Spirituals (Cadence, 1962)

Pianist Extraordinary (Cadence, 1962)

Piano Spirituals (1962)

Don Shirley Presents Martha Flowers (1962)

Drown in My Own Tears (Cadence, 1962)

Water Boy (Columbia, 1965)

The Gospel According to Don Shirley (Columbia, 1969)

Don Shirley in Concert (Columbia, 1969)

The Don Shirley Point of View (Atlantic, 1972)

Home with Donald Shirley (2001)

Don Shirley's Best (Cadence, 2010)

#01/29 #04/06

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beinglibertarian · 6 years ago

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Freedom Dividend & Ditching The GDP?

Ten days after the midterm election, Andrew Yang gathered a group of about forty people, mostly college students and active community members, in Iowa City, Iowa, to discuss the 2020 presidential election. Yang one of six Democrats already declared, and maybe the most active one so far. He’s spent the second most money, behind John Delaney, who announced last year, and he’s appeared at Iowa state Democrat functions and held rallies across the country. I had the chance to sit down with him after his rally and discuss his lengthy platform.

One thing that was clear about Yang is that he is intelligent, articulate, and has done his homework. His website has his views on 73 different issues and policy proposals. He could talk in depth on just about all of them. The biggest piece of his platform is his idea for a Universal Basic Income, which he calls a “freedom dividend,” but it isn’t the only idea he’s trying to bring to the forefront of political discussion. He also wants to modernize the metric for national success, which is currently the Gross Domestic Product, and provide an alternate currency for community involvement. Make no mistakes, he’s not a libertarian. But he has interesting ideas that merit discussion.

If I was a Democrat and could only have five candidates to choose from, I’d want Yang to be one. His ideas are new and different, and still boldly progressive. He’s a genuine, intelligent, and well-spoken man. And if I was a Trump supporter and wanted a sure victory, I would not want Andrew Yang to be nominated. That is not to say that Trump couldn’t defeat Yang (his ideas are fringe, and UBI is largely untested anywhere, let alone in the US), but it wouldn’t be as sure as facing Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker, polarizing politicians with a wealth of public exposure to pick at. Instead, Yang is the opposite of Trump, without picking up the incredible baggage of a career politician. He also is focusing on solutions for the swing-state voters who handed Trump the 2016 victories, who were largely blue collar.

The following is a transcript of an interview between Andrew Yang and myself. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Bartholomew: So to start off, for those who are unfamiliar, who are you, and why are you running for President?

Yang: I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for president in 2020 because I’m convinced that we’re going through the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our government and leaders are asleep at the switch. So, I’m running to modernize our economy, which includes a “freedom dividend” of $1,000 per American citizen, adult, per month.

B: And, I guess, what’s more of your background? What did you do for a living?

Y: Sure, so I’m a serial entrepreneur, I’ve started several companies, I was the CEO of an education company that grew to become #1 in the United States and was acquired by a public company in 2009, and then after that I started an organization called Venture for America to help train hundreds of entrepreneurs around the country to create thousands of jobs. And so I spent seven years doing that, and during that time, I realized that we’re automating away the most common jobs in the economy. We started with 4 million manufacturing jobs, around the country, over the last 15 years, and we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, truck drivers, and so that’s why I’m running for president: to wake us up to the reality of what’s happening around us, and also to implement meaningful solutions that would strengthen our society.

B: Why are you the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump?

Y: Well, the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math, and I’m running to solve the problem that got Donald Trump elected, which unfortunately most politicians do not seem to understand or be focused on. So, that’s why I’m the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. He actually said at a rally last month that he’s excited to run against all of the people that are primed to run as Democrats against him and his one worry is that some new figure would come out of nowhere, that people had not heard of, to run against him, and I am his kryptonite. I am Donald Trump’s nemesis.

B: We are only 10 days out from an election, why start so early?

Y: I’m relatively new, most people haven’t heard of me, so I need the time to introduce myself to people and get them excited about what we can do as a society and an economy if we get our acts together.

B: To shift gears a little bit, back to the basis of your platform, do you have a philosophy, and who are some people who have influenced you?

Y: I certainly studied many of the thinkers during my education, because I studied economics and political science, with a dash of philosophy in college, and I did go to law school so there is a little bit of that sprinkled. So some of the thinkers that influenced me: I think Mill’s idea of utilitarianism really stuck with me, I think Hobbes’s ideas of the state of nature were really powerful and influential. Milton Friedman has been a big influence on me, he’s influenced all of Western economic thought, so he’s someone that I’ve internalized a lot of his thinking. Yeah, so there are a lot of ideas I think I have in common with many libertarians, I believe.

B: Could you put a label on that?

Y: Well, part of is that, is just the reality, and I’m a serial entrepreneur and this is true of many entrepreneurs, is that I think the enemy of humanity is now bureaucracy. I think that the larger an organization gets the more inhuman and irrational it tends to get. And so, I’ve as an entrepreneur started businesses, and when you start, it’s just you, and you’re completely integrated because, you know, you’re incentives are aligned with yourself, and then you start hiring people and you can still maintain alignment and integrity through three, five, ten people, but then when it gets to ten thousand people, it becomes this giant machine where you have tons of processes and staff and departments and everything else, so in terms of my philosophies about this, it’s that we have to try to make it so that we’re all more human, and bureaucracy is really the enemy of that.

B: On the note of philosophy, would you consider yourself a capitalist, or perhaps more fairly, what would you describe as your brand of capitalism?

Y: Yeah, so I think capitalism is responsible for a ton of the progress that we’ve experienced over the last number of decades, but at this point, to quote Eric Weinstein, we did not know that capitalism was going to get eaten by its son, technology, and at this point we need to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different arenas, and that in many ways that capitalism and socialism dichotomy is now out-of-date and unproductive and not very useful. So I consider myself a capitalist, but I’m framing it as a human capitalist, and I think that we need to start moving our market towards things that actually benefit us, and that right now, capital efficiency benefits fewer and fewer of us.

B: Would you ascribe yourself more to the Nordic model, where you allow capitalism to grow, and then social democracy to sort of reap the rewards, or more of the East Asian model where capitalism is more confined to certain areas?

Y: Yeah, I think both of those models are very useful and powerful, I think there are a lot of things we can learn from the Nordic countries. Their retraining is actually genuine, they have significant family leave, which I think makes perfect sense as someone who has had children, and in the East Asian model, also, I think has some lessons for us, so I would be for a hybrid of those two.

