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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Black Widow: The Disturbing Real Spy History Inspirations

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This article contains Black Widow spoilers.

Black Widow is the first Marvel Studios release to have an opening credits sequence since 2010’s Iron Man 2. Which by itself is kind of nice. After all, both movies bookend Scarlett Johansson’s tenure in the role of Natasha Romanoff. Yet when watching the opening moments of Marvel’s latest adventure, the decision to include an ominous montage of young Nat’s childhood after the movie’s brutal cold open is about more than creating symmetry with the past; it fills in the most mysterious Avenger’s blindspots… and reveals the red in her ledger is also our own.

Scored to a haunting cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Black Widow’s opening titles dovetail out from one of the movie’s best moments. With a stripped down prologue devoid of space gods and magic rocks, Black Widow’s first 10 minutes wouldn’t look out of place in a Tom Clancy adaptation or an hour of premium cable TV: Young American girls Natasha and Yelena (Ever Anderson and Violet McGraw) have the comforts of their midwest childhoods ripped away when their “father” Alexi (David Harbour) reveals to “mother” Melina (Rachel Weisz) that their cover is blown. American authorities are coming to arrest them as Russian spies, and they need to leave the country. Now.

While the following car chase features some of Marvel’s typical bells and whistles, there is an impressive restraint implemented (at least initially) by director Cate Shortland. The movie minimizes the CG spectacle here but ups the on-the-nose Americana: high school football, rock and roll, and literal “American Pie” of the Don McLean variety. This is a story about a sham “family” of four Russian spies seeing their illusionary bliss shattered, and their innocence stolen. The implications then become explicit during the unusually bleak title sequence which juxtaposes Nat’s sterile and cruel girlhood with the geopolitical chaos that closed out the 20th century.

Unlike nearly every Marvel film not named Iron Man or Black Panther, there is a momentary consideration for the real world context in which these flights of comic book fancy are borne, and how grim post-Cold War espionage would be for a superhero’s origin story. With fleeting snapshots of young Natasha and Yelena asked to imitate happy Christmastime memories for phony family photos, or being brainwashed inside the fabled Red Room’s ballet studio, Black Widow echoes actual horrors from the recent past…

Russian Spies on American Soil

The story of Russian spies infiltrating American borders is of course nothing new. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg made international headlines in 1950 when the American couple was arrested, and later convicted, for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Indeed, they were the first Americans executed during peacetime for espionage after they were revealed to have smuggled nuclear weapon designs to Russia.

Of course the childhood origins of Natasha and Yelena better resemble more recent Russian spy games, including sleeper cells who operated in the U.S. for decades. Like FX’s The Americans TV series before it, the prologue and opening credits of Black Widow appear to be greatly inspired by a Russian spy ring arrested by the FBI in 2010.

Dubbed the “Illegals Program” by American law enforcement, the Russian spy network dated back to the early 1990s and was implemented after the fall of the Soviet Union by the SVR—Russia’s foreign intelligence service which replaced the KGB. Designed to place Russian spies in positions of influence and access in American government, business, and academia, the program included 11 spies operating in locations as far flung as New York City and Seattle, and Boston and northern Virginia.

While the program never successfully achieved its reported aim to gather information on America’s nuclear weapon arsenal, foreign policy toward Iran, or access to CIA or congressional leadership, it did in retrospect presage the soon-to-be chilling relationship between the U.S. and Russia.

It also required intricate false identities, aliases, and cover stories which led to some Russian operatives starting families in the guise of blending in. For instance, Vladimir and Lidya Guryev arrived in the U.S. in the 1990s under the names Richard and Cynthia Murphy. Cynthia proved especially adept at adapting American life, if not gathering pertinent state secrets. In 1997 she earned an associate degree from NYU, and in 2000 an MBA from Columbia University. During that entire time frame, she worked at a prestigious Manhattan accounting firm, taking home an annual six-figure salary.

The couple also gave birth to two daughters during their time as Russian sleeper agents, with both children being American citizens when their parents were arrested in 2010. The daughters were ages 11 and nine at the time, and were forced to follow their parents back to Russia after they were swapped with Americans convicted of espionage in Russia.

Similarly, Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova were assigned the task of becoming Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley while still a young Russian couple. They moved to Canada to more easily establish false identities before immigrating to the U.S., with “Donald” eventually studying at Harvard. Their two sons Tim and Alex were born in Canada and were ages 20 and 16 when their parents were arrested. Despite having Canadian passports and having never even been to Russia, they were stripped of their citizenship, which as of the publication of an in-depth profile in the Guardian in 2016, they were still fighting to get back.

“I never had anything close to a suspicion regarding my parents,” Alex told the British newspaper. “It seemed all my friends’ parents led much more exciting and successful lives.” It didn’t even seem quite real to Alex and his brother until they went to Russia and were shown photographs of their parents in their 20s—in officers’ uniforms and adorned with medals.

Perhaps the most famous spy from this ring remains redheaded Anna Chapman, who the press in 2010 dubbed the “sexy Russian spy.” In fact, The Independent reported that the FBI’s then-counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi said she was getting “closer and closer” to possibly seducing a member of the Obama administration’s cabinet in a classic “honeypot” scenario.

However, Figliuzzi said he was misquoted and they were worried about her proximity to American officials, not “seduction.” Cynthia Murphy, however, did establish contact with a friend and fundraiser of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Clinton was then the Secretary of State.

Since being deported to Russia, Chapman became a model and social media celebrity… and a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump.

The Real Red Rooms

Another aspect that looms over Black Widow’s opening credits and beyond is the depravity of the Red Room, an institute we see teased in the movie’s title sequence when Ray Winstone’s interpretation of slime-incarnate, Col. Dreykov, tells young Natasha the school “is your home.” Viewers are also later reminded this is where Natasha was sterilized as a teenager after being taught to kill, and an older Yelena (Florence Pugh) was literally brainwashed with mind-altering drugs.

While mind control and sterilization appear to be fanciful additions made by Marvel, Soviet espionage schools for young women and otherwise were a definite product of the Cold War era. While details remain obscured even decades after the Iron Curtain fell, CIA officers and even some former Russian intelligence personnel have given peaks behind the shroud. Former KGB Lt. Gen. Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin recalled living in a “dilapidated” dormitory while being trained in espionage and surveillance.

And a school specifically designed to train women to use sex and seduction as tools of spyycraft did exist. According to multiple former CIA officers, it was located in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. Graduates of the program, variously known as “swallows” in the espionage world, inspired many Cold War stories, including how the Widow program is depicted in the MCU.

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Jason Matthews, who worked as a CIA officer for over 30 years, including in Europe during the Cold War, explored the sordid details as an author in his Red Sparrow trilogy, which the CIA officially reviewed as “accurate [and] richly detailed.”

“The Russians have for many, many years, used women to try and sexually entrap [high-ranking foreign officials] for blackmail purposes, to try and tell their secrets,” Matthews told CNBC in 2018. And while he said the Kazan “Sparrow School” has been closed down, those honeypot operations persist.

Indeed, Jonna Mendez, a former CIA chief of disguise and a member of the International Spy Museum’s Board of Directors, confirmed the Kazan swallows school. In a 2018 interview, she told The New York Times about the time a swallow compromised a U.S. Marine stationed in Moscow during the 1980s. After being enticed by the Soviet spy, he allowed her and several other women (also likely swallows) into the American embassy. The marine was later convicted of allowing a security breach.

“It was a seduction scenario not unlike what you would have [seen in the Red Sparrow movie],” Mendez said.

The Menace of Dreykov

The real world seediness of the Red Room and Widow program’s inspirations is only matched by the darkness of Dreykov. To go back again to the movie’s opening credits, it’s disquieting in the way the villain of the film is juxtaposed. He is not seen rubbing shoulders with Thanos or a cameoing Vulture, nor is he depicted as in pursuit of some mythical MacGuffin.

When we get our first good look at Dreykov, he’s visiting the Rose Garden with President Bill Clinton, who occupied the White House during the film’s 1995 prologue. Another shot in the credits show him meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who was President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor and then later his second Secretary of State. She participated in the meetings that led to decades of war in the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq and its quest for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

When coupled with actual shots of the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003—which would’ve been around the time Natasha “graduated” from the Red Room—the implication is obvious: Dreykov is orchestrating or participating in world events from the shadows. While the film never overtly states Dreykov played a role in shaping American or Russian foreign policy at the turn of the century, it is nonetheless heavily inferred as his root motivation, much like the menace of sexual manipulation and violence in a school inspired by actual Soviet era honeypot programs.

In fact, during the climax of Black Widow, Dreykov is revealed to be a sleazy amalgamation of multiple predatory men in power who’ve finally seen their reckoning in the last several years. During their final confrontation, Dreykov looms over Johansson’s Natasha like a brute trying to intimidate a woman by his girth and the implicit threat of violence. He’s a toxic blend of every account about Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes trying to manipulate and assault women, or the way a certain presidential candidate purposefully stalked around a debate stage to loom over his female rival.

It also mirrors the disturbing connections that some of these serial abusers possessed. Convicted sexual offender, pedophile, and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein famously associated with leaders of every political stripe, visiting the Clinton White House four times, and having the former president fly repeatedly on his private jet. Donald Trump, meanwhile, flew on the same plane, multiple times according to Epstein’s brother Mark. Epstein was also a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club where at least one underage girl was allegedly preyed upon and groomed into Epstein’s sex ring. Epstein was eventually banned from the resort in 2008, but that came after he was indicted by a grand jury for soliciting child prostitution.

In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

The Marvel Method

That a Marvel Studios film would wade into any of this, even with the lightest of steps and most diminutive of glances, is a surprise. Which is not to say Black Widow—a movie which features a flying mansion fall from the sky—is some kind of pensive commentary on the exploitation of women, be it in espionage or other halls of power. It’s a superhero movie, and one made by Disney, no less.

And yet, in its own way, it is a superhero movie that at least reflects the world it’s made in, thereby offering something more tactile than most Marvel alternatives. It also provides an entirely euphoric catharsis. From the opening credits to the ending resolution, we witness in all its comic book trappings how powerful men embodied by Dreykov use and abuse women’s bodies, often beginning when they’re still girls who can be indoctrinated into what’s “expected” of them.

Seeing Scarlett Johansson sever her own olfactory nerve to break the power of a man like this and then beat him to a pulp— signaling to her target audience they are not just the tools or playthings of the society around them—is the kind of spy game we should watch play out a lot more.

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hogtown-socialist-alternative · 5 years

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How Socialists Defeated Amazon’s Bid to Buy Seattle’s Elections

By Ty Moore -November 9, 2019

Jeff Bezos’s bid to buy Seattle City Council has backfired. Despite big business dropping unprecedented cash behind Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, Seattle voters rejected this attempt to flip the council to the right in all but two of the seven council races. In Seattle’s most-watched, most expensive, and most polarized council in decades, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant appears to have won a narrow victory.

(Watch the victory press conference here. )

After election night returns showed Sawant behind by 8 points, with 46% to Egan Orion’s 54%, the corporate media and big business sounded triumphalist. But 60% of late arriving ballots counted in the following days swung toward Kshama. By Friday evening’s count Sawant had crested 3.6% past Orion with a lead of 1,515 votes, with that number likely to rise a bit further in the days ahead.

Washington State’s mail-in ballot system allows voters to mail in their ballots up to three weeks before election day. Early voters tend to be older and wealthier, with later voters being disproportionately younger, working class, and renters – those more likely to vote socialist. This year the late ballot bump for Sawant was bigger than ever, a reflection of the huge 58% turnout in District 3. Even our critics in the local media were forced to credit Socialist Alternative’s record-breaking get-out-the-vote operation.

The high turnout also reflected the wave of outrage that swept Seattle in the final three weeks of the election following Amazon’s $1 million “money bomb” dropped on Seattle on October 14. This brought Amazon’s total contribution to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce PAC to $1.5 million, and corporate PAC spending as a whole to over $4.1 million – approaching five times the previous record!

National political figures weighed in against Amazon, followed by a wave of national media attention. The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board complained that “Bernie Sanders tweeted this week that Amazon’s spending in Seattle was ‘a perfect example of the out-of-control corporate greed we are going to end.’ Elizabeth Warren decried Amazon for ‘trying to tilt the Seattle City Council elections in their favor,’ adding that ‘I have a plan to get big money out of politics.’”

A Referendum on Corporate Power

Warning that Bezos’s $1.5 million gamble to defeat Sawant and other progressives may have backfired, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat said: “The election was playing out as a referendum on the performance of the City Council.” An Elway/Crosscut poll showed 67% of likely voters supporting “someone who wants to change” the Council’s direction. Westneat continued: “Now [the election] could well be a referendum on Amazon and corporate power” (10/23/19).

Of course, the Seattle Times is at the forefront of a relentless corporate propaganda offensive to blame Sawant and other so-called “left ideologues” for the failed “performance of the City Council” in addressing Seattle’s homelessness and affordability crisis, the top concern for voters. The paper endorsed Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, portraying them as “change” candidates.

In reality, Seattle’s housing crisis is part of the global failure of capitalism, which treats housing as a commodity to enrich billionaire speculators, rather than as a basic human right. Working people are right to be angry at the inaction of city, state, and federal authorities to address the crisis. But blame for this falls squarely on a political establishment that is complicit with corporate power, not on activists and political leaders like Kshama Sawant calling for universal rent control and taxing big business to massively expand quality public housing.

Amazon executives’ chosen opponent for Kshama was Egan Orion, a fully corporate candidate who posed as a “progressive” to win votes. Orion put posters up all over town saying he accepted no corporate PAC money despite the fact that he applied for corporate PAC money, interviewed with the PAC, and thanked them when he got their endorsement. He sent out mailers with lies about Kshama to every household.

Orion’s supporters tore down over 1,000 Kshama Sawant yard signs throughout the district, and in the final two weeks, they vandalized over 200 signs with spray-painted profanities. Crucial to overcoming the lies and attacks against our campaign was building widespread public awareness about this attempt to buy the election through thousands of conversations on the doors and at street corners by our members and volunteers.

Debate on Seattle’s Left

Once again, Seattle has shown that socialists and working people can take on the most powerful corporate titans and win. This victory should give confidence to movements everywhere, from the recent wave of mass anti-austerity and democracy protests spreading across the globe, to the youth climate strikes, labor battles, as well as other socialist election campaigns including Bernie Sanders’ inspiring fight for the presidency.

Yet it would be a major mistake to imagine that similar victories can be won through struggle and determination alone. The role of Marxist perspectives, program, and organization was essential in Seattle and will be vital to defeating the concentrated power of the capitalist class everywhere.

At the start of the election campaign, a de-facto alliance between big business, key labor leaders, and most liberal political figures had coalesced to try and defeat Sawant and block the election of Democratic Socialists of America candidate Shaun Scott in District 4. This anti-Sawant alliance came to life in the aftermath of the “Tax Amazon” campaign in 2018, which went down in defeat following aggressive bullying by Amazon, including threats to move jobs out of Seattle.

The broad coalition built around the Tax Amazon campaign, in which Sawant’s office and Socialist Alternative played a central role, initially won unanimous passage of the tax on the top 3% of Seattle corporations to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. However, facing intense pressure from big business and a well-funded repeal campaign, this coalition was shattered and city council repealed the tax in a 7-2 vote just one month later.

From left-liberal and pro-business voices alike, blame for the defeat was put on the “divisive” approach of Sawant and Socialist Alternative. Despite support from a number of unions, leaders of the Ironworkers and other trades angrily denounced the campaign as a “tax on jobs,” fearful that Amazon would follow through on their threats to cut back new construction in retaliation.

In the August 6 primary, with no endorsements from her fellow city councilmembers or other prominent Democratic Party politicians, with labor publicly divided, Sawant received just 37% in the primary election. “No incumbent in recent memory has survived a primary showing that low,” wrote Westneat in the Seattle Times (8/7/19). “[T]he days on the council for the crusader for rent control and taxes on big business could be numbered.”

The Fight for Unity Against Amazon

If Sawant and Socialist Alternative had adopted the approach of most liberal and labor leaders to try and avoid a direct confrontation with Amazon, it’s likely Jeff Bezos’ bullying strategy and attempt to buy the city council would have succeeded. There was nothing automatic about the widespread working-class distrust toward corporate power getting organized into a coherent fightback.

In fact, most elections across the U.S. don’t feature bold working-class challenges, given the corporate domination of the two-party system. Even in Seattle, where the local Democratic Party organizations have shifted leftward under the impact of Sanders and other left challengers, this hasn’t resulted in strong working class fighters running for city council in most races.

Socialist Alternative based our electoral strategy on confidence that, if offered a fighting lead, working class and young people in Seattle were capable of defeating Amazon and big business. Crucial to this strategy was the potential for working-class pressure from below to push progressive and labor leaders off the sidelines and into a united fight with us against Seattle’s corporate establishment. Socialist Alternative members provided the Marxist backbone of this strategy. Their energy, self-sacrifice, and political skills successfully built perhaps the most powerful grassroots election campaign in Seattle history.

Over 1,000 volunteers and SA members have helped us knock on over 225,000 doors and make 200,000 phone calls. 7,900 working people donated to the campaign, and with a median donation of $20 we raised $570,000, smashing all previous records for both the number of donors and total amount raised. We’ll be publishing a fuller report of this historic effort soon.

The dynamic unleashed after the primary election confirmed our strategy. Candidates backed by Amazon and big business moved on to the general election in all seven council races, facing off against more progressive candidates. With the looming threat of the Chamber of Commerce engineering a wholesale takeover of City Hall, our call for maximum unity against big business rapidly gained traction among grassroots activists, exerting pressure on bigger political players.

More endorsements for Sawant, as well as Shaun Scott, began rolling in from progressive leaders and groups who had sat on the sidelines in the primary. The scandalous effort of conservative labor leaders to win Egan Orion the Labor Council’s endorsement was defeated when over 300 union members signed an open letter in protest. By the final weeks, 21 unions had endorsed Sawant – a substantial majority of the union locals who endorsed in the District 3 race. A joint event promoting a Green New Deal for Seattle was organized with Sawant, Morales, and Scott speaking, an important display of programmatic left unity that was absent in the primary.

In a major defeat for the business-backed Democratic establishment who have long-dominated city politics, local Democratic Party groups endorsed both Shaun Scott and Kshama Sawant in September (they had already endorsed Morales in the primary). Sawant is the first independent socialist ever endorsed by Seattle’s Democrats, and this endorsement was made despite her very public calls for left Democrats, labor, and social movements to join together to build a new party for working people. This victory, the product of an energetic grassroots effort, was linked to passing resolutions condemning corporate PAC spending through four Democratic Party organizations.

