#right wing news headlines since 1950

[your-krazy-uncle-bob]

"Civil War" Porn

As President Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover.

This time, the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures.

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned “civil war.”

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss’ death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.”

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired “civil war” is the latest shrill warning from the left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months.

On cue, Hollywood now joins the “civil war” bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples.

Pentagon grandees promise to learn about “white rage” in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.

When we do hear of an insurrectionary plan—to kidnap the Michigan governor—we discover a concocted mess. Twelve FBI informants outnumbered the supposed four “conspirators.” And two of them were acquitted by a jury and the other two so far found not guilty due to a mistrial.

The buffoonish Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government.

What it did do was give the left an excuse to weaponize the nation’s capital with barbed wire and thousands of federal troops, in the greatest militarization of Washington, D.C., since the Civil War.

In contrast, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for more than four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was more than 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.

Such violent protesters torched the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church and attempted to fight their way into the White House grounds. Their violent agenda prompted the Secret Service to evacuate the president of the United States to a secure bunker.

The New York Times gleefully applauded the rioting near the White House grounds with the snarky headline “Trump Shrinks Back.”

As far as secession talk, it mostly now comes from the left, not the right. Indeed, a parlor game has sprung up among elites in venues such as The Nation and The New Republic imagining secession from the United States. Blue-staters brag secession would free them from the burden of the red-state conservative population.

Over the past five years, it was the left who talked openly of tearing apart the American system of governance—from packing the Supreme Court and junking the Electoral College to ending the ancient filibuster and nullifying immigration law.

Time essayist Molly Ball in early 2021 gushed about a brilliant “conspiracy” of wealthy tech lords, Democratic Party activists, and Joe Biden operators.

Ball bragged how they had systematically poured hundreds of millions of dark money into changing voting laws and absorbing the role of government registrars in key precincts.

What was revolutionary were new progressive precedents of impeaching a president twice, trying him as a private citizen, barring minority congressional representatives from House committee memberships, and tearing up the State of the Union address on national television.

In contrast, decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary. Nor is being appalled at the FBI raiding a former president’s and possible presidential candidate’s home, when historically disputes over presidential papers were the business of lawyers, not armed agents.

Historic overreach is insurrectionary, not objecting to it. And those who warn most of some mythical “civil war” are those most likely to incite one.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

[tcm]

How Race Prevented Dorothy Dandridge from Being a Star By Susan King

Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black movie star. “She was our queen,” once said African American actress Nichelle Nichols (of Star Trek fame). Dandridge also made history with her full-blooded performance as the femme fatale in Otto Preminger’s 1954 CARMEN JONES. She became the first Black woman to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and the first to grace the cover of Life magazine.

Her achievements were during a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and her nomination would mark five decades before a Black actress, Halle Berry, would win in that category. Berry also won an Emmy for her performance as the Dandridge in HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999).

By the time Dandridge landed her role in CARMEN JONES, she had already paid her dues tenfold. She knew how difficult it was to be gifted, young, Black and beautiful in Hollywood. “CARMEN JONES was the best break I ever had,” said Dandridge, who tragically died at the age of 42 in 1965. “But no producer ever knocked on my door. There just aren’t as many parts or a Black actress. If I were white, I could capture the world.”

She was a child singer along with her older sister Vivian as part of The Wonder Children. Her mother, actress Ruby Dandridge, was the ultimate stage mother and so was her companion Geneva Williams, who oversaw their career. She was strict and allegedly was abusive. With family friend Etta Jones, Dorothy and Vivian became The Dandridge Sisters. They came to Hollywood around the time she was four. “I was one of those musical kids you hear about, with parts in pictures like the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races (‘37),” Dandridge said.

The Dandridge Sisters performed in Europe, the famed Cotton Club and appeared on Broadway in 1939 with Louis Armstrong in the short-lived Swingin’ the Dream. They also sang with African American band leader Jimmie Lunceford. And besides appearing in A DAY AT THE RACES, they were a specialty act in such movies and shorts as Snow Gets in Your Eyes (‘38), in which they perform “Harlem Yodel” and “Rhythm Rascals.”

Even as a teenager, you can’t keep your eyes off of Dandridge. She had the indescribable “It” factor. And after she went out on her own, she continued to dazzle in short musical films known as “soundies” that were produced for video jukeboxes of the era. She also had tiny roles, often uncredited, in movies, including David O. Selznick’s popular World War II film SINCE YOU WENT AWAY (‘44). Perhaps her most notable performance at this time was in the Sonja Henie musical ice-skating comedy SUN VALLEY SERENADE (‘41) in which she performs “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in a slinky black ensemble with the tap-dancing duo Harold and Fayard Nicholas.

“No film fan has ever forgotten her as a dream girl with the brothers,” said African American film historian Donald Bogle in his book Hollywood Black: The Stars, the Films, the Filmmakers.

She was all of 19 when she married Harold Nicholas, whom she had first met while performing at the Cotton Club. Their only child Harolyn was born in 1943. Nicholas had gone off to play golf the day Dandridge went into labor and he took the car keys, so she was delayed getting to the hospital to deliver the baby. Harolyn was born brain damaged and was never able to speak or even recognize Dandridge.

Dandridge believed the reason she was born mentally disabled was because of the delay in delivery. Dandridge would be haunted by guilt the rest of her life. She provided expensive care for her daughter, but when her finances became grim, Harolyn became a ward of the state. According to the TCM.com overview of BRIGHT ROAD (‘53), in which Dandridge portrays a dedicated young schoolteacher, seeing “healthy African-American children playing on the set proved too much for her, and she fled to her dressing room.”

Dandridge had always wanted to be a dramatic actress and attended the progressive Actors’ Lab in Los Angeles, becoming one of the school’s first Black students. Marilyn Monroe was also one of the students and became great friends with Dandridge. It would be considered a communist organization in the early 1950s with several members being blacklisted and the theater soon closed.

She also worked with noted coach and composer/arranger Phil Moore to develop a nightclub act, which Dandridge performed internationally to great acclaim. Under Moore’s guidance, Dandridge went from the young vivacious singer to a sultry, sexy chanteuse. Time magazine wrote about a nightclub appearance where she “came wriggling out of the wings like a caterpillar on a hot rock.” And according to a 1997 New York Times piece by Janet Maslin, when Dandridge headlined the Mocambo nightclub in L.A. in 1953, the cigarette girls actually sold copies of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

“I think it was really the heartache over my child and the failure of my marriage that forced me to make a success out of my career,” Dandridge explained in 1954. “I had to keep busy. I threw myself into my work. It’s a wonderful therapy. You don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself.”

She landed roles in three low-budget films including TARZAN’S PERIL (‘51). Dandridge is the best thing about the adventure as Melmendi, the young, beautiful and feisty Queen of Ashuba, who is kidnapped and rescued by Tarzan. Bogle notes that Lex Barker’s Tarzan shows a lot more interest in Melmendi than he does in Jane (Virginia Huston). “Here were suggestions of an interracial romance that the studio didn’t explore.” But audiences were titillated. Ebony magazine put her on the cover with the banner: “Hollywood’s Newest Glamour Queen.’’

She would appear in a few more roles, including THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS (‘51) and BRIGHT ROAD opposite Harry Belafonte, who would star with her the following year in CARMEN JONES. The operetta gave her high visibility but few additional film roles. Also, she had fallen in love with Preminger, who didn’t give her the best career advice. They would work together one more time in the film adaptation of PORGY AND BESS (‘59), for which Dandridge was nominated for a Golden Globe.

“But sadly, her decline came soon after her triumph,” notes Bogle in Brown Sugar. “She realized she was a token figure within the movie colony, her position not much different than Lena Horne’s in the ‘40s. There was no great follow-up of roles to sustain her fame. Three years passed before she appeared in another film.” Dandridge once said of racial prejudice: “It is such a waste. It makes you loggy and half-alive. If it gives you nothing.”

Dandridge was drinking heavily and taking antidepressants by the late 1950s. In fact, when Dandridge married a second time in 1959, to the man who was not only abusive but would leave her broke, she was so drugged that she fell asleep at the reception. “Dandridge’s last years were lonely and sad as she struggled to find work,” said Bogle.

[96thdayofrage]

The Original Karens: From Emmett Till’s Accuser To The White Woman Who Sparked The Tulsa Massacre

Written by Clay Cane

In this current climate of protests and demands for justice, the entitled and indignant white women known as “Karens” appear to be falling apart.

From Amy Cooper, whose over dramatic 911 call on a birdwatching Black man blew up in her face, to Lisa Alexander, who was shocked to discover that no one needs her permission to write “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on their own property, Karens are in a rage. Not even a camera in their face will stop their toxic entitlement, which has led to a string of viral sensations.

When thinking of the country’s experiences with white supremacist violence, the discussions are typically centered around men. However, white women have historically been at the helm of this terror, using their tears and imaginary delicateness as ammunition for victim hood and ultimately destroying lives or at its worst, taking one.

Once upon a time, even the slightest hint that white womanhood may be in danger resulted in the lynching of Black children or a thriving town full of Black families being burned to the ground.

Here are some of the most horrific stories of Karens going wild before the term came into existence.

Sarah Page

There has been a lot of talk around Tulsa, Oklahoma due to this month's 99th anniversary of the tragic race massacre that took place there in 1921. Many people may not know the race massacre began with a 17-year-old named Sarah Page.

Page was an elevator operator in what was called the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. On May 30, 1921, reportedly, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, was getting on the elevator to use a segregated bathroom on a higher floor. He allegedly tripped when entering the elevator, accidentally grabbed Page's arm and she reacted by screaming. Rowland fled but the police were called. The next day, Rowland was arrested and word spread that a Black man assaulted a white woman.

According to the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report via The Washington Post, Rowland was accused of assaulting Page “on a public elevator in broad daylight."

Within 18 hours, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street, was annihilated. In 1921, The New York Times described the massacre as “one of the most disastrous race wars ever visited upon an American city.”

No one knows what happened to Sarah Page or Dick Rowland after the massacre.

Fannie Taylor

On January 1, 1923, 22-year-old Fannie Taylor began screaming outside of her home. A neighbor rushed to the distressed white woman only to find her beaten and bruised, yelling for her baby. Miss Fannie claimed a Black man broke into her home and attacked her. The neighbor searched her house to find the baby safe and no signs of a break in.

Rumors quickly spread that Taylor was raped and robbed by a Black man. Taylor’s husband, James Taylor, gathered a group of men to find the imaginary criminal, even calling on the Klu Klux Klan for assistance.

A pack of 400 terrorists headed to the neighboring area, an affluent Black town in Rosewood, Florida, accusing any Black man they could of the crime. Fannie’s fraudulent tears was the excuse these envious hellions needed to purge out their rage.

Their first victim was Sam Carter, a local blacksmith, who was tortured and hung. They eventually began looking for a man named Jesse Hunter, who they claimed was an escaped convict.

The Black residents of Rosewood fought back but there were many casualties, including Sarah Carrier, a woman who did Fannie Taylor’s laundry. She was shot in the head, according to History.com. Her son Sylvester Carrier was also fatally shot.

The race massacre lasted for a week, burning Rosewood to the ground and killing countless Black people.

As for Fannie Taylor, she reportedly had an affair with a white man who beat her, which is why she had been found abused that night. She thought it was better to accuse a Black man of assault then to take accountability for her own actions.

The 1997 film Rosewood, directed by the late John Singleton, depicted the massacre.

See the clip below of actress Catherine Kellner as Fannie Taylor.

Eleanor Strubing

In December of 1940, Eleanor Strubing, a wealthy white woman in Connecticut accused her 31-year-old Black chauffeur, Joseph Spell, of raping her four times and throwing her into a river. Spell was arrested within hours and immediately sent to jail to wait for trial.

The New York Times famously ran a story with the headline, "Mrs. J.K. Strubing Is Kidnapped And Hurled Off Bridge by Butler; WOMAN KIDNAPPED; HURLED OFF BRIDGE." The article claimed he “confessed after 16 hours" of questioning.

Spell was facing 30 years in prison.

Thankfully, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and its head lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, represented Spell. Marshall and his co-counsel proved evidence that Strubing lied. She, in fact, had consensual sex with Spell and jumped in the river because she was terrified that she might become pregnant from their affair. In her mind, the only option was to accuse Spell of rape in order to justify a possible pregnancy.

An all-white jury found Joseph Spell not guilty, which was shocking for the time. Nonetheless, if this accusation would have been made in the South, Joseph Spell certainly would have died by public lynching.

Wil Haygood, the author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, wrote about the ruling, "It was a miracle. But Thurgood Marshall trafficked in miracles.”

Strubing, whose father was an investment banker and the former governor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, suffered no punishment for lying under oath. Her husband, John K. Strubing, died in 1961 and she remarried to John W. Barclay. Stribing died at 92 years old in 2000.

Joseph Spell moved to East Orange, New Jersey after the trial. It’s not clear when he passed away.

The 2017 movie Thurgood was based on the Joseph Spell trial. See the clip below of Kate Hudson as Eleanor Strubing.

Carolyn Bryant

In August of 1955, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of touching her and whistling at her in a store (he reportedly had a lisp and was unable to whistle.) Till, who was visiting from Chicago, was in Mississippi for the summer spending time with family. Within hours, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s home. The child was tortured, mutilated and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His naked body was weighed down with a fan blade.

Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law J.W. Milam, the terrorists who lynched Till, were found not guilty by an all-white jury.

In the 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant admitted to lying and claimed that she actually didn’t remember what happened that day in the store.

She is still alive today, living in Mississippi at 86 years old. Emmett Till would have been 79 years old on July 25 if it wasn’t for Carolyn Bryant.

The 65th anniversary of his death is August 28.

Victoria Price and Ruby Bates

Before The Central Park Five in 1989, which would become the Exonerated Five in 2002, there was the Scottsboro Boys in 1932.

On Mach 25, 1931, a group of Black and white teenagers were riding freight trains looking for work, which was common during the Great Depression. The white teens wanted the Black teens off the train and a fight broke out. The white teens attempted to forcibly throw the Black teens from the train. In defending themselves, the Black teenagers instead kicked the white teens off the locomotive.

The angry white teens went to a local sheriff who demanded the train be stopped.

Nine Black teens were removed, ages 13 to 19. However, two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, were also on the train and spent their time wrongfully accusing several of the Black boys of rape.

Similar to the Exonerated Five, that one accusation stole the innocence of nine Black children.

The teens were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama: Haywood Patterson, 18; Clarence Norris, 19: Charlie Weems, 19; brothers Andy Wright, 19 and Leroy Wright, 13; Olin Montgomery, who was nearly blind, 17; Ozie Powell, 16; Eugene Williams, 13, and Willie Roberson, 16, who could barely walk due to severe syphilis.

The all-white and all-male jury trial was over in a matter of days and all of them — except 13-year-old Leroy Wright — were found guilty of rape and given the death penalty. There was no evidence of course since Bates couldn’t identify the men she claimed raped her.

The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal wing of the American Communist Party, joined the case. By November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel. Shortly after, Ruby Bates admitted she lied.