B: Back to Universal Basic Income, you talked about the Freedom Dividend, a thousand dollars to every American every month, my thought here is that we are going through a technological change but we’ve gone through two major ones in the last half-millennium. We had people, like the Luddites, who did have a great deal of fear there. What makes this different, what makes this fear more realized, because obviously then we saw population booms but we also saw employment booms and we saw new fields emerge. What makes this different?

Y: We just have to look at the numbers, where according to Bain, we’re looking at three to four the times the level of displacement as the last industrial revolution by 2030. And if you look at our labor force participation rate right now, it’s down to 62.9%, in large part because many people have already been displaced in various fields and they did not find new work. They went on disability, they left the workforce, they took drugs, they killed themself. So, if you look at the numbers, there’s no reason to think that this is going to magically align itself, and when people talk about the last industrial revolution, what they tend to forget is that the last industrial revolution brought about the formation of labor unions, brought about mass riots and protests that killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, inauguration of labor day, implementation of universal high school, this was all the last industrial revolution, so if you think that it’s going to be three to four times faster than that, then you would expect massive unrest, even based upon historical precedent. So there’s no reason to think like, hey, we went through this before. If you look it, yeah, we did go through this before, and it was hellacious, and this is going to be several times more hellacious.

B: As we move back to the libertarian perspective on universal basic income, do you see this replacing welfare programs and the bureaucracy that runs them, or do you see this running largely supplementary?

Y: I see it as largely replacing welfare programs, and the bureaucracy that administers them, and I think that there are many perverse incentives to the current systems. I think that it is infantilizing to many Americans, and I think that it’s even debilitating, because the disability programs, for example, have the perfect incentives to keep you disabled, because if you feel better, then your benefits got to zero. So right now there is a zero percent churn rate from long-term disability, where no one ever feels better. So I’d want to replace a lot of those programs, we have 126 programs right now, it’s like a patchwork, and no one thinks that it’s working well. So the freedom dividend would replace, hopefully, a lot of that, maybe most of it.

B: Could you name specifics?

Y: So the way I’m modeling the freedom dividend is that it’s opt-in, but if you opt in, then you lose any other benefits that you’re getting. So the issue is that because people rely upon different programs for different things, you don’t want to step in and say I’m gonna take it all away from you, because some people are receiving more, some are receiving less, and if they’re relying upon it to that level you could rely destroy someone’s survival mechanism if you were to replace or eliminate programs, so what you do is you say, look, you can make a determination, if you opt in to the freedom dividend, then you lose everything else you’re getting. And you end up substituting for many of those programs because someone would look at it and say, I’m getting $700 worth of food stamps and housing assistance, I’d much prefer a thousand dollars cash. And so then you would end up eliminating many of these programs.

B: We’ve got an $800 billion deficit, the freedom dividend would cost about $2.5 trillion a year, how do we manage that, where’s that money coming from?

Y: So the big change we have to make, is that the big winners of artificial intelligence and big data and autonomous vehicles are going to be the mammoth tech companies, and the mammoth tech companies are great at not paying a lot of taxes, because they will just move it through Ireland or their favorite tax shelter, so we have to join every other advanced economy and have a value-added tax, which would then get the public a sliver of every Amazon transaction or Google search. Because our economy is so massive at $19 trillion now, a value-added tax at even half the European level(1) would generate about $800 billion in new revenue. So that, plus our existing welfare spending(2) which is about $800 billion, which substitutes in for part of the freedom dividend, plus the new tax revenue from growing the consumer economy by 12%, which is about $500 billion, plus cost-savings in our healthcare, incarceration, and homelessness services, and the value gains from having a stronger, healthier, more educated, more mentally-well population ends up balancing out the $2.4 trillion so that it’s deficit neutral.

B: What is the biggest piece of your platform if you had to take UBI out of it?

Y: It’s evolving our economic measurements to include things that are, right now, not included in GDP that are core to the human experience and human well-being, so that’s health, mental health, affordability, like median income, and updating our measurements for the twenty-first century, because we’re in the midst of the biggest measurement problem in the history of the world, and it threatens to destroy us if we don’t get it right.

B: You did mention the digital social credit, you talked about that rewarding things like community activities, like volunteering at a food bank, but also things like this. What difference can the government see between a political rally with somebody with good intentions and new ideas, and a Klan rally? Where does the government ethically have the room to make that decision?

Y: In my opinion, it would not. So the digital social credit would probably be based upon convening people for almost any purpose, and then having people spend a certain amount of time. We’re really just trying to re-integrate the fabric of community, and so we’re not going to judge the reasons for getting together. You could be knitting, you could be reading campfire stories, you could be having a music festival, we’re not gonna judge the quality of the offering.

B: This would certainly require a constitutional amendment, would you include in that amendment that you cannot discriminate on the basis of activity?

Y: I don’t think it would require a constitutional amendment, because all you’re doing is you’re just putting up, like, community incentives for various things, so I don’t see any constitutional obstacle, but I would favor that there is no judgment of the nature of the activity.

B: Do you have an unrestricted view of the first amendment, of freedom of speech, to include hate speech?

Y: I think that our culture has definitely gone too far in trying to police various statements and terms in a way that’s very unproductive, that said I do think that there are limitations to the first amendment that involve, you know, yelling fire in a theatre or directly inciting violence, so there are limitations. To me, some of the more interesting first amendment issues actually revolve around pornography, because I think that, at this point, child access to pornography is a major issue, particularly with the internet, and so I’m less worried about hate speech and more concerned about desensitizing children to various sexual images.

B: One last question, if it comes down to it, and it’s you and Donald Trump, why should a libertarian pick you?

Y: Because I want to genuinely put economic power and freedom into the hands of every American, and as far as I can tell, Donald Trump does not.

(1)The average European rate is nearer 20%, which would mean one can double the projections made by the CBO, linked. Of course, that can’t be done exactly, and actual numbers would shift for a 10% tax rate projection.

(2)Because the opt-in nature of his UBI program, people can choose to remain on their welfare. This means that while the cost will go down slightly, the savings will be less from our welfare programs. Thus, his system would benefit from higher enrollment.