All this laid the basis for our re-election campaign to become the central driving force behind a unified response when Amazon dropped their $1 million money bomb on October 14th. Alongside the Democratic Party groups, we organized a press conference two days later outside of Amazon headquarters, followed by rally called by Amazon workers a week later.

This broke the dam. A wave of national media coverage followed. In a high profile reversal, even Lorena Gonzalez and Teresa Mosqueda – the liberal city councilmembers who had publicly called for Sawant’s defeat in the primary – felt compelled to speak at the rally against Amazon and announce their endorsement of both Sawant and Scott. A wave of other progressive Democratic Party leaders followed suit.

The naked attempt by Jeff Bezos to buy Seattle City council backfired, but only because it met a well-prepared united front strategy to mobilize working class anger into a unifying force, pushing even reluctant labor and liberal leaders into alliance with socialists to fight big business. The role of Socialist Alternative, with our clear analysis, strategy, and a politically self-confident membership, was absolutely vital to moving these wider forces into united action.

As the wave of socialist election campaigns across the country continues to expand, the rich lessons of how we defeated Jeff Bezos in his hometown can help serious socialist organizers develop winning strategies for working class struggle everywhere.

https://www.socialistalternative.org

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years

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The Pretty Reckless’ Taylor Momsen: “If I’m Going To Be Famous, I Want To Be Famous For The Music That I Make”

Taylor Momsen almost gave up following the deaths of her heroes, but now The Pretty Reckless are back with a new purpose

On the evening of May 17, 2017, Taylor Momsen did her job as usual. Appearing onstage at the Fox Theatre, in Detroit, the then 23-year-old singer with The Pretty Reckless sang nine songs to an audience of more than 5,000 people as special guests to the night’s headliners, Soundgarden. The following morning she woke to the news that Chris Cornell, the singer with the Seattle group, had been found dead in the bathroom of his hotel room at the MGM Grand in the Motor City. He was later ruled to have died by suicide.

“To get the Soundgarden tour was such an exciting moment that we were all living,” Taylor says. “It was such an accomplishment for us to be able to watch them every night, and to be on that tour was so thrilling. It was the highest of highs – we couldn’t get happier and we couldn’t get higher.”

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the Seattleites impacted on the life of Taylor Momsen. To her ear, only The Beatles have set higher standards. Speaking from her home on an island off the coast of Maine, the thoughtful and chatty singer declines to divulge her encounters with Soundgarden on a tour that endured for 13 dates. But suffice it to say, its singer’s death hit her hard.

“The right word is to say that I plummeted,” she says. “It crushed me. We cancelled all the touring. I wasn’t in a place to be public because it really devastated me, like I think it did to a lot of people. Everyone he touched was just crushed. I cancelled everything and said, ‘I can’t do this right now, I need time. I can’t go out every night and entertain an audience and pretend I’m super happy and okay.’ I wasn’t okay. So I stopped. We quit tour and went home to try and process what had happened.”

When The Pretty Reckless formed, in 2009, it was a love of Soundgarden that brought together its principal players. Founded by Taylor, guitarist Ben Phillips, and producer Kato Khandwala – the trio that wrote the songs on the group’s debut album, Light Me Up, from 2010 – LPs such as Badmotorfinger and Superunknown made these three near-perfect strangers feel as if they were the best of friends.

So delighted was Kato of The Pretty Reckless’ berth on a tour with Soundgarden that he flew to every one of its spring dates. Less than a year later, on April 25, 2018, Taylor was sitting on her couch in Maine when she received a call informing her that her 47-year-old friend and producer had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Los Angeles. Today the singer describes receiving the news as being like “a nail in my coffin.”

She says that “[it] took me into what I can only describe as an extraordinarily dark downward spiral. I was in a hole that I didn’t know how to get out of, or if I was going to get out of it; what’s more, I had no idea where to even start trying. It was a scary time because I didn’t care any more. I’d given up on everything. I thought, ‘What am I going to do? My musical partner is dead. My musical idol is dead. I don’t care, what’s the point of any of this?’ So I gave up.”

Only, she didn’t. “It took time,” she says, “and it sounds clichéd, but it was music that was the thing that brought me back to life. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t leave my house, I couldn’t talk to anyone – I was a mess. And so the only thing that I could turn to was music and that eventually led to me just writing how I was feeling. It was like going back to childhood, really, and writing another diary that was my best friend, the only person I could talk to. And it turned into this record, which essentially I consider to be a rebirth.”

The record to which Taylor refers is the newly finished, fourth album from The Pretty Reckless, Death By Rock And Roll, which had been due for imminent release until the world held its breath in the face of you-know-what. In lieu of an entire LP, fans can at least take comfort in the unveiling of the band’s first single for three years. Released today, the album’s impressive title-track features as its intro the sound of the footsteps of Kato Khandwala.

“We spent over a year recording the album,” says Taylor. “And it’s all in there. There was no hiding from it. It took everything we had to make this record. In fact, it felt like we were making the first album again. That’s the thing we had with Light Me Up, we threw everything we had at that album, too. And we did that again this time.

“It very much feels like a rebirth,” she says.

Taylor Momsen is used to making music in trying circumstances. When The Pretty Reckless gathered themselves to record Light Me Up – which celebrates its 10th birthday this summer – the then-15-year-old singer was better known for playing the role of Jenny Humphrey in the television series Gossip Girl. By day she would film her scenes in New York City, and then by night retreat to the House Of Loud studio in Elmwood Park and Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record songs during the vampire shift. If she caught three hours’ sleep as the sun bid good morning to the Garden State, she was lucky.

The album hit at the first time of asking, but the singer faced all the predictable problems of a woman in early 21st century rock. She dodged the sour intentions of men working in an industry in the days before the #MeToo movement – “I think like any woman, yes, there were uncomfortable and inappropriate moments,” she says – and ignored the sharks on social media by turning away from her phone with the attitude that “it’s not real – it’s not like someone is actually right in front of you, screaming in your face”. Similarly short shrift was given to those who believed that she was a MAW – ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’ – who had a new musical plaything but nothing to say.

“I felt bad at the beginning that there was no clean slate so people already had a perception of me,” she remembers. “That was the thing that I had to overcome, and in the beginning it was frustrating at times. But the way I overcame it was by not telling [people] over and over again that I was real and that this is who I am. They don’t hear that, they just hear you preaching. Instead, I just did it.”

She came to England and gazed in wonder at the landmarks of rock’n’roll heritage. It felt “like I was suddenly part of the history that I’d been reading about”. She snapped a photograph of the Battersea Power Station, over which Pink Floyd flew a giant inflatable pig for the cover of their Animals album. She saw the crossing outside a famous recording studio in Northwest London, across which The Beatles strode for the cover of their Abbey Road LP. And outside the Notting Hill Arts Centre, on May 12, 2010 she witnessed a crowd queuing tight around the block to see The Pretty Reckless make their debut in the capital.

“That was such an incredible feeling as an artist,” she says, “to see that I’d really connected with people.”

But more than anything, Taylor Momsen grafted. Imbued with a work ethic that saw her begin modelling at two years of age – “That taught me how much work and sacrifice it takes to pursue a career in any of the arts,” she says – she took The Pretty Reckless on the road for months on end without once looking back. Were it not for the small matter of a planetary pandemic, this summer she would be sharing stages with both Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam.

“I am an entire workaholic,” she says. “But it’s all music so it doesn’t feel like work. Before I spoke to you I was playing my guitar, and I’ll go back to playing it as soon as we’re finished. That’s the lucky thing about this job – I would be doing it anyway. The line that separates work for pleasure is kind of gone. It’s non-existent.”

Which is just as well. Through no small measure of talent, and a double scoop of application, over the course of three hit albums The Pretty Reckless have managed the enviable feat of prospering in an age of declining music sales. Better yet, this success has been earned with a measure of pizzazz and good old-fashioned Star Quality in the shape of Taylor Momsen. When the planet finally decides to take its finger off the pause button, she’ll be right there waiting and ready, with a smile that says: ‘Nice planet, I’ll take it.’

“If I’m going to be famous, I want to be famous for the music that I make,” she says. “I want be famous for something that I’ve worked really hard to create. I don’t want to be famous for the sake of being famous. I want the songs to be more famous than me. I want people to recognise the song without necessarily knowing that it’s even sung by me. My goal is not to be famous as myself, but to have the songs live on through time.”

#Taylor Momsen #the pretty reckless #2020 interviews

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dickwheelie · 5 years

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@ciguierre suggested on the Discord server that I write a ficlet about Aziraphale trying coffee, which turned into a discussion about the boys going to Starbucks, which turned into this. Thank you for the inspo Cig!

Disclaimer: I love Starbucks, and I went there basically every day while I was in college, but because of that I also know that Starbucks absolutely belongs to Hell.

____________

Contrary to popular belief, Starbucks was not a human invention. (Nor were any two-tailed mermaids involved.) While the original locally-run coffee shop founded in the charming and often damp American city of Seattle, Washington in the early seventies was a quite human family business, the Starbucks Company that grew from such humble (read: marketable) beginnings was a result of the demonic forces of Down Below, as one would say in polite company.

Specifically, it was a result of the demonic forces of Crowley.

Crowley had always liked coffee, ever since the strange effects of the coffee bean had first been discovered by a young Ethiopian woman during a primitive version of a game of truth or dare. While he wasn’t necessarily after the effects of the drink, he did enjoy the taste, and although he preferred tea he wouldn’t say no to a nice, hot, strong brew of black coffee.

Crowley hadn’t turned Starbucks into an international brand because he liked coffee, however. He’d done it because he’d envisioned, prophetically, as it turned out: the long lines, impatient customers, frazzled employees, too-expensive drinks, confusing cup sizes, terrible brewing methods, tasteless pastries, and above all, below-average coffee that would soon cloud the early-morning skies with evil all over the globe. Crowley had only ever had one drink at a Starbucks in his lifetime, to test the results of his meddling in action. He’d ordered an Americano with almond milk and a shot of espresso, and it had been as horrible as he’d hoped it would be.

(The Frappuccinos were not one of his. Only humans could come up with something so ridiculous and yet so popular.)

Despite all of this, Crowley was currently standing in a Starbucks. He was very upset to discover this, because even though he’d deliberately made the trip there, parked the Bentley out front, walked into the store, and had been standing in line for about five minutes now, he still couldn’t quite believe he had been talked into this.

He shot a glare at Aziraphale, who was staring up at the corporate-mandated seasonal fall menu in blissful ignorance. Aziraphale, out of all the beings in the Universe, was probably the only one who could have talked Crowley into this, and even then he had only just barely managed it. He’d promised to pick one (1) item, place his order quickly, and get them out of that place as soon as possible.

Aziraphale was not sticking to that promise.

“I’ll have the Pumpkin Spice Latte,” he was saying to the barista, who looked as though he would have rather been feeding his own limbs to an alligator than taking orders at a Starbucks. “No--no, wait, the White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino. Or, no, the Dragonfruit Refresher. What is a Refresher? Is it like lemonade?”

“Angel . . .” Crowley muttered into his ear.

“Right, right, sorry.” Aziraphale smiled his most angelic smile at the barista, who, despite the fact that Aziraphale was objectively the worst customer to have in line on a busy day, actually managed to smile back. (He didn’t understand why, of course, but since it was the first time he’d had a reason to smile since his shift had started at 8 AM, he wasn’t going to question it.) “I will have the Pumpkin Spice Latte.”

Wonderful, Crowley thought. Something simple, quick to make, and then they could flee.

“. . . And the Dragonfruit lemonade. And the White Chocolate thingy I said earlier, that sounded delightful.”

Crowley massaged his temples. He loved Aziraphale with all of his heart, but sweet Someone, that angel was going to kill him one of these days.

“Oh, and one of those delicious-looking almond scones as well, there’s a dear.”

Crowley was going to drive home without him. He was. His feet weren’t moving, but he was absolutely going to do it, just you wait.

“What sizes would you like for your drinks, sir?” said the barista. Crowley fought the urge to curse him right then and there; it wasn’t his fault the sizes were confusing. In fact, it occurred to him, it was technically Crowley’s fault, but he quickly shoved the thought aside.

“Ah, medium, I think,” said Aziraphale. “All things in moderation, yes?” This was a phrase Crowley had never heard Aziraphale use or implement in his everyday life, and he suspected he was quoting something Gabriel had said at a meeting once.

The barista pointed up at the menu board. “We have tall, grande, venti, and trenta.”

“Ah. I . . . see,” said Aziraphale, visibly confused. “Which one is medium, then?”

“I guess grande would be medium, sir.”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows knitted together. “But grande means large in Italian, yes? And venti is twenty. Twenty what?”

Crowley had mostly tuned out of the conversation, but something had caught his attention, and his mind was slowly catching back up. “Wait. Trenta? What on Earth is trenta?”

The barista looked at him in surprise; he hadn’t said a word since he’d come grumpily slinking into the store behind Aziraphale. “It’s our largest size, sir. Thirty-one ounces.”

Crowley had never wanted so badly to take Christ’s name in vain before. He felt certain he hadn’t come up with that one. Once again, the humans had one-upped him in terms of acts of pure evil.

“I’ll just take them in grande,” Aziraphale said hastily, sensing that Crowley’s patience was wearing thinner by the second.

“Name?”

“Aziraphale.”

The barista Looked at him. It was the kind of Look that really earned the capital L. He scribbled something on each of the cups. Aziraphale paid without another word.

As they waited at a too-small and slightly dirty table for Aziraphale’s order to be called, Crowley asked, “Why’d you want to come here, anyway?”

“Newt told me about it,” said Aziraphale excitedly. “I was telling him about how I so enjoyed the coffee you made for me, and he said I should come here. He goes all the time, apparently, although Anathema won’t set foot in the place.”

“Smart woman.”

“He recommended the pumpkin spice thing to me, and told me with my sweet tooth, I’d be sure to love anything on the menu.”

“Huh.” That was probably true, at any rate. “You do realize this is one of mine, right?”

Aziraphale looked up at him, eyes wide with alarm. “Is it?”

Behind his sunglasses, Crowley’s own eyes widened. “Angel, I thought you knew. I mean, it should be alright now, Heaven isn’t exactly breathing down your neck anymore, and--”

Aziraphale was giggling. Crowley’s mouth snapped shut.

“You’re having me on.”

“Oh, my dear. I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d be so upset. Of course I knew, it’s my job to keep track of your wily schemes, so I can thwart them.”

“You’re doing an excellent job of thwarting them now,” Crowley deadpanned. “You only bought twenty pounds’ worth of merchandise.”

“Well, it’s like you said,” Aziraphale said wryly, in that slightly devilish way that Crowley adored, “Heaven isn’t exactly breathing down my neck anymore.”

They were interrupted by a shout from the counter. “A falafel?” a second barista called out confusedly.

Aziraphale sighed and rose from the table. “I suppose that must be me.” He returned a moment later with a tray of three drinks and the bagged scone.

One by one, Aziraphale tried each item, and to Crowley’s disappointment (but not necessarily his surprise), he seemed to love every single one.

“The scone isn’t terribly good,” said Aziraphale through a mouthful of scone, which he was almost finished with, “but the rest of it is just delightful. I don’t think I’ve ever had lemonade with dragonfruit in it, but it’s a lovely combination.”

“Isn’t lemonade,” said Crowley, “but I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.” He meant it; if his angel was happy, he was happy. He just hoped that, if this was going to become a thing, Aziraphale would be willing to get Starbucks to go from now on. Or just miracle up a passable imitation at home.

They sat there for an hour while Aziraphale worked through his three drinks. Now that they weren’t waiting in line or dealing with confusing menu items, Crowley had to admit it wasn’t so bad to just sit in a Starbucks and chat with one’s companion. (Granted, that companion was Aziraphale, whom he’d be happy to sit and chat with inside of an active volcano, but the sentiment still applied.)

Aziraphale, for his part, was practically glowing with joy, and every frustrated writer and college student in that building felt a bit of weight lift off their shoulders.

Despite Crowley’s protests (“This is a Starbucks, Angel, not the Ritz,”), Aziraphale insisted on going back up to the counter when he was done and thanking each barista individually, by name, even if they’d forgotten their nametags. Though he’d tipped generously when he’d paid, Aziraphale dropped another twenty-pound note into the tip jar before he left. By the time Crowley managed to pull him away, the baristas were all smiling at him and waving goodbye. “Come again soon!” said the barista at the register, and found with surprise that he actually meant it.

“Leave it to you,” said Crowley as they climbed into the Bentley, “to leave a place of demonic influence looking like that.”

“Just doing my job,” Aziraphale said with a pleased little smile that made him look like an absolute bastard.

“Thwarting all my wiles.”

“Left and right, my dear.”

“. . . Aziraphale.”

“Yes?”

“What are you eating.”

“I . . . hadn’t quite finished the scone, darling.”

“ . . . Just . . . please don’t get any crumbs in the Bentley.”

“I won’t, dear.”