Nonetheless, the back and forth with the courts continued for years.

By 1936, Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years. In 1948, he escaped from prison and made it to Michigan. The governor refused to extradite him to Alabama. By 1951, Patterson was convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl. In 1952, he died of cancer. He was 39 years old.

In July of 1937, Clarence Norris was eventually convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 1946 and moved north, where he married and had children. His autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys was released in 1979. He passed away in 1989 at 76 years old.

In July of 1937, Andrew Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. He was released in 1950 at 38 years old. Charlie Weems was also convicted of rape and paroled in 1943. He spent the rest of his life in Atlanta. It’s not clear when or if Wright and Weems have passed away.

Ozie Powell’s rape charges were dropped but he pled guilty to assaulting a deputy, which happened while in custody. He was released from prison in 1946. After spending four years on death row as adults, all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Leroy Wright were dropped.

It is not known how or when Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, or Ozie Powell died.

After being released, Leroy Wright, the youngest, went on a national lecture tour and then joined the Army. In 1959, according to PBS, Wright accused his wife of having an affair, fatally shot her and then committed suicide. He was 41 years old.

As for Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Price never recanted her testimony and died in 1982 at 77 years old. Bates had the privilege of going on a speaking tour, bizarrely, for the International Labor Defense (ILD), which defended the Scottboro Boys. She claimed to have lied because she was "excited and frightened by the ruling class of Scottsboro." Bates died in 1976.

[archive-archives]

Coming in April!

NEW 2020 1080p HD masters                                                                               JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS IN OUTER SPACE

Run Time             352:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs        DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio       1.33:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    COLOR

Disc Configuration 2 BD 50

 Rock stars Josie and the Pussycats are out of this world...literally! When the bumbling Alexandra accidentally launches Josie and the gang into outer space, they travel through the galaxy searching for a path back to Earth. Along the way, they meet cat people, robot monsters, evil dictators, space pirates and plenty of strange creatures, including their new companion Bleep, voiced by Hanna-Barbera legend Don Messick. Fortunately, everyone’s a fan of Josie and the Pussycats, including aliens! Rocket through the universe with your favorite superstars as they save the day, sing some songs and have a hip-happenin’ good time in a 2-disc, 16-episode Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space complete series collection that hits all the right notes!

                                                                                                                                NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from 4K scan of preservation film elements!       

GREEN DOLPHIN STREET

Run Time             141:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs:       DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio:      1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    BLACK & WHITE

Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Lux Radio Theater Broadcast;  Theatrical Trailer (HD)    

                                                                        The Academy Award® winner about star-crossed love that spans the years – and the globe. After her triumph as the lunchroom temptress in the crime classic The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner expanded her range with Green Dolphin Street. Set in 19th century Europe and New Zealand, this sweeping romance tells the story of two beautiful sisters, one headstrong (Turner) and one gentle (Donna Reed), and of the man (Richard Hart) who marries one even though he loves the other. The film’s riptides of emotion are matched by breathtaking physical tumult: a fierce Maori uprising plus a catastrophic earthquake and tidal wave that earned the film a 1947 Oscar® for special effects. With its dramatic story and spectacular visuals, Green Dolphin Street drew huge audiences for epic moviemaking, being one of the top-ten box office hits of the year.

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from 4K scan of Nitrate preservation elements!               

BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940    

Run Time             102:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs:       DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio:      1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    BLACK & WHITE

Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Making-of Featurette: "Begin the Beguine" (hosted by Ann Miller); "Our Gang Comedies: The Big Premiere"; MGM Cartoon: "The Milky Way" ; Original Theatrical Trailer (HD)

 The job – a career breakthrough – is supposed to go to hoofer Johnny Brett, but a mix-up in names gives it to his partner. Another example of Broadway hopes dashed? Not when Johnny is played by Fred Astaire. Sparkling Cole Porter songs, clever comedy and dance legends Astaire and Eleanor Powell make the final Broadway Melody (co-starring George Murphy) a film to remember. Powell’s nautical “All Ashore" routine (a/k/a I Am the Captain”), Astaire’s blissful “I’ve Got My Eyes on You” and Fred & Eleanor's elaborate routine to Cole Porter's classic "I Concentrate On You" are more than enough to please any fan. But they’re just a warm-up for the leads to tap one finale number into immortality: “Begin the Beguine,” introduced by Frank Sinatra in That’s Entertainment! with, “You can wait around and hope, but you’ll never see the likes of this again.”                                                                                     

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from a new 4K restoration of the last-known surviving nitrate Technicolor print!

DOCTOR X (1932)            

Run Time             76:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs:       DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio:      1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color      COLOR; BLACK & WHITE

Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Alternate B&W version of feature; DOCTOR X (HD): UCLA Before & After Restoration featurette (HD); New documentary: "Monsters and Mayhem: The Horror Films of Michael Curtiz (HD); New feature commentary by author/film historian Alan K. Rode; Archival feature commentary by Scott MacQueen, head of preservation, UCLA Film and Television Archive. Original B&W Theatrical Trailer (HD)             

 Is there a (mad) doctor in the house? “Yes!” shrieks Doctor X, filmed in rare two-strip Technicolor®. An eminent scientist aims to solve a murder spree by re-creating the crimes in a lab filled with all the dials, gizmos, bubbling beakers and crackling electrostatic charges essential to the genre. Lionel Atwill is Doctor Xavier, pre-King Kong scream queen Fay Wray is a distressed damsel and Lee Tracy snaps newshound patter, all under the direction of renowned Michael Curtiz. The new two-color Technicolor master was restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation in association with Warner Bros. Entertainment. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Foundation. Also includes the separately filmed B&W version (which has been restored and restored from its original nitrate camera negative) originally intended for small U.S. markets and International distribution, and which has been out of distribution for over 30 years.

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from 4K scan of original nitrate Technicolor negatives!       

ANNIE GET YOUR GUN (1950)

Run Time             107:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Sound Quality    DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English

Aspect Ratio       1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    COLOR

Disc Configuration           BD 50

Special Features: Susan Lucci retrospective & intro piece (from 2000 DVD release); Outtakes: Let’s Go West Again-Betty Hutton, Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly-Judy Garland, I’m an Indian, Too-Judy Garland,  Colonel Buffalo Bill with Howard Keel and Frank Morgan; Stereo audio pre-recording session tracks including There’s No Business Like Show Business featuring Judy Garland; Theatrical Re-issue Trailer (HD)

 Betty Hutton (as Annie Oakley) and Howard Keel (as Frank Butler) star in this sharpshootin’ funfest based on the 1,147-performance Broadway smash boasting Irving Berlin’s beloved score, including “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” “I Got the Sun in the Morning” and the anthemic “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” As produced by Arthur Freed, directed by George Sidney, and seen and heard in this new remastered HD presentation, this lavish, spirited production showcases songs and performances with bull’s-eye precision, earning an Oscar®* for adaptation scoring. The story is a brawling boy-meets-girl-meets-buckshot rivalry. But love finally triumphs when Annie proves that, yes, you can get a man with a gun!                                                                    

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master!                                                                                 QUICK CHANGE (1990)

Run Time             88:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Sound Quality    DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English

Aspect Ratio       1.85:1, 16 X 9 WIDESCREEN

Product Color    COLOR

Disc Configuration           BD 25

Special Feature: Theatrical Trailer

 The star of Caddyshack, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day headlines and codirects this uproarious Big Apple heist-and-pursuit caper. Bill Murray plays Grimm, a frazzled urbanite who disguises himself as a clown – and sets out to rob a bank. Geena Davis and Randy Quaid play accomplices in Grimm’s daring scheme and Jason Robards is the blustery cop caught up in Grimm’s “Clown Day Afternoon.” Swiping a million bucks is a snap compared to getting out of town. Grimm and cohorts commandeer a car, a cab, a bus, a baggage tram and a plane (and encounter future stars Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub in hilarious supporting roles) to make what becomes a less-than-merry escape. But for comedy lovers, Quick Change is a ticket to ride!                                                                                                 

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from 4K scan of best surviving nitrate preservation elements!            EACH DAWN I DIE (1939)

Run Time             92:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs:       DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio:      1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    BLACK & WHITE

Disc Configuration           BD 50    

Special Features: Warner Night at the Movies including 1939 Short Subjects Gallery: Vintage Newsreel,  WB Technicolor Short: "A Day at Santa Anita", WB Cartoon: "Detouring America"; Restrospective featurette: "Stool Pigeons and Pine Overcoats: The Language of Gangster Films" ; Feature Commentary by Film Historian Haden Guest; Breakdowns of 1939: Studio Blooper Reel; WB Cartoon: "Each Dawn I Crow"; Radio show w/George Raft & Franchot Tone; Trailer for "Wings of the Navy" and Original Theatrical Trailer for Each Dawn I Die (HD)  

 Framed for manslaughter after he breaks a story about city corruption, reporter Frank Ross is sure he’ll prove his innocence and walk out of prison a free man. But that’s not how the system works at Rocky Point Penitentiary. There, cellblock guards are vicious, the jute-mill labor is endless, and the powers Ross fought on the outside conspire to keep him in. Frank’s hope is turned to hopelessness. And he’s starting to crack. Two of the screen’s famed tough guys star in this prison movie that casts a reform-minded eye on the brutalizing effects of life in the slammer. James Cagney “hits a white-hot peak as [Ross,] the embittered, stir-crazy fall guy” (Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide). And George Raft (Cagney’s friend since their vaudeville days) portrays racketeer Hood Stacey, who may hold the key to springing Ross.                               

 NEW 2021 1080p HD Master Sourced from 4K scan of best surviving preservation elements!                 

ANOTHER THIN MAN (1939)

Run Time             102:00

Subtitles               English SDH

Audio Specs:       DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 - English, MONO - English

Aspect Ratio:      1.37:1 4x3 FULL FRAME

Product Color    BLACK & WHITE

Disc Configuration           BD 50    

Special Features: M-G-M Musical Short: Love on Tap; Classic M-G-M Cartoon: The Bookworm

 Dum-Dum, Wacky, Creeps, Fingers: They’re just a few of the hoodlums in the world of amateur sleuths and professional bon vivants Nick and Nora Charles. And now there’s a new hood: parenthood. A birthday – make that boithday – party that some of da boys hold for infant Nick Jr. is part of the fun in this third film in the witty series. The case begins when the Charles family arrives for a weekend with a Long Island industrialist who fears someone wants to kill him. Sure enough, his fears come true. Nick (William Powell) is among the suspects. Asta scrams with what may be the murder weapon. And Nora (Myrna Loy) has her own ideas about the case and sneaks off to a nightclub to ferret out a clue. “Madam, how long have you been leading this double life?” Nick asks. “Just since we’ve been married,” she replies.

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Headlines

American tourists face bans and restrictions across the world amid pandemic (Yahoo) The reputation and prestige once associated with a passport from the United States have suffered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. For Americans right now, traveling is harder than ever before—they aren’t welcome in the majority of the world’s countries because of the U.S. response to the outbreak. As a result, the U.S. passport ranking has fallen 50% in the last year, down from the no. 3 spot to the no. 19 spot in the Passport Index. “The American passport was always in the top five passports over the last five years,” Armand Arton, founder of Passport Index, told Yahoo Money. Pre-pandemic, an American passport holder could access 70% of the world’s countries without a visa. Arton said the “only reason” for America’s sudden fall from grace was the coronavirus. “It is not foreign policy,” he said. “It is not the visa restrictions. It is really the temporary limitation of travel of U.S. citizens, based on the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t want U.S. citizens coming to their countries.”

Millennials and younger are new US majority (AP) Sorry, boomers. Millennials and their younger siblings and children now make up a majority of the U.S. population. A new analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that 50.7% of U.S. residents were under age 40, as of July 2019. The Brookings’ analysis of population estimates released this summer by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the combined millennial, Generation Z and younger generations numbered 166 million people. The combined Generation X, baby boomer, and older cohorts represented 162 million U.S. residents. Millennials typically are defined as being born between 1981 and 1996. Baby boomers, long considered a primary driver of demographic and social change in the U.S. because of their large numbers, were born between the end of World War II and the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964.

The Pandemic Workday Is 48 Minutes Longer and Has More Meetings (Bloomberg) We log longer hours. We attend more meetings with more people. And, we send more emails. From New York City to Tel Aviv, the telecommuting revolution has meant a lot more work, according to a study of 3.1 million people at more than 21,000 companies across 16 cities in North America, Europe and the Middle East. The researchers compared employee behavior over two 8 week periods before and after Covid-19 lockdowns. Looking at email and meeting meta-data, the group calculated the workday lasted 48.5 minutes longer, the number of meetings increased about 13% and people sent an average of 1.4 more emails per day to their colleagues. During the two month time frame, there was one part of working that did improve: Those additional meetings were shorter, according to the analysis by researchers at Harvard Business School and New York University.

Pandemic Is Changing the Military, From Boot Camp to Office Work (Bloomberg) The U.S. military is finding its footing and changing how it operates as cases of the coronavirus keep rising. The services have been forced to continue widespread use of quarantines and to rethink future training, deploying, and day-to-day work. The virus curve has shot up from 10,462 cumulative cases in early June to 37,824 total cases by late July, according to the Defense Department. The figure includes more than 14,300 current infections among active-duty troops, as well as total cases reported among civilian workers, dependents and contractors since the pandemic began.

Seeking refuge in US, children fleeing danger are expelled (AP) When officers led them out of a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border and onto a bus last month, the 12-year-old from Honduras and his 9-year-old sister believed they were going to a shelter so they could be reunited with their mother in the Midwest. They had been told to sign a paper they thought would tell the shelter they didn’t have the coronavirus, the boy said. The form was in English, a language he and his sister don’t speak. The only thing he recognized was the letters “COVID.” Instead, the bus drove five hours to an airport where the children were told to board a plane. “They lied to us,” he said. “They didn’t tell us we were going back to Honduras.” More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws. Lawyers and advocates have sharply criticized the administration for using the global pandemic as a pretext to deport children to places of danger. No U.S. agents looked at the video the boy had saved on his cellphone showing a hooded man holding a rifle, saying his name, and threatening to kill him and his sister, weeks after the uncle caring for them was shot dead in June. And even though they were expelled under an emergency declaration citing the virus, they were never tested for COVID-19, the boy said.

Coronavirus surprise: Remittances to Mexico rise during pandemic (Washington Post) It was an intuitive prediction, supported by virtually every expert who had studied the subject: As the coronavirus pandemic caused the global economy to tumble, remittances to Mexico and Central America would crash. It turns out the forecast was wrong. Instead of collapsing, remittances to Mexico were up year-over-year in five of the first six months of 2020. In June, payments to El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras also increased compared to the same period in 2019, after a dip earlier this year. In March, the month the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, remittances to Mexico topped $4 billion—a record. Across the United States, migrants and the children of migrants say they have prioritized sending money to family in Mexico and Central America during the pandemic.