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josiewe · 3 years ago

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I saw your state of the union! I cannot believe you said Iranians instead of Ukrainians! I cannot believe how weak you truly are! WAKE UP PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN! Please open the keystone pipeline! Reverse the gas and oil leases! And please lead for the people of this country! And 5000 barrels of oil you bought from Russia are you kidding me!!! DISGRACEFUL! The American people cannot continue to strive with your horrible policies! Everything you touch hurts the American citizens! While, your add it close our borders! Stop making our country dangerous for terrorists! You lost Afghan individuals in 49 states without vetting them! How do you lose all those people???? I'm an immigrant that my parents brought me to this precious country legally!!! My parents were not given money, medical, food stamps they worked hard! This country gave our family opportunity to strive in this country! You failed with Afghanistan and now your failing Ukraine! Maybe you should take notes from the President of Ukraine! He is courageous, and stands for freedom of his country! Have to admire him. After President Vladimir Putin is such a bully!!! He is killing women, babies, children, and men. INNOCENT CITIZENS! For what???? We're all watching this in real time!

If you continue to buy barrels of oil from Russia after what he is doing to innocent citizens then you're no different from the President of Russia!

Wake up Mr. President Joe Biden! Do the right thing for our country! You have the power to change all of this!

Just cannot believe how much everything costs I blame you President Joe Biden and all of your administration's! A President that cannot articulate anything. You mumble, whisper, confused! We're all seeing in real time! We need a President for the citizens of The United States of American's to stand for our country! A strong leader not a weak one. We cannot continue in the path you're leading our country. What is going to take?

Also do something about the crime! I mean your defunding of police! And please stop with the mandates! We need our military, police, doctors, nurses, paramedics, firefighters, truck drivers. All of these people worked through the pandemic without vaccines! Oh please tell General Milley and the rest of them to train our military as they always have! Stop making our military weak as you're! Mr. President Joe Biden!

Let me let you in a little secret United States of America is a strong country with so many intelligent personnel! Stop with the garbage of hiring personnel due to race rather than character, knowledge, and integrity!

You have single handedly divided our country! Insult Americans! You're the worst President in American history! And your term isn't done yet! First time I am afraid for our country due to a weak President!

I pray that God keeps the President of Ukraine safe! My prayers and heart goes out to all of the Ukrainians and also all the Russian citizens that disagree with and are protesting against President Vladimir Putin!

Sending Angel's to all.

I believe in humanity! I believe in love not hate! I believe in Peace not War.

I declare peace for the world!

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Once Upon a Time in America Is a Movie That Can Never Be Too Long

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Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America is as epic as The Godfather, gorier than Goodfellas, and as streetwise as Mean Streets. It tells a full history, from childhood to old age, street hustles to political suicides, community toilets to opium dens. The version which is right now available on Netflix has been amazingly restored by Italy’s Bologna Cinematheque L’Immagine Ritrovata lab. I don’t think I have ever seen the film so clear, and it is a perennial to me, as is The Godfather.

It’s true, even the most devoted gangster fan and cinephile doesn’t watch Once Upon a Time in America as often as The Godfather, and it’s got Robert De Niro at his most gangta. For one thing, Leone’s film has never been as accessible. It is not shown regularly on any kind of broadcast channel, and even the film’s own producers thought it was too long for people to sit through. Pop culture history makes it sound like Once Upon a Time in America had a short version that ran 10 hours and a long version that ran a week.

How Long is Too Long for Once Upon a Time in America?

The truth is, Leone did have up to 10 hours of finished cinematic material, which he cut down to six hours. He wanted to put it out in two parts, much like the initial saga of The Godfather was extended into a sequel. Leone’s original vision for the film was two 180-minute motion pictures which would be shown on consecutive days. After the initial run, he planned to edit the two parts down for a general release which would run as one four-hour and 29-minute film.

Film distributors convinced Leone to release a “Director’s Cut” feature at a running time of 3 hours and 49-minutes, with no intermission, which was the version shown at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival (Martin Scorsese led the push to restore the original version, which was shown at Cannes in 2012, though it’s still missing 18 minutes). This version caught on in Europe. But American audiences saw an even more butchered cut in 1984. The U.S. financial backers, The Ladd Company, founded by actor Alan Ladd’s son, cut 90 minutes from the already-edited film, bringing it to two hours and 19 minutes. But they also restructured the film, cutting the flashbacks-within-flashbacks to present the story chronologically.

This most affects the opening, which is an extended action sequence told with the expressionism of a silent film and the nihilism of post-war Italian neorealism. It is a bit of a jumble coming out of an opium dream. Noodles is on the run, behind in the game, and stoned out of mind. The flashbacks create a cognitive dissonance, and the audience experiences the freefall in a visceral way. By the time they land, it’s in the beginning of a story, which may all be an opium dream. The longer version did play at art cinemas in the U.S. Having seen both on their initial release, this writer preferred the long version of the crime classic, but will admit, they could have answered a phone in the opening sequence before it rang 30 times.

I’d Watch an 8-Hour “Making of” Documentary on This

The production of the film is worthy of a star-studded documentary itself. Leone devoted most of his adult life to getting it done. He turned down The Godfather to make it. Once Upon a Time in America is the final entry in Leone’s “Once Upon a Time” trilogy. It followed Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era Una Volta Il West) (1968), and Once Upon a Time in the Revolution, which came out in 1971 as Duck, You Sucker!. One of the first America drafts was written by Norman Mailer, the author of the novel The Naked and the Dead, and Marilyn: A Biography, the 1973 Marilyn Monroe biography which first speculated the Hollywood icon had been killed by the FBI and CIA. Leone told American Film magazine the novelist was not “not a writer for movies,” but wasn’t satisfied with a screenplay until the end of 1974.

Leone first became interested in making Once Upon a Time in America while making Once Upon a Time in the West. He came across the book The Hoods, which is described on its cover flap as “a notorious mob boss of the syndicate tells the full inside story of hired killing and crime operations.” Published in August 1952, it was very open about Jewish gangster life during the 1920s and ‘30s. It was written by Hershel “Noodles” Goldberg under the alias Harry Grey.