Crowley sighed, and floored it.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #ciguierre #listen I don't know anything about coffee but starbucks isn't coffee so it's ok #gwyneth writes

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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America Under Total Censorship Lockdown as it Circles the Drain The United States is under a broad censorship lockdown. News from regional press is blocked from national coverage, stories are crushed, certainly Facebook and Google ban and delist, but now at a level that should be unimaginable. The stories run in two areas, seemingly unrelated, that being BLM protests and the other COVID-19. Both are political issues for sure. One strange, certainly inexplicable move has been made by the Trump regime, starting July 16, 2020. Trump has ordered defunding of COVID-19 testing, something that will certainly cripple efforts to rein in the pandemic, and he has also ordered massive cuts to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), ending their ability to report test numbers, hospitalizations and deaths. He then issued an executive order to hospitals to stop reporting COVID-19 data to the appropriate agencies and to channel data directly to his political staff. This will be the painful story as there is a reason for these actions, ignored entirely by the press, but first we need to establish the extent and severity of censorship from the ground up. We will cover a number of stories that should have been followed, certainly investigated and ask some hard questions. Real news reaches a very few and with it warnings, to be careful. Even the FBI, once the enforcers of corporate rule in America, is left out of the loop. There may well be a hideous secret being kept from Americans and the world about how bad things are in the US and any who threaten that secret may well face the fate of so many who have died reporting facts that make the Deep State uncomfortable. As a journalist, I regularly get whistleblower reports, certainly on a daily basis. Many are outrageous and conspiratorial and weeding between credible and insane is taxing in a world where “insane” is the norm. However, a pattern has made itself perfectly clear. Let us take a few anecdotal issues and see where we go. This week, in Detroit, a man convicted of two murders was released. It seems the police detective who handled the case back in 2002 faked everything, witnesses were coached, evidence fabricated, a man spent 16 years in jail and was obviously innocent. The story was reported but what wasn’t reported is that the same Detective Sergeant had done this before. All complaints were quashed by police officials, and many of his fake cases were featured on reality television. Up to half of the “solved” murder cases in Detroit, once “Murder Capital of the World,” involved this corrupt cop, who is still “on the job,” meaning hundreds are in prison for decades, even life, who are innocent. It also means this is still going on. Worse still, who did the killings? We now suspect that a criminal group within the police may be running a “murder for hire” organization and has been doing so for years. There are no investigations, and no one is asking why. Who are their clients? On a broader national issue, there is a huge but largely unreported controversy in Portland, Oregon. President Trump and Attorney General William Barr have sent several hundred armed personnel to Portland to act as fake police against protesters there. No one is sure where these men come from, the fake police, not the protesters, though this is a valid question also, but they seem to be prison guards. It is illegal in the US for the federal government to send police to a state. It is illegal for prison guards, who are not police, to exercise arrest power outside the walls of a prison as they are not “certified” and “sworn” law enforcement officers within the state where they are, in this case, deployed. This is a massive constitutional crisis. Then something more curious happened. Senator Ted Cruz, a comic figure, tweeted a photo of those arrested by these fake police. Photos of a dozen young men, all white, claiming they were Antifa operatives. In the Tweet, Cruz referred to their “mullet” haircuts. The “mullet” is a style often ridiculed. Those wearing this hairstyle are invariably rural, deeply conservative, and poorly educated. They are classic “Trump base.” There was little evidence, other than sketchy news stories, that Antifa even existed. It is now clear that the all-white violent demonstrators are hired thugs from among the rural poor, hired from “Trumpland.” This is a common GOP practice dating back to Watergate and Donald Segretti. The same story came up in Grand Rapids, Michigan when violent demonstrators began looting during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in June. Those arrested were white, had arrived from across the state, and had been paid $300 each by political organizers. Guessing whose political organizers isn’t too difficult. These facts were delisted by Google, the Tweets were taken down and Facebook posts were erased as well. No press follow-up was done and both police and prosecutors have since “disappeared” those arrested. On June 1, 2020, a Ukrainian truck driver who had worked for a CIA sponsored militia fighting against Donbass separatists, plowed his vehicle into protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bogdan Vechirko failed to kill anyone, but shocking video showed 2000 peaceful demonstrators running for their lives. All reporting ended there. We found that Bogdan Vechirko was not jailed and that no legal action has been taken. Worse still, no one has asked why. A month later, in Seattle, an Eritrean immigrant plowed his white Jaguar into protesters killing two. His family has strong ties to CIA sponsored war lords. The video is among some of the most horrific ever filmed with those he struck at 100 miles per hour flying high in the air. He was chased down by a witness who pulled his vehicle over miles away. Press was told he is under arrest. No details are available. He may be out on bail; no details are available. Where he lives, anything about his family or background is withheld. He is a ghost. Only days ago, a Trump supporter entered a convenience store outside Lansing, Michigan. State law requires anyone entering a store to wear a mask. When confronted by a shopper, the Trump supporter pulled out a large kitchen knife, just the thing used for buying cigarettes and milk, and stabbed the 77-year-old shopper repeatedly. The video from the store is withheld as is the name of the victim and any witnesses. It gets better. In moments, police found the perpetrator and an officer pulled his car over. This was in an affluent neighborhood, in front of the perpetrator’s home. The perpetrator got out of his vehicle with a butcher knife in one hand and a large screwdriver in the other. The police officer, a woman with 22 years’ experience, demanded he drop his weapons. His replies, maniacal and haunting, are unforgettable, like something out of a horror film. As he ran toward the officer, she fired more than a dozen shots, hitting him 8 times as he slashed at her. He barely went down even then but died at the scene. Now the incident has been “un-happened.” There are no facts about who this was, why this happened or how the perpetrator, a well-paid state employee, became a terrorist. We have dozens more such incidents daily in the US, some are legitimate, angry people under pressure while others are theatrical with the perpetrator’s ghosts. As a juxtapose, when a wealthy couple in St. Louis pointed weapons at demonstrators near their magnificent home, media reported on every aspect of their lives, story upon story for weeks. These are all tabloid level stories that should have driven media to shake every tree, question families, show photos of victims and bloody crime scenes. This is how the media makes money, as the saying goes, “if it bleeds-it reads.” Not anymore, not when perpetrators are clearly not what they seem to be. Where are we going? Well, we are certainly going to take this one home. So, why is there a massive crackdown on reporting? Is it tied to police murders? Yes, maybe it is but we don’t think so. Is it tied to COVID-19? We have held off thus far in asking questions about censorship of COVID-19’s impact on the US. We will ask some of those questions now. We have both facts and “alternative facts” hitting the media regarding the pandemic. As COVID-19 levels skyrocket in states like Arizona, Florida, California and two dozen others, reporting becomes, not just contradictory but insanely so. In Florida the governor, DeSantis, claims that 98% of the state’s hospital beds are currently empty. The graphs he publishes are all over Twitter and Facebook, placed there by political trolls. At the same time, however, the largest hospitals in Florida report that they are at 119% of capacity and are overrun with COVID-19 patients. Rebekah Jones, a medical statistician fired for disputing faked data ordered by Governor DeSantis, says deaths are being not just underreported but on a large scale. Easily available video of overflowing hospital wards and licensed “real” medical professionals complaining of lack of medicines and equipment, can be found but are never reported on mainstream media. We do know this, the only drug that treats COVID-19, Remdesivir, is virtually unaffordable, is totally controlled by Jared Kushner and that the State of Florida, in the midst of a massive outbreak of COVID-19, exhausted all supplies over a week ago and Washington isn’t sure when they can release more. This isn’t being reported either. We are also told that those who die are often over 80 years old but massive anecdotal evidence, including regular reports by experts, cite the large number of young victims who are seriously ill. However, their serious illness and hospitalization is not reported and their deaths, if they are dying, are unreported as well. In fact, none of the data received can be depended on, not just in Florida but in dozens of states that seem to be “sitting on” numbers hospitalized and even fatalities. This censorship is driving many to openly shun needed precautions leading to massive increases, all documented, of COVID-19 infections. Why? Conclusion As a test against censorship and misreporting, algorithms are run, based on total tested, total tested positive, total hospitalized, total cured and those who die. As more are tested, more with lesser symptoms, the percentage of infected who later die is continually lowered or was until the beginning of July 2020 when numbers hit a plateau. When COVID reporting began to yield usable data, around mid-April 2020, death rates of those infected were at an unrealistic 36%. Testing levels, through presidential interference, were extremely low, something that would seal America’s role as a failed state. As testing increased, the percentage of recovered compared to deaths followed a predictable curve, which would flatline at some point. With testing levels, after months of interference, substantive enough to give a meaningful result and death levels somewhat modified by the use of Remdesivir, the death percentage “flatlined” at 7 percent. Thus, if a state like Florida were to have 10,000 new cases in a day, with an average of 7% dying, this would mean that eventual death levels would hit 700 a day for this state alone. This figure would be modified by higher or lower numbers testing positive or by lower death rates for larger numbers of younger infected. No such figures are reported. Using figures already proven, many states are reporting very inconsistent figures when looking at testing-hospitalizations-recoveries and deaths. Simply put, they are lying, underreporting by as much as 50%. Florida is clearly one of these. It is clear that the press has yet to do any statistical analysis on COVID-19. Why? There is also significant evidence that the medical community is aware of these inconsistencies. Respected medical professionals have come forward repeatedly with claims of underreporting and, more serious as well, their own theories that COVID-19 is a biological weapon. Attempts to debunk professionals by medical quacks and charlatans backed by conservative think tanks fill the media, while respected professionals are boycotted entirely. Could the US be hiding 100,000 additional COVID-19 dead? A recent leak from the CDC now predicts 800,000 dead by the end of 2020. From the Daily Beast: “If someone had suggested five months ago that we would be seeing more than 3 million cases and 135,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US by mid-July, I wouldn’t have believed it. But now it’s distinctly possible that, five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and more than 800,000 Americans may die in this extraordinary outbreak. That is what many of our most prominent public-health experts now expect.” However, as of this writing that figure is 143,042, or is it? Is there a lie so big that the United States would find it offensive to perpetrate? I think we all know that answer.

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kemetic-dreams · 5 years

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Ibrahima & Abdoulaye Barry Written by Deborah BachAudio by Sara Lerner

How a new alphabet is helping an ancient people write its own future

When they were 10 and 14, brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry set out to invent an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde, which had been spoken by millions of people for centuries but never had its own writing system. While their friends were out playing in the neighborhood, Ibrahima, the older brother, and Abdoulaye would shut themselves in their room in the family’s house in Nzérékoré, Guinea, close their eyes and draw shapes on paper.

When one of them called stop they’d open their eyes, choose the shapes they liked and decide what sound of the language they matched best. Before long, they’d created a writing system that eventually became known as ADLaM.

The brothers couldn’t have known the challenges that lay ahead. They couldn’t have imagined the decades-long journey to bring their writing system into widespread use, one that would eventually lead them to Microsoft. They wouldn’t have dreamed that the script they invented would change lives and open the door to literacy for millions of people around the world.

They didn’t know any of that back in 1989. They were just two kids with a naïve sense of purpose.

“We just wanted people to be able to write correctly in their own language, but we didn’t know what that meant. We didn’t know how much work it would be,” said Abdoulaye Barry, now 39 and living in Portland, Oregon.

“If we knew everything we would have to go through, I don’t think we would have done it.”

ADLaM is an acronym that translates to 'the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.'

A new writing system takes shape

The Fulbhe, or Fulani, people were originally nomadic pastoralists who dispersed across West Africa, settling in countries stretching from Sudan to Senegal and along the coast of the Red Sea. More than 40 million people speak Fulfulde — some estimates put the number at between 50 and 60 million — in around 20 African countries. But the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue, also known as Fulani, Pular and Fula. Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet, so Fulfulde speakers improvised as they wrote, with varying results that often led to muddled communications.

The Barry brothers’ father, Isshaga Barry, who knew Arabic, would decipher letters for friends and family who brought them to the house. When he was busy or tired, young Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would help out.

“They were very hard to read, those letters,” Abdoulaye recalled. “People would use the most approximate Arabic sound to represent a sound that doesn’t exist in Arabic. You had to be somebody who knows how to read Arabic letters well and also knows the Fulfulde language to be able to decipher those letters.”

Abdoulaye asked his father why their people didn’t have their own writing system. Isshaga replied that the only alphabet they had was Arabic, and Abdoulaye promised to create one for Fulfulde.

“At a basic level, that’s how the whole idea of ADLaM started,” Abdoulaye said. “We saw that there was a need for something and we thought maybe we could fix it.”

The brothers developed an alphabet with 28 letters and 10 numerals written right to left, later adding six more letters for other African languages and borrowed words. They first taught it to their younger sister, then began teaching people at local markets, asking each student to teach at least three more people. They transcribed books and produced their own handwritten books and pamphlets in ADLaM, focusing on practical topics such as infant care and water filtration.

While attending university in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, the brothers started a group called Winden Jangen — Fulfulde for “writing and reading” — and continued developing ADLaM. Abdoulaye left Guinea in 2003, moving to Portland with his wife and studying finance. Ibrahima stayed behind, completing a civil engineering degree, and continued working on ADLaM. He wrote more books and started a newspaper, translating news stories from the radio and television from French to Fulfulde. Isshaga, a shopkeeper, photocopied the newspapers and Ibrahima handed them out to Fulbhe people, who were so grateful they sometimes wept.

But not everyone was pleased by the brothers’ work. Some objected to their efforts to spread ADLaM, saying Fulbhe people should learn French, English or Arabic instead. In 2002, military officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting, arrested Ibrahima and imprisoned him for three months. He was not charged with anything or ever told why he was arrested, Abdoulaye said. Undeterred, Ibrahima moved to Portland in 2007 and continued writing books while studying civil engineering and mathematics.

ADLaM, meanwhile, was spreading beyond Guinea. A palm oil dealer, a woman the brothers’ mother knew, was teaching ADLaM to people in Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone. A man from Senegal told Ibrahima that after learning ADLaM, he felt so strongly about the need to share what he’d learned that he left his auto repair business behind and went to Nigeria and Ghana to teach others.

“He said, ‘This is changing people’s lives,’” said Ibrahima, now 43. “We realized this is something people want.”

ADLaM comes online

The brothers also understood that to fully tap ADLaM’s potential, they needed to get it onto computers. They made inquiries about getting ADLaM encoded in Unicode, the global computing industry standard for text, but got no response. After working and saving for close to a year, the brothers had enough money to hire a Seattle company to create a keyboard and font for ADLaM. Since their script wasn’t supported by Unicode, they layered it on top of the Arabic alphabet. But without the encoding, any text they typed just came through as random groupings of Arabic letters unless the recipients had the font installed on their computers.

Following that setback, Ibrahima made a fateful decision. Wanting to refine the letters the Seattle font designer developed, which he wasn’t happy with, he enrolled in a calligraphy class at Portland Community College. The instructor, Rebecca Wild, asked students at the start of each course why they were taking her class. Some needed an art credit; others wanted to decorate cakes or become tattoo artists. The explanation from the quiet African man with the French accent stunned Wild.

“It was mind-blowing when I heard the story of why he was doing this,” said Wild, who lives in Port Townsend, Washington. “It’s so remarkable. I think they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for what they’re doing. What a difference they’ve made on this planet, and they’re these two humble brothers.”

Wild was struck by Ibrahima’s focus and assiduousness in class. “He was always a star student,” she said. “He had this skill set and unending patience. He worked and worked and worked in class on the assignments, but at the same time, he was taking all this stuff he was learning in class back to ADLaM.”

Wild helped Ibrahima get a scholarship to a calligraphy conference at Reed College in Portland, where he met Randall Hasson, a calligraphy artist and painter. Hasson was seated at a table one afternoon, giving a lettering demonstration with another instructor, and Ibrahima came over. A book about African alphabets rested on the table. Ibrahima picked it up, commented that the scripts in the book weren’t the only African alphabets and offhandedly mentioned that he and his brother had invented an alphabet.

Hasson, who has extensively researched ancient alphabets, assumed Ibrahima meant that he and his brother had somehow modified an alphabet.

“I said, ‘You mean you adapted an alphabet?’” Hasson recalled. “I had to ask him three times to be sure he had actually invented one.”

After hearing Ibrahima’s story, Hasson suggested teaming up for a talk on ADLaM at a calligraphy conference in Colorado the following year. The audience sat rapt as Hasson told Ibrahima’s story, giving him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. During a break earlier in the day, Ibrahima asked Hasson to come and meet a few people. They were four Fulbhe men who had driven almost 1,800 miles from New York just to hear Ibrahima’s talk, hoping it would finally help get ADLaM the connections they sought.

Hasson was so moved after speaking with them that he walked away, sat down in an empty stairwell and cried.

“At that moment,” he said, “I began to understand how important this talk was to these people.”

Ibrahima made connections at the conference that got him introduced to Michael Everson, one of the editors of the Unicode Standard. It was the break the brothers needed. With help from Everson, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye put together a proposal for ADLaM to be added to Unicode.

Andrew Glass is a senior program manager at Microsoft who works on font and keyboard technology and provides expertise to the Unicode Technical Committee. The ADLaM proposal and the Barry brothers’ pending visit to the Unicode Consortium generated much interest and excitement among Glass and other committee members, most of whom have linguistics backgrounds. Glass’s graduate studies focused on writing systems that are around 2,000 years old, and like other linguists he uses a methodological, technical approach to analyze and understand writing systems.

But here were two brothers with no training in linguistics, who developed an alphabet through a natural, organic approach — and when they were children, no less. New writing systems aren’t created very often, and the chance to actually talk with the inventors of one was rare.

“You come across things in these old writing systems and you wonder why it’s the way it is, and there’s nobody to ask,” Glass said. “This was a unique opportunity to say, ‘Why is it like this? Did they think about doing things differently? Why are the letters ordered this way?’ and things like that.”

Microsoft worked with designers to develop a font for Windows and Office called Ebrima that supports ADLaM and several other African writing systems.

It was during the Unicode process that ADLaM got its new name. The brothers originally called their alphabet Bindi Pular, meaning “Pular script,” but had always wanted a more meaningful name. Some people in Guinea who’d been teaching the script suggested ADLaM, an acronym using the first four letters of the script for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.” The Unicode Technical Committee approved ADLaM in 2014 and the alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, released in June 2016. The brothers were elated.

“It was very exciting for us,” Abdoulaye said. “Once we got encoded, we thought, ‘This is it.’”

But they soon realized there were other, possibly even more challenging hurdles ahead. For ADLaM to be usable on computers, it had to be supported on desktop and mobile operating systems, and with fonts and keyboards. To make it broadly accessible, it also needed to be integrated on social networking sites.

The brothers’ script found a champion in Glass, who had developed Windows keyboards for several languages and worked on supporting various writing systems in Microsoft technology. Glass told others at Microsoft about ADLaM and helped connect the Barry brothers to the right people at the company. He developed keyboard layouts for ADLaM, initially as a project during Microsoft’s annual companywide employee hackathon.

Judy Safran-Aasen, a program manager for Microsoft’s Windows design group, also saw the importance of incorporating ADLaM into Microsoft products. Safran-Aasen wrote a business plan for adding ADLaM to Windows and pushed the work forward with various Microsoft teams.

“It was a shoestring collaboration of a few people who were really interested in seeing this happen,” she said. “It’s a powerful human interest story, and if you tell the story you can get people onboard.

“This is going to have an impact on literacy throughout that community and enable people to be part of the Windows ecosystem, where before that just wasn’t available to them,” Safran-Aasen said. “I’m really excited that we can make this happen.”

ADLaM creators Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry in Portland, Oregon.

Microsoft worked with two type designers in Maine, Mark Jamra and Neil Patel, to develop an ADLaM component for Windows and Office within Microsoft’s existing Ebrima font, which also supports other African writing systems. ADLaM support is included in the Windows 10 May 2019 update, allowing users to type and see ADLaM in Windows, including in Word and other Office apps.

Microsoft’s support for ADLaM, Abdoulaye said, “is going to be a huge jump for us.”

ADLaM is also supported by the Kigelia typeface system developed by Jamra and Patel, which includes eight African scripts and is being added to Office later this year. The designers wanted to create a type system for a region of the world lacking in typeface development, where they say existing fonts tend to be oversimplified and poorly researched. They consulted extensively with Ibrahima and Abdoulaye to refine ADLaM’s forms, painstakingly working to execute on the brothers’ vision within the boundaries of font technology.

“This was their life’s work that they started when they were kids,” Patel said. “To get it right is a big deal.”

And to many Africans, Jamra said, a script is more than just an alphabet. ”These writing systems are cultural icons,” he said. “It’s not like the Latin script. They really are symbols of ethnic identity for many of these communities.”