Economy tanking, Cuba launches some long-delayed reforms (AP) With its airports closed to commercial flights and its economy tanking, Cuba has launched the first in a series of long-promised reforms meant to bolster the country’s struggling private sector. The island’s thousands of restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, auto mechanics and dozens of other types of private businesses have operated for years without the ability to import, export or buy supplies in wholesale markets. While the communist government began allowing widespread private enterprise a decade ago, it maintained a state monopoly on imports, exports and wholesale transactions. As a result, the country’s roughly 613,000 private business owners have been forced to compete for scarce goods in Cuba’s understocked retail outlets or buy on the black market. That has limited the private sector’s growth and made entrepreneurs a constant target of criminal investigation. With the essential tourism business cut off by the novel coronavirus and the government running desperately low on hard currency, the government last month announced that it would allow private restaurants to buy wholesale for the first time. Ministers also announced that private businesspeople could sign contracts to import and export goods through dozens of state-run companies with import/export licenses.

Former Colombian president placed under house arrest (Economist) Colombia’s Supreme Court ordered that Álvaro Uribe, a conservative former president, be placed under house arrest. It is examining whether Mr Uribe had tried to tamper with witnesses in an investigation that he instigated against a left-wing senator. Mr Uribe, the mentor of Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque, is the first sitting or former president since the 1950s to be detained.

Emergency lockdown in Scotland (Foreign Policy) Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon moved quickly to impose a partial lockdown in the city of Aberdeen on Wednesday, after 54 new cases of COVID-19 were reported. The outbreak was linked to a bar, leading Sturgeon to close all pubs in the city and impose a ban on all non-essential travel. Sturgeon told reporters that the lockdown was a necessary measure. “We need to take decisive action now in order to prevent a larger outbreak and further harm later on,” she said.

Closed for vacation: France faces new virus testing troubles (AP) With virus cases rising anew, France is struggling to administer enough tests to keep up with demand. One reason: Many testing labs are closed so that their staff can take summer vacation, just as signs of a second wave are building. Testing troubles have plagued the U.S. and other countries too. But France’s August ritual of fleeing cities for weeks of holiday rest on seashores, mountainsides or grandma’s country house is an added tangle. “Closed for vacation” signs dangle from door after door across Paris this month, from bakeries to shoe shops and iconic cafes. Doctor’s offices and labs are no exception. Their staff need a rest more than ever this difficult year. But this August, socially distanced lines snake outside the scattered Paris labs that remain open, from the Left Bank to the city’s northern canals. Trying to get a test appointment can take a week or more. So can getting results.

Pakistan stands behind Kashmir (Foreign Policy) On the first anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s special autonomous status, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan heaped criticism on his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, and reiterated his support for Kashmiri self-determination. In a statement, Khan called Indian activity in the region since the move a “crime against humanity,” and in a subsequent address to the legislative assembly, he said Modi has been “exposed in the world.” One year later, the region is still saturated with troops, communications are slow, and arrests are a routine part of daily life.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (Foreign Policy) Anti-government protests took place in Thailand earlier this week as demands for limits on the power of the monarchy grow. Due to strict laws forbidding criticism of royals, the demonstrations featured a happy twist. Many of the 200 activists showed up dressed as Harry Potter and other characters from the popular book and film series in an effort to draw parallels between their fight against the government and Harry Potter’s battle against the totalitarianism of Lord Voldemort.

Survivors mark 75th anniversary of world’s 1st atomic attack (AP) HIROSHIMA, Japan—Survivors of the world’s first atomic bombing gathered in diminished numbers near an iconic, blasted dome Thursday to mark the attack’s 75th anniversary, many of them urging the world, and their own government, to do more to ban nuclear weapons. An upsurge of coronavirus cases in Japan meant a much smaller than normal turnout, but the bombing survivors’ message was more urgent than ever. As their numbers dwindle—their average age is about 83—many nations have bolstered or maintained their nuclear arsenals, and their own government refuses to sign a nuclear weapons ban treaty. The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. The United States dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered Aug. 15, ending World War II and its nearly half-century of aggression in Asia. But the decades since have seen the weapons stockpiling of the Cold War and a nuclear standoff among nations that continues to this day.

As Smoke Clears in Beirut, Shock Turns to Anger (NYT) Since an orphaned shipment of highly explosive chemicals arrived at the port of Beirut in 2013, Lebanese officials treated it the way they have dealt with the country’s lack of electricity, poisonous tap water and overflowing garbage: by bickering and hoping the problem might solve itself. But the 2,750 tons of high-density ammonium nitrate combusted Tuesday, officials said, unleashing a shock wave on the Lebanese capital that gutted landmark buildings, killed 135 people, wounded at least 5,000 and rendered hundreds of thousands of residents homeless. Beirut’s governor said the damage extended over half of the city, estimating it at $3 billion. The government has vowed to investigate the blast and hold those responsible to account. But as residents waded through the warlike destruction on Wednesday to salvage what they could from their homes and businesses, many saw the explosion as the culmination of years of mismanagement and neglect by the country’s politicians. And with the country already deep in the throes of a major economic crisis, residents had no idea how they would afford to rebuild. Because of the financial crisis, banks have placed strict limits on cash withdrawals to prevent runs.

U.S. eyes Saudi nuclear program (NYT) American intelligence agencies are scrutinizing efforts by Saudi Arabia, working with China, to build up its ability to produce nuclear fuel. A classified analysis has raised alarms that doing so could be a cover to process uranium and move toward development of a weapon, U.S. officials told The Times. American officials have searched for decades for evidence that the Saudis are moving toward a nuclear weapon, and the kingdom has made no secret of its determination to keep pace with Iran. But the spy agencies have been reluctant to warn of progress, for fear of repeating the colossal intelligence mistake that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years, appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Early life

Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She was reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family, and both sides of her family were through a mixture of African, Native American, and European descent and belonged to the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated people. Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne Jr. (1893–1970), a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three and moved to an upper-middle-class African American community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron (1894–1976), was a granddaughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was a Senegalese slave. Horne was raised mainly by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne.

When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne, dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old. She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. Aged 18, she moved to her father's home in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. Horne made her first screen appearance as a dancer in the musical short Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party (1935). A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Horne already had two low-budget movies to her credit: a 1938 musical feature called The Duke is Tops (later reissued with Horne's name above the title as The Bronze Venus); and a 1941 two-reel short subject, Boogie Woogie Dream, featuring pianists Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Horne's songs from Boogie Woogie Dream were later released individually as soundies. Horne made her Hollywood nightclub debut at Felix Young's Little Troc on the Sunset Strip in January 1942. A few weeks later, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In November 1944, she was featured in an episode of the popular radio series Suspense, as a fictional nightclub singer, with a large speaking role along with her singing. In 1945 and 1946, she sang with Billy Eckstine's Orchestra.

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, (1943), at 20th Century Fox, while on loan from MGM. She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that her films had to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. A notable exception was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, although one number from that film was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing "Ain't It the Truth" while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film That's Entertainment! III (1994) which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film's release. Lena Horne was the first African-American elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, but MGM sources state she was never considered for the role in the first place. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Changes of direction

By the mid-1950s, Horne was disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She made only two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: Duchess of Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's final film); and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism. She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda in The Wiz (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III (1994), in which she was candid about her unkind treatment by the studio.

After leaving Hollywood, Horne established herself as one of the premier nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In 1957, a live album entitled, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, became the biggest-selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA Victor label at that time. In 1958, Horne became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" (for her part in the "Calypso" musical Jamaica) which, at Lena's request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall.

From the late 1950s through to the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows, appearing multiple times on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, and The Bell Telephone Hour. Other programs she appeared on included The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace, and The Andy Williams Show. Besides two television specials for the BBC (later syndicated in the U.S.), Horne starred in her own U.S. television special in 1969, Monsanto Night Presents Lena Horne. During this decade, the artist Pete Hawley painted her portrait for RCA Victor, capturing the mood of her performance style.

In 1970, she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in the hour-long Harry & Lena special for ABC; in 1973, she co-starred with Tony Bennett in Tony and Lena. Horne and Bennett subsequently toured the U.S. and U.K. in a show together. In the 1976 program America Salutes Richard Rodgers, she sang a lengthy medley of Rodgers songs with Peggy Lee and Vic Damone. Horne also made several appearances on The Flip Wilson Show. Additionally, Horne played herself on television programs such as The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Sanford and Son in the 1970s, as well as a 1985 performance on The Cosby Show and a 1993 appearance on A Different World. In the summer of 1980, Horne, 63 years old and intent on retiring from show business, embarked on a two-month series of benefit concerts sponsored by the sorority Delta Sigma Theta. These concerts were represented as Horne's farewell tour, yet her retirement lasted less than a year.

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center's Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti's plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear. James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and noted that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Lena following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, she performed the entire show again to record it for television broadcast and home video release. Horne began a tour a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for the show, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984. Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1995, a "live" album capturing Horne's Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle's Classic Ellington album.

Civil rights activism

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of black servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Because the U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she staged her show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. After quitting the USO in 1945 because of the organization's policy of segregating audiences, Horne financed tours of military camps herself.

She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965. In 1983, the NAACP awarded her the Spingarn Medal.

Horne was a registered Democrat and on November 20, 1963, she, along with Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman John Bailey, Carol Lawrence, Richard Adler, Sidney Salomon, Vice-Chairwoman of the DNC Margaret B. Price, and Secretary of the DNC Dorothy Vredenburgh Bush, visited John F. Kennedy at The White House, two days prior to his assassination.

Personal life

Horne married Louis Jordan Jones, a political operative, in January 1937 in Pittsburgh. On December 21, 1937, their daughter, Gail (later known as Gail Lumet Buckley, a writer) was born. They had a son, Edwin Jones (February 7, 1940 – September 12, 1970) who died of kidney disease. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944. Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, who was music director and one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947 in Paris. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial couple. She later admitted in an interview in Ebony (May 1980) that she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.

Horne had affairs with Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Vincente Minnelli, and the boxer Joe Louis.

Horne also had a long and close relationship with Billy Strayhorn, whom she said she would have married if he had been heterosexual. He was also an important professional mentor to her. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet, known for her award-winning screenplay Rachel Getting Married, is Horne's granddaughter, the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet and Horne's daughter Gail. Her other grandchildren include Gail's other daughter, Amy Lumet, and her son's four children, Thomas, William, Samadhi, and Lena. Her great-grandchildren include Jake Cannavale.

From 1946 to 1962, Horne resided in a St. Albans, Queens, New York, enclave of prosperous African Americans, where she counted among her neighbors Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and other jazz luminaries.

Death

Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010. Her funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. Thousands gathered and attendees included Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, Lauren Bacall, Robert Osborne, Audra McDonald, and Vanessa Williams. Her remains were cremated.

Legacy

In 2003, ABC announced that Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biographical film. In the weeks following Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne had demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. "ABC executives resisted Horne's demand", according to the Associated Press report, "but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part." Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note." Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne with a remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge", and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006. In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January to March 2009). In 2011, Horne was also portrayed by actress Ryan Jillian in a one-woman show titled Notes from A Horne staged at the Susan Batson studio in New York City, from November 2011 to February 2012. The 83rd Academy Awards presented a tribute to Horne by actress Halle Berry at the ceremony held February 27, 2011.

In 2018, a forever stamp depicting Horne began to be issued; this made Horne the 41st honoree in the Black Heritage stamp series.

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Pandemic Intensifies Divisions Among US Elite On Thursday April 30th, protesters, some carrying firearms, marched into the Michigan state capitol building. The demonstration was just the latest of a stream of protests demanding an end to the lockdown and social distancing. Despite giving daily briefings to the country amidst the pandemic, and urging social distancing, US President Donald Trump has tweeted in support of these protests, which are taking place across the country. Trump has also singled out Michigan’s democratic governor for criticism. It seems there is a widespread mobilization opposing necessary health measures throughout the United States. It is unclear what the protesters want. Some echo the sentiments of Glenn Beck and Texas Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick, that the lives of elderly and vulnerable people should be sacrificed for the sake of revving up America’s economy. Others echo claims circulating on social media, alleging that the pandemic is a hoax conducted by enemies of Donald Trump. Signs follow the ideological brand of the 2008-2010 Tea Party protests that opposed Obama’s healthcare plan. Slogans include “Social Distancing is Communism” and there are placards containing references to Hitler, the US Constitution, Liberty, and Tyranny. Meanwhile, there are also mobilizations of the organized political left. Examples of these include: car caravans calling for a rent freeze, strikes and organizing among essential workers. Unrest is brewing in US society as the economy is the worst it has been in decades. Unemployment numbers have reached level not seen since the Great Depression. The chasm between two factions in the US economic ruling class, divisions which expanded under Obama and became even more intense following the 2016 elections, are sharper than ever. Who is Behind The Anti-Lock Down Protests? The people responsible for the right wing mobilizations are a coalition of millionaires and billionaires who feel like they are locked out by the ultra-rich. This is the coalition that took Trump to the White House in 2016. Amidst the pandemic, these lower levels of American capital are watching the blood gush from their financial wounds. With oil prices lower than they have ever been, an essential part of the Trump coalition, fracking companies, have begun to face the possibility of their ultimate demise. Frackers were already extracting oil and natural gas from American shale on credit from banks, with low oil prices hurting their profit margins. The New York Times published an op-ed by Bethany McLean with the headline: “Coronavirus May Kill Our Fracking Fever Dream” predicting that the pandemic will finish them off for good. Meanwhile, the other big names among the Trump camp are also suffering. AmWay, the multi-level marketing scheme that enriched Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has watched its sales plummet. Hobby Lobby, whose CEO, David Green, was one of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, closed all of its stores until further notice on April 7th. NASCAR is hoping to resume its season in late May, but its CEO, Jim France, son of outspoken Trump supporter, Brian France, has undoubtedly lost significant amounts of money from the cancelled races and lost advertisement revenue. While Home Depot, owned by Trump supporter, Bernie Marcus, has managed to stay open as an essential business, it has been forced to accept limited hours, and sales have significantly decreased in the spring months that usually generate about 30% of annual sales. The desperation to end the lockdown on the part of many millionaire and billionaire capitalists is quite real. They face financial ruin. Meanwhile, they are very well aware that certain competitors are fortified enough to ride out the storm. Who benefits from the lockdown? Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos is an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump. He owns the Washington Post, a publication that has been harshly critical of the administration. While the lockdown has been bad for most US businesses, on April 14th, Amazon’s stock reached its all-time high. Amazon is hiring new employees to deliver products, and Bezos has made billions. The big four super-major oil companies that dominate the New York Stock exchange and function like a mini-cartel, are happily watching their competitors in fracking and drilling suffer amidst the oil price drops. With the elimination of frackers, Exxon-Mobile, BP, Chevron, and Shell Oil would walk out of the lockdown with an even more well established monopoly than before. Social media giants are certainly not suffering as Americans sit at home, updating their status, tweeting, posting pictures and watching ads. These types of corporations that already function as a natural monopoly are quite happy to see a large percentage of the US population working from home. Many of the conspiracy theories that claim the pandemic is a hoax focus on Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft. Bill Gates is an outspoken Malthusian who believes the human population must be decreased. In the conspiracy theories, Bill Gates has become a stand in poster boy for a faction of the US ruling class long-labelled “The Eastern Establishment.” The Rockefeller Family, whose Standard Oil is now reincarnated as Exxon-Mobile, the Morgans, the Duponts, the Mellons, and the “old money” elite that has been the most powerful faction in US politics for generations, represents a more managerial wing of the American elite. These are the elements that worked with Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Group, and eventually gave birth to the Council on Foreign Relations. Rockefeller money worked to create the Trilateral Commission, Planned Parenthood, the Asia Society, and many of the other institutions that have crafted US government policy in a long-term and strategic way. These forces favor stability and long-term hegemony over their own short-term economic growth. They are closer to the Intelligence Agencies than the military, and friendlier to Silicon Valley than to retail owners and industrialists. The ideological right-wing has long targeted this wing of American politics, from the 1950s when the John Birch Society accused the Rockefellers of being Communists, up to the rants of Alex Jones denouncing Goldman Sachs and calling for “real capitalism.” These forces have entrenched themselves well enough, and built up enough of a monopolistic position, that the pandemic will not put them out of business. Rather, the pandemic is a convenient way to clear out their competitors and secure their position. As the lower levels of capital bleed, they call out their powerful nemesis with rage, realizing that while they have much to lose, the Eastern Establishment is likely to emerge even more powerful and dominant. What Comes After Lockdown? As restrictions are starting to be lifted across the USA, many questions remain about what will happen. Unemployment, poverty, and hunger are already starting to boil over. Food banks are overwhelmed. Catholic Charities in the Queens Borough of New York City encountered blocks and blocks of desperate people lined up in the hopes of receiving assistance. There is much talk in leftist circles of the 1930s and how the Communist Party USA organized hungry people to confront elected officials and demand relief. Various calls for a “rent strike” and a revival of anti-capitalism is taking place on the left.Voices that were calling for a “universal basic income” to ease economic pain have only gotten louder. Leftist film-maker Michael Moore produced and released a new film called “Planet of the Humans” arguing that economic growth is bad, and that overpopulation is the main the problem causing climate change. Alarm bells are ringing among the circles of power who can see that social unrest is pretty much inevitable. The national suicide hotline reported a 338% increase in call volume during March. Opioid deaths have also risen. The Trump faction, that was already hostile to China, is looking to point the finger of blame at Beijing. Liberal voices also condemn China but in a somewhat softer tone. The divisions among the American ruling class have become thicker than ever, and the scramble for profits is likely to intensify. A burning question for the American elite is how intense will the climate be in the lead up to the Presidential vote in November and how the results will be affected.