Goldberg also wrote the 1958 book, Portrait of a Mobster, about Jewish mob legend Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer. He wrote The Hoods while serving time in Sing Sing prison. Leone met with Grey in a New York City bar, according to Christopher Frayling’s 2012 book, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. The author was still in hiding from his former mob associates. The renowned Spaghetti Western director didn’t find a heroic figure like “Paul Muni in Scarface or James Cagney in The Public Enemy,” in the bar. Instead there was a poor man “with a machine gun in his hand and a Borsalino on his head.”

I’d watch a 12-Hour Version of the Original Cast of the Unmade Film

Leone began casting in 1975. When The Hoods begins, the leading characters are teenage criminals. Richard Dreyfuss was first cast as young Noodles. The older version of the character was to be played by James Cagney, who hadn’t made a film since Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three in 1961. He wouldn’t make another until 1984, the year Leone’s film was finally released, when he appeared in Miloš Forman’s Ragtime. That film also stars Elizabeth McGovern, who plays adult Deborah in Once Upon a Time in America. French actor Gerard Depardieu was cast as young Max, and the part would pass to veteran actor Jean Gabin, an icon of French gangster films.

This is true dream casting. Dreyfuss made his mob movie bones playing Baby Face Nelson in Dillinger (1973) and would go on to become an acting institution. Cagney was an acting legend, who began his career creating young gangster icons. Judging from the outstanding acting performances Leone got from Hollywood Golden Age actors like Henry Fonda, it would have been a masterwork.

Leone brought out unsuspected feats of greatness from veteran actors who had been subject to the rules of mainstream cinema. It would also be wonderful just to watch Cagney and Gabin create onscreen dynamite together. Meanwhile Gabin is probably best known as the lead in Jean Renoir’s 1937 antiwar masterpiece, La Grande Illusion. But that was also the year he played “The Prince of Plunder” in director Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937). That gangster-in-hiding title role established him firmly in French crime cinema, and it should be seen by any fan of Casablanca or Algiers. He also starred in Jacques Becker’s mob film Touchez pas au grisbi (Don’t Touch the Loot) (1954), and plays the capo of the Manalese crime family in director Henri Verneuil’s The Sicilian Clan (1969).

I would gleefully binge 10 hours of Gabin and Cagney rehearsing.

And I Could Watch the Final Cast All Weekend

I’d also binge rehearsals for the cast that ultimately wound up filming Once Upon a Time in America. Robert De Niro, as grown-up David “Noodles” Aaronson, was in his prime. He was already gangster film royalty, having played in The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), and as young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. His Jake La Motta took a career-killing dive for the mob in Raging Bull (1980). But while De Niro also proved he could play psychopaths like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), that part was better filled by his co-star.

Movies

Why The Godfather Part IV Never Happened

By Don Kaye

Movies

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone Proves a Little Less is Infinitely More

By Tony Sokol

James Woods, who plays the adult Maximilian “Max” Bercovicz, created one of the most convincing sociopaths of crime cinema in The Onion Field (1979). He also brought one of the sleaziest characters in science fiction to David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult masterpiece, Videodrome. For gangster and crime film fans, De Niro and Woods together are like seeing Cagney work with Edward G. Robinson in Smart Money (1931), Humphrey Bogart in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), or George Raft in Each Dawn I Die (1939).

While Joe Pesci’s crime boss Frankie Monaldi is so authentic in Once Upon a Time in America that it looks like he was picked out of a lineup, Burt Young’s performance as his brother Joe Monaldi is pure cinema verité. He almost makes you want to take a shower. The only relief comes from watching Treat Williams as a union leader who takes a bath.

Tuesday Weld, who plays Carol, is an icon of licentious cinema. She was Stanley Kubrick’s first choice to play the title role in Lolita (1962), and the wildest orgy enthusiast in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). Weld started acting as a teenager in the 1956 jukebox musical Rock! Rock! Rock!, and brought more tension than Steve McQueen and Ann-Margret combined in the 1965 gambling classic, The Cincinnati Kid, which also starred Edward G. Robinson. Quentin Tarantino would probably be proud to recommend Weld’s filmography as a film binge subject.

Once Upon a Time in America also began production in 1980 but was scuttled by an Actor’s Strike. It would have seen Tom Berenger and Paul Newman playing the Noodles characters. For Max, Leone considered Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, John Malkovich, and John Belushi. Brooke Shields was set to play young Deborah, which went on to be Jennifer Connelly’s film debut. She would go on to play in Labyrinth (1986) with David Bowie, as well as to an acclaimed career as an adult in movies like Requiem for a Dream (2000) and win an Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind (2001).

What’s in a Bad Reputation?

The Godfather is briskly paced, relatable, and every sequence is perfectly framed. Had Once Upon a Time in America been split into two parts, as the director intended, it may have become just as iconic. Coppola saves the Corleone family backstory for the second film, where it sits comfortably as it mirrors one rise with another.

In today’s environment, where binge-watching is the norm, Once Upon a Time in America should be reevaluated on that basis. People are more accustomed to long-long form entertainment, because they have readily available short-form at their fingertips on apps like TikTok. Alejandro Jodorowsky wanted to make a 10-hour adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune. He got the same blowback as Leone.

“Myself, I make an enormous project of a film that will not be a normal film, 14, 16, maybe 19 hours,” Jodorowsky told Den of Geek while promoting his film Psychomagic. “Hollywood thought I was crazy. A picture [should be] one hour and half or two hours, no more. But now, with series television, you see eight chapters. The short pictures are dying, it’s not anymore necessary. We need to make a serious chapter, you know? Ten hours.”

Today, Jodorowsky’s Dune would be a Netflix miniseries–or at the very least two films, as enjoyed by director Denis Villeneuve. Once Upon a Time in America is far more watchable than its legend declares, and Leone was a filmmaker who should have been afforded his cut. “He was a real artist of industrial movies,” Jodorowsky told Den of Geek. “You need to be very intelligent to do that, and he did it. The picture, all of his pictures, I love these pictures.”

I have watched The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, The Godfather, Part III, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the box set collectors’ edition of The Godfather Saga, and still have a recording of the first time the film ran with all the deleted scenes restored. I will watch them all again. But there is room for more than one Gangster Epic. Once Upon a Time in America’s reputation as a sloppy, overlong film is undeserved. It bears repeated viewing.

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stoweboyd · 7 years ago

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Work Futures Daily - AI is Everywhere

But there is no agreement on the impact of AI-driven automation

2018-04-03 Beacon NY — AI is finding it's way into every conceivable niche it seems. Australian conservationists are employing drones to track sharks, and emplying AI to identify Great White and other large and toothy sharks. The goal is to head off dangerous interactions with the giant beasts. Simialr projects are going on in Cape Town and California, too.