They’re also a means of preserving and advancing a culture. Without a writing system it’s difficult for people to record their history, to share perspective and knowledge across generations, even to engage in the basic communications that facilitate commerce and daily activities. There is greater interest in recent years in establishing writing systems for languages that didn’t have them, Glass said, to help ensure those languages remain relevant and don’t disappear. He pointed to the Osage script, created by an elder in 2006 to preserve and revitalize the language, as an example.

“There is a big push among language communities to develop writing systems,” Glass said. “And when they get them, they are such a powerful tool to put identity around that community, and also empower that community to learn and become educated.

“I think ADLaM has tremendous potential to change circumstances and improve people’s lives. That’s one of the things that’s really exciting about this.”

Keeping a culture alive

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye don’t know how many people around the world have learned ADLaM. It could be hundreds of thousands, maybe more. As many as 24 countries have been represented at ADLaM’s annual conference in Guinea, and there are ADLaM learning centers in Africa, Europe and the U.S. On a recent trip to Brussels, Ibrahima discovered that four learning centers had opened there and others have started in the Netherlands.

“I was really surprised. I couldn’t imagine that ADLaM has reached so many people outside of Africa,” he said.

Abdoulaye “Bobody” Barry (no relation to ADLaM’s creator) lives in Harlem, New York and is part of Winden Jangen, now a nonprofit organization based in New York City. He learned ADLaM a decade ago and has taught it to hundreds of people, first at mosques and then through messaging applications using an Android app. The script has enabled Fulbhe people, many of whom never learned to read and write in English or French, to connect around the world and has fostered a sense of sense of cultural pride, Barry said.

“This is part of our blood. It came from our culture,” he said. “This is not from the French people or the Arabic people. This is ours. This is our culture. That’s why people get so excited.”

Suwadu Jallow emigrated to the U.S. from Gambia in 2012 and took an ADLaM class the Barry brothers taught at Portland Community College. ADLaM is easy for Fulfulde speakers to learn, she said, and will help sustain the language, particularly among the African diaspora.

“Now I can teach this language to someone and have the sense of my tribe being here for years and years to come without the language dying off,” said Jallow, who lives in Seattle. “Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak (Fulfulde) just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.”

Jallow is pursuing a master’s in accounting at the University of Washington and hopes to develop an inventory-tracking system in ADLaM after she graduates. She got the idea after helping out in her mother’s baby clothing shop in Gambia as a child and seeing that her mother, who understood little English and Arabic, could not properly record and track expenses. ADLaM, she said, can empower people like her mother who are fluent in Fulfulde and just need a way to write it.

“It’s going to increase literacy,” she said. “I believe knowledge is power, and if you’re able to read and write, that’s a very powerful tool to have. You can do a lot of things that you weren’t able to do.”

The Fulbhe people in Guinea historically produced a considerable volume of books and manuscripts, Abdoulaye Barry said, using Arabic to write in their language. Most households traditionally had a handwritten personal book detailing the family’s ancestry and the history of the Fulbhe people. But the books weren’t shared outside the home, and Fulbhe people largely stopped writing during French colonization, when the government mandated teaching in French and the use of Arabic was limited primarily to learning the Koran.

“Everything else was basically discounted and no longer had the value that it had before the French came,” Abdoulaye said.

Having ADLaM on phones and computers creates infinite possibilities — Fulbhe people around the world will be able to text each other, surf the internet, produce written materials in their own language. But even before ADLaM’s entry into the digital world, Fulfulde speakers in numerous countries have been using the script to write books. Ibrahima mentions a man in Guinea who never went to school and has written more than 30 books in ADLaM, and a high school girl, also in Guinea, who wrote a book about geography and another about how to succeed on exams. The president of Winden Jangen, Abdoulaye Barry (also no relation to Ibrahima’s brother), said many older Fulbhe people who weren’t formally educated are now writing about Fulbhe history and traditions.

“Now, everybody can read that and understand the culture,” he said. “The only way to keep a culture alive is if you read and write in your own language.”

‘The kids are the future’

Though ADLaM has spread over several continents, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye aren’t slowing down their work. Both spend much of their spare time promoting the script, traveling to conferences and continuing to write. Ibrahima, who sleeps a maximum of four hours a night, recently finished the first book of ADLaM grammar and hopes to build a learning academy in Guinea.

On a chilly recent day in Abdoulaye’s home in Portland, the brothers offer tea and patiently answer questions about ADLaM. They are unfailingly gracious, gamely agreeing to drive to a scenic spot on the Willamette River for photos after a long day of talking. They’re also quick to deflect praise for what they have accomplished. Ibrahima, who sometimes wakes up to hundreds of email and text messages from grateful ADLaM learners, said simply that he’s “very happy” with how the script has progressed. For his brother, the response to ADLaM can be overwhelming.

Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak Fulani just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.

“It’s very emotional sometimes,” Abdoulaye said. “I feel like people are grateful beyond what we deserve.”

The brothers want ADLaM to be a tool for combating illiteracy, one as lasting and important to their people as the world’s most well-known alphabets are to cultures that use them. They have a particular goal of ADLaM being used to educate African women, who they said are more impacted by illiteracy than men and are typically the parent who teaches children to read.

“If we educate women we can help a lot of people in the community, because they are the foundation of our community,” Abdoulaye said. “I think ADLaM is the best way to educate people because they don’t need to learn a whole new language that’s only used at school. If we switched to this, it would make education a lot easier.”

That hasn’t happened yet, but ADLaM has fostered a grassroots learning movement fueled largely through social media. There are several ADLaM pages on Facebook, and groups with hundreds of members are learning together on messaging apps. Abdoulaye said he and Ibrahima used to hear mostly about adults learning ADLaM, but increasingly it’s now children. Those children will grow up with ADLaM, using the script Abdoulaye and Ibrahima invented all those years ago in their bedroom.

“That makes us believe ADLaM is going to live,” Abdoulaye said. “It’s now settled into the community because it’s in the kids, and the kids are the future.”

Originally published on 7/29/2019 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft

#fulani #african writing #african writing systems #abdoulaye #adlam #kemetic dreams

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siren-theories · 5 years

Text

The Pownall Massacre

TL, DR: Too complext to summarise. Sorry, you have to read through this. If you want to, you can skip to Part IV to read what I think really happened.

There is but one certainty with historical events - that they can and most likely will be interpreted differently depending on the eye of the beholder. Our own upbringing, socialization, education, sexuality, gender etc. can all cause us to be biased when interpreting historical events. There are always different "truths" depending on who you ask.

As a simple example most readers would be familiar with lets take a look at a "great" US President, George Washington. If you would have asked a Native American of the time about George Washington he would have called him a destroyer of native villages who led massacres. If you would have asked a loyalist, he would have considered Washington a traitor to the crown. If you would have asked a member of Washington’s army in the Revolutionary War, he would have hailed Washington as a great hero. And if you would have asked his slaves....

This is no less true for the period of "Manifest Destiny" and westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century. What looks like massive land robbery, ethnic cleansing and even genocide to the outside (modern) observer might also be romanticized as the era of brave settlers and brave cowboys, the era of daring people prevailing against adversity to secure a better life for themselves. Modern Media has (regrettably) largely chosen the later path.

Please keep the above in mind when considering everything that follows in this posts. Also, please note that this is a theory built on evidence from the show - but this theory has not been explicitly confirmed by any of the show writers.

Part I: The historical context of the Pownall Massacre.

Understanding the historical context is the most important thing when it comes to interpreting past events.

All sources agree that the massacre happened 150 years before the time the show starts, so somewhere in the vicinity of 1868. By this time Washington State had already been settled by native Americans for close to 14.000 years (thus giving us the earliest possible form of divergence between humans and sirens).

Native Americans hunting ducks, taken from Wikimedia Commons

Native American villages of the time seem to have been mostly concentrated on the coasts and near rivers, being focused on salmon fishing, hunting and gathering berries/roots etc. You can see how Washington is a perfect setting for the Siren story - even before the arrival of the white settlers. The most prominent of those tribes seemed to have formed what is called the Salish language community.

The salish language family (from here).

The earliest contact between the natives and Europeans happened during the spanish mapping expeditions of the Northern American coast. One such ship, the Santiago, was captained by Bruno de Hecata. You can read a bit about his expedition here.

Unfortunately this ship also carried a deadly cargo - smallpox. This disease resulted in a harrowing smallpox epidemic which killed at least 30%, if not 50% of the native population (approximately 11.000 - 20.000 people). Even though the introduction of the disease was unintentional (indeed a third of the Europeans themselves died from it) these events proved fatal to the strength of the local populations. This blow allowed northern tribes like the Haida to muscle in on the territory of the local tribes. .

[Sidenote: For those of you who would want to read more about this I suggest Robert Boyd: The coming of the spirit of pestilence. Introduced infectious diseases and population decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle 1999). Be warned, it makes for grim reading.]

Eventually, British fur traders and settlers arrived on the scene. In 1790 Spain and Britain reached an agreement that gave the British free reign over the Northwest coast. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition reached Washington and the USA entered the struggle for dominance over the region. Britain however gained dominance due to the war of 1812 and the Hudson Bay Company eventually became the most important fur trader of the region. These early years were characterized by a high rate of intermarriage between fur traders and local women, as well as the introduction of European technology and European goods, most importantly firearms.

However, in the 1840s large numbers of American settlers trekked westwards and started settling Washington State. Soon outnumbering the British fur traders and local natives (who seemed to have fallen into some form of uneasy coexistence), this formed the basis for what was later called the Oregon dispute between Britain and the United States.

In 1846 the Oregon Treaty ceded Washington State to the USA and settlement began, with all the negative effects this had on the local population - disease, land robbery, ethnic cleansing and genocide. In 1862 another devastating smallpox epidemic broke out, again killing roughly one-third to half of the remaining indigenous population.

If the massacre happened in 1868 then it would have happened during a time which was filled with strife. The boundary dispute between England and the USA had not been fully resolved yet (it would only be resolved through the mediation of the German Empire in 1872). The community of Bristol Cove would have been at best a few decades old (and probably was significantly younger, maybe only having been formed in the 1850s). There might have been bad blood between ex-British and American members of the community. The native population would have suffered from the devastating smallpox epidemic only a few years earlier and I highly doubt the natives had surrendered the prime fishing grounds willingly.

The settlers and fishers of Bristol Cove themselves would have been hard men who had suffered through the deprivations of the long trek westwards. The fact that most of them would have been adventurous young white men without many suitable marriage prospects is also problematic as historically a surplus of young males has nearly always led to conflict. Judging from the town's football team being called the whalers and the harpoons being found in Helen's shop it seems that Bristol Cove primarily was a fishing and whaling town - two profession that require men that are comfortable with killing what they perceive as animals.

In short it does not require much imagination to view the Bristol Cove of 1862-1870 as a powder keg waiting to explode. All it needed was the right man to lit the fuze.

(Enter Charles H. Pownall, aka literally Hitler)

Part II: The sources covering the massacre

Let's look at the sources covering the massacre and try to decipher what they are telling us about the massacre and the reasons for it.

a) The official human version

The official version of what happened during the massacre is that essentially no massacre happened at all and the entire story is presented as a fairytale for small children. It is used as the centerpiece of the annual mermaid festival, being used to draw in tourists and bored college students looking for an adventure.

(Tfw your family history gets appropriated by college girls looking for an excuse to paaartaaaay.)

The Timestamp for the official human version is 4:35 - 5:10 of Episode 101 "The mermaid discovery".

(how lovely, a play about genocide. With Children in it. What could go wrong?)

NARRATOR: "It was more than a 150 years ago when a local fishing captain, Charles H. Pownall, fell in love with a mermaid in these very waters, enchanted by her beautiful siren song." POWNALL: "I love you fishermen" SIREN: "I love you mermaid" NARRATOR: "But one day, he went to the bay, and his mermaid was gone, back to her home in the sea, never to return." NARRATOR: "And that is how thanks to Charles H. Pownall, Bristol Cove became the Mermaid Capital of the World"

(Is it my mermaid that I see there on the horizon? No, just a giant whitewash,)

The depiction of an episode of violence against other populations as a fairytale is not a new idea. For example, take the story of Pocahontas. Popular knowledge focuses on the fairytale aspect of this historical story (native Powhatan "princess" Pocahontas rescues brave white explorer John Smith) but nearly all popular retellings omit the continuation of that story - how the brave explorer John Smith continued to raid the food stores of the Powhatans, how the white colonists massacred the Powhatans, took their lands, assassinated their leaders and drove them into pitiful reservations. (Put THAT in a movie, Disney).

As such, this story fits the archetype to a T. And yet there are a few facts in the official version that merit a mention:

The official human version claims that Pownall was enchanted by the beautiful siren song (which would mean that the siren would have taken the initiative to make contact with Pownall)

The mermaid in question disappeared without a trace, leaving Charles to look for her with no success

b) Helen's books

Another take is being presented in one of Helen's books aptly titled "An Illustrated History of the Mermaid", which features the mermaids of Bristol Cove in a chapter. Sadly the chapter is truncated and we only see the first page of it in detail - while other pages also show text, freeze-framing and enlarging them sadly showed them to be taken from a book on schooners and a book about the Napoleonic wars - a common trick by TV shows to save valuable time writing those props.

The page dealing with the massacre is shown in Episode 102: “The Lure” as follows:

(Pls Maddie move your hand a bit lower? Pretty pls?)

I have transcribed the visible text:

The Mermaids of Bristol Cove Being a true account of the bitter and broken heart of a Fisherman and the retribution that was exacted by Men of the Land upon the Maidens of the Sea

The proud men of Bristol Cove were renowned up and down the western coastline of the Americas for their craft and Bravery upon the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The men abord Captain Pownall's ship were especially known for their prowess upon the waves and their seemingly supernatural ability to find and capture more fish than any other craft. This ability was attributed to more than mere craft. It was whispered, in certain coastal taverns, that Captain Pownall himself was responsible for his own share of the bountiful harvest. It was rumored that the captain was [illegible text] a mermaid and that it was [illegible]and the deep that had resulted [illegible] his curious [illegible] five years[illegible]

This text is really short on details for its length. What we get out of it is a timeframe (five years) and a lot of fluff about the skilled and brave men of Bristol Cove - and that the relationship was also based on mutual fishing cooperation. However, the headline already tells us what interpretation the story will use here - that Pownall and the mermaid fell in love, she then broke his heart and the "brave and skilled" fishermen exacted retribution by massacring them. I was expecting some brazen apologia but not one this brazen. Yeah, some eeeevil woman(tm) hurt you by leaving you, go murder her relatives in revenge. That makes you "brave and skilled".

Excuse me for a second while I find the nearest container to throw up in.

[Sidenote: Painting genocide as a tragedy while also arguing the victims deserved getting massacred is par the course for colonial apologia of the 19th century. Even in the 20th century Turkey for example justified its genocide of the Armenians by arguing that it was "just" a relocation that got out of hand due to Armenian banditry. This text fits well into all the other 19th century texts that allegedly deplored violence against indigenous people while similarly arguing that this could all have been avoided if the darn natives had not been so unaccommodating. Feel free to imagine a lot of fake pearl clutching as a side dish to all that juicy victim blaming.

I commend the writers of Siren for actually writing such a text for it shows their attention to detail but this was infuriating to read.]

c) The Pownall family history

Lets hear it from the direct descendants of Charles "stil literally Hitler" Pownall. Ben confronts his father after meeting a mermaid himself and nearly becoming the evening snack of said mermaid (no, snack is not used euphemistically here.) The conversation takes place in Episode 102: "The Lure" from 19:00 - 20:40.

(...So...uh...about great-great-great-great-grandpa...)

I have transcribed the relevant parts:

BEN: "I wanted to ask you something. I remembered that you and Grandpa used to talk about Charles Pownall, about what really happened back then." TED: "You really came here to ask me that?" BEN: "Yeah.” TED: "Why the sudden interest in the family history?" BEN: "I ran into Helen Hawkins.” TED: "Oh, c'mon." BEN: "Dad? Maybe I'd show up to more family events like the statue unveiling if you told me the real story about our family." TED: "All right. Look, Charles might not have been exactly who we make him out to be. I can't say for sure, but there might have been some mental illness, maybe even schizophrenia. Long months at sea, a constant stream of booze and, uh, well, he was seeing things. [chuckles] Mermaids? You know this. You did the play in school. That's how the town got its folklore. Now, as for Helen and her stories, well, we all know she's got a vivid imagination." BEN: "That's it?" TED: That's it."

Additional info about the Pownall Mermaid is delivered to us in the form of a conversation between Ben and his father in Episode 110: “Aftermath”. It starts from 21:30 and ends at 23:00.

(Don't mind me getting defensive here about not giving you all the information you asked for earlier)

TED: "Look, Charles had an affair with a woman in town, okay - she worked at a local bar...a brothel." BEN: "Wait, so she was a prostitute?" TED: "You can imagine...an extramarital affair, a child born out of wedlock with a woman in that profession - these aren't things people talked about back then. Every family has its secrets, Ben." BEN: "This isn't some kind of ancient history, dad. I have a relative living in town that I've known my whole life." TED: "You know our family Ben. This kind of history, nothing they'd want out there. Why dwell on the ugliness? Okay, Charles was a troubled guy. We talked about that. From what I understand, he had a lot of demons."

From these two conversations we get not only a lasting impression that Ted is knowing more than he lets on but also a lot of relevant information:

Charles Pownall suffered from alleged mental illness, maybe even schizophrenia - or something that made it appear as if he did.

Charles liked his booze, maybe too much

The mermaid was according to Charles family a woman of ill repute

Charles was already married when he met the mermaid and when the baby was born

The Pownall family has been paying Helen's family off to keep quiet.

d) The Siren sources

In Episode 209 “Street fight”, Ryn tells Ben the Siren side of the story.

(”Story? No, not story. Real”)

The conversation starts at 11:50 and ends at about 13 minutes.

RYN: "There was one of us who spent time with a human long time ago. She lived with him on land. Together they had little one." Ben: "A child?" RYN: "Yes. But the child was not normal, not look normal. He took it away from her into the woods. He killed their child. So she went back home in the water. But this made him angry. His head-bad. He brought many men, and they killed us. So many of us that...the water was red with our blood. Ben: "Helen told me that story. Not about a child though." RYN: "Story? No, not story. Real."

It is interesting that as much as the human sources place the blame on the Sirens, the Siren side of the story places the blame just as squarely on the humans. What we can take away from this version is:

The mermaid lived with Charles on land and they had a child together.

The baby was deformed and thus Charles took it into the woods and killed it.

The mermaid left Charles whose head then went “bad”.