[aigrefinmedia]

Kosher nazis

• 1946 to 1979: The Animist Party and National Renaissance Party (NRP), early U.S. “neo-Nazi groups,” are organized under titular leader James Madole, actually a cat’s-paw of the Anti-Defamation League. Former Bolshevik spy Vladimir Stepankowsky, Emanuel Trujillo (alias ‘Mana Truhill’), and other Jewish and/or Communist agents of the ADL are Madole’s main source of financial support and organizational talent from the beginning. During the 1950s the NRP emerges as the most sensational and visible American “neo-Nazi group,” with its brown-shirted swastika-banded “stormtroopers” frequently staging street demonstrations in New York City that often and predictably deteriorate into riots. All related expenses, including the uniforms, are defrayed by the NRP’s main benefactor, the ADL. The swastika is displayed at ADL spy Truhill’s insistence. As “liaison officer” and de facto leader of the NRP by 1954, Truhill is in constant contact with other right-wing groups and individuals all over the world. His real work is name-gathering these people and incriminating them by coaxing extreme anti-Semitic remarks from them, thus collecting juicy tidbits for the ADL’s vast library of dossiers. (Joseph P. Kamp, The Bigots Behind the Swastika Spree (New York: Headlines, 1960))

• 1950s & ’60s: The foreign intelligence division of Stasi, Communist East Germany’s secret police apparatus, infiltrates spies into West Germany to pose as “neo-Nazis engaged in anti-Semitic vandalism,” a psy-ops campaign organized by Stasi spy-master Markus Wolf—a Jew. ADL director Benjamin R. Epstein follows through by traveling to Germany and advocating long-term Stalinist “re-education” for West Germans. In other words this is just the Jew World Empire performing a “pretext operation” so it can further torment people it hates (Joseph P. Kamp, The Bigots Behind the Swastika Spree (New York: Headlines, 1960); Michael Kallenbach, Stasi Files reveal links to anti-Semitic attacks in former West Germany, 12 March 1993 Jewish Chronicle (UK))

• 1965-1971: The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC; Canada’s premier Jewish advocacy organization) decides to promote John Beattie, an insignificant fringe figure, to “public menace” status along with his ridiculous “Canadian Nazi Party,” Canada’s closest thing to the NRP. Most of Beattie’s ten “followers” are actually CJC spies / agents provocateurs. Following a curious, probably staged incident in May 1965, Beattie is suddenly “newsworthy,” his irrelevant extreme views palmed off as “news” on the front pages of most Toronto dailies. Only the “conservative” Toronto Telegram notices the weird smell and exposes the food chain behind Beattie, for example CJC operative Henrick Van Der Windt’s involvement (issue of 25 June 1965). Soon the 100-year-old newspaper is being abandoned by major advertisers and sabotaged from within by union employees, finally collapsing six years later. Thanks to a down-payment donated by Van Der Windt, ergo the CJC, Beattie is able to move his outfit into an inflammatory Toronto address.

Beattie’s circus freak act is suddenly so “important” and prominent because the CJC wants to manipulate Canadians into accepting federal laws criminalizing ‘hate speech,’ laws it’s been conniving to shove down their throats since the 1930s and is preparing via the ‘Cohen Committee’ in Ottawa, also beginning in 1965. As §319 of the Criminal Code and §13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, titled “telephonic communication of hate,” these laws are signed into effect in 1971, after which the Canadian Nazi Party promptly implodes. (Patrick Walsh, The Unholy Alliance: A Documented Exposé of How Agents Provocateur Infiltrate and Misdirect, then Destroy, Well-Meaning Patriotic Groups (Flesherton, Ontario : Canadian Intelligence Publications, 1986) The John Beattie Case; Canadian Association For Free Expression, John Beattie to Expose the Nazi Party That Never Was (press release), 26 November 2000)

• June 25, 1978: Frank “Collin” the Heartless Nazi Monster leads his “Nazi march” on its alternate route through Chicago. During preceding weeks “Collin” achieved national notoriety with his outrageous original plan to march through the suburb of Skokie, the largest community of “Holocaust survivors” on earth. His “right to march” is championed by Jewish attorney and purported “civil liberties advocate” Alan Dershowitz.

“Collin’s” real family name: Cohen. He’s Jewish. His father is a “Holocaust survivor.”

His “Fuhrer” career is destroyed when this comes to light, but most Americans are none the wiser, so three years later “Frank ‘Collin’ the Nazi Monster” and his march become the subject of a nationwide made-for-television slobber-fest titled Skokie, one of many such propaganda bombs during these years. The original was NBC’s eight-hour miniseries Holocaust, a tele-orgy of fake “history” that aired two months before Collin’s march. The whole Skokie affair thus proves instrumental in catapulting Holocaust Guilt into mainstream American consciousness right when the Jewish psy-war on America is shifting gears in exactly this direction, thus Dershowitz’s real interest.

• February, 1979: Using his frequent alias of “James Guttman,” Mordecai Levy of the Jewish Defense League swaggers into the National Park Service office in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, dressed in full Nazi drag to obtain a permit for a “Nazi rally.” With permit in hand, he next contacts KKK chapters, Nazi clubs, leftist and Jewish groups, black churches, etc., alternately “inviting them to participate” / “alerting them to an outrage.” His own banner reads: “Hitler was Right! Gas the Commie Jews!” At this time Levy is an asset of the Anti-Defamation League (as revealed by ADL fact-finder Gail Gans to Village Voice reporter Robert Friedman). Reporters penetrate Levy’s sordid plans and the permit is canceled under a cloud of astonishing headlines: “Jew Applied For The Permit For Nazi Rally” (Philadelphia Journal); “Nazi Rally Rouser Really Jewish” (Philadelphia Bulletin). Had Levy’s charade not been uncovered, he might have succeeded in engineering a major race riot— but it sure would have made “Nazis” look bad! (Robert Friedman, Oy Vey, Make My Day, 8/22/1989 Village Voice, p. 15).

• December 7, 1981: Minneapolis television station WCCO airs an in-house documentary, Armies of the Right, to expose “the disturbing hidden world of paramilitary right-wing extremism in the U.S.” The program’s most virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric is uttered by one “Jimmy Anderson,” actually James R. Rosenberg, one of several ADL agents provocateurs known to have infiltrated the Queens, New York chapter of the Christian Patriot’s Defense League, expressly to agitate the group as “rabid anti-Semites.” The producers of Armies of the Right know who and what Rosenberg really is but withhold this information from their audience.

• 1990s: The Canadian Jewish Congress gets back in the act, this time using member and Canadian government (CSIS) spy Grant Bristow to infiltrate the Heritage Front, a Canadian-German advocacy group, to act as an agent provocateur urging violence against Jews. Sure enough some of Bristow’s dupes are arrested at a well-known Jewish hangout after raiding it and provoking a brawl. Totally disgraced by this moronic action, the Heritage Front rapidly disintegrates—obviously the real purpose from the beginning.

• Mid-1990s: “Davis Wolfgang Hawke,” a.k.a. “Commander Bo Decker,” etc., makes himself the new darling of the “neo-Nazi” movement by launching a tiny, flamboyant “Nazi” group, the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party. Many parallels to the John Beattie and Frank “Collin” cases are striking, not least being the absurd amount of attention “Hawke” receives from media and law enforcement.

[rowanwhittington]

The Handmaids Tale and the Importance of Fashion in Cults

To get an external interpretation of cults in which women are sexually abused, I watched Bruce Miller’s 2017 TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's book series ‘The Handmaids Tale’. 

Despite not being explicitly about a cult, the show explores a Christian based governments rule over a heavily class divided society, in which many women have become infertile due to STDs and environmental factors. Those who are fertile are enslaved as Handmaids to bare children for higher ranking members of society, raped in a ritual known as ‘the ceremony’. Despite being a fictional story, this has many similarities to actual sex based cults, particularly those with strong religious beliefs. It is thought that the woman must give herself up for the Lord, and to do that she must be impregnated to grow the cult and their message. 

A poignant quote the I wrote down from episode one was “ordinary is just what you’re used to [...] after a time this will become ordinary.” This sounded extremely familiar to the situation many people find themselves in when in a cult group. Although it may seem preposterous to an outsider, through slow indoctrination the strange behaviours start just being normal, which allows leaders to perform violent and depraved acts with less retaliation. 

Another similar situation happens when it's alluded that a woman has been raped by multiple men. She is shamed and blamed by the other handmaids despite them all being systematically raped. This could be an interesting perspective to look at my project from, as in many cases the assaulted woman is ignored by the community around her or even blamed for actions that were out of her control. 

Later on in the episode a man is brought out in front of the Handmaids to be executed in a ‘particicution’ after being found guilty of raping a pregnant Handmaid, resulting in her miscarrying. The Handmaids gather in a circle around him and beat him, most likely to death. I find it incredibly interesting and impactful that even though the handmaids are raped continuously by higher ups without argument, they act out in violence when allowed to punish a man for it. This perhaps reflects their anger towards their own treatment, or more likely shows how deeply the cult like rules have influenced them; that rape is only punishable in this world when it impacts on the life of a commander’s baby.

Fashion is used to show a woman's place in the world of Gilead (formerly the USA), in which they are divided by social classes shown by the colour of their dresses. The Handmaids wear long red dresses with white ‘wings’ on their head to conceal them from public eye and also restrict their vision. Marthas, the housekeepers, wear loose green dresses styled like overalls or aprons, with their hair covered by a headscarf. The Wives of Commanders, one of the higher positions for women in society, wear deep blue dresses similar to those of the 1950s, a nod to the discipline wives were expected to show their husbands during this era. Econowives are of the lower class and wear varying shades of grey. Unwomen, the female prisoners, wear rags and are expected to clean up toxic waste until they die from the radiation. Aunts wear brown and guide the Handmaids through their new role. They are the only women allowed to read, although this is only because it is required for their position in society. The only women to wear clothes from before this new regime are Jezebels, who refuse to the part in any new career and are forced into prostitution out of secret brothels. They wear costumes and lingerie, which are otherwise forbidden, suggesting that their reclaimed sexuality has given them some freedom despite them still being victims. 

The context behind the book:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/margaret-atwood-expands-the-world-of-the-handmaids-tale

https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-how-she-came-to-write-the-handmaids-tale/

“I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)”

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/sep/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-real-life-inspiration.html

“These are the early epigraphs which I didn’t use, but they’re pretty interesting. I found better ones in the end. These ones were a bit too obvious. The first is from Dora Forster, who in 1905 wrote a book called Sex Radicalism: As Seen by an Emancipated Woman of the New Time: ‘I hope the scarcity of children will go on until motherhood is honoured at least as much as the trials and hardships of soldiers campaigning in wartime. It will then be worthwhile to supply the nation with a sufficiency of children.’ And this one is from the 1980s, by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, who wrote about the relationship between biology and culture: ‘The great majority of economically more primitive societies are polygamous, and the number of wives is generally regarded as a measure of masculine success.’  And then there’s the one I did use, from the Rachel and Leah story: ‘Give me children, or else I die.’”

“‘Women forced to have babies.’ This is an article about Ceaușescu and Romania. He passed laws that said women had to have four babies. They had to have pregnancy tests every month and if they weren’t pregnant they had to explain why. ‘The latest sicko Red ruling was announced by cold-blooded Romanian president Nicolas [sic] Ceaușescu, who wants women to have more babies so the country will get richer.’ It was this policy that filled up the Romanian orphanages, which then became a scandal around the world for their inhumane conditions.”

“‘Conservatives are out to get the women’s movement. They wish to attack birth control and voluntary sterilization. Their eventual target is to wipe out the women’s movement.’ And this is a good headline that highlights religious tensions: ‘Catholics say cult taking over.’ It’s about a cult called the People of Hope that ‘subordinates its women, discourages social contact with non-members, arranges marriages, moves teenage disciples to households for indoctrination . . . their treatment of women is very Islamic. It’s a form of brainwashing.’”

“I didn’t even research it. There was no Internet then, you couldn’t just go online and put in a topic, so this is just stuff I came across when reading newspapers and magazines. I cut things out and put them in a box. I already knew what I was writing about and this was backup. In case someone said, ‘How did you make this up?’ As I’ve said about a million times, I didn’t make it up. This is the proof – everything in these boxes.”