Meanwhile, Equinix is predicting customer churn with AI, in the section below.

Has AI intruded into your work or extracurricular activities? Let me know, if so, here.

…

On Artificial Intelligence For Customer Prediction

Data center company Equinix has created an app to determine the likelihood of customer churn for its clients:

For its prediction model, a team of Equinix data scientists looked at roughly 70 attributes that could contribute to customer churn, such as how many times a customer logs into a customer portal or placed an order over a certain time period, or whether power consumption increased or decreased. Using a deep neural network, the team built a model that predicts the likelihood of customer churn over a 30-, 60- or 90-day period and says whether each customer is a high, medium or low churn risk.

[…]

In its first iteration, it predicted churn with 50% to 60% accuracy when compared to actual churn data. After months of testing and refining, it now is close to 90% accuracy.

The model runs about once every two weeks and provides and spits out the probability that each customer account might churn, along with potential reasons why. That information is fed into the company’s Salesforce.com Inc. system so sales reps can see it while working with Equinix’s roughly 9,800 customers.

“Before, customers would churn because they didn’t hear from reps,” Mr. Wagle said. “That behavior is changing.”

Just as important for a skeptical user community, they had to provide a raitonale for the churn prediction:

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to explain the model’s decision-making process.

[...]

Now, alongside the risk score, a table shows sales reps reasons that might explain the risk, such as a decrease in power consumption or an extended period without using the customer portal.

Notably, Equinix declined to explain how the technical team derived the rationale from the neural network used.

On Predicting the Impact of Automation

There seems to be little convergence on estimates for the impact of AI and Automation on jobs. The MIT Technology Review has collated a table:

Predictions are all over the place, no convergence, not even on the fundamental question of whether more jobs will be created versus destroyed.

Erin Winick of MIT Technology Review states,

In short, although these predictions are made by dozens of global experts in economics and technology, no one seems to be on the same page. There is really only one meaningful conclusion: we have no idea how many jobs will actually be lost to the march of technological progress.

On Unions

Unions are having a real resurgence in the US, as a bottom-up radicalization of teachers, long denied pay wage increases and confronted by attempts to cut benefits, have walked out, often surprising — or turning against — their union 'leaders'.

Dana Goldstein reported on 2 April,

Thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked off the job Monday morning, shutting down school districts as they protested cuts in pay, benefits and school funding in a movement that has spread rapidly since igniting in West Virginia this year.

In Oklahoma City, protesting teachers ringed the Capitol, chanting, “No funding, no future!” Katrina Ruff, a local teacher, carried a sign that read, “Thanks to West Virginia.”

“They gave us the guts to stand up for ourselves,” she said.

The walkouts and rallies in Republican-dominated states, mainly organized by ordinary teachers on Facebook, have caught lawmakers and sometimes the teachers’ own labor unions flat-footed. And they are occurring in states and districts with important midterm races in November, suggesting that thousands of teachers, with their pent-up rage over years of pay freezes and budget cuts, are set to become a powerful political force this fall.

The next red state to join the protest movement could be Arizona, where there is an open Senate seat and where thousands of teachers gathered in Phoenix last week to demand a 20 percent pay raise and more funding for schools.

The growing fervor suggests that labor activism has taken on a new, grass-roots form.

[...]

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the movement an “education spring.”

“This is the civics lesson of our time,” she said. “The politicians on both sides of the aisle are rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.”

Note that this is taking place in states where the teachers' unions are barred by law from compelling workers to pay dues, weakening them financially.

…

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron's efforts to strip benefits from railway workers has led to the long-anticipated protests:

A strike at railway operator SNCF began Monday evening and will run through Thursday morning, with only one in every eight long-distance trains running and one-in-five shorter regional trips due to depart on Tuesday. Roughly half of RER commuter trains to Paris are running. Eurostar, which runs service between London and Paris, canceled five trains today in each direction, or about one-third of the trains it would run on a normal Tuesday.

Unions say half of SNCF workers are striking, including 77 percent of train drivers. SNCF advised passengers to postpone trips, and television stations showed footage of near empty train stations.

[...]

The strikes are the latest in a series of disruptions that started last month and also involve energy and garbage collection companies, as well as students protesting changes at state-backed universities. Demonstrations across the country have already caused severe disruption in commuter trains and school shutdowns.

Labor unions plan their biggest protest against changes at SNCF, the indebted national railroad, where Macron plans to deny future hires the job security, early retirement and special pensions of existing workers, while opening up train lines to competition. There are 36 days of strikes planned at the train operator over the coming months.

Taking on the railway company’s 74,000 workers will be tough for Macron, after he pushed through a liberalization of France’s labor code and cut taxes on capital in his first year in office. Next, he’s planning to overhaul jobless benefits, simplify France’s retirement systems and streamline parliamentary procedures.

France is deeply divided: 46% say the strike is justified, 53% say it isn't. With the work stoppages likely to be two days out of every five, those numbers could shift: but which way?

Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)

Follow me on Twitter.

More media, politics, and social commentary on stoweboyd.com, including bio.

#unions #ai #automation #emmanuel macron #strikes #teachers #equinix #Work Futures Daily