Charles took his men and slaughtered them in the water.

e) The Hybrid sources

Perhaps the most important tidbits of information come from Bristol Cove's resident mermaid expert, Helen Hawkins, in Episode 110 "Aftermath". The conversation starts at 16:12 and ends at around 18:50.

(Lemme just drop some knowledge on you children...)

HELEN: "She was the first. She was the daughter of Charles Pownall and his mermaid." BEN: "The baby is buried here? Ryn told me that Charles killed his child." HELEN: "Oh no. [to Ryn] That may be what your colony believes, but that's not what happened. The baby was born in transition and appeared deformed, a soul caught between two worlds. Charles knew that the doctors of Bristol Cove would see her as an abomination and refuse to treat her. The Baby was gonna suffer and die. So he took her into the woods." MADDIE: "To put her out of her misery?" HELEN: "No. He brought her to bigger minds than the doctors of Bristol Cove. To people who weren't afraid of shape-shifters." MADDIE: "The Haida" HELEN: "Yes. BEN: "She lived?" HELEN: "The Haida helped her to complete her transition and she lived for a very long time. I am her last living descendant." BEN: "You*re one of them?" HELEN: "That's right. One-eigth to be exact." MADDIE: "Ryn, did you know this?" RYN: "Yes. I sense she is one of us. But I did not know the child lived."

Helen claims that:

Charles took his daughter to the Haida to find help for her

The Haida were able to help the hybrid daughter

The daughter lived for a long time in Bristol Cove among humans, eventually dieing there

Part III: Literally Hitler? The trouble with Charles H. Pownall

(Look at him. He is just standing there. Menacingly.)

Much of how we view the massacre is dependant upon how we assess the character of Charles H. Pownall himself. It is easy to think of him as a typical machismo of his day, a ruthless conqueror who was blinded by his own sense of superiority, who could not handle rejection and committed genocide in revenge. There might be some truth to that interpretation - after all, the people who settled Washington were not exactly enlightened liberals.

And yet we know some facts which are unquestionably true (because otherwise Helen would not exist) that paint a different picture of Charles H. Pownall. When faced with the problem of his daughter's life being in danger, Charles acts rationally and decisively. He seeks out help from the only people who know how to deal with hybrids, the Haida. Doing so was not a small task considering the troubled times the Haida were facing due to the arrival of the white men and such an endeauvor might have easily ended with Charles being killed. But he persevered, the Haida managed to save his daughter's life and when returning to Bristol Cove Charles he took great care to safeguard his daughter's future.

He organized regular funds to be paid to her and her eventual descendants and concocts a story to tell his family as to where this mysterious daughter suddenly appeared from and why they needed to pay her to keep her quiet (her being the alleged daughter of a prositute he had relations with). Admitting to a child born out of wedlock in those days had the potential to ruin a man's career and honour and thus his place in society so this was not a trivial thing to do.

Those two brave actions mentioned above are hardly those we would expect from a bloodthirsty genocider only concerned with himself.

Yet how do we reconcile this image of a at least somewhat caring father with the image of a madman slaughtering Sirens on the water? There might have been a logical reson for Charles turning into a monster.

Both the Siren version of events and the Pownall family history mention that Charles suffered from mental problems which Ted characterizes as schizophrenic behaviour, seeing things and acting besides himself. What do we know of in the show that causes visions and causes people to act as if they are suffering from mental illnesses? In fact these are the exact symptoms people suffering from the Siren Song (Ben) or people suffering from withdrawal symptons (Chris) exhibit. Without having access to the song anymore and the only recourse being self-medication with alcohol (psychology was not exactly a practiced medicine back then, nor did MRIs exist), is it any wonder that his mental state deteriorated? It might be that the Charles H. Pownall that perpetrated the massacre bore little resemblence to the Charles H. Pownall that his mermaid fell in love with.

This might be a way too charitable interpretation of events. After all, not everybody suffering from an addiction and brain damage starts to commit genocide. However, at the very least Charles should be considered more than the black hat as which he appears in the Siren version of events (the sirens perception of him is also colored by him allegedly murdering his daughter which which never happened). Him being more of a grey character would also be in line with all the antagonists we see depicted in the show so far. Take for example Nicole, the main antagonist of Season 2 - while she lies and manipulates everything around her in order to get Ryn to cooperate with the military she is not entirely devoid of compassion. I think that therefore the interpretation of Charles H. Pownall as a more grey character fits better with this show.

This of course does not excuse his genocidal actions in any way. But it might serve as an explanation for them.

(Maybe not quite Hitler after all)

[Sidenote: I still hate the submissive pose the Pownall family chose for the statue of the mermaid, even if it fits the story the humans are trying to tell.]

Part IV: An attempt at reconstructing the events leading up to and including the massacre

As mentioned in the intro to this post, every group involved in an important and traumatic event has their own versions of the truth. This does not mean that each group necessarily lied or had a hidden agenda/hidden truth. Each version of the story (except for the two human apologia pieces already mentioned) might have been honest conclusions based on incomplete information.

So what are the facts of the story which we can reconstruct while trying to reconcile all the different pieces of information and using all information that we know not to be demonstrably false?

In the years between 1863 to 1868 Charles H. Pownall met a Siren. It might be that this Siren was actively looking for somebody to live with or to cooperate on fishing with (possibly due to the indigenous populations she used to fish with being decimated by the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1862).This cooperation led to Charles H. Pownall becoming the most renowned and wealthiest fishermen of Bristol Cove and might have continued for five years in total.

[Sidenote: The reasons for those cooperation might have been similar to those that causes other ocean predators to cooperate with humans in reality. See for example the Australian “Law of the tongue” or the Brazilian dolphin-human cooperation.]

Some time during this cooperation the mermaid and Pownall fell in love. Maybe she sang to him from the start, maybe she only sang to him after she realised she loved him. (Note that no version at all mentions that Pownall caught her so the approach was most likely consensual. Especially considering how forward Sirens can be I find the idea of the Siren initiating contact - and maybe even intiating the sexual part of the relationship - believable).

[Sidenote: In previous human-siren interactions - as the ones I postulated for the Haida in my earlier piece - this relationship would not have been a problem. The Haida and Sirens knew how to interact with each other as well as the dangers that could happen from exposure to the Song - as did the Sirens. The mermaid most likely thought the settlers would have knowledge of the problems as well. It might have been an innocent mistake to assume that. But the culture of the settlers would have been anathema to such a relationship. Having a female co-captaining a ship in the 19th century would have caused great offence, especially if she was sleeping with the married(!) captain to boot. As such, society would have almost certainly put trememndous pressure on the relationship even if the wider settler population might not have known that she was a mermaid.]

The Siren and Charles conceived a child together. The pregnancy resulted in a difficult birth with the baby caught halfway in transition. To the settlers the "deformed" baby was considered an abomination, maybe even a punishment from god for breaking the vows of marriage.

In desperation, Charles takes the baby to the Haida. He successfully pleads for their help only to discover his mermaid missing when he returns.

[Sidenote: Had the Haida been the dominant population at Bristol Cove at that time the birth of a hybrid would not have been a problem. Guess ethnic cleansing does come back to bite you in the behind after all.]

The Siren, assuming that Charles went into the woods and killed their child, had left for the water during his abscence, never to return.

[Sidenote: This part is the one which I find hard to reconcile. I find it hard to believe that Charles would have known to take the baby to the Haida without his Siren telling him. In any case, I find it hard to believe that he just left Bristol Cove with the Baby without telling her what he was intending to do.

Or maybe there is another explanation. Maybe she assumed that the baby was dead because people told her so? There were certainly plenty of people with motivation to get rid of her. Charles' human family, moralists opposed to children born out of wedlock, competing fishermen trying to rid Charles of his competitive advantage, religious zealots or plan old racists and bigots - and those are just the human factions. There might also have been Siren factions opposed to mingling with humans - imagine a 19th century version of Katrina - do you think sirens like that would have shied away from sabotaging such a relationship or even shied away from making one of their own disappear?]

Alone and with no access to the song - nor to any cure - Charles’ mental state deteriorated to the point of no return, his condition worsening due to self-medication with alcohol. It is quite likely that he did not understand what was happening to him.

[Speculation: Eventually - maybe with some "assistance" from some of the anti-Siren factions mentioned in the previous sidenote - he started blaming the Sirens for his mental problems, maybe even for taking away the siren he had fallen in love with.]

In 1868, after an unknown period of suffering excarbated by alcohol abuse, Charles H. Pownall, with the help of his shipmates surprised the sirens near the surface and massacred them.

The Sirens subsequently severed all human contact and went into hiding, forbidding any Siren to go on land and teaching their children to avoid the land.

(”Land bad. I learn this.)

The Hybrid daughter of Charles and his mermaid lived and prospered, despite being shunned by the rest of the Pownall family for allegedly being the daughter of a local prostitiute.

(”She was the first....”)

Acta est fabula. Clamate.

Addendum: The observations about the parallels between Ben and Charles and Ryn and Charle’s mermaid can be found here.

#Siren #siren freeform #freeform siren #charles pownall #long post #analysis #Pownall Massacre #ryn #Ben Pownall #helen hawkins #when you write about a massacre and realize the story was probably more heartbraking than you thought in the first place #I think I need a drink #jeez this was grim #pls excuse spelling mistakes I am le tired

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progressiveparty · 5 years

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Bigger Than Bernie: The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment (via Christopher Hass)

Our Progressive Candidates

Our endorsed candidates are running for office representing progressive values. Fighting for progressive ideas, for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, ending mass incarceration and deportation. It’s time to empower the voice of a new generation of Progressives who represent the people. A new generation of Progressives who will fight for solutions that match the need of the many.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

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PRAMILA JAYAPAL, U.S. HOUSE – WASHINGTON (WA-07)

ILHAN OMAR U.S. HOUSE – MINNESOTA (MN-05)

RO KHANNA U.S. HOUSE – CALIFORNIA (CA-17)

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UNITED STATES LOCAL GOVERNMENT

CANDIDATES CLICK HERE Can not find your progressive candidate?

Year 2020 – Recognize a Progressive – Nominate a Candidate:

The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment

By Christopher Hass “Today,” Bernie Sanders booms in his monotone shout, “we begin a political revolution to transform our country—economically, politically, socially and environmentally.” He marks each beat with his right hand, as if conducting with an invisible baton. Behind him, a lone seagull flaps its wings as it flies across Lake Champlain. The crowd of 5,000 that has come to Burlington, Vt., on a sunny afternoon in May to witness Sanders’ official campaign announcement breaks into a cheer. At the time, it was easy to dismiss talk of revolution as the rallying cry of a 74-year-old democratic socialist who clings too dearly to memories of the 1960s. Eleven months and more than six million votes later, Sanders’ call for revolution is harder to ignore. But what, exactly, would this political revolution look like? It’s not hard to imagine Sanders marching in the streets with the masses—he’s walked plenty of picket lines, most recently alongside Verizon workers in New York City last October—but that’s not the revolution he’s calling for. For Sanders, political revolution means shifting control of American politics away from corporate interests, convincing non-voters to go to the polls and attracting white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, all while moving the party left enough to embrace democratic socialist policies. A political revolution of that kind is going to require two things: a wave of candidates committed to a bold set of progressive ideas and a mass of voters with the political will to elect them. There’s evidence both of these are already here.

Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money. —Jamie Raskin read the full interview In These Times spoke to U.S. House and Senate challengers across the country who are very much a part of this wave. They are all outsiders to varying degrees, and all of them are running against the Democratic establishment in its various forms—from corporate donors and super PACs to the head of the Democratic National Committee herself. These challengers range from first-time candidates to experienced lawmakers, from community organizers to law professors. Each is balancing the individual concerns of the voters they seek to represent alongside the larger mood of the nation. None of them is running because of Bernie Sanders, but they clearly benefit from the enthusiasm and sense of progressive possibility his campaign has created. It would be a mistake to call them “Sanders Democrats” (and it’s unlikely Sanders himself would want anything to do with the term). Some have endorsed Sanders, others remain neutral or even back Hillary Clinton. But they are coalescing around a set of progressive policies familiar to anyone who has heard Sanders speak, including single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage and breaking up the big banks. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic platform more at odds with Bill Clinton’s centrist Third Way of the 1990s. More importantly, these positions increasingly reflect the popular will. Even after the brutal battles over Obamacare, polls show that more than half of Americans support moving to a single-payer healthcare system. Fifty-eight percent want to break up the big banks. Sixty-three percent support raising the minimum wage to $15. And Americans are nearly united in agreement (78 percent) that Citizens United should be overturned. What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucusgoers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in. This is what happens when you have a generation of young people whose central experiences with capitalism have been two recessions, a financial crisis, crushing college debt, flat wages and soaring income inequality. For young people, the devil they don’t know is looking better and better than the devil they do—and that sentiment is fueling insurgent challengers. Many of these candidates continually emphasize the need to purge U.S. politics of corporate money, starting with the Democratic Party. “It’s easy for candidates to say they’re for overturning Citizens United, but it’s really meaningless when they’re also taking so much corporate and dark money that they’ll never follow through,” says Tim Canova, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. “The Democratic Party has lost its way. It has gone corporate and Wall Street on so many issues that it has unfortunately turned its back on its own grassroots base.” And it’s more than a matter of principle: Many of these candidates believe that voters are fed up with how the corporate capture of the party has pulled it to the right. “The Democratic Party has been Lucy with the football and the voters have been Charlie Brown,” says Tom Fiegen, a candidate for Senate in Iowa. “Democrats have pulled the football away too many times, so the voters say, ‘Nope, I am not going to be tricked again. I am not going to have you lie to me and tell me you’re on my side, and then when I send you to D.C., you vote for the TPP or you vote for the Keystone Pipeline.’ ” Nowhere is this trust gap felt more keenly than among young voters. Sanders has won the support of young people like few politicians before. In each of the 27 states that held primaries or caucuses in February or March, he won the youth vote, often by more than 50 points. In his home state of Vermont, he defeated Hillary Clinton among voters under 29 by an overwhelming 95 percent to 5 percent. Tom Fiegen saw how this played out in Iowa. “In the conventions I went to,” he says, “there was probably 30 to 40 years difference in age between Bernie supporters in one half of the room and Hillary supporters in the other half of the room.” Fiegen himself has endorsed Sanders, and you can hear in his voice the same passion that has animated so many young people: “We are idealists. … We want a better world. We think we can achieve it. We’re willing to basically throw our bodies in front of the bus to do that.”

The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders, and that I’ve tried to emulate, is: Tell the truth. —Tom Fiegen The challengers:

Tim Canova (FL)

Donna Edwards (MD)

Tom Fiegen (IA)

Lucy Flores (NV)

Alan Grayson (FL)

Eric Kingson (NY)

Pramila Jayapal (WA)

Susannah Randolph (FL)

Joseline Peña-Melnyk (MD)

Jamie Raskin (MD) It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that this year’s election is playing out in a moment when protest movements have interjected themselves into the national conversation in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the climate movement and more have demonstrated the value of setting uncompromising demands and pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible. It’s no surprise then that some of these progressive challengers come directly out of protest movements. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state senator running for the 7th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, has a long history of activism and advocacy in Seattle. She founded the post-9/11 immigrant rights group Hate Free Zone (now OneAmerica), which has held massive voter registration drives. “The only reason I got into politics was because I believed it was another platform for organizing,” she says, “and that’s what I want to do with my congressional campaign. We’ve brought in thousands of leaders, young people and people of color and women who never saw themselves as part of democracy.” Joseline Peña-Melnyk, who is running for Congress in Maryland’s 4th District, says: “These movements give me hope for the future of our democracy. They show that the spirit that gave rise to the civil rights movement is still alive as people take up causes that matter and challenge the status quo.” Donna Edwards, a co-founder of the National Network to End Domestic Violence now running for Maryland’s open Senate seat, agrees. “I’ve always believed in outside movements,” she says. “Government doesn’t move effectively and elected officials don’t move effectively unless they have a big push from the outside.” Candidates like Debbie Medina, a democratic socialist running for state Senate in New York’s 18th District, are happy to be that push. As she told The Nation, “This election is just another rent strike.” Sanders himself is arguably the biggest protest candidate of them all. But a funny thing is happening: Many of the protest candidates are winning. By the middle of April, Sanders had won 16 states, as well as the Democrats abroad primary. Donna Edwards has led by as much as 6 points. Polls show Lucy Flores, a Sanders supporter running for Congress in Nevada, leading by 20 points. In Maryland’s 8th congressional district, Jamie Raskin’s two closest opponents are busy arguing over who’s in second place. For any new president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress. The establishment, however, is not going quietly. In Florida, where Tim Canova is challenging Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her congressional seat, news got out in March that the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) had denied Canova’s campaign access to the party’s voter file. His supporters created an uproar; the file is crucial to any campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts. The FDP eventually backed down in order to avoid, in the words of the state party executive director, the “appearance of favoritism,” but the policy remains in place for all other Democratic primary challengers in Florida. And not just Florida—Democratic challengers in other states are routinely denied access to this data or charged extra for it. “The DNC and state Democratic parties must stop favoring incumbents over insurgents in Democratic primaries,” Canova says. “We need to recruit activists committed to our progressive agenda to run for office, and that includes challenging incumbent Democrats.” Given that these candidates want to rid the party of corporate influence, it’s no surprise that many are going head-to-head with big money. In Maryland, Jamie Raskin’s two biggest challengers in the Democratic primary are a wine mogul named David Trone, who has already spent more than $5 million of his fortune on the race, and Kathleen Matthews, who once oversaw the Marriott political action committee and is now herself the recipient of more lobbyist money than any Democrat running for the House in 2016. “My major opponents here have no real history of involvement in Democratic Party politics,” Raskin says. “They are creatures of the big money politics that have overtaken our country.” He’s won the endorsement of both liberal groups and a number of Democratic state lawmakers, and—borrowing a page from Sanders’ playbook—has relied on a surge of small-dollar donations to remain competitive. “Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money,” Raskin says. In Nevada, Lucy Flores faces a multi-millionaire, Susie Lee, who has loaned her own campaign $150,000. But as Jeb Bush will tell you, money alone only gets you so far, especially in a year when voters seem more interested in authenticity. “The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders,” Tom Fiegen says, “and that I’ve tried to emulate is: Tell the truth.” Donna Edwards put it this way: “We should not run away from who we are as Democrats and the values that we share. … We lose elections because our voters stay home.” For a President Sanders or a President Clinton to be successful, they’re going to need voters to come out not just in November, but in 2018, 2020, and beyond. For any president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress, made up of people like Donna Edwards, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal and others. When Barack Obama first ran for president, he spoke frequently about how his election was not about him, but us. He may have meant it, but it was hard to shake the feeling that at that moment in American history, it was in fact very much about him and the qualities he possessed. Today, when Sanders uses the same language, you believe him—if for no other reason than it’s hard to imagine a wild-haired septuagenarian in a baggy suit as the catalyst for a popular movement. Clearly, something deeper is going on. For the most part, Sanders himself has remained focused on his own election fight with Hillary Clinton. He has avoided talk of the future. But in a recent interview with Cenk Uygur of the “Young Turks,” Sanders let his guard down for a minute, saying, “We need, win or lose for me, a political revolution which starts electing people who are accountable to the working families of this country.” There it was—“electing people,” plural, not a single president. That’s what revolution looks like. These challengers are also carrying the flag of the political revolution sparked by Bernie Sanders. This Piece Originally Appeared in Christopher Hass Read the full article

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oxboykev · 5 years

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First Friday

I am jobless. By choice. You see, a month ago I ended my employment as a technical writer at a biotech company. It wasn’t exactly a rash decision. I had been contemplating this imminent separation since probably last December.