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-08-29/inspiration-behind-handmaid-s-tale

https://www.insider.com/handmaids-tale-based-on-real-world-origins-history-events-2019-8#the-concept-of-using-handmaids-to-battle-infertility-is-inspired-by-a-biblical-story-1

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Tulip

The Daily Tulip – News From Around The World

Monday 21st May 2018

Good Morning Gentle Reader….  Start of another week.. how quickly they come round.. We leave the house for our morning walk, after a great week end of beach time, never moving the car once.. We wander up the hill this morning, Bella catching some scent or other as she sniffs the morning air.. the little bats are wheeling and diving, mice with wings, my mother used to call them, regaling me with tales of when her sister got a bat caught in her long hair.. ah! The tales … even though there is not a cloud in the sky it feels a little humid this morning, …. Hope all is well where you are…

JAPANESE TRAIN DEPARTS 25 SECONDS EARLY – AGAIN…. A Japanese rail company has apologised after a train left a station 25 seconds early, the second such case in months. The operator said the "great inconvenience we placed upon our customers was truly inexcusable". If the details are anything to go by, customers are faced with slipping standards: a train last November left 20 seconds early while this time it was a full 25 seconds premature. As was to be expected, social media has been making the most of the story. Twitter post by @HarrisAzhari…What a shame Japan!!? Early departure for 25 second? What if I only can catch the train 4 seconds before departure!?? According to Japan Today, the train conductor thought his train was scheduled to leave Notogawa Station at 07:11 instead of the actual scheduled time of 07:12 on Friday. After closing the doors to the commuter train one minute early he realised his mistake and still could have averted the looming embarrassment. But as he couldn't spot any waiting passengers on the platform, he decided to go head and leave early - rolling out of the station 25 seconds ahead of time. Japanese trains have a reputation for extreme punctuality, and it turned out that there were indeed still people hoping to get onboard. Left on the platform, they complained to the rail operator and an official apology was issued shortly afterwards.

IS REMOVING 'ABORIGINAL' FROM BIRTH CERTIFICATES WHITEWASHING HISTORY?.... Garry Smith wants Western Australia to stop altering historical birth records. It was never a requirement, but back in the 1800s some clerks in Australia took it upon themselves to add notes about ethnicity to some birth certificates. As the BBC's Frances Mao in Sydney writes, a move to reverse that has generated a new problem. Garry Smith just wanted to complete a family tree documenting his Aboriginal heritage. However in 2013, when he retrieved the 19th Century birth certificate for his great-grandmother, he noticed a glaring omission: the word "Aboriginal" had been covered over. He asked authorities what had happened, and was told the word had been erased due to its "offensive" connotations. "Having somebody telling you it's offensive, I just stood there and felt a bit sick," he told the BBC. "Was I supposed to be embarrassed or ashamed to have Aboriginal heritage, ashamed of my father, and great grandparents?"

POPE WARNS NUNS TO USE 'SOBRIETY' ON SOCIAL MEDIA…. The Pope has issued instructions telling nuns to use social media apps "with sobriety and discretion". The document, titled Cor Orans, clarifies rules governing monastic life that were issued in 2016. It says the guidance is intended to safeguard silence and recollection. The document mentions "social communications" rather than specific apps, but Catholic newspaper the Tablet said that this referred to Facebook and Twitter among other services. The document says that discretion should apply to "the quantity of the information and the type of communication", in addition to the actual content of the media. An order of nuns in northern Spain made headlines last month after taking to social media to comment on a controversial case in Pamplona that saw a group of men accused of gang rape given what many regarded to be unduly lenient sentences. On their Facebook page (in Spanish), the Carmelite Nuns of Hondarribia defended the victim by pointing out the free choice they had made to live in a convent, to not drink alcohol or go out at night. "Because it is a FREE decision, we will defend with all means available to us (and this is one) the right of all women to FREELY do the opposite without being judged, raped, intimidated or humiliated for it," they added. The latest guidance is not thought to have come about as a result of that case; and this is not the first time the Catholic Church has issued guidelines on social media use for nuns. The original constitution on feminine monastic life, Sponsa Christi Ecclesia, was published in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, but Pope Francis expanded the document in 2016 to warn against digital culture's "decisive influence" on society. He urged nuns not to let digital media "become occasions for wasting time". The Vatican itself is a prolific tweeter. It has posted close to 15,000 messages on its news account and more than 1,500 times via the Pope's English-language official page. It also runs Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+ accounts.

UK PRISONS 'AWASH' WITH SMUGGLED PHONES AND SIM CARDS…. "We are also taking decisive action to find and block mobile phones" - Prison Service spokesman. At least 15,000 mobile phones or SIM cards were confiscated in English and Welsh prisons last year, equivalent to one for every six inmates. Phones are used by some prisoners to order drugs and co-ordinate criminal activity inside and outside jail. A penal reform charity said the government had failed to tackle the root of the issue. The Prison Service said improved security measures had led to more confiscations. The BBC's Shared Data Unit compared figures for the period 2010-2014 and 2017 from ministers' answers to written questions in Parliament, Freedom of Information requests to prison services in Scotland and Northern Ireland and published prison population figures. A former prison worker, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity, said: "They [mobile phones] are a huge problem - they make getting any kind of contraband in very easy. "They can sit all night with unlimited access to the internet and make voice calls. "The big part of being in jail is you are cut off and denied your liberty. With the spread of mobile phones that's completely irrelevant. "It's difficult to keep order in jail because staff are outnumbered. If prisoners don't take the authority seriously, it makes a joke out of the whole system. "People see [videos posted on social media from inside jail] and they are less frightened of jail, they think their mates are having a whale of a time." Mobile phones have been used by prisoners in recent years to orchestrate fatal revenge attacks, helped coordinate an armed, masked gang freeing a drug baron en route to court and by inmates flouting authority by broadcasting themselves live.

RUSSIA WORLD CUP: ARGENTINA 'FLIRTING MANUAL' PANNED….  The manual was issued to journalists, coaches and officials heading to the World Cup in Russia. The Argentine Football Association (AFA) has been panned for including a chapter about "how to stand a chance with a Russian girl" in a manual it handed to journalists travelling to the World Cup in Russia. It recommended that journalists "look clean, smell nice and dress well" in order to impress Russian "girls". It also urged them to treat women as "someone of worth". The advice caused an outcry on social media and the AFA has since removed it. The association apologised and said that an internal investigation had found that part of the material was "printed by mistake". The controversy comes just months after the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, saw the biggest women's march in Latin America with protesters decrying rampant sexism and demanding an end to violence against women.

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this, Monday morning… …

Our Tulips today are just plain beautiful... if beauty can be defined as plain.....

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Monday 21st May 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A host of Israeli leaders and pro-Israel voters had long been advocating for the decision that President Trump announced on Wednesday, which recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and began the process of relocating the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv. The fact that the controversial decision was carried out by a Republican president is indicative of the dramatic change in the GOP’s position on Israel since Israel was founded.

The Republican party has moved from not supporting Israel enough, in the eyes of many Jewish Americans, to backing policies that now go further than the positions espoused by many Jewish voters — but are in keeping with the views of evangelical voters. As bipartisan support for Israel erodes, the controversial move risks further accelerating a growing party split.

Jewish Americans have for decades voted overwhelmingly for the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who defeated Hitler and was beloved for his New Deal policies, and Democrats were the party that championed Israel when it was first established in 1948. In contrast, Israel and the Republican Party had a tumultuous relationship early on. In the 1950s, following Democratic President Harry Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel, support for the country within the Republican Party and the conservative movement was highly limited. Since the vast majority of Jews were Democrats, there was little push from within the GOP to support the newborn nation.

The GOP’s domestic and foreign policy orientation in that era didn’t strengthen the case for the party supporting Israel either: The Middle Eastern country’s socialist bent scared away the anti-communists in the Republican Party, and the GOP’s foreign policy pragmatists were concerned that support for Israel would undermine America’s ties with the increasingly important oil-producing nations in the Middle East, many of which had fought against Israel when it declared independence.

Typical of Republican sentiment at the time were the critiques of Israel published in The National Review. Political philosopher Leo Strauss went so far as to write a letter in 1956 to complain. The journal’s editor, Willmoore Kendall, acknowledged there was an “anti-Israel bias among my colleagues, and in Right-wing circles in general.”

Although Kendall emphasized that he did not believe that anti-Semitism was behind that bias, successive Republican presidents were eyed warily by many pro-Israel Jews well into the George H.W. Bush administration. Richard Nixon, though he supported Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, was believed to be a raging anti-Semite (a belief that was vindicated when tapes of his conversations were released decades later), and even Ronald Reagan’s support for Israel was questioned when he penalized the Jewish state for its bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactors.

By the end of the 1990s, though, attitudes began to shift, due largely to world events, changes in a major GOP constituency and changes in the Jewish community. Israeli politics also played a role.

The most pronounced turning point in GOP voters’ support for Israel came after 9/11, as increased U.S. military involvement in the Middle East resulted in more pro-Israel policies percolating into the Republican agenda. Israel was struggling with its own upswing in terrorist attacks, so many influential conservatives saw new relevance in Samuel Huntington’s model for a clash of civilizations in which Israel and the United States were aligned as members of “the West,” in opposition to other cultures — in this case, Islam.

At the same time, the Jewish community was increasingly made up of baby boomers who had rejected their parents’ affinity for the Democratic party and found themselves at home in Republican administrations seeking to project American power and values. They also took on key roles in campaigns, both as donors and advisers, which allowed them to bring more attention to their top issues.

Starting as early as 2004, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, for example, began to throw his financial weight behind Republican candidates, whom he said better represented his values — and especially his support for Israel. Writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2012, Adelson explained that he had left the Democratic Party because it had changed, becoming home to “a visceral anti-Israel movement among rank-and-file Democrats.”

It can be argued whether Adelson’s assessment was fair, but public opinion polls over the last decade have suggested that Democrats’ support for Israel has cooled even as support among GOP voters increased.

In some ways, Israeli politics themselves have contributed to the Republican Party’s shift in views. Since the mid-1990s, the Israeli right wing has been dominated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who served as prime minister for part of that decade and now holds the office again. Netanyahu broke away from the traditionally statist Israeli right to support economic policies that lined up with those of U.S. economic neoliberals. He shares a major supporter — Adelson — with many top U.S. Republicans, and he has cultivated personal relationships with U.S. Republican leaders.

When Republicans now look to Israel, they see in Netanyahu a leader cut from a similar ideological cloth to many of their own representatives — not just in terms of foreign policy beliefs but also in economic positions, one who shares a Republican skepticism of the welfare state and embraces free markets. A 2015 poll found that Republicans ranked Netanyahu alongside Ronald Reagan as the “national or world leader you admire most.” Netanyahu’s headline-grabbing tussles with then-president Barack Obama, which alienated many Jewish Democrats, only served to raise his profile among Republicans.

But perhaps most importantly, since the 1990s, evangelical Christians have come to represent one of the strongest and most hawkish pro-Israel demographics within the Republican party. Until the 1970s, evangelicals tended to avoid direct involvement in political activism. When Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority emerged at the end of that decade, fusing religion and politics, Israel wasn’t the top issue. But Falwell did emphasize that evangelicals — a group that at times had had mixed attitudes toward Jews and Israel — should understand their theology as strongly backing Israel. (Many pro-Israel evangelicals believe that Israel is essential to the second coming of Jesus or that they are following a literal interpretation of a Biblical injunction that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel.) In the early ’80s, support for Israel dovetailed with strong anti-communism, as evangelicals slammed the Soviet Union for maintaining harsh policies restricting Jewish and Zionist activities.

Today, Israel is a voting priority for many evangelicals. A 2015 poll noted that 64 percent of evangelical Christian Republicans say that a candidate’s stance on Israel matters “a lot,” compared with 33 percent of non-evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.

And evangelical Christian voters, unlike Jews, represent a significant percentage of Republican voters. Some 26 percent of the electorate identified in the 2016 elections as born-again or evangelical Christian, and 81 percent of them voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton. Capturing evangelical support is essential for Republican candidates; as of 2014, evangelical and born-again voters represented the plurality (45 percent) of voters who are Republican or who lean Republican.

Propelled by evangelicals, the GOP has in many cases become more hawkish than most U.S. Jews. While the Republican Party has notably turned away from traditional U.S. support for a two-state solution, which would establish a Palestinian nation alongside Israel (only 23 percent of evangelicals polled in 2017 agreed that Israel should agree to the creation of a Palestinian state), the majority of U.S. Jews believe that Israel and an independent Palestine can coexist peacefully. Although members of the Trump administration — most notably, perhaps, Mideast negotiator and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — support Israeli construction in the disputed West Bank, only 17 percent of U.S. Jews believe that Jewish settlements in the area help Israel’s security. An election-night poll of Jewish voters in 2016 by the dovish J Street suggested that Israel isn’t even really the primary voting issue for many Jews: Only 9 percent listed it as one of their top two voting priorities.

In fact, it is the pro-Israel evangelical community — and particularly Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel — that has mobilized alongside hawkish pro-Israel Jews to push for a change of U.S. policy on Jerusalem. Hagee, whose organization boasts over three million members, has been pushing Trump to move the embassy since the 2016 campaign season, to prove the president’s commitment to evangelical values.

The evangelical community is unusual in their support for moving the embassy to Jerusalem. A November poll indicated that 63 percent of Americans oppose the move, but 53 percent of evangelical voters support it.

Whatever GOP constituency pressed for the move the most, what matters in the end is that they succeeded. Though Democratic and Republican presidential candidates alike have long promised to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy there, none who won the office ever did so — until Trump.

But the president is not widely embraced by Jews as a whole (while some 50 percent of Orthodox Jews voted for Trump, the two larger streams of U.S. Judaism — Reform and Conservative — opposed Trump), so it remains to be seen whether his recognition of Jerusalem increases Jewish affinity for the Republican Party. That outcome will surely be influenced by what happens next.

[englishchinesetranslations]

It was news and no news; the most significant milestone in one of the most profound changes to affect the US in the past century, and yet a non-event. Last week the US Census Bureau issued figures showing that non-hispanic whites made up 49.8 per cent of the population of California.

Anglo-Saxon whites are already a minority in Hawaii and the District of Columbia. Now they are an ethnic minority in the country's most populous state, the one most usually identified with the American dream.

'It's my hope we can all see our state's diversity as a cause for celebration and not consternation,' said California's lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamente, a Latino. Robert Newby, a white shop-owner who has lived in Los Angeles for 40 years, echoed his optimism: 'This confirms what most of us have thought for years. I am happy for there to be more immigrants - by and large they work harder and have more money to spend.'

Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you

Read more

As recently as 1970, eight out of 10 Californians were white. Fuelled by immigration at its highest rate since the start of the last century, and higher fertility rates, the Asian and Latino populations of California have risen by almost a third since 1990. At the same time, with limited immigration and low birth rates, the population of non-hispanic whites has fallen by 3 per cent. By 2040, hispanics are expected to be the overall majority in the state.

Where California goes, the rest of America is predicted to follow. At present 72 per cent of the US population is non-hispanic whites; the US Census Bureau predicts they will become a minority between 2055 and 2060.

Not every one likes the new face of America. White far-right extremists predict the break-up of the union. Thomas W. Chittum, a New Jersey-based Vietnam War veteran, declared in his book Civil War Two, that the US, like Yugoslavia, will shatter into new, ethnically-based nations. 'America was born in blood, America suckled on blood, America gorged on blood and grew into a giant, and America will drown in blood,' Chittum warned.