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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John J. Sweeney, Crusading Labor Leader, Is Dead at 86 John J. Sweeney, a New York union researcher who climbed to the pinnacle of the American labor movement in the 1990s, leading the A.F.L-C.I.O. for 14 years through an era of fading union membership but rising political influence, died on Monday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 86. Carolyn Bobb, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. spokeswoman, confirmed the death. She did not specify the cause. As president, from 1995 to 2009, of the nation’s largest labor federation — 56 unions with 10 million members near the end of his tenure — Mr. Sweeney flexed labor’s political muscle with thousands of volunteers and helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. Over the years, he also helped elect Democrats to seats in Congress, to governorships and to state legislatures across the country. His tougher task, a quest to reinvigorate and diversify the faltering labor movement itself, had the weight of history pushing against him. For decades in the 20th century, labor had not welcomed women, African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans, often engaging in blatantly discriminatory tactics to preserve the dominance of white men in the workplace. Substantial but uneven gains had been achieved since the civil rights era of the 1960s, when unions began removing “whites only” clauses from their constitutions and bylaws. But Mr. Sweeney, still facing lopsided demographics, plotted a sea change. He crusaded to bring women and minorities into the fold, often in leadership posts; made alliances with civil rights groups, students, college professors and the clergy; and championed low-wage workers, shifting away from the A.F.L-C.I.O’s traditional emphasis on protecting the best-paid union jobs. In Mr. Sweeney’s campaign for the federation presidency, his running mate, for the newly created post of executive vice president, was Linda Chavez-Thompson, a Texas sharecropper’s daughter. She was the first minority group member ever elected to organized labor’s top executive ranks. The 1995 balloting itself was unique: It was the first contested election in the history of the federation, which had been created in 1955 by a merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations after a long estrangement. A signature Sweeney initiative encouraged the recruitment of thousands of immigrants to his unions. Many members had long been hostile to undocumented workers, accusing them of stealing union jobs and dragging down wage scales. Mr. Sweeney rebuked such talk as discriminatory and called for justice that included better treatment for underpaid immigrants and a path to citizenship for those in the United States illegally. Critics contended that Mr. Sweeney’s policies were locked in a liberal past, deploying mid-20th century civil rights and blue-collar union strategies to organize 21st century workers with internet skills. Mr. Sweeney rejected that claim, just as he had rebuffed corporations that moved jobs overseas and denounced the hostilities that many young white-collar workers voiced toward old-line unions. In a labor movement that had been declining since 1979, when union membership peaked at 21 million, Mr. Sweeney prodded his constituent unions to greatly increase spending on organizing. He often said that his first priority was to reverse the long slide and substantially expand labor’s rank-and-file. But by 2009, when he stepped down, his vision of a dramatic unionization surge comparable to those of the late-Depression 1930s and the postwar ’40s had failed to materialize. In fact, overall union membership in America had fallen on his watch to about 12 percent from 15 percent of the workforce, a trend that has since continued, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Based on the optimism that supporters of the labor movement felt in 1995 when he was elected, I think it’s hard not to be disappointed with the results,” Richard W. Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University, told The New York Times in 2009. “How much of that you can trace back to John Sweeney is a whole other question.” In a departing interview with The Times in his Washington office — looking across Lafayette Park to the White House, where he had conferred with President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and with Mr. Obama more recently — Mr. Sweeney spoke optimistically in the face of the Great Recession, which had been underway for more than a year and had already forced thousands of layoffs, further winnowing union ranks. “I think the recession is going to drive people to the conclusion that they can’t resolve their problems by themselves, and they have to look to organizing,” he said. And, noting that his father had been a unionized New York City bus driver, he drew a lesson from childhood. “Because of the union, my father got things like vacation days or a raise in wages,” he said. “But my mother, who worked as a domestic, had nobody. It taught me from a young age the difference between workers who are organized and workers who were by themselves.” John Joseph Sweeney was born in the Bronx on May 5, 1934, to James and Agnes Sweeney, Irish-Catholic immigrants whose struggles in America had shaped John’s social perceptions from an early age. The boy had accompanied his father to many union meetings, where he learned of class and workplace inequalities and of union efforts to improve wages and working conditions. He attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1952. Coming of age, he resolved to find a future in organized labor. He worked as a gravedigger and building porter (and joined his first union) to pay his way through Iona College, a Catholic school in New Rochelle, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956. He worked briefly as a clerk for IBM but took a sharp pay cut to become a researcher for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Manhattan. He met Thomas R. Donahue, a union rep for the Building Service Employees International Union, Local 32B, who persuaded him in 1960 to join his union as a contract director. Mr. Sweeney would face Mr. Donahue in a run for labor’s top job 35 years later. In 1962, Mr. Sweeney married Maureen Power, a schoolteacher. She survives him, along with their children, John Jr. and Patricia Sweeney; two sisters, Cathy Hammill and Peggy King; and a granddaughter. The building employees union was one of the most progressive of its day, representing 40,000 porters, doormen and maintenance workers in 5,000 commercial and residential buildings in New York City. Its contracts guaranteed pay raises, medical coverage, college scholarships for members’ children and requirements that employers hire and promote workers without regard to race, creed or color. Mr. Sweeney rose through the ranks, and in 1976 was elected president of Local 32B of the renamed Service Employees International Union. Soon his 45,000 members struck thousands of buildings for 17 days and won major wage and benefit increases. He later merged Local 32B with Local 32J, representing janitors, and in 1979 struck again for contract improvements. In 1980, he was elected president of the 625,000-member national S.E.I.U. and, moving his base to Washington, began merging with unions of public employees and workers in office jobs, health care and food services. He pushed for stronger federal laws for health and safety, and spent heavily to organize new members. By 1995, he represented 1.1 million union members and was a national power in the labor movement. Labor was at a crossroads. Years of rank-and-file frustration with Lane Kirkland, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. since 1979, boiled over in a revolt of union presidents in 1995. Mr. Kirkland, whose internationalist vision of labor had made him a hero to Poland’s Solidarity movement but had left him unmoved, even hostile, to proposed reforms for unions at home, was forced to resign. The 1995 election pitted Mr. Sweeney against Mr. Donahue, his old friend from Local 32B, who had risen to secretary-treasurer of the federation and was Mr. Kirkland’s heir apparent. But Mr. Donahue’s ties to Mr. Kirkland forced him to defend the status quo, and Mr. Sweeney’s progressive calls for growth and change won the presidency with 57 percent of the delegates, representing 7.2 million members. He was re-elected to four more terms of two to four years each, the last time in 2005, when he broke a pledge not to remain in office beyond age 70. He retired in 2009, at 75, and was succeeded by Richard L. Trumka, his longtime secretary-treasurer and a former president of the United Mine Workers. In a statement posted on the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s website on Monday, Mr. Trumka said of Mr. Sweeney: “He was guided into unionism by his Catholic faith, and not a single day passed by when he didn’t put the needs of working people first. John viewed his leadership as a spiritual calling, a divine act of solidarity in a world plagued by distance and division.” Mr. Sweeney wrote a memoir, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: My Life in the American Labor Movement” (2017), and was the co-author of two books: “America Needs a Raise: Fighting for Economic Security and Social Justice” (1996, with David Kusnet) and “Solutions for the New Workforce: Policies for a New Social Contract” (1989, with Karen Nussbaum). In 2010, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. “He revitalized the American labor movement,” Mr. Obama said at a White House ceremony, “emphasizing union organizing and social justice, and was a powerful advocate for America’s workers.” Alex Traub contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #Crusading #Dead #John #Labor #leader #Sweeney

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stone-man-warrior · 4 years ago

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January 7, 2021: 7:49 pm:

Cries for help remain unanswered.