Prior to this job, I was employed as a Captionist at a local technical university. That lasted all of two months. They could see that all the training in the world wasn’t going to help me learn on the job and so they told me to stop clutching onto the banister I was dangling from and, for all of our sakes, let go. The job required expert listening, near perfect accuracy capturing speech and translating it into electronic shorthand and lightning bolt typing speed. It was humbling to know that I possessed only one out of the three, at varying times, and, honestly, was fair to mediocre in demonstrating either of them consistently.

Like now, back then when I turned in my work laptop and its corresponding rolling suitcase to the office I contemplated my essential worth to society. As has been written countless times and is known to virtually everyone around the world, having an occupation not only allows you to accumulate capital, but it also invests a person with a sense of belonging and dignity. It provides a sense of worth in the eyes of one’s family, peers, loved ones and, most importantly, oneself. It’s an easy calculation to make, but I seem to be the only one in my immediate surroundings who can’t seem to come up with the correct change.

Thus, it was with much fanfare that I welcomed the decision of the aforementioned biotech company to bring me aboard as its newest technical writer last July. After several months of searching and one extensive and effectual in-person interview later, I had accomplished a professional aspiration I had of being a technical writer. What I didn’t let on was that I had only brushed shoulders with technical writers and had never written a proper technical document up until my hiring. In actuality, through word-of-mouth and first-person accounts I only lived the job vicariously through a number of technical writers with whom I was coworkers or friends. The fact that I had never held the title or had actually done any such writing previously was to be my ultimate undoing. But I charged ahead anyway because, to be completely honest, I needed the money and security of the benefits that a full-time job guaranteed. Even so, I was still confident in my intelligence and capacity to learn through touch and sight how to become a technical writer. I was fully prepared to make technical writing my career of choice.

Reality, though, has the unique talent of cutting you off at the knees if you dare ride into a situation with such sugar plum delusions dancing in your head. Landing the job of technical writer, I soon learned, was not that much of a hurdle. The seemingly insurmountable difficulties occurred when I tried navigating the pre-existing dynamic that had already been baked inside the “team” at the company. I know that it takes a while for me to warm up to new people and situations, but I always felt I compensated for my initial stiffness by keeping my eyes and ears open and holding out the hope that I would eventually learn my way around any obstacles and redeem myself with my coworkers by becoming more familiar with and sympathetic to their little quirks. That’s the same attitude I carried with me into the technical writer position to this new team. However, it didn’t serve me well this time because I couldn’t learn the basics and intricacies of the job as fast as the boss and coworkers expected me to.

It didn’t help that my boss had spread her attention and energy thin by accepting a new supervisory position for a different department within the company shortly before she hired me. She ostensibly was going to have to do double-duty in order to juggle her oversight responsibilities for two departments. On my first day in the office, my boss had already packed up most of her office items and was transitioning to her new office in a different part of the office building. So within a couple weeks of me starting she was out of pocket and already assuming the duties of her new role. That left limited facetime between us and wasn’t especially conducive to getting to know each other better and attempting to be in sync. Perhaps it’s a mistake on my part to think I need a lot of personal attention to place things in order and put all my effort into learning the ins-and-outs of a job. Given my years of experience in the workforce, maybe I shouldn’t be so unnerved by the feeling of being left to fend for myself and just jump into the stream of work before me.

Suffice it to say, the limited attentiveness of the boss left my two other beleaguered coworkers to pick up the slack and take on the majority of my training. All I can say is that they did the best they could, given the timing and circumstances. But when the more senior medical writer decided to quit several months after I arrived, in October 2018, leaving the junior technical writer to deal with me plus another recently hired technical writer that’s when, I feel, my tenure at the company became more and more tenuous. The pressure to “get it right the first time” and perform like a veteran technical writer were implicit points made to me by the supervisor in her office during our one-one-one meeting a few days prior to the senior medical writer leaving for good. Of course, I readily conceded to her demands because I needed the job, considering I had been jobless for over a year after leaving Seattle, then the short stint of playing Captionist and finally a return to an uncertain job search before landing the technical writer job. If I had been completely honest, for both of our sakes, and told her that it was going to take a considerable amount of time for me to perform at the level she expected of me, then I would’ve rendered my usefulness to the team moot. In hindsight, I did myself a disservice by believing I had to cling to this one particular job instead of cutting my losses, once again, and find myself something more fitting.

So I bit my lip and continued to rough it through the thicket of a subject field I realize now I had no business being in. By the end of 2018, with three new writers installed, we became a team of five. And I was the only male. Regardless, I had been in numerous work situations where I was the only man and had no trouble fitting in and actually forming some strong bonds of friendship with my female counterparts. So it was all the more curious and a bit humiliating to be gradually ostracized by the newest recruits. No matter what effort I made in the beginning to chat with them and become familiar with their personalities, they eventually coalesced into an inviolable clique. As the months warmed up, I noticed these three would go for walks during lunchtime and not invite me. Then, eventually, they didn’t invite me into their casual conversations anymore. I guess the increasingly humiliating part for me was that they would commiserate around the near vicinity of my desk and act as if I weren’t sitting just a few feet away. From my vantage point, it had gotten to the point that each and every day they were giving me the brush-off, sans any rationale, and I just had to take it. It wasn’t as if I could argue back, since all three of them had stopped talking to me, thus leaving me nothing to work with. This untenable situation became more acute when the junior technical writer went on maternity leave at the end of May 2019. There I was, the guy none of his teammates talked to and whose boss came by once in a while to check up on me. Isolated. Plus, I was given fewer and fewer assignments as the weeks and months rolled by.

After my first annual performance review, I could tell the boss was slow-motion demoting me. Due to a combination of factors, including, admittedly, a fair number of unforced errors on my part, my boss noted that the quality of my work was subpar. She went through the motions of advising me how I could improve and letting me know that she appreciated my willingness to learn from past mistakes. In my head, I wanted to ask her, “Why are you keeping me on? Why waste your and my time any longer?” It got to the point where I would just sit at my desk each day and pretend to be busy. You would think fake working would be rather easy. However, when you’re a man of conscience and pride, like I am, it was actually a numbing and increasingly resentful experience. The fact is, I really wanted to be a valuable contributor and demonstrate my hard work ethic. But there was going to be no path forward for me when my position was continually being undercut and my workload, for months, had been dwindling to virtually just one project. I really stopped caring. I had no backers, I had no moral support and the point of it all seemed to be getting more and more pointless.

Without acknowledging the obvious tension and remaining silent about the inevitable parting-of-the-ways between she and me, my supervisor emanated professional antagonism toward me every day that I persisted in showing up at the office. So after taking a week-long vacation toward the end of September, I went to my computer and typed up a brief, to-the-point resignation letter and handed it in to my supervisor on a Monday morning. The look on her face and her body language told me immediately she had been looking forward to this moment just as much as I.

Although I feel like I’m in more limbo now than ever, to be honest, I also feel freer than I’ve ever felt in the last year and a half. But this also means I have plenty of free time to second-guess myself and wonder what was it all for. I guess that’s what’s called “being human”.

#work #occupation #job #resign #quitting

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hyojinrk-archived · 5 years

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MGA 5 EPISODE ONE: tooice’s tt ( 8:08 - 9:11 ) & billie eilish’s idontwannabeyouanymore ( 3:31 - 4:17 ) reimagined acoustic cover

SHOWCASED: singing, guitar, creativity, bilinguality concept versatility??

TW: minor anxiety

there’s a sinking feeling in his chest when he sees the email, with its sleek, coldly official design and matter-of-fact wording. clicking around, reading every email except for the one from mnet, hyojin chews his bottom lip as he tries to immerse himself in anything but the reminder that he had, even for a moment, decided to stray from the path he had decided to follow for the past few years.

‘CONGRATULATIONS, KIM HYOJIN.’

for some reason, he doesn’t feel like he’s being congratulated at all.

he skims through the acceptance email from motte capital, the familiar name of the manager not bringing him much comfort. at this point, he was already guaranteed a spot as an employee, having worked there since his freshman year in university. he’s sure it’s a position that would be envied by anyone else in his department -- getting a job at a large finance firm over one break, nevertheless every one? if he didn’t know better, he would have thought it preferential treatment, too.

( of course, that wasn’t true. the only connection he had was was back in anyang, wondering how her dear son was doing in the big city. )

with a sigh, he opens the email, wondering if there was some kind of mixup, or confusion, or just general cruelty. maybe they were congratulating him for trying out, only to reject him and tell him that he wasn’t good enough. maybe things were better off that way, anyways.

it’s not very normal of him to be this melancholy -- it’s just that his fight with doyoung and resurfacing memories of seungyeon have been weighing him down and keeping him awake lately. there isn’t much comfort he can find unless it’s in singing or when he’s in the studio with seunghun, or even just hanging around with sakura. it’s difficult, indeed.

he remains there foolishly, like a statue, at the slow sinking realization that it wasn’t a joke -- the email gives him an address and information that would make no sense otherwise unless he had somehow passed whatever preliminary screening they had put him through two weeks ago. hyojin’s first reaction, naturally, is to put his phone on the table, face down, and to ignore the message despite the objection his heart raises.

one day and many hours of mindlessly singing songs on the piano that he can vaguely remember the chords for, hyojin finds himself straying back to the lyrics for seattle by sam kim, the unfamiliar, twisting feeling in his gut that had been haunting him ever since he had seen the email growing stronger with every note. he stops and sits there for a while, looking at his fingers on the plastic white keys, the way the keyboard slowly moves with his arms on the thin beams that held it up. in retrospect, it was already used and cheap when he had gotten ahold of it, but at that time, he had carefully collected all of the wages he had gotten from the bakery in a little piggybank on his desk to buy some kind of replacement for the old, rundown piano that he had left back at home, only bringing his guitar along with his small suitcase.

he was more comfortable now than he used to be, of course, but the thought still lingers whenever he plays, the reminder that he had been so determined to get what he wanted just to sing, to make music in the way he could best striking a chord in him.

maybe this was a sign.

❀

“no, this isn’t it.”

covering his mouth with his hand to try and muffle both a sigh of frustration and a yawn, his eyes remain glued on the bright screen of his laptop as he exits out of the fiftieth music video he’s seen that night. call it a bad habit, but when he stays up late for things like this, he tends to keep all the other lights off -- partially not to disturb jooyoung, but also to save electricity. there wasn’t much for him to lose, anyways -- he already wore glasses with an admittedly rather high prescription.

hearing the inklings of sleep creeping into his voice, now gruff from staying completely silent for at least an hour or so, he ruffles his hair to try and keep himself awake. he doesn’t have much time to waste before the internship starts in a week or two and with the auditions approaching faster than ever. he’ll fix whatever mess he makes of his sleep schedule later, when the performance is over. for now, he’ll have to find something that fits perfectly.

he wants to show another side of him while keeping the same theme. a chaos song? 12:30? a classic, but not currently trendy. what about a momoland song? or...

pausing in his trail of thought, hyojin’s mind zeroes in on an idea. a girl group song? that’s a good mix of trendy and catchy. finally picking up his guitar after spending so long with his fingers itching to play something, anything, but his head not allowing himself to get sidetracked while doing something so important.

closing his eyes and strumming a few chords while muffling the strings, hyojin quietly starts to sing a song from the top of his head. “what to do, keep me still / make me like ooh ahh ooh ahh -- oh? that’s not bad, what about this,” changing the fingering patterns, he starts a new song, “who that who that who that boy,” then changing again, “i can’t stop this trembling / on and on and on / i wanna throw my all / into your world.” he stops playing once his voice gets a little too loud and he can hear it echo, wincing.

a girl group medley wouldn’t be too bad, but considering his time frame, the amount of time it would take him to decide on songs and arrange them together and practice seemed unrealistic. maybe he’ll just stick with one or two.

it’s relatively smooth sailing after that -- he ends up choosing tooice’s tt, and after another session of scrolling through random songs on youtube to try and jar his memory as to what would be good to sing, he decides to settle on a billie eilish song as well. no matter how much he tries, he can’t ignore his ballad and emotional vocal side.

by the night before the performance, hyojin finds that the late thoughts have ebbed away, and falls into a dreamless sleep.

❀ IN THE STUDIO ;

if he was asked to list out the top three things he was most grateful for at that very moment, hyojin would definitely list his cousin as one of them. he’s trying not to take note of how clammy his hands feel and the amount of nerves he has for something as big as this, but he manages to maintain his composure, more so to keep up appearances around jooyoung and not worry him.

perhaps he’s too preoccupied with trying to absorb the largeness of the studio and everything around him, but before he knew it, his hand was being grabbed by jooyoung and he was being pulled along to a section of the seats. it takes him a second too late to realize that they weren’t going to be sitting along this time around -- although it isn’t unwelcome to see seungmin in any sort of setting, the realization that both jooyoung and seungmin were going to be sitting together for god knows how long. he’s tempted to take the lead and sit in between them to avoid becoming the collateral damage of their interaction, but it’s clear that the older male has something else in mind when he literally sits next to the boy.

“ah, seungminnie.” he waves a hand weakly in greeting, only offering an embarrassed smile when he’s responded to with surprise.

admittedly, he hadn’t told anyone except for maybe jooyoung and sakura, but he also had run into seunghun and sungwoon during auditions. that makes for less than five people, but in retrospect, he didn’t seem like the type to do something like this.

he can feel the tension boiling between the two siblings, sitting awkwardly in his seat and watching the spectacle almost nervously, as if waiting any moment to break them apart in case a fight went down. so this would be what the kim family reunion would be like, huh. although, he supposes the only person missing would be junyoung.

regardless, he simply smiles back at jooyoung when the male turns helplessly to give him a dry smile and shrug, as if saying what can i do, that’s how youngsters are. laughing to try and break the bad mood, he shifts in his seat again and rubs the back of his neck sheepishly.

“let’s just do well, everyone.”

once the broadcasting begins and the ceos are introduced, hyojin finds himself covering his mouth in shock, and he turns to look at jooyoung in surprise. admittedly, he hadn’t really watched much of the mgas unless it was clips concerning sungwoon, so he had thought the judging panel would just be a bunch of professional performers that could judge idols.

instead, seeing all five figures in front of him on the stage sends shocks through his body, somehow making the stakes seem far higher now that such qualified eyes were upon them. it wasn’t exactly that he listened to a lot of idol music or paid close attention to the entertainment companies, but it’s still the feeling of seeing celebrities in the flesh that makes him so starstruck.

even then, adding onto that, the contestants seemed to be called in a random order after the initial announcements were made by the judges. nevertheless, he tries his best to enjoy the stages, watching carefully and attentively as each of them performed and cheering for his friends. he can’t help but comment on haruto as he gets on the stage as well, surprised at seeing the familiar face.

“ah, so cute,” hyojin says, smiling fondly and his hands curling up in an almost cringe at how endearing he found the boy during his introduction, and he calls out a soft “がんばってね ( ganbatte ne / do your best )” to the boy in japanese before he starts his skating performance. it’s incredibly impressive and certainly something he’s never seen before until now, and the finesse with which the younger boy performed was definitely eye-catching. of course, he stands up in his seat when haruto ends up falling off the stage after waving, clear concern on his face for the poor boy that still doesn’t go away entirely, even when he proves to be okay.

that aside, he remains seated for the rest of the performances, cheering for seungmin as he sings an english song, mesmerized by his voice, and then jooyoung, who plays some of the guitar. despite having heard jooyoung practicing in his room from time to time, hyojin still chuckles at the similarity in their instrument choices, swaying along to the songs he plays.

“guess it’s a kim cousin thing.” he says to seungmin, gesturing at the acoustic guitar he had with him as well, before looking up at jooyoung with his electric guitar meaningfully.

by the time it was his turn to go up, it felt more like he had been watching a concert and was now being asked to perform.

❀ ON THE STAGE ;

growing shy when he hears baek jiyoung call his name, hyojin grabs his guitar and heads onto the stage, ducking his head down with red ears. admittedly, he’s a little flustered to have all of their attention on him, but he tries his best to stay relaxed nevertheless. the moment he slings the guitar over his shoulder, however, he feels his legs starting to quiver slightly, only growing more intense when baek jiyoung asks him to introduce himself.

“ah, hello, i’m 21 year old kim hyojin,” he says, holding up two fingers on one hand and one finger on the other with a soft smile.

he tries not to think of other things while speaking, but he can’t help but think back to how doyoung would occasionally call him a ‘pretty boy,’ and even how his old middle school friends would comment on his eye smile and how sweet he looked whenever smiling. stuttering before he continues his sentence, hyojin adds, “i’ve been singing since i was around... seven? yeah -- i won’t take up too much longer, but i hope you’ll enjoy and that the worries you might have had today will be erased. also...”

inhaling softly once he realizes how his legs are wobbling a bit now, hyojin grows sheepish, asking, “would it be okay if i got a chair? i think i’ll sit while playing.”

thanking the staff member that brings up a chair for him to sit on and adjusting the microphone to his height while strumming the guitar to make sure it’s tuned, he looks up again at the audience, then the judges, trying not to grow red before flashing a thumbs up. taking a deep breath, he starts to strum the beginning to tooice’s tt.

이러지도 못하는데 i’m in two minds 저러지도 못하네 in an awkward situation 그저 바라보며 ba-ba-ba-baby i just stare and say ba-ba-ba-baby 매일 상상만 해 이름과 함께 everyday i only imagine without asking 쓱 말을 놨네 baby i talk casually and say your name baby 아직 우린 모르는 사인데 but we don’t even know each other

singing the song sweetly despite it being at the same fast pace, hyojin purposefully slows down at some parts to emphasize, varying the notes in a more syncopated, sensual way than the typically cutesy way of the original. at the same time, he notably pouts at the last line, his eyes shining as his fingers brush over the strings in a well practiced manner.

nanana nananana 콧노래가 나오다가 나도 몰래 i start humming and before i know it 눈물 날 것 같애 i feel like crying, i don’t feel like myself 아닌 것 같애 내가 아닌 것 같애 this isn’t like me at all i love you so much

trying not to grow shy when he hears jooyoung’s voice cheering for him the crowd, he closes his eyes briefly, starting to feel himself get lost in the rhythm of the song, growing out of his nervous shell that he had shown in the introduction. as soon as he hits the chord for the last line, he opens his eyes to wink at the judge panel on ‘i love you so much.’