The separatists have set up groups such as Americans for Self-Determination. One of the founders, Jeff Anderson, said: 'We are suggesting the US be partitioned into states for blacks, whites, hispanics, and so on, along with multi-racial states for those who wish to continue with this experiment. Now is the time to begin such a multi-racial dialogue about separatism, before a storm of violent racial conflict erupts.'

The shifting sands of the US reflect wider - and highly controversial - changes elsewhere in the world. It is an area in which few demographers dare to tread for fear of being accused of racism. 'You cannot quote me - a word out of place and I get crapped on from a very great height,' said one academic. 'Whatever you say you are deemed racist'.

The past millennium was more than anything the era of the whites. Just 500 years ago, few had ventured outside their European homeland. Then, with several acts of genocide clearing the way, they settled in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, southern Africa.

But now, around the world, whites are falling as a proportion of population. The United Nations collects and produces a vast array of statistics on population, but produces none relating to race or ethnic origin. Indeed few countries collect their own figures on ethnicity - in Europe, only the UK and the Netherlands do.

However, the UN's State of the World Population 1999 predicted that 98 per cent of the growth in the world's population by 2025 will occur in lesser developed regions, principally Africa and Asia. The most significant reason for this is lower birth rates in rich countries: in 61 countries, mainly the rich ones, people are no longer having enough babies to replace themselves.

In its World Population Profile 1998, the US Census Bureau predicted that by the second decade of this century all the net gain in world population will be in developing countries. 'The future of human population growth has been determined, and is being determined, in the world's poorer nations,' it said.

The global centre of gravity is changing. In 1900 Europe had a quarter of the world's population, and three times that of Africa; by 2050 Europe is predicted to have just 7 per cent of the world population, and a third that of Africa. The ageing and declining populations of predominantly white nations have prompted forecasts of - and calls for - more immigration from the young and growing populations of developing nations to make up the shortfall.

Last year net immigration to Britain reached 185,000, an all-time record. The Immigration Minister, Barbara Roche, recently announced plans to attract migrants to fill specific skills shortages, such as in the computer industry.

Last month Edmund Stoiber, the premier of Bavaria in southern Germany, called on Germans to have more babies as an alternative to more immigrants. 'We are having too few children - to a worrying degree, the significance of which is scarcely recognised,' he said. His calls echoed those of a fellow Christian Democrat who earlier this year stood on a platform of 'Children not Indians'.

In Britain the number of ethnic minority citizens has risen from a few tens of thousands in the 1950s, to more than 3 million - or around 6 per cent of the total population. While the number of whites is virtually static, higher fertility and net immigration means the number from ethnic minorities is growing by 2 to 3 per cent a year.

One demographer, who didn't want to be named for fear of being called racist, said: 'It's a matter of pure arithmetic that, if nothing else happens, non-Euro peans will become a majority and whites a minority in the UK. That would probably be the first time an indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority in its historic homeland.'

Lee Jasper, race relations adviser to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, predicted a similar future, telling The Observer : 'Where America goes, Europe follows 30 years later. There is a potential for whites to become a minority in some European countries.'

In Britain, that is almost certain to happen in London, and in the relatively near future. 'At the moment ethnic minorities are about 40 per cent in London. The demographics show that white people in London will become a minority by 2010,' said Jasper. 'We could have a majority black Britain by the turn of the century.'

British National Party chairman Nick Griffin said: 'I don't think there's any doubt that within this century, white people will be a minority in every country in the world.' For Griffin, however, it is a major cause of alarm: 'Every people under the sun have a right to their place under the sun, and the right to survive. If people predicted that Indians would be a minority in India in 2100, everyone would be calling it genocide.'

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Foreign Policy Centre, who arrived in London from Uganda in 1972, said such fears are basically racist: 'Only white people worry about this. It's because for such a long time the world has been their own. To talk about it feeds a particular type of racism that says that blacks breed like rabbits. There is an underlying assumption that says white is right.'

She added: 'There is a white panic every time one part of their world seems to be passing over to anyone else. But it's foolish to panic about it. So what if we do become a majority? What difference does it make?'

For Alibhai-Brown, the decline of whites is a question of redressing the balance after they colonised much of the world. 'The empire strikes back really. There was this extraordinary assumption that white people could go and destroy peoples and it would have no consequence. It astounds me,' she said.

But present trends have little chance of redressing the injustices of history. Native Americans used to have the lands to themselves but are now less than 1 per cent of the US population, with little chance of becoming a majority again. The biggest growth is among Latinos (largely derived from Spain), and Asians, particularly from China and the Phillippines.

Jasper said the concerns of the British National Party are based on outdated ideas. 'The racial mix of nations changes all the time. There is no way that ethnicity of blood can be tied to a specific geographic place in a global world. You can no longer look at ethnic states, saying that Germany is Anglo-Saxon and so on.'

Jasper felt the process would strengthen Britain. 'Diversity strengthens a country. It makes it more exciting. We have hundreds of languages spoken, when we go out to eat we never eat English, we eat Thai or French or Indian. It makes London a very cool place to live and work.'

Nor does it seem likely that whites will become marginalised in terms of influences, even if their numbers decline. David Owen, of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at Warwick Univer sity, said: 'Population has never been the main determinant of influence - it's wealth and income. White people still have their hands on most of the levers of military and economic power.'

Even so, Griffin warns that, as in Germany and the US, the rise of ethnic minorities will lead to a backlash. 'It's going to put race to the top of the political agenda,' he said.

But that seems unlikely. Britain has far less of a track record of racism and right-wing extremism than other European countries. Alibhai-Brown insisted that rising numbers of ethnic minorities could even help reduce what racism there is: 'The right-wing parties are growing in Somerset, not Brixton. The idea that more black people means more racism is not born out by the research. The more of us there are, it reduces racism.'

Back in California, in a land built by immigrants, Bustamente put a positive spin on the end of the white majority: 'If there are no majorities, then there's no minorities.' In Europe, with its 40,000-year-old indigenous white population, the rise of a non-white majority may not be greeted with such equanimity.

• In the United Kingdom, the number of people from ethnic minorities has risen from a few tens of thousands in 1950 to more than 3 million now.

• In Italy, the birth rate is so low that, without immigration, the population is predicted to decline by 16 million by 2050.

• The United States government predicts that non-hispanic whites will become a minority in the country by 2055.

• The United Nations predicts that 98 per cent of world population growth until 2025 will be in developing nations.

• The population of Europe is expected to drop from 25 per cent of the world total in 1900 to 7 per cent in the next 50 years.

[2whatcom-blog]

Revolt in opposition to the Wealthy

In 2015 I attended a workshop on political polarization with an eclectic group of students and activists. We swapped concepts on resolving battles over local weather change, inequality, abortion and homosexual rights. One impediment to compromise, a psychologist stated, is that many Individuals have a visceral, emotional response to points like homosexuality. I've a visceral, emotion response to inequality, I replied. It sickens me that some Individuals have billions whereas others barely have sufficient to eat. An economist derided my perspective as typical left-wing irrationality. Inequality isn’t the issue, he stated, poverty is the issue, and we shouldn’t attempt to resolve it by taking extra from the wealthy. I felt chastened. However a flurry of latest articles—with headlines like “Abolish Billionaires” and “The Economics of Soaking the Wealthy”—argues that we needs to be appalled by the immense hole between the poor and wealthy. The proliferation of billionaires reveals that capitalism is malfunctioning and in want of reforms, together with greater taxes on the ultra-wealthy. One vocal billionaire-basher is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly elected Congresswoman from New York and self-identified democratic socialist. “I’m not saying that Invoice Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral,” she stated lately, “however a system that enables billionaires to exist when there are components of Alabama the place persons are nonetheless getting ringworm as a result of they don’t have entry to public well being is mistaken.” A report from the anti-poverty group Oxfam gives a worldwide, historic perspective on inequality. Most tax charges within the richest nations fell from a median of 62 % in 1970 to 38 % in 2013, and inequality has surged. The variety of billionaires has doubled over the previous decade to 2,208. The collective wealth of the 26 richest folks now equals that of the three.eight billion poorest, whose whole wealth fell final yr by 11 %. In brief, the wealthy are getting richer and the poor, at the very least these days, poorer. “We have to rework our economies to ship common well being, training and different public providers,” Oxfam states. “To make this doable, the richest folks and firms ought to pay their justifiable share of tax.” Ocasio-Cortez has proposed elevating the federal tax fee for ultra-wealthy Individuals to 70 %, nearly double the present most federal tax on revenue. The so-called marginal tax would apply to annual revenue above $10 million. Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have referred to as for greater taxes on belongings in addition to revenue of the ultra-rich. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, agrees on the necessity for such taxes. The 70-percent tax proposal of Ocasio-Cortez, he writes in his New York Occasions column, relies on analyses by economist Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, and Christina Romer, former head of President Obama’s Council of Financial Advisers. The analyses, Krugman explains, are primarily based on “the common sense notion that an additional greenback is value so much much less in satisfaction to folks with very excessive incomes than to these with low incomes. Give a household with an annual revenue of $20,000 an additional $1,000 and it'll make an enormous distinction to their lives. Give a man who makes $1 million an additional thousand and he’ll barely discover it.” That is the reasoning behind progressive tax charges, which rise together with revenue. Elevating tax charges too excessive may discourage some folks from being extra productive, leading to a web lack of tax income. Balancing these elements, Diamond and Romer advocate most marginal tax charges of 73 and 80 %, respectively. Krugman rejects the declare that prime taxes harm the economic system. Most tax charges reached 90 % within the late 1950s, and so they remained at 70 % as lately because the early 1980s earlier than plummeting in the course of the Reagan administration. The U.S. economic system “did simply nice” throughout these durations, Krugman says. “Since then tax charges have come approach down, and if something the economic system has achieved much less nicely.” One other Nobel-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, argues that inequality is socially corrosive. In “A Rigged Financial system,” revealed in Scientific American in November, Stiglitz notes that “economies with higher equality carry out higher, with greater development, higher common requirements of residing and higher stability. Inequality within the extremes noticed within the U.S. and within the method generated there truly damages the economic system.” Over the previous 4 a long time inequality in America “has reached new heights,” Stiglitz says. “Whereas the revenue share of the highest 0.1 % has greater than quadrupled and that of the highest 1 % has nearly doubled, that of the underside 90 % has declined.” The wealthiest Individuals “pay a smaller fraction of their revenue in taxes than those that are a lot poorer—a type of largesse that the Trump administration has simply worsened with the 2017 tax invoice.” Rising inequality results in a “vicious spiral,” Stiglitz contends, that subverts democracy. Financial inequality “interprets into political inequality, which ends up in guidelines that favor the rich, which in flip reinforces financial inequality.” Stiglitz recommends countering inequality with campaign-finance reform, cheaper training and, sure, greater taxes on the wealthy. In The Atlantic, economics author Derek Thompson rejects the declare that elevating taxes on the rich will stifle economy-fueling innovation. New York Metropolis and San Francisco, which have two of the very best income-tax charges within the U.S., are “hubs of innovation.” Nations with greater tax charges than the U.S. even have greater charges of entrepreneurship. Conservatives contend that entrepreneurs like Invoice Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk deserve their riches, as a result of they created merchandise that enhance our lives and spur financial development. The federal government, in distinction, wastes tax dollars. Really, economist Mariana Mazzucato factors out in Harvard Enterprise Evaluation, government-funded analysis underpins the fashionable tech increase. The Web and ”almost all of the applied sciences within the iPhone (together with GPS, Siri, and touchscreen)” stemmed from federal analysis, Mazzucato says. “And within the power sector, photo voltaic, nuclear, wind, and even shale gasoline had been primed by public finance. Elon Musk’s three corporations Photo voltaic Metropolis, Tesla, and House X have acquired over $4.9 billion in public help.” Making the case for greater taxes, New York Occasions tech columnist Farhad Manjoo writes that “expertise is making a world the place a number of billionaires management an unprecedented share of world wealth.” Excessive wealth “buys political energy, it silences dissent, it serves primarily to perpetuate ever-greater wealth, typically unrelated to any reciprocal social good.” Final month historian Rutger Bregman triggered a stir on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos when he accused wealthy contributors of avoiding greater taxes. Sure, some billionaires, notably Invoice Gates, have achieved good works with their wealth, Bregman acknowledges, however societies mustn't depend on the generosity of the wealthy. “Philanthropy isn't an alternative choice to democracy or correct taxation or a superb welfare state,” he says. Some wealthy folks agree. Enterprise capitalist Nick Hanauer contends in The Prospect that “taxing the wealthy is the one plan that will enhance funding, increase productiveness, develop the economic system, and create extra and higher jobs.” He dismisses the conservative declare that elevating taxes on the rich and firms will lower funding and enhance unemployment as a “con job.” “When President Invoice Clinton hiked taxes, the economic system boomed,” Hanauer states. “When President George W. Bush slashed taxes, the economic system finally collapsed.” Since Trump and his fellow Republicans reduce taxes in 2017, “company America has introduced greater than 140,000 job cuts… whereas sharing simply 9 % of its $76 billion tax windfall within the type of wage hikes and one-time bonuses.” I admire capitalism. Over the previous few centuries free-market forces have helped humanity escape millennia of crushing poverty, ignorance and early loss of life. Economist Deirdre McCloskey, whom I interviewed in 2016, calls this era, throughout which per-capita incomes surged by an element of 10, “the Nice Enrichment.” Wealth-distribution schemes like these proposed by economist Thomas Picketty usually tend to entice folks in poverty than raise them out of it, based on McCloskey. To assist my college students admire humanity’s progress, I assign them an essay by which McCloskey extols the Nice Enrichment. I present them charts, compiled by economist Max Roser, that monitor the surge in humanity’s well being and wealth. However as anthropologist Jason Hickel factors out, the Nice Enrichment encompassed slavery, colonization and the violent displacement of indigenous folks. Right this moment, greater than half of humanity nonetheless lives on $7.40/day or much less, barely enough for a good life. From this angle, Hickel says, the “grand story of progress appears tepid, mediocre, and--in a world that’s as fabulously wealthy as ours--completely obscene.” Neither I nor any of the critics cited above needs capitalism abolished. We merely need the rich to contribute their justifiable share. Many individuals have a visceral, emotional aversion to greater taxes on the wealthy, however that response, even for the wealthy, is irrational. Additional Studying: “A Fairly Good Utopia” (profile of Deirdre McCloskey in free on-line ebook Thoughts-Physique Issues) Is Nuclear Struggle the Solely Remedy for Inequality? Training Is not Serving to Individuals Overcome Deepening Inequality Pricey Occupy Wall Avenue: Learn Jeffrey Sachs! Pricey Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Please Work to Finish Struggle Sure, Trump Is Scary, however Do not Lose Religion in Progress Noam Chomsky Calls Trump and Republican Allies "Criminally Insane" Read the full article

[challengingpride]

No Pride in Apartheid: Pinkwashing in Israel

           Swarms of muscled, care-free, white men revel on the white beaches of Tel Aviv, a paradise for rich, white, gay men to vacation. With the rich blue sea, stunning natural landscapes, and modern cities, one almost forgets the coexisting ethnic cleansing project happening in Israel alongside this homoerotic beach party. This is what I gather from the television spots developed by Brand Israel in an attempt to engage in pinkwashing. Pinkwashing refers to the homonationalist efforts of governments to focus international attention of their progressive LGBTQ+ rights record (though more often than not, this is just a pseudonym for gay rights), in order to draw attention away from their human rights violations. In this case, these violations encompass the existing state of Apartheid within Israel in which Palestinians are designated second-class citizens. Meanwhile, Israel continues their settler-colonial project to appropriate ever-dwindling Palestinian land, engages in bombing campaigns against Palestinian civilians, and exploits Palestinian labor.