Twenty-five years of trying to get help while in Oregon. and more time trying while in California more than 25 years ago, all unanswered.

There remains a vacuum of assistance.

The presence of lack of rescue remains persistent.

There are no helpful people anywhere around here.

Please send help.

Please send US Military to Oregon.

Please send medical services to Oregon.

Bring your own hospital, without your own, the terror army will kill you at the hospitals if you are injured while trying to help. There are no medical services for US Citizens in Oregon, only Canadian terror army is treated for health conditions, everyone else is killed at the medical facilities. Illusion of medical treatment facilities is present throughout the state.

======================

9:50 pm:

Donald Trump “Insult to Injury” terror:

The whole nation is in such financial distress that it was decided that every citizen should receive stimulus payments, twice.

That’s pretty bad financial conditions for that to have happened.

On the other hand, it appears that things are not so bad after all, in fact, it looks like everything is financially hunky dory, as the social security beneficiaries were only granted a 1.3% cost of living increase, it maxes out at 3% for a cost of living increase for elderly and disabled persons, and is calculated by some asshole this year, because clearly the cost of living has increased more than any other year of record, and that is well documented with the stimulus payments to tens of millions of citizens.

I am getting mixed messages from my government leaders here. One team says “Holy shit!, if we don’t hand out some coins, millions of people will starve because of Corona Virus.” while another team is saying: “Yeah, but we need to save some money somewhere, so, we’ll just fuck the old people and those gimpy fucks in the wheel chairs. canes, and crutches, they are all a bunch of leaches anyway, so, fuck ‘em... give ‘em a 13 just to let them know we mean business, and not to talk about the cut rate increase... they are all a bunch of Tiny Tim wanna bee’s... fuck Tiny Tim, and everyone who looks like him.”

Insult to injury, Christian style, from the top 1%.

It’s 1.7% light on the increase for cost of living.

Woodstock, 1998 Live Version of Edge of Seventeen by Fleetwood Mac.

youtube

The song is all fucked up in this version and the venue looks like three farmers took the barn apart to build the venue stage and fencing with a “Farm Pack” from the local lumber yard, for the “Jesus was a Carpenter” version of Edge of Seventeen in New York Catskill Mountains at Woodstock.

Google “Farm Pack” if you don’t understand what that is, or why the Farmer wants to be a Carpenter.

Mixed messages is a life-size thing, is giant blender where old and disabled people are tossed into along with some small children, for making a product that is sprayed onto the roadsides as a erosion abatement, keeps the mudslide from being noticed after the reigns come, for a prophet, and contracted by the state.

========

1-8-2021: 2:01 pm:

The Woodstock Version features Stevie wearing gold, she is famous for white and black, not gold.

It’s the “Sympathy for the Devil” version with a “Welcome to Jamaica, have a nice day” tattoo version, comes with a helicopter and alternate Harmonic Vocal Tuning, and, as noted, the screams of the crowd, were indeed heard.

=======

10:30 pm:

In the event that someone wants to do that math on “Jesus was a Carpenter” and why it’s associated to “Edge of Seventeen“ so heavily, need to have a look at 1985-ish United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Journeyman Wage Scale for Residential Carpenter Pay Rate.

There, you will find that the scale was about $17.50 per hour, while pay scale for Commercial Journeyman was about $22.10 per hour.

The $17.50 Residential Carpenters used to have a lot sayings, one is “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go” another was “Another day, another seventeen-fifty... and another oweee, damn, that hurt when I fell yesterday”

The Carpenters Union was hijacked back then, the story about is long and complex. It’s an important part of why the White House and Congress are all occupied by terrorists bent on ruling the world in league with Britain and the Vatican.

no one will speak to me to hear the story of Jesus worked as a Residential Union Carpenter who was making about $17.50 per hour when he was hit over he head and nailed to a cross on the jobsite.

Adam Schiff was there, part of the takeover of the carpenters union in the 1980′s. He worked for L & M Builders of Ventura County (Thousand Oaks and around there) and used the name “Cory” last name unknown, we used to have a Saturday night poker game together with some of the guys on the crew at the time.

I could be wrong... but I could be right... it was a long time ago, and “Cory” once told me he was an actor, just on the job to check things out, then one day, Cory said “I’m going to Montana”. He left, and that was the last I saw of him until I met him again here in Oregon at a dinner party at a friends house, Kurt Hill, the fork lift driver of Longboard Lumber in Merlin. There he was, “Carpenter Cory of Montana”, at the dinner party, some 25 years later on Jumpoff Joe Creek Road in Josephine county, where I was shot at by someone who ran into the forest after shooting, when Cory said “Can you go over there, and hand me that thing there...?” kind of way to put me in range. Paul Birch was owner of Longboard Lumber, turned out to be a hardcore Christian terror operative here in Merlin, and built hundreds of “Bomb Carts”... I never was able to learn more about the “Bombs” though, only that there was talk of tunnels, and a cabinet shop at Union Ave and Ringuette near the hospital. The carts were made of dimensional lumber and plywood, about four feet square, with a vertical back on one side, heavy duty castors, could haul about 1,000 lbs each, and there were hundreds made at Longboard Lumber by “Will”, an employee there at the Lumber yard, who also turned out to be a terror soldier who kept trying to kill me, for about 16 years so far, he used to stalk me to the Walgreen’s last year, often had a small boy with him. I think I killed Will at the Walgreen‘s in defense about one year ago. Paul Birch took his business dealings to Newport Oregon, to start a terror cell there when Longboard Lumber closed down about 10 years ago-ish.

Like I said, it’s a long story. is important, includes Fleetwood Mac, and Buckingham Palace.

============

1-8-2021: 3:17 pm: additional:

“Carpenter Cory Montana”: My memory is that his last name started with the letter n: neuman; newsome: neuter... something like that. “Cory Newsome” sounds hauntingly familiar.