이미 난 다 컸다고 생각하는데 think i’m all grown up now 어쩌면 내 맘인데 왜 i’m free to make my own choices, but why 내 맘대로 할 수 없는 건데 why can’t i have it my way 밀어내려고 하면 할수록 the more i try to push you away 자꾸 끌려 왜 자꾸 자꾸 끌려 baby the more i’m drawn and attracted to you baby

slowly picking up the beat as he reaches an especially well known part of the popular girl song, he bursts into a bright smile once he starts to see some heads bobbing in the audience, clearly enjoying the rendition of such a popular song, some even starting to do the gestures of the dance vaguely.

i’m like tt, just like tt 이런 내 맘 모르고 너무해 너무해 you don’t know how i feel, so mean, so mean i’m like tt, just like tt tell me that you’d be my baby

hitting the chorus, he starts to have fun with the lyrics, his voice following along smoothly as he slightly angles his head to glance at the contestants in the audience with a slighty half smile, almost like a smirk, shaking his head cutely while singing ‘so mean, so mean.’ once he reaches the end of the segment, he slows down his strumming, ending it on a nice chord.

before a silence ensues, he adjusts his sitting position ever so slightly before starting, strumming the guitar, before entering right into the middle of the chorus of idonwannabeyouanymore.

if "i love you" was a promise would you break it, if you're honest tell the mirror what you know she's heard before

hitting each beat hard, he starts to sing more powerfully, voice thick with emotion and eyes squeezing shut as he feels the melody, shifting into a far different mood from the playful nature of tt. in a few seconds, the atmosphere suddenly turns melancholy and moody.

i don't wanna be you i don't wanna be you

slowing down as he draws out the lines slowly, he starts playing the guitar more quietly in the background, barely pausing to repeat the line again, this time going into a higher note, hearing it sound smoothly in the studio.

i don't wanna be you, anymore

finally, one last time, he echoes the last line, playing nothing but one last chord and eyes reopening gradually. removing his fingers from the neck of the guitar, he speaks a “thank you” into the microphone before standing up and bowing multiple times to the people around him.

flipping the guitar so that it hung over his shoulder against his back, he makes his way off the stage with a little more confidence than when he entered it. as much as it was nervewracking, he would be lying if he said it wasn’t enjoyable.

maybe singing was what he was meant to do, after all.

#&. galaxy #rkmga5 #rkmga5callback #[[ mentioned!#rkjooyoung #rkseungmin #rksakura #me: okay just get the audition in and you're fine #me: 1k again before literally anyone performs #hyojin aka the man with the world's longest backstory ig #rkharuto #tw; anxiety #( stamina... maybe??? )

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didanawisgi · 5 years

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Today, we begin with a new Full Measure poll on the national news media. As you might expect: the results aren’t very good. For the media. Whether it’s coverage of the Russia investigation or the Covington High School kids, news consumers on all sides of the political spectrum report declining trust — in us. We turn to two experts to analyze the current Media Madness.

Sharyl: One need only sample lowlights from a single month to get a sense of the problem.

In January, a Seattle Fox affiliate aired a doctored video of President Trump.

President Trump: Some have suggested a barrier is immoral.

Buzzfeed: The comparison which shows Trump with an altered face and a looped licking of his lips

The same month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller refuted a BuzzFeed bombshell that falsely claimed Trump directed his ex-lawyer to lie to Congress.

And a January article about Melania Trump in the Telegraph was followed by seven corrections an apologyand an undisclosed payment to Mrs. Trump. One-sided narratives presented virtually unchallenged. National news quoting anonymous sources that turn out to be wrong.

The headline contains the most devastating part: President Trump directed his attorney to lie to congress.

The same month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller refuted a Buzzfeed bombshell that falsely claimed Trump directed his ex-lawyer to lie to Congress.

The Washington Post took us “Inside theBattle Over Trump’s Immigration Order”— only to later admit the article misreported Trump’s actions, a reported meeting had not actually occurred, and a conference call hadn’t happened as described.

FBI Director James Comey debunked a New York Times article about supposed contacts between Trump campaign staff “senior Russian intelligence officials.”

And NBC News reported that Russian President Putin said he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite. It’s been a bad few years for media credibility.

A new Full Measure poll conducted for Full Measure by Scott Rasmussen finds: 42% of Americans believe national political news coverage is inaccurate and unreliable. Fewer— 38%—believe it’s accurate and reliable. And 52% say it’s worse compared to five years ago.

National political reporters also get poor scores. Only 26% of those polled say reporters carefully report the facts. 57% say reporters use news stories to promote their own ideological agenda.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen:

Rasmussen: We asked about national political reporters are, are they credible, are they reliable? And you know, a little more than one out of three people say yes. When we ask about Wikipedia, we get the exact same answer. So what's happening is we have a world where people look at journalists like they look at Wikipedia. “Gee, that's an interesting fact. I better check it myself.”

Sharyl: And what does that tell you?

Rasmussen: The media has a huge credibility problem and it's always had the problem. Oh, we talk about it differently today. Now we talk about it as a political bias. I think the issues have always been there. I mean, people were complaining about the bias of Walter Cronkite back in the 1960s.

Sharyl: People forget about that.

Walter Cronkite: For it seems now more certain then ever that the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

Sharyl: It is often argued that Donald Trump created this media environment where everybody hates the media. And then others say he simply understood that environment, and capitalized on it. Which is it you see?

Rasmussen: Oh, people have hated the media for a very long time

Trump: Fake news folks, fake news. Typical New York Times fake stories.

Rasmussen: Donald Trump capitalized on it. He understood it, but he's not the first to do so. The first President Bush when he was campaigning, he actually got kind of aggressive with, I think it was Dan Rather, during an interview because a lot of Republicans weren't sure he had the fire to, to be president.

President Bush 1: It's not fair to judge my whole career by a re-hash on Iran. How would you like it if I judge your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?

Rasmussen: So he capitalized on that. But all you're doing is tapping into a sentiment that's already there and Donald Trump is playing them but beautifully

Rasmussen says his polling found a good recent example of how many today have come to regard— or disregard— the national media. The Covington High School pro-life students’ confrontation with a Native American activist at a Washington DC protest.

Rasmussen: When the story broke, of the students from Covington high school, we went out and polled right away when the story first broke and ask people what they thought. And as you would expect, liberals and conservatives had different views of whether the high school students acted inappropriately or somebody else did.

Sharyl: So to summarize, liberals probably thought the high school students who were pro-life behaved inappropriately and aggressively.

Rasmussen: Yes.

Sharyl: And Conservatives thought the Native American was the one who is inappropriate.

Rasmussen: Yes. And by the way, conservatives also thought the media was inappropriate.

ABC news: A group of teenagers, some Catholic high school students, seen wearing Make America Great Again hats, appearing to face off with Nathan Phillips – a 65 year old Native American.

Rasmussen: And then we had a week's full of coverage. And as you recall, there was a lot more coverage that came out, uh, about the incident. A lot more videos and a lot more information. And a week later, nobody's opinion changed.

Sharyl: I’m surprised by that because some reporters and in media even apologized that they had been too hard on the children at first or the high school students without knowing the full story.

Whoopi Goldberg: So many people admitted they made snap judgements before all these other facts came in.

Sharyl: But you're saying the public at large, didn't change their mind?

Rasmussen: That's correct. The public at large made up their mind. They knew their sources

Sharyl: But the most overwhelming results came when we asked about the motivation of political reporters.

Rasmussen: 78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.

Sharyl: Most people also seem to think reporters cannot be fair when it comes to their chosen political candidate.

Rasmussen: if a reporter found out something that would hurt their favorite candidate, only 36% of voters think that they would report that.

Sharyl: So most people think the reporter would cover it up because they like the person?

Rasmussen: Right, exactly. So voters are looking at them as a political activist, not as a source of information.

Sesno: An actual report or professional reporter would yeah never do that.

Frank Sesno is a former CNN correspondent and bureau chief. As head of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, he routinely confronts declining public trust in the media.

Sesno: The public understands fundamentally what journalism should be. They don't understand how it's actually practiced. And that falls to news organizations in my view, to be more creative, more imaginative about how they're engaging with their publics, to both explain what they do to defend what they do when it's controversial and to be accountable for what they do if it's wrong.

Sharyl: After 2016 when so many of us got the election so wrong, we promised a period of self-reflection and correction, have we done it?

Sesno: No, not enough. If we had done the self-reflection and correction better and more deeply, there would be more reporters reporting from more places across the country talking to more diverse audiences. We would not be so in tiredly focused at least in certain media channels and places on the Trump administration and the outrage of the moment. That being said, there is so much news from this administration. It's kind of hard not to do that.

Trump: If we don’t get what we want, I will shut down the government.

Sharyl: In the era of the Trump presidency, can you point to a couple of things you think the media has done right

Sesno: I would start, actually, in the Trump era by calling out NPR. I think NPR has done an exceptional about getting outside of Washington and engaging other voices and people from different sides of the ideological divide to get their sense of what's happening. would call out the New York Times and the Washington Post for making remarkable use of multimedia. So there's a lot of good journalism and good media that's taking place also that, that extends beyond the Trump administration. There is such a thing as beyond the Trump administration.

It may not seem like it as we move quickly into campaign 2020.

Sharyl: I guess we should warn people, hang on to their seat belt with 2020 campaign coming. What do you foresee in terms of media?

Sesno: Yeah, so here's the next danger. The next is everybody for walks right off the cliff of coverage like they did last time. Obsessing over, you know, the, the candidate du jour, the moment, du jour. How will the media be able to arbitrate this mass of people who all want to be president so that the audience can follow it with some degree of clarity, and so that you neither fall into an oversimplified narrative, or a narrative that just revolves around the melodrama of who's up, who's down, and who's making the most noise or tweeting the most.

You can find my list of Media Mistakes in the era of Trump at SharylAttkisson.com

#Sharyl Attkisson #journalism #investigative journalism #investigative reporting

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nanonaturalist · 6 years

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Yo! I’m an Anthropology student but I’m super fascinated with entomology n’ the like. Any tips for how to self study entomology/get started? How did you become the bug lover you are today?

Sup! I am a HUGE animal lover. Like, I don’t think you understand how much I love animals. Back when google image search was this crazy new thing, I would google things like “puffer fish” and literally start crying from how cute and precious they were. I don’t remember ever not liking bugs. I was bringing in caterpillars when my age was single digits, which I named and kept in shoe boxes, and who would invariably wander out and make a random cocoon somewhere.

STORY TIME! (what? you wanted a short answer? Sorry!)

… (actually check out this post from a while back [link] about tips for getting started, it was written for a high school student but most of the things I mention are good for all ages)…

Thing is, this was the point in history when you needed to use a card catalog to look a book up in the library. No idea what I’m talking about? That’s how long ago this was. If there was a book about bugs in the school book order form, I would ask for it (and sometimes I’d get one), but that was the full extent of my knowledge pool for things that we weren’t directly taught about in school. In 4th grade, we had a unit on marine animals (with the most amazing field trip on a research boat ever, omg the scuba divers brought up things for us to touch, and we got to look at plankton in the microscope eeeeeee!), and it was like I was reborn. I memorized everything we learned, including the taxonomy of cnidaria (jellies, anemones, corals) and strange eating habits of echinoderms (starfish, urchins). I got REAL into this stuff, to the point where 4 years later, I told anybody who asked me that when I grew up, I was going to get a PhD in Marine Biology.

There was just one problem. You can’t get a degree in any kind of animal biology without doing dissections or killing things. Remember, I’m an animal Lover with a capital L. I wanted to be a vegetarian starting at age 4 (parents said no, but I picked meat out of everything until I made it official at 12). So I gave up on biology real quick. Flash forward about ten years to 2006. I had graduated from college (with a psychology degree that cost me $70,000), was working soul-sucking jobs, and needed a hobby. But wait, DIGITAL CAMERAS ARE A THING! WOW! So I picked up “crappy nature photography” as a hobby. And what did I take pictures of with my First Ever Digital Camera when I bought one that summer?

I found this longhorn beetle on the hood of my car at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. But back in 2006… What are you going to do with pictures of bugs when you have no background in biology? I posted some on LiveJournal, and that was that. What kind of bug was it? I couldn’t even tell you that it was a beetle at that point. And when I was going through my old photos more recently, I couldn’t even remember seeing it.

I still took photos of basically everything I saw, but nothing ever really happened with them.

Who are these? At the time (photos are from 2006 to 2009), the most I could have told you was “dragonfly, wasp, spider, caddisfly larva.” Which is pretty good, I guess, but I didn’t even realize how much diversity I was missing out on by not going any deeper.

Me + Slugs: Left - Banana Slug in Redwood National Forest, CA (2008); Center and Right - Chocolate Arion Slug at my apartment in Redmond, WA (2006)

Time passes, nature photos are taken. I will take photos of any bug I see, but I don’t intentionally seek them out and I never know what any of them are. Now flash forward to 2013, when I moved from Seattle, WA to Austin, TX.

My mind was blown. The bugs were huge, strange, and EVERYWHERE. I NEEDED TO KNOW WHAT THEY WERE! But… It was still hard. At this point, looking things up on the internet was just what you did, but … what was I supposed to look up? “Giant screaming thing in my potted plant that looks like a leaf?” “Pile of handsnails?” I took pictures, shared them on Facebook (nobody used Livejournal anymore!), and went about my day.

At this point, I had gone back to college to study engineering (I moved to Austin for grad school), and somehow ended up watching a lot of youtube. SciShow got me onto VlogBrothers, which got me onto The Brain Scoop (@thebrainscoop), which got me onto tumblr *waves*. And I was thinking some hard thoughts about what I actually wanted to do when I grew up because I was tired of soul-sucking jobs. Hey, I love museums (that’s actually where most of my science knowledge came from), so I started thinking about careers in science museums, and I followed UT’s collection page on Facebook. One day in 2015, they shared an event for a Bioblitz, sponsored by several groups associated with UT and Texas Parks and Wildlfie. What’s a Bioblitz? I had no idea. So I clicked.

Basically, you take as many pictures of living things as you can. There were subject matter experts who would lead you on hikes and tell you what things were and how you can tell them apart (WAIT, WHAT?!?). The event required that you download this new nature app called iNaturalist (@inaturalist), which is where you would post the photos you took. With the data you posted from the app, other users of the website would identify your photos, and the state park we were at would use that data to create species checklists to track what occurred there. Your iNat account kept a permanent log of all of your observations. I tend to be extremely skeptical/resistant to new technologies and being told to do things, so at first I wanted to know what was wrong with the way I took photos NOW, I didn’t need some stupid website telling me what to do.

But then I started testing it out before the event.

Two of my first iNat observations (both butterflies). Left: Henry’s Elfin caterpillar; Right: American Lady butterfly. Links to iNat observations.

I had no idea where to start with identifying either of these, and the Henry’s Elfin caterpillar took me a few years to ID myself. But the American Lady? People told me what it was within hours of me posting it. Within hours.

About a week later, the Bioblitz happened. It was perfect. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were just like me. They wanted to go on long slow walks through nature, turning over logs and walking directly into ponds and poking at insects, all while taking photos of things and identifying them. I was spending the weekend with real life biologists and I was learning everything I could. And the things I saw?

HOLY CARP. Texas has dung beetles?! (top left) Parasitic wasps REALLY DO THAT? (braconid wasp cocoons on inchworm caterpillar, top right) Diving beetles?! (water scavenger beetle, bottom left) Giant fishing spiders?! (bottom right)

This event was the moment I “got started” with entomology. I regularly used iNaturalist, and in the process of trying to identify my observations with BugGuide.net [link], I quickly began to learn some of the “basics.” For example, stink bugs are a thing. So are green lacewings. And there are a LOT more kinds of spiders than orbweavers and wolf spiders (who knew?). I was so smitten with iNaturalist that I professed my love for all to read on tumblr [link] (all being… 3 people?). I used iNaturalist regularly, but still, unless I was on a bioblitz, I didn’t seek things out. I mentioned I was a grad student, right?

Then 2016 rolls around. I’ve had enough of school and drop master out of my program. I get a Real Engineering Job and Buy a House with a Yard. I started my new job when I was finishing up my thesis (probably not the best idea…) and so my back yard took on a life of its own. By the time I had finished my thesis, the grass was hip height, and the HOA had no rules about what my back yard had to look like, so I just never mowed it. And the bugs… oh man, the bugs. The bugs were good. By January 2017, I was getting more confident in my Bug Knowledge, and I was using iNaturalist every week. I had joined clubs centered around nature (Texas Master Naturalists and Travis Audubon). I signed up for a birding trip in Malawi. Then in April, I found a pile of butterfly eggs and a chrysalis. And the guy leading the Malawi trip (one of the directors at Travis Audubon) asked me to do an insect table at their outreach event. Then City Nature Challenge 2017 happened (and I am *very* competitive). And… uh… I guess I just never looked back?

The thing to remember here is: the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. What I love about iNaturalist is that I can create a time capsule showing what I did and didn’t know at the time. And what I didn’t know is… really amazing. I taught the entomology class for my Master Naturalist chapter’s training course this year, and I told the people in the class that one year ago, I didn’t know any of the things I was going to talk to them about. I know it sounds like I’m putting on a commercial for iNaturalist (which is actually exactly what I’m doing, I love that website), but besides the curiosity about nature that I had to begin with, iNaturalist is the single most important thing that has enabled me to nurture and grow my love for our invertebrate friends.

Through my use of iNaturalist, I have met real people and made real friendships. Many of the people I meet are professionally biologists, but there are just as many randos like me who crawled out of the internet to hang out with nature freaks. One of the great things about this community is there is no elitism, and even professional entomologists are just as willing to admit they have no idea what something is and will listen to me explain what I know, as they are to explain something I don’t know and answer my questions. The people I have met are absolutely awesome, and the general attitude people on iNat (online and in person) tend to have has really rubbed off on me. If someone I’m talking to doesn’t know something that tends to be commonly known (example: my coworker is a gardener, but hadn’t heard about the ant/aphid relationship), oh boy, it’s awesome, let me TELL YOU about ANTS fighting off PREDATORS so they can DRINK APHID PEE!!!

Above: Crematogaster ants farming keeled treehopper nymphs on sunflower SO THEY CAN DRINK THEIR PEE

One of the best things you can do to get more into entomology is to just be observant. Look. Notice patterns. Pay attention to relationships between “higher” and “lower” organisms. When you travel, look there too. What is different from home? What’s similar?

The other best thing: meet people. Find groups/clubs for people into nature. Go on hikes with entomologists. Go to “nature days” events (these are always geared towards kids, but ADULTS ARE WELCOME!). A lot of nature clubs and organizations are heavy on the retiree demographic, which means the meetings may not be easy to learn about online. I actually joined the Austin Butterfly Forum after hearing about it from the people I was sitting next to at a Travis Audubon event (Victor Emanuel’s autobiography had just published and he kicked off his book tour with a live interview in Austin), and I’ve met several new friends through ABF.

I don’t even know how to explain it, but naturalists are a totally different flavor than any other person I’ve known. It’s like, there are other people who would rather be crawling through the swamp in 105°F weather for 8 hours straight than sit and watch TV? There are other people who will skip two meals and stay up until 2 am to get really good bug pictures? I mean, I can’t describe what it feels like to be slowly picking through the deserts of west Texas with 15 other people, when one of them yells, “SNAKE!” and suddenly EVERYBODY RUNS TOWARDS THE SNAKE AND IMPATIENTLY WAITS THEIR TURN TO HOLD HIM.

I know this is long and maybe not entirely what you were expecting, @marichuu, but want to make sure that anybody reading this knows that if you like nature, even if you don’t know very much about it now, there are a ton of people like me and those weirdos up there who are so excited to share the world with you that you can’t even imagine it now. Want to stay online because you’re nervous about meeting new people? That’s great! Tons of us are online! But if you’re ready to put yourself out there and meet people in person, chances are, they’re awesome and will love answering your questions (and if they’re not awesome tell me and I’ll YELL AT THEM FOR YOU YOU DESERVE BETTER).

Anyway. Bugs are awesome and I hope they think you are just as awesome. Also anthropology is super neat and there’s a lot of intersections with entomology [link] that you can look at from an interesting angle.

Posted June 4, 2018

#asks #informational #how to #teach yourself entomology #entomology #inaturalist #inat #citizen science #insect photography #nature photography #tl;dr #wall of text #tmi #nanonaturalist's life story #resources #bioblitz #naturalists #master naturalists #audubon

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rememberthattime · 3 years

Text

Chapter 60. Second US Tour

This day was always going to come.

In August 2015, Chelsay and I were just starting our careers – we were wide-eyed, in our mid-20s, and ready to see the world. We were excited to begin our two-year work rotations in London, but had no idea how our time abroad would go: would we like expat life? Would we travel as often as we hoped? Could anything in London top our 2011 visit to Harry Potter Studios?

Chelsay and I felt so lucky to live abroad, but regardless of how the two-year rotation went, we knew we’d return to the US someday.

We knew this day would come… we just never expected it would be SIX years later.

The following four posts will be my last (for now). Ending these sixty-plus chapters was always going to be challenging, but these posts are especially ambitious. The fact that I fell nearly a year behind makes these that much harder, but things have been busy and that’s reflected in the number of posts required. I’ll [1] start our second US housing visit, [2] cover our move-out tour of the UK, [3] write about our return to the US, and [4] wrap up with a goodbye post to our time as expats.

This first post will focus on our second US housing visit.

I covered the initial US tour – through Charleston and Chicago – in the previous Cornwall post. Although Charleston was likely the prettiest city we’d seen in the US, Chelsay & I left our visit with a pretty good feeling about Chicago. We felt surrounded by ‘our people’.

This was an important move for Chelsay & I though, so we wanted to be sure. We decided we needed a second US visit – a “completeness check” to make sure we’d considered all viable options.

As I’ve written in previous posts, Chelsay & I knew we wanted our next home to be by the water. Sydney got us hooked – there are just so many more outdoor activities when you have parks, forests, AND the water nearby. I spent several months scouring the web for “most liveable US cities”, watched YouTube videos on “best coastal towns”, and virtually crawled up & down US coastlines on Zillow to see if I’d missed any contenders.

Maine? Cape Code? DC? Outer Banks? Oregon? For a day or two, I seriously considered Florida before Chelsay put her foot down.

Eventually, Chelsay and I agreed on three alternatives worth comparing to Chicago: Connecticut, San Diego, and Santa Barbara.

Westport, CT was a dark horse. The main draw is it’s proximity to New York City, but wouldn’t it essentially be the same as living in Chicago’s North Shore – except we wouldn’t have any family nearby? Even in the day or two before our trip, I was asking Chelsay whether we should skip it and just go straight to California.

She was very wise, saying we needed to see for ourselves: “There may be things we’d never expected.”

She was dead-on. I’m writing this post from Chicago, so the result of all these house tours should be obvious. But if there was any town that came close to unseating Chicago, it was Westport.

This was one of the most idyllic communities we’d ever seen. Every house was 150+ years old but immaculately maintained. Each lot was 0.5 acre minimum, and tucked behind private hedges for good measure. There were large forests – true forests – that rivaled London’s Hampstead Heath. A charming town with both high-end shops and unique boutiques. The beachline tucked within quiet neighborhoods yet overlooking Manhattan in the distance.

I’ll never forget looking across Compo Beach, when Chelsay described Westport as “Where Presidents come from.”

We drove through surrounding villages, grabbed bagels in Old Greenwich, strolled sunny dog parks, and enjoyed the Long Island Sound from Sherwood Island. We were particularly surprised by the diversity [which reminded us of Seattle], and how active everyone was [we genuinely didn’t see a single overweight person over two days].

We each had a strong feeling that Connecticut MIGHT be home.

The final test was a visit to NYC – it’s the World’s capital, but was it a strong enough draw to lure Chelsay and I away from family in Chicago?

The answer is no. Although I loved visiting New York, it is a very very dirty place. The trains and subway suck, garbage was rolling around every street, and at any given moment, there’s at least a 3% chance you’ll be killed.

To be clear, I <3 NYC. You just can’t replicate some New York experiences. Times Square, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Friends apartment. Chelsay & I stumbled into an exceptional dinner at Korean Cote – one the US’ most acclaimed steak restaurants, yet an unpretentious vibe accentuated by playing 90s R&B hit after hit.

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Had Chelsay and I not moved to London, New York would have been a great place for our 20s. But we aren’t 20 now, and if access to NYC was a big part of Westport’s appeal, it just wasn’t a big enough draw.

That said, though we didn’t ultimately choose Westport, it refined what we were looking for in Chicago: big lot, privacy, close to water.

Next up was San Diego. If Westport was a dark horse, San Diego was Chicago’s most direct competitor. It’s often described as America’s Sydney, and when it comes to best places to raise a family, you really can’t beat sunshine, beaches, and perfect weather year-round.

I watched A LOT of San Diego real estate videos, so I knew La Jolla, Solana Beach, Encinitas, and Carlsbad would be our best bets. That said, I was also aware of the California exodus: a flood of families leaving California’s housing market, tired of paying $1.5 million for 1500 square feet.

The question was whether the beaches made up for the high prices. Unfortunately, they did not. Although the beaches were certainly better than Chicago or Connecticut, they were all located right on the highway. They weren’t enough to overcome houses that were just too small, tightly packed together, and entirely overpriced.

Despite the real estate disappointment, Chelsay and I still really enjoyed our time in sunny San Diego. My parents flew in from Dallas – their first flight post-pandemic – and we’d catch up over dinner each night: how was getting the vaccine? What have you been up to the past year? How is Carlsbad considered one of the US’s best beach towns???

If San Diego was overpriced, our next destination, Santa Barbara, didn’t have much of a chance.

Along with the Bay Area, Santa Barbara has become the epitome of California’s exodus. Absolutely stunning, but wildly over-priced.

Yes, the scenery exceeds expectations. Sun-drenched beaches, palm tree-lined streets, movie star homes tucked into lush hillsides, and a coordinated, pueblo style downtown.

But home prices are out of control, and only getting worse. For about one day, we considered a $1.7 million home that was only 2000 square feet. It was recently remodeled, had a well-manicured 0.25 acres [basically a farm in CA], and views of the ocean.

It sold for $2.1 million. $400 thousand OVER asking price.

We took that as a sign, deciding to focus less on Santa Barbara real estate and more on just enjoying the city. We visited the old mission, took a taco tour of the city, and enjoyed McConnell’s ice cream on the beach while the sun set.

Without a realistic path to live in Santa Barbara, Chelsay and I audibled on our last day, moving our return flight from Los Angeles to instead depart from San Francisco. This trip was a ‘completeness check’ intended to gauge Chicago’s competition, and Carmel and Monterrey had always lingered as potential options. It was only a four hour drive, and we had plenty of Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights left, so decided to see the area for ourselves.

Again: California exodus. Carmel is especially attractive – the best beaches we’d seen in the US, with piney woods and hills descending onto sandy beaches. The problem was again home value: with a price per square foot ratio similar to Santa Barbara.

Although we ultimately didn’t go with any cities from our second US house tour, the trip was still valuable. It confirmed our confidence in Chicago [which I’ll write about in a subsequent post], and refined what Chelsay and I really value in a home.

Now that we finally knew our destination, there were just a few items to sort out: getting support from our work, packing up our London flat, arranging travel to include Indy, finding short-term accommodation in Chicago, starting our search for a permanent house… oh, and buying a car.

It would be a journey to get to Chicago, but Chelsay and I shared excitement [and relief] in knowing we’d found our new Home.

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aishnidoh · 4 years

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1. Andrew Carnegie (goal setter)

Andrew Carnegie was an American entrepreneur who actually immigrated from Scotland. Born into the lower class, Carnegie and his family immigrated to Pennsylvania, where they lived a better lifestyle. Carnegie later founded the Carnegie Steel Company, growing it to become one of the largest companies in U.S. history.

In addition to the success of his company, Carnegie became a very successful angel investor. Using the money made through his steel company, he invested in various car companies, messenger services, and land that contained oil reserves. Upon his death in 1919, Carnegie had an estimated net worth of $350 million, which, in 2021 dollars, would be worth nearly $5.5 billion.

Interview

Creative vision is the first of three principles Carnegie raises. What exactly does creative vision mean? Carnegie breaks it down into ten fundamental attitudes, which in aggregate form the basis for creative vision.

“The organized thinker never gives up anything he undertakes until he has exhausted every effort to finish it.”

Controlled attention is the final principle. Controlled attention is in some ways an offshoot of the other two. According to Carnegie, if you orient your mind in a specific way, all your attention starts to siphon in a specific direction. “Controlled attention magnetized the brain with the nature of one’s dominating thoughts, aims, and purposes, thus causing one to be always in search of every necessary thing that is related to one’s dominating thoughts.”

“A man will always be more effective when engaged in the sort of work he likes best. That is why one’s major purpose in life should be of his own choice. People who drift through life performing work they do not like, merely because they must have an income as a means of living, seldom get more than a living from their labor. You see, this sort of labor does not inspire one to perform service in an obsessional desire to work. It is one of the tragedies of civilization that we have not found a way to give every man the sort of work he likes best to do.”

2. Henry Ford (efficient)

Unlike Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford was a natural-born citizen who grew up in Michigan. Born into a family that originated from England and Ireland, he was well off, though not wealthy. Ford was a hard-working man and eventually completed an apprenticeship with the Detroit Dry Dock Company. In 1891, he met with Thomas Edison and told him about his concept of the automobile. Edison liked the idea and let Ford use his warehouse to develop and manufacture two prototypes.

Using the prototypes, Ford soon founded the Detroit Automobile Company. The company was short-lived, however, since the product did not meet Ford's standards. He went on to found the Cadillac Motor Car Company, which also failed, before starting the Ford Motor Company for which he is famous. His third attempt at a car company made him very successful, and the company remains a going concern with annual sales of over $155.9 billion.

Interview

Like many another he had entertained his mind with ideas of having lived before. The thing that really mattered, he said, was what experience we got from a former life and what we gathered in this to pass on to help other people for their next life. It is the sum of what we carry on from one generation to another that makes the essence of experience the thing, he said.

As we passed on to lighter themes I asked him if in a future incarnation he would leave old-fashioned things like motor-cars and concentrate on a small aeroplane with, say, a gyroscope. He replied that he did not know anything about that or what he would like in another life.

'The only thing is,' said Henry Ford, 'I should like to be sure of having the same wife.' 'That's the difference between you and me, Mr. Ford,' his interviewer ventured to say, 'I hope that my own wife will have better luck in the next world.' 'There you are, Henry,' said Mrs. Ford, who was sitting near, 'you only think of yourself, but your friend thinks of his wife.' 'It means the same thing,' said Henry Ford, delighted with the turn the talk had taken, and he put out his hand and we shook hands, and the conversation grew in warmth.

3. Ophra Winfrey (persistent)

Oprah Winfrey is a shining example of an American success story. While she did not reveal her past until 1986, Winfrey was a victim of sexual assault at the age of nine and became pregnant at the age of 14 before losing the child during childbirth.

These early trials and tribulations gave her the perspective and confidence that helped her land her first TV show in 1983. From there, Winfrey steadily grew her brand and her empire, founding Harpo Studios, a multimedia company, in 1988.The company, through ad revenue and other revenue streams, has steadily grown to over 12,500 employees.

Winfrey co-founded Oxygen Media, another media company that attracts millions of annual television viewers.Winfrey, a TV personality turned entrepreneur, has a net worth of $2.6 billion as of Jan. 13, 2021

Interview

“It’s another situation I’ve got myself in,” she laughs, “but I care about injustice and if I get the opportunity to flag it, I will, every time. I’ll stand up there.” Ironically, the charismatic icon is more grounded than ever. Oprah recognises she cannot do everything alone, as she once thought she could, and accepts that when it comes to real change, we all have a long way to go, and a lot to contribute. "It's a significant moment in time for all of us. Society will never revert to how it was. It can't and it won't"“It’s a significant moment in history for all of us,” she utters in her famously rich tones. “Society as an entity will never be the same again, and will never revert to how it was. It can’t, and it won’t.”The truth is, Oprah is already a leader who empowers and emboldens her supporters, so it’s understandable that she isn’t willing to risk it all for a spin of the Washington wheel. If the media is the natural successor to the power of politics, then Oprah, who owns her own cable channel, OWN, and is a special correspondent for current affairs show 60 Minutes, is already an unrivalled leader. Perhaps part of that is because—unlike the current US President and so many others at the top table—Oprah was not born into wealth; she has worked tirelessly over the past four decades to build her formidable empire.

4. Bill Gates (risk taker)

Bill Gates, one of the most well-known American technology entrepreneurs, is the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of over $133 billion as of Jan. 13, 2021.Gates grew up in Seattle, Wash., and began tinkering with personal computers at an early age with friends such as Paul Allen. Showing a ton of aptitude and promise, Gates enrolled in Harvard, where he met Steve Ballmer before dropping out to start Microsoft.

Gates, with the help of Allen, Ballmer, and others, built Microsoft to become one of the world's largest and most influential tech companies. In 2020, Gates only recently stepped down from the board of Microsoft, which is valued at over a trillion dollars based on its market capitalization. He is decided to refocus his personal efforts on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Interview

Pretty quickly we decided that we ought to get out there and really help these guys get their act together. I never became an employee. Paul was their Vice President of Software. But I moved out and whatever I did from the inside, I did on behalf of Microsoft. I got out there and alot of what I started doing at first was actually enhancing the BASIC. 537

DA: Let me ask this Bill. You mentioned that, even before this, you and Paul had had many discussions about the future. How did this work affect what you thought the future was going to hold?

BG: Well, Paul had talked about the microprocessor and where that would go and so we had formulated this idea that everybody would have kind of a computer as a tool somehow. Not just for business, but also for something they would play around with as a home device. We knew that however it got started, that there would be certain standards built-up around it, about how you programmed things. We wanted to be part of that excitement. And so we saw this machine as just the beginning of an era. And this company was a wild company. I mean they were actually bankrupt before they did this because they had gotten screwed up doing Kit Calculators which had been their thing they had done after model rocketry.

MITS actually stands for "Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems", funny little things you stick on top of the rocket that tells you what the temperature is at the top of the flight or eventually, they had ones that would take pictures. So, they had done okay in that and then got into Kit Calculators. But was wiped out by Bomar and TI. And then just as a desperate thing, they did Kit Computers. When these computers came out at $360, the price of the 8080 chip was $360. So people kept saying, "They must be broken chips, it must be fake." And, of course, when they put these kits together, they didn't preassemble them, so if you miss one part -- a lot of people had a hard time putting these things together. But, a lot of people got it done and eventually went on to buy the Teletype and BASIC, and actually get a running system. So we thought, "Hey, are we really on to something here? We think so." And MITS was just great because it was just a center of activity for those first few years. We went around the country in this big van, big blue van, they had, with these machines starting up user groups and demonstrating things. Actually, before we even shipped BASIC, somebody stole the demo copy out of the van and started copying it around and sending it to different computer clubs. There was a real phenomenon taking place there, right around this Altair computer. In fact, the MITS guys were kind of upset when people would imitate this computer, same plug-in bus for peripherals -- things like that. They really weren't sure what to do about it.

5.Larry Page (committed)

Larry Page is the co-founder of Google, the world's number one search engine. Google was started by Page and his co-founder Sergey Brin while they were doctorate students at Stanford University.12 With an initial investment of just $100,000, the two partners quickly grew Google into a multinational conglomerate.In 2015, Google was restructured to form the parent company Alphabet Inc., with Page serving as CEO.Page has a net worth of $82.0 billion as of Jan 13, 2021.

Interview

Looking forward 100 years from now at the possibilities that are opening up, he says: “We could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.”It is a decade on from the first flush of idealism that accompanied its stock market listing, and all Google’s talk of “don’t be evil” and “making the world a better place” has come to sound somewhat quaint. Its power and wealth have stirred resentment and brought a backlash, in Europe in particular, where it is under investigation for how it wields its monopoly power in internet search.

Page, however, is not shrinking an inch from the altruistic principles or the outsized ambitions that he and co-founder Sergey Brin laid down in seemingly more innocent times. “The societal goal is our primary goal,” he says. “We’ve always tried to say that with Google. I think we’ve not succeeded as much as we’d like.”

Even Google’s famously far-reaching mission statement, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, is not big enough for what he now has in mind. The aim: to use the money that is spouting from its search advertising business to stake out positions in boom industries of the future, from biotech to robotics.

Asked whether this means Google needs a new mission statement, he says: “I think we do, probably.” As to what it should be: “We’re still trying to work that out.”

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/092315/top-5-most-successful-american-entrepreneurs.asp

https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/entrepreneur-traits

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2018/07/30/andrew-carnegie-on-achieving-wealth-and-prosperity/amp/

https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,127365,00.html

https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/celebrities/interview-oprah-winfrey

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/3173f19e-5fbc-11e4-8c27-00144feabdc0

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