         Brand Israel is a multi-million dollar marketing campaign developed in 2005 between the Israeli government and American corporate marketing executives (Schulman). This propaganda campaign was focused on shifting the then-dismal and accurate public perception of Israel as a conflict-ridden settler-colonial state, and works to maintain an image of Israel as a modern, progressive, and legitimate state. Brand Israel further promotes Israel as a refuge for persecuted Palestinians, when in fact, the Israeli Apartheid severely restricts the movement of Palestinians, and queer Palestinians taking refuge from homophobia in Israel are “often detained and sent back to the West Bank or Gaze where they face the same abuse they fled from.” Queer Palestinian refugees (queer activist groups reject the LGBT acronym and labels as a Western influence) often live in severely marginalized conditions to avoid detainment, despite the fact that their deportation as LGBTQ+ refugees violates Israel’s accord with international humanitarian law (Feng).

           To be clear, Palestine is by no means queer-friendly. Homosexuality is illegal in the Gaza Strip, but has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s “when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians [must] follow” (Schulman). Queer Palestinians can potentially face both extreme interpersonal and state violence, including “beatings, stabbings, burnings, prolonged immersion in sewage water, and forced starvation” (Feng). Queer Palestinians do not have specifically outlined rights within the law. However, the definition of queerness as Other, and thus, the need for laws to protect queer Palestinians, is the result of the importation of homophobia from British colonialism. Further, the propagation of Israel’s LGBT rights is demonstrably a tool for rebranding, not done out of concern for queer Palestinians. Beyond the fact that Israel legally does not accept queer Palestinian immigrants, Brand Israel coordinates its pinkwashing with StandWithUs, an Israeli government-funded lobby group with ties to right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ activists such as John Hagee of Christians United for Israel (Barrows-Friedman). “The rise of the gay equality agenda in Israel is concomitant with the increasing repression of the Israeli state towards Palestinians,” explains anthropologist Rebecca L. Stein.

           It’s important to distinguish between LGBTQ+ rights not as something gifted from the West to non-Western nations, but to reframe LGBTQ+ rights as something necessitated by the homophobia enhanced, imported, and imposed by Western colonialism. It must also be acknowledged that the representation of the non-white immigrant (especially Muslim immigrants) as intensely homophobic “opportunistically ignores the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church, and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays.” This narrative has been transposed from its origins as a European xenophobic tool to a facilitator of the Israeli apartheid. Puar clarifies that homonationalism in Israel is not “a reflection of any exceptionalist activity,” but is merely an iteration of a traditional colonialist tactic, which weaponizes the treatment of marginalized groups “to justify imperialist violence” (Jasbir 283). Classic examples include the British-Consul General Lord Cromer, head of the colonial Egyptian government, supposed supporter of the liberation of Egyptian women, despite restricting their education, and founder and president of the Britain-based Men’s League For Opposing Women’s Suffrage.

           The discussion of pinkwashing consistently refers to the weaponization of “LGBT” rights, and yet, Israel’s gay-targeted marketing agenda and even outside pinkwashing activism, ambiguously situate trans people within their frames. Saffo Papantonopoulou terms this “trans-homonationalism” (because transnationalism was “already taken”). Papantonopoulou describes a “Zionist economy of gratitude” that inserts transgender people in Israel into “a cycle of debt...[in which the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West for allowing her to exist” (281). Thus, although trans people targeted by pinkwashing in implicit terms only, as Brand Israel’s marketing describe an LGBT haven, but shows only (mostly white) gay men. Israel’s trans rights are relatively underdeveloped for a nation that seeks to align itself with Western models of modernity – specifically, it is very difficult for trans people in Israel to transition under the age of 18, and a significant number are turned away because of strict definitions of gender dysphoria diagnoses. Trans people may serve in the military, although the right to enforce the Israeli settler-colonial project should not correlate with progressivism. For example, Israel has recently promoted its first transgender military officer, Shachar Erez. Erez’s tour is, consequently, presented by StandWithUs. Israel’s neoliberal idea of progressivism once again situates itself in such a way as to distract from the state’s human rights abuses, in such a blatant way that it nearly satirizes itself. Luckily, Nora Barrows-Friedman can do that on her own, covering Erez’s tour with the Onion-worthy headline: “Israel’s First Trans Officers Helps With Ethnic Cleansing.”

           Like homonationalism, pinkwashing insidiously appropriates the struggles of queer people to the detriment of others; in this case, it is those within our own community who suffer. Israeli Apartheid and the decolonization of Palestine is an LGBTQ+ issue. LGBTQ+ organizing against Israeli Apartheid is developing throughout the United States and beyond. We must give our support and deference to queer Palestinian liberation groups like Aswat, Al-Qaws, and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. We cannot allow apolitical Israeli or pro-Israeli events to take place in LGBTQ+ spaces. Not in our name.

Free Palestine.

- Emily

CITATION

Barrows-Friedman, Nora. "Israel’s First Trans Officer Helps with Ethnic Cleansing." The Electronic Intifada, 12 Apr. 2017.

Feng, Josh. "A Selective Sanctuary: "Pinkwashing" and Gay Palestinian Asylum-Seekers in Israel." The Yale Review of International Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, Oct. 2014.

Papantonopoulou, Saffo. "“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv”: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude." WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1-2, 2014, pp. 278-293.

Puar, Jasbir. "Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel." Feminist Legal Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 133-142.

Schulman, Sarah. "Israel and 'Pinkwashing'." The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2011.

[blackkudos]

Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American jazz and pop music singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the 1943 films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Because of the Red Scare and her political activism, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

Early life

Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family, both sides of her family were a mixture of African-American, Native American, and European American descent, and belonged to the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated people. Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne, Jr. (1893–1970), a numbers kingpin in the gambling trade, left the family when she was three and moved to an upper-middle-class black community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron (1894–1976), was a granddaughter of inventor Samuel R. Scottron; she was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively. Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was a Senegalese slave. Horne was mainly raised by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne.

When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia. For several years, she traveled with her mother. From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne, dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia, who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was 12 years old. She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. Aged 18, she moved in with her father in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.

Career

Road to Hollywood

In the fall of 1933, Horne joined the chorus line of the Cotton Club in New York City. In the spring of 1934, she had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade starring Adelaide Hall, who took Lena under her wing. A few years later, Horne joined Noble Sissle's Orchestra, with which she toured and with whom she made her first records, issued by Decca. After she separated from her first husband, Horne toured with bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1940–41, but disliked the travel and left the band to work at the Cafe Society in New York. She replaced Dinah Shore as the featured vocalist on NBC's popular jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. The show's resident maestros, Henry Levine and Paul Laval, recorded with Horne in June 1941 for RCA Victor. Horne left the show after only six months when she was hired by former Cafe Trocadero (Los Angeles) manager Felix Young to perform in a Cotton Club-style revue on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and was replaced by actress Betty Keene of the Keene sisters.

Horne already had two low-budget movies to her credit: a 1938 musical feature called The Duke is Tops (later reissued with Horne's name above the title as The Bronze Venus); and a 1941 two-reel short subject, Boogie Woogie Dream, featuring pianists Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Horne's songs from Boogie Woogie Dream were later released individually as soundies. Horne made her Hollywood nightclub debut at Felix Young's Little Troc on the Sunset Strip in January 1942. A few weeks later, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In November 1944, she was featured in an episode of the popular radio series Suspense, as a fictional nightclub singer, with a large speaking role along with her singing. In 1945 and 1946, she sang with Billy Eckstine's Orchestra.

She made her debut at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Panama Hattie (1942) and performed the title song of Stormy Weather based loosely on the life of Adelaide Hall, (1943), which she made at 20th Century Fox, on loan from MGM. She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, most notably Cabin in the Sky (1943), but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that her films had to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers. As a result, most of Horne's film appearances were stand-alone sequences that had no bearing on the rest of the film, so editing caused no disruption to the storyline. A notable exception was the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, although one number from that film was cut before release because it was considered too suggestive by the censors: Horne singing "Ain't It the Truth" while taking a bubble bath. This scene and song are featured in the film That's Entertainment! III (1994) which also featured commentary from Horne on why the scene was deleted prior to the film's release. Lena Horne was the first African-American elected to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), she performed "Love" by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Horne lobbied for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM's 1951 version of Show Boat (having already played the role when a segment of Show Boat was performed in Till the Clouds Roll By) but lost the part to Ava Gardner, a personal friend in real life. Horne claimed this was due to the Production Code's ban on interracial relationships in films, but MGM sources state she was never considered for the role in the first place. In the documentary That's Entertainment! III, Horne stated that MGM executives required Gardner to practice her singing using Horne's recordings, which offended both actresses. Ultimately, Gardner's voice was overdubbed by actress Annette Warren (Smith) for the theatrical release.

Changes of direction

By the mid-1950s, Horne was disenchanted with Hollywood and increasingly focused on her nightclub career. She only made two major appearances for MGM during the 1950s: Duchess of Idaho (which was also Eleanor Powell's final film); and the 1956 musical Meet Me in Las Vegas. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. She would subsequently disavow communism. She returned to the screen three more times, playing chanteuse Claire Quintana in the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter, Glinda in The Wiz (1978), which was directed by her then son-in-law Sidney Lumet, and co-hosting the MGM retrospective That's Entertainment! III (1994), in which she was candid about her unkind treatment by the studio.

After leaving Hollywood, Horne established herself as one of the premier nightclub performers of the post-war era. She headlined at clubs and hotels throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In 1957, a live album entitled, Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria, became the biggest-selling record by a female artist in the history of the RCA Victor label at that time. In 1958, Horne became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Musical" (for her part in the "Calypso" musical Jamaica) which, at Lena's request featured her longtime friend Adelaide Hall.

From the late 1950s through to the 1960s, Horne was a staple of TV variety shows, appearing multiple times on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, and The Bell Telephone Hour. Other programs she appeared on included The Judy Garland Show, The Hollywood Palace, and The Andy Williams Show. Besides two television specials for the BBC (later syndicated in the U.S.), Horne starred in her own U.S. television special in 1969, Monsanto Night Presents Lena Horne. During this decade, the artist Pete Hawley painted her portrait for RCA Victor, capturing the mood of her performance style.

In 1970, she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in the hour-long Harry & Lena special for ABC; in 1973, she co-starred with Tony Bennett in Tony and Lena. Horne and Bennett subsequently toured the U.S. and U.K. in a show together. In the 1976 program America Salutes Richard Rodgers, she sang a lengthy medley of Rodgers songs with Peggy Lee and Vic Damone. Horne also made several appearances on The Flip Wilson Show. Additionally, Horne played herself on television programs such as The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Sanford and Son in the 1970s, as well as a 1985 performance on The Cosby Show and a 1993 appearance on A Different World. In the summer of 1980, Horne, 63 years old and intent on retiring from show business, embarked on a two-month series of benefit concerts sponsored by the sorority Delta Sigma Theta. These concerts were represented as Horne's farewell tour, yet her retirement lasted less than a year.

On April 13, 1980, Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and host Gene Kelly were all scheduled to appear at a Gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to salute the NY City Center's Joffrey Ballet Company. However, Pavarotti's plane was diverted over the Atlantic and he was unable to appear. James Nederlander was an invited Honored Guest and noted that only three people at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House asked for their money back. He asked to be introduced to Lena following her performance. In May 1981, The Nederlander Organization, Michael Frazier, and Fred Walker went on to book Horne for a four-week engagement at the newly named Nederlander Theatre (formerly the Trafalgar, the Billy Rose, and the National) on West 41st Street in New York City. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony award, and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. The 333-performance Broadway run closed on Horne's 65th birthday, June 30, 1982. Later that same week, the entire show was performed again and videotaped for television broadcast and home video release. The tour began a few days later at Tanglewood (Massachusetts) during the weekend of July 4, 1982. The Lady and Her Music toured 41 cities in the U.S. and Canada until June 17, 1984. It played in London for a month in August and ended its run in Stockholm, Sweden, September 14, 1984. In 1981, she received a Special Tony Award for her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which also played to acclaim at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1984. Despite the show's considerable success (Horne still holds the record for the longest-running solo performance in Broadway history), she did not capitalize on the renewed interest in her career by undertaking many new musical projects. A proposed 1983 joint recording project between Horne and Frank Sinatra (to be produced by Quincy Jones) was ultimately abandoned, and her sole studio recording of the decade was 1988's The Men in My Life, featuring duets with Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams. In 1989, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

The 1990s found Horne considerably more active in the recording studio. Following her 1993 performance at a tribute to the musical legacy of her good friend Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's longtime collaborator), she decided to record an album composed largely of Strayhorn's and Ellington's songs the following year, We'll Be Together Again. To coincide with the release of the album, Horne made what would be her final concert performances at New York's Supper Club and Carnegie Hall. That same year, Horne also lent her vocals to a recording of "Embraceable You" on Sinatra's Duets II album. Though the album was largely derided by critics, the Sinatra-Horne pairing was generally regarded as its highlight. In 1995, a "live" album capturing her Supper Club performance was released (subsequently winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album). In 1998, Horne released another studio album, entitled Being Myself. Thereafter, Horne essentially retired from performing and largely retreated from public view, though she did return to the recording studio in 2000 to contribute vocal tracks on Simon Rattle's Classic Ellington album.

Civil rights activism

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Because the U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German POWs. Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. Tom Lehrer mentions her in his song "National Brotherhood Week" in the line "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek" referring (wryly) to her and to Sheriff Jim Clark, of Selma, Alabama, who was responsible for a violent attack on civil rights marchers in 1965. In 1983, she was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.

Personal life

Horne married Louis Jordan Jones in January 1937 in Pittsburgh. On December 21, 1937, their daughter, Gail (later known as Gail Lumet Buckley, a writer) was born there. They had a son, Edwin Jones (February 7, 1940 – September 12, 1970) who died of kidney disease. Horne and Jones separated in 1940 and divorced in 1944. Horne's second marriage was to Lennie Hayton, who was Music Director and one of the premier musical conductors and arrangers at MGM, in December 1947 in Paris. They separated in the early 1960s, but never divorced; he died in 1971. In her as-told-to autobiography Lena by Richard Schickel, Horne recounts the enormous pressures she and her husband faced as an interracial couple. She later admitted in an interview in Ebony (May 1980), she had married Hayton to advance her career and cross the "color-line" in show business.

Horne also had a long and close relationship with Billy Strayhorn, whom she said she would have married if he had been heterosexual. He was also an important professional mentor to her. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet, known for her award-winning screenplay Rachel Getting Married, is Horne's granddaughter, the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet and Horne's daughter Gail. Her other grandchildren include Gail's other daughter, Amy Lumet, and her son's four children, Thomas, William, Samadhi, and Lena. Her great-grandchildren include the actor Jake Cannavale.

Death

Horne died on May 9, 2010, and was cremated in New York City The funeral took place at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. Thousands gathered and attendees included Leontyne Price, Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, Jessye Norman, Chita Rivera, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, Lauren Bacall, Robert Osborne, Audra McDonald, and Vanessa Williams.

Legacy

In 2003, ABC announced that Janet Jackson would star as Horne in a television biographical film. In the weeks following Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" debacle during the 2004 Super Bowl, however, Variety reported that Horne had demanded Jackson be dropped from the project. "ABC executives resisted Horne's demand", according to the Associated Press report, "but Jackson representatives told the trade newspaper that she left willingly after Horne and her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, asked that she not take part." Oprah Winfrey stated to Alicia Keys during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she might possibly consider producing the biopic herself, casting Keys as Horne.

In January 2005, Blue Note Records, her label for more than a decade, announced that "the finishing touches have been put on a collection of rare and unreleased recordings by the legendary Horne made during her time on Blue Note." Remixed by her longtime producer Rodney Jones, the recordings featured Horne in remarkably secure voice for a woman of her years, and include versions of such signature songs as "Something to Live For", "Chelsea Bridge", and "Stormy Weather". The album, originally titled Soul but renamed Seasons of a Life, was released on January 24, 2006. In 2007, Horne was portrayed by Leslie Uggams as the older Lena and Nikki Crawford as the younger Lena in the stage musical Stormy Weather staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California (January to March 2009). In 2011, Horne was also portrayed by actress Ryan Jillian in a one-woman show titled Notes from A Horne staged at the Susan Batson studio in New York City, from November 2011 to February 2012. The 83rd Academy Awards presented a tribute to Horne by actress Halle Berry at the ceremony held February 27, 2011.

Wikipedia

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Ethel Merman and the Boy Scout Show

S2;E19 ~ February 10, 1964

Synopsis

When Ethel Merman headlines the Annual Boy Scout Show, Lucy and Viv are relegated to being costumers. Feeling sorry for them, Merman agrees to share the spotlight.  

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carmichael), Vivian Vance (Vivian Bagley), Gale Gordon (Theodore J. Mooney), Ralph Hart (Sherman Bagley) and Jimmy Garrett (Jerry Carmichael)

Candy Moore (Chris Carmichael) does not appear in this episode.

Guest Cast

Ethel Merman was born in Queens, New York, in 1908. Known primarily for her powerful belt voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called 'the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage.'  Among her many stage credits are: Anything Goes (1934), DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Call Me Madam (1950), and Gypsy (1959). “There's No Business Like Show Business” from Annie Get Your Gun became her signature song. It was also the title of a 1954 movie musical starring Merman. Hollywood was not always friendly to Merman, who was replaced for the film versions of Annie Get Your Gun (1950) by Betty Hutton, Gypsy (1962) by Rosalind Russell, and Dubarry Was A Lady (1943) by Lucille Ball!  Dubarry Was A Lady also included the song “Friendship,” which was featured in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3). In 1934 Ball and Merman co-starred with Eddie Cantor in the film Kid Millions. Merman recreated her stage performances on TV in “Panama Hattie” (1954) and “Annie Get Your Gun” (1967). Merman died in 1984 from a long illness after a brain tumor.

LUCY: “You’d think she was the biggest star on Broadway.” VIV: “She is.” 

This was the second of two episodes to feature Ethel Merman. Originally, they were intended to be one episode, filmed on December 5, 1963, but the material seemed rushed and the stars were enjoying the work so it was decided to expand into a second episode. The first draft of this script was dated November 20, 1963 with pink and blue pages (updates and changes) from December 1963. 

The previous episode (which originally had this episode's title) was re-titled “Lucy Teaches Ethel Merman To Sing” and the final scene of it was rewritten to lead into this one. However, due to Merman's schedule, it wasn't filmed until a month later. By that time, Lucy had started wearing a new wig, Viv was tanned from a Christmas vacation, and Merman had changed her hair color. In between the two episodes, Desilu produced “Lucy Plays Florence Nightingale” (S2;E14), “Lucy Goes To Art Class” (S2;E15) and “Chris Goes Steady” (S2;E16).  

These two Ethel Merman episodes were re-run on CBS on May 24 and June 1, 1964.  

Lucy was a big fan of Ethel Merman and offered her a guest spot after her Desilu pilot “Maggie Brown” was not picked up for series. Lucille Ball and Gary Morton attended the filming of the pilot and Merman also was in the audience for an episode of “The Lucy Show.” On the DVD extras, Jimmy Garrett recalls that Lucille Ball caught him watching filming from the wings and whispered "Watch very carefully. You'll never see anyone better."

Vivian Vance understudied Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney in the 1934 Broadway musicals Anything Goes and Red, Hot and Blue (1936), both by Cole Porter.

Merman is living with Lucy and Viv while she's in Danfield. Lucy and Viv were established as den mothers of their sons' scout troupe in “Lucy Visits the White House” (S1;E25).

Mr. Mooney's daughter Rosemary, who lives in Trenton, New Jersey, is about to give birth to his first grandchild. This is the fourth Mooney child to be mentioned on the series: Arnold, Bob, Ted Jr. and Rosemary. Like her mother, Irma, Rosemary is never actually seen. Lucille Ball briefly lived in Trenton, New Jersey, as an infant.  

In the living room, Merman sings a few bars of “Red, Red Robin” with Jerry and Sherman dancing around her in bird costumes. "When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)" was a 1926 popular song written by Harry Woods. It was a big hit for Al Joleson, Bing Crosby, and Doris Day. 

When Viv demands Lucy finish her costume right away, Lucy calls her a “wicked stepsister” - a reference to the fairy tale “Cinderella.”  The line gets a large round of applause from the studio audience. 

Lucy says the old manual sewing machine belongs in the Betsy Ross museum.

LUCY: “When I looked at the bobbin it was full of red, white, and blue thread.”

Coincidentally, as Lucy says this, she is wearing a blue shirt, with red and white tape measures around her neck.

Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Griscom Ross (1752–1836) is widely credited with making the first American flag. Although there is no actual Betsy Ross museum, the Betsy Ross House on Arch Street in Philadelphia is the location where she supposedly sewed the first flag, although this fact (and her residence there) is disputed by many historians. Betsy Ross was a character on “The Jack Benny Program” in 1964 (above) when Lucy played Mrs. Paul Revere!  

Lucy tearfully tells Merman she’s always dreamed of having her ‘name up in lights’.  She tediously spells out her full name: “L-U-C-I-L-L-E  C-A-R-M-I-C-H-A-E-L”.  Ethel replies “If you ever get to Broadway, you’ve got to get a shorter name!” Not coincidentally, Ethel Merman herself shortened her name for the marquee: she was born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann!   

THE ANNUAL BOY SCOUT SHOW 

Sherman does an acrobatic dance routine as an opening act

In “Lucy the Music Lover” (S1;E8), Sherman did a quick ballet dance through the living room to impress Lucy's date. Ralph Hart was also a musical theatre performer, seen in the film musicals Gypsy, The Music Man, and Bye Bye Birdie. 

Jerry (in his scout uniform), tells a joke.

From his first audition for the series, Lucille Ball thought that Jimmy Garrett's dry delivery of his lines was hysterical.  

The adult performers alternate in providing linking narration and paging the stage curtain to transition to the next act. Technically, the Boy Scout Show does not run in one continuous cut. The paging of the curtain allows for subtle edits in the film to piece together what were separate takes. 

Merman, Lucy, Viv and Mr. Mooney sing “There's No Business Like Show Business”

The song is from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1949). It will also be sung again the the Boy Scout Show's finale. Jerry spoke the title in the previous episode “Lucy Teaches Ethel Merman To Sing” (S2;E18).  

VAUDEVILLE

Lucy does a quick juggling act.  

The plates are obviously rigged for comic effect. 

Mr. Mooney and Viv sing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", which was originally to be sung by Mr. Mooney and his wife Irma, had she not had to go to Trenton for the birth of their grandchild. 

“Tiptoe Through the Tulips (with Me)” was composed by Joe Burke with lyrics by Al Dubin for the 1929 film Gold Diggers of Broadway. In 1968, it was sung by Tiny Tim, whose version charted at #17, becoming his signature song. Due to its resurgence in popularity, the title was also mentioned on several episodes of “Here’s Lucy”.

THE FLICKERS (aka SILENT MOVIES)

Lucy, Mr. Mooney, and Ethel Merman perform a silent movie sketch about a husband leaving his wife for another woman. 

The sketch is pantomimed to honky-tonk piano accompaniment. 

THE TALKIES 

Viv as Shirley Temple sings "On the Good Ship Lollipop". Vivian Vance, an accomplished singer, makes a concerted effort to satirize the mannerisms and vocal limitations of a child performer like Shirley Temple. 

"On the Good Ship Lollipop" was composed by Richard A. Whiting with lyrics by Sidney Clare. It was the signature song of child actress Shirley Temple, who first sang it in the 1934 movie Bright Eyes. Shirley Temple was mentioned on “I Love Lucy” in 1955's “The Tour” (ILL S4;E30), by which time the former child star was married and known as Shirley Temple Black.

BROADWAY MUSICALS

A tribute to 1920s stage musicals features Lucy, Viv, Ethel Merman and Mr. Mooney

In “Lucy Teaches Ethel Merman How To Sing” (S2;E18), Viv suggested dancing the Charleston for the Boy Scout Show, but the idea was shot down by producer Sherman. The sketch also features Gale Gordon doing a cartwheel, something he would do in future ‘show-within-a-show’ episodes. After being jilted, Lucy sings a few bars of “Am I Blue?” a song written by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke in 1929. It has since become a standard, covered by many musical artists. The sketch ends happily with Merman singing the final notes of her hit “I Got Rhythm”, a song she originated in the 1930 Gershwin musical Girl Crazy and also sang in the previous episode.  

RADIO

Mr. Mooney is a radio host presenting a lady saxophone player (Lucy) from Altoona, Pennsylvania, playing "Glow Worm" (badly)

"The Glow-Worm" is a song from Paul Lincke's 1902 operetta Lysistrata. It was also used in the 1907 Broadway musical The Girl Behind The Counter. Lucille Ball had briefly played the saxophone as a child. During the radio sequence Mr. Mooney says “Round and round she goes! Where she stops, nobody knows!” This was a quote from “Ted Mack's Amateur Hour” a radio and TV talent show that began in 1934. A wheel of fortune was spun to determine the order of the performers and while it was spinning, Mack intoned the now-famous line. The show officially ended in 1970 but was revived briefly in 1993. Before entering television, Gale Gordon was the highest paid radio performer in Hollywood. Lucille Ball was also a radio performer with her own series “My Favorite Husband.” 

TELEVISION

A tribute to “The Ed Sullivan Show” and its showcase of variety acts

To show the cyclic nature of entertainment, Lucy repeats the same exact juggling act she did at the start of the show. Ed Sullivan hosted an immensely popular variety show on CBS from 1948 to 1971. Up until 1955 it was called “Toast of the Town.” Ethel Merman frequently appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” often singing her signature songs.  

FINALE

Ethel Merman sings "Everything's Coming Up Roses"

"Everything's Coming Up Roses" is a song introduced by Merman in the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Merman sang the song throughout her career, even to a disco beat! 

Everyone joins in for a reprise of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”

After the filming was complete, Merman recalled that she and Vance went to Lucille Ball's house for some girl talk and Lucille styled their hair – to disastrous results. Ball also threw Merman a bridal shower (above) before her month-long marriage to Ernest Borgnine in 1964.  

Callbacks!

Lucy Ricardo used a sewing machine for the first time in “Lucy Wants New Furniture” (ILL S2;E28).  

Cheesy vaudeville gags such Lucy’s rigged plate juggling were an integral part of the finale of “Ethel's Home Town” (ILL S4;E15). Fred and Ethel Mertz were former vaudevillians.  

In “Lucy Has Her Eyes Examined” (ILL S3;E11), Lucy Ricardo and the Mertzes burst into an a capella rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in an impromptu audition for Mr. Parker, a Broadway producer.  The song would also be quoted (not sung) by Lucy Ricardo in “Baby Pictures” (ILL S3;E5).

"When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)" was sung by Fred Mertz (William Frawley) in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3) and later by Lucy Carter in “Guess Who Owes Lucy $23.50″ (HL S1;E11). 

Lucy also played “Glow Worm” on “The Saxophone” (ILL S2;E2) and in “Lucy’s Club Dance” (ILL S3;E25). It was the only song she knew, until it was inexplicably “Sweet Sue” during season six! 

LUCY: “Well, you see, Ethel. All my life I’ve wanted to be in show business!” 

Lucy sobs in front of Ethel Merman because all her life she wanted to be in the show, something Lucy Ricardo also did many times on “I Love Lucy.”  The above line might easily have been spoken to Ethel Mertz or Ricky, instead of Merman.

When Merman agrees to give up one of her numbers for Lucy to be in the show, Viv asks Lucy if she would really let a big star like Merman do such a thing. Lucy lets out a high-pitched “Weeeelll” the same way that Lucy Ricardo often did. 

In 1954, “The Ed Sullivan Show” (aka “Toast of the Town”) devoted an entire hour to Lucy and Desi. Sullivan’s name and his show were mentioned several times on “I Love Lucy.” 

Lucy and Viv Charleston at the start of the ‘Broadway Musicals’ section of the Boy Scout Show. On “I Love Lucy” Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel Charleston at the end of “Lucy Has Her Eyes Examined” (ILL S3;E11). 

This is the second time a silent film skit has been part of “The Lucy Show.” The first was with Lucy as Charlie Chaplin during “Chris's New Year's Eve Party” (S1;E14). 

Fast Forward!

Those red, red robins just keep bob, bob, bobbin’ again in “Kim Moves Out” (HL S4;E20) in 1974. 

The Charleston never goes out of style, as demonstrated by Lucy and Kim Carter when “Ginger Rogers Comes to Tea” (HL S4;E11) on “Here’s Lucy” in 1971.

Blooper Alerts!

Flown the Coop! Although, Ethel Merman has Lucy make 24 robin costumes so that she can sing “When the Red, Red Robin” while the scouts dance around her, the song is not in the finished show! 

Bulldog Cement? After the 1920's stage musical segment, Mr. Mooney's false mustache is falling off. It may have been due to spirit gum not adhering to Gale Gordon's own mustache or it may have been done for comic effect.  

“Ethel Merman and the Boy Scout Show” rates 5 Paper Hearts out of 5