There may be a connection to a US Postal Mail Carrier by the name of “Mo” who was the carrier for this route for many years when I first moved here to Oregon in 1996. Mo, used to always wear a beany, I have “Mo’s Beany”, but I do not know why, or how I obtained “Mo’s Beany”. The words “That’s Mo’s Beany” have been said my many a terror intruder into my home over a long period of time, as I keep “Mo’s Beany” clearly on display at a place in my home where terror intruders tend to hide when they enter. There are only very few places to hide inside my house these days, I have all of the rooms nailed shut to keep intruders from hiding in them. Had I not closed off all of the rooms in my house, I would have been killed a long time ago.

I advise US Citizens to reduce their living spaces to a bare minimum, as the intruders tend to hide, and wait quietly until the intended victims are asleep in their beds. That is the reason I have not slept in a bed in more than ten years... it’s far too dangerous to use a conventional bed. Sleep is a luxury I cannot afford, neither can you.

============

I think “Adam Cory Schiff” was stalking the L & M Builder’s owner’s son, Cory Reese, who was also part of the Saturday night poker game crew, back in the day when a card game was just a game of Dealers Choice, not global annihilation done by SAG Actors.

I considered Kurt Hill to be a friend until one day I saw him wrap a Pharmacist with cellophane shipping warehouse style plastic wrap, and drag the pharmacist out of the Service Drugs that used to be on 6th St. and toss him into a truck, and drive away from there. It was dusk, at the time. Kurt was a big giant of a man, very strong. I think I killed him in defense out by the mailboxes about ... a long time ago, in defense after some geese were seen running around with no heads on them, making horrible sounds out front on the road.

Seventeen-Fifty is the connection to “Edge of Seventeen“, Union Journeyman scale wages.

=================

11:28 pm:

Other Carpenter Union take over details:

There was a local union hall either on Ventura Blvd in Woodland Hills Ca, or near there, I belonged to that one for awhile, then moved my card to District Counsel 844. I learned that carpenters were being hired by the framing contractors, and they were being signed up as Journeyman, even when they had few skills, but I was not one of those, I did, however, join as a Journeyman having worked non-union for my whole life by the time I joined the union. There was a housing boom, carpenters were on short supply. (it turns out that the housing boom was a “manufactured housing arrangement”, so to speak, to create housing for the upcoming influx of Canadian terror soldiers. Tracts of houses, many thousands each tract, all in phased of one-hundred to four-hundred homes each phase, all around Southern California) Those Journeyman newcomers were paid union wage scale, worked forty hours per week, but were only actually paid for some other amount of hours, typically, about 20 hours were paid out at scale wage for a 40 hour week worked on the job. A carpenter and an employer came to agreement on the side, about hourly rate, about $10 was norm, so, the math was worked to pay $10 per hour, while reflecting full scale on the pay check, with reduced hours showing for the full week of work, making illusion that they only worked part time, about 20 hours or so.

Those carpenters were robbed of the necessary accumulation of hours to become vested for pension.

I demanded one dollar over scale, I was paid one dollar over scale, always, after I learned of that weird arrangement of hours. I was hurt before I became vested.

L & M Builders had a jobsite I worked on where a police officer was shot, and hand cuffed to his steering wheel, I heard him, used his radio to call for help, he died though right there in the car after I got his cuffs unlocked. That jobsite in Thousand Oaks, north side somewhere, at the edge of the city limits, was the weirdest place ever... they built the model homes, five or six different layouts, in a culdesac, to demonstrate what would be for sale later. We built those, then, some other crew of special people came and took the model houses apart piece by piece, then, we built the same floor plans again, on the same slabs. The houses were about 4,000 sq. ft. two story homes, all taken apart after completion of all trades... roofs were on, drywall was all done, plumbers had finished, electrician ran the wire, the HVAC was done... all done. Then, they took them apart, so we could build them again.

Same thing happened here in Grants Pass. The place that just is being completed now called Cascade Public Storage, was all built, completed, done... about ten of maybe twenty years ago... they took the whole thing apart, made it look as if the place was never there, and now, decades later, the exact same structures are there again. The place is weird. The construction techniques include every kind of method there is, block, iron, wood frame, metal frame, concrete... every kind of tradesman on earth was needed to build that thing, twice.

My guess is that the terror army is advertising for help wanted at that site in far away places to draw craftsmen to come to Oregon where they are captured and used as slaves, or are killed and replaced. It’s visible from I-5 at the exit 58 near Club Northwest, where the terror leadership is at, and CNW is the same as Grants Pass Chamber of Commerce as far as membership goes at the Club Northwest terror HQ. There used to be a National Security Administration Field Office next door to Club Northwest, but that seems to have been taken apart a different way, one NSA officer at a time, and was put back somewhere else as Department of Homeland Security, while they put a Department of Health Services where the NSA used to be, for confusion service. and to fulfill “insult to injury” terror protocols required by the Christian Church.

I am pretty sure that the leading Church components to the terror army are at the 9th St. Seventh Day Adventist Church, it’s next door to the Oregon State Police Field Office that’s on 7th St., but you have to hop over a block wall to get from one place to the other, last time I looked over there.

There is a fire station on Park St at the Grants Pass Pkwy intersection that is remarkable for having been built with that multi-faceted construction techniques that Cascade Storage is built with. The place is stunning to look at, is awesome building, is extreme expense for a fire station, way over the top, in my opinion.

These subjects of buildings are in the realm of a place called “Options of Southern Oregon” across from the Walgreen‘s, and another place called “Crisis Resolution Center” between where Walgreen’s and the Hospital are at, which might be the source of some of the most wicked of all of the killing contraptions used around here in Josephine County... very scary places are CRC and Options.

There are no shortages of impostors around here, so, in the event that someone who claiams to be the author of this account has found some helpful people to talk to, that’s not the author of this account. Be advised that I think it was the Sparacino terror cell that stole all of my old pay stubs from back in the day, and has stolen much personal items, to use to impersonate the author of this information. Clyde Baum at 333 Jackpine is famous for the lengths he has gone to impersonate the author of this information also. Both Sparacino of 545 and Baum of 333 are supported in their efforts to impersonate by the local Oregon authorities.

(account is hijacked again)

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patriotsnet · 4 years ago

Text

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

And Then There Were Three

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Poop Feminism

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-inducing sleep app could help, though?

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt