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rauthschild · 2 months

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Communist History Of V. P. Kamala Harris

This is a really revealing history of of this nation's Vice President and presidential candidate. It is a long article but is necessary because it is so very important for you to know. This editorial is by Major General Higginbotham U.S. Marines (Ret)

This timely editorial that exposes the hidden background of Kamala Harris is from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee. It is posted here with permission of the author. CVFC PAC supports the election of US military combat veterans to the US Senate and House of Representatives.

The editorial begins:

Kamala Harris' father was an avowed Marxist professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Both of Harris' parents were active in the Berkeley based Afro-American Association; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the heroes of the Afro-American Association. The group's leader, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), mentored two young Afro-American Association members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; they created the Maoist inspired Black Panther Party which gained strong support from Communist China; the Black Panther Party served as the model for creation of the Black Lives Matter Marxist organization Khalid al-Mansour subsequently went on to arrange financing and facilitated for Barack Hussein Obama to be accepted as a student to matriculate at Harvard Law School.

Following her graduation from college, Harris returned to California and subsequently became the mistress of the 60-year-old married Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, Jr. Brown's political campaigns were supported and funded by Dr. Carlton Goodlett, the owner of The Sun Reporter and several other pro-Communist newspapers. Brown was elected as Mayor of San Francisco, and strongly endorsed Harris' Marxist political philosophy; he guided Harris' political rise in California politics, leading to her election as California's Attorney General. Willie Brown, Jr. is a well-known long-time Communist sympathizer.

Willie Brown, Jr. was initially elected to public office with substantial help of the Communist Party USA. Today, Willie Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party's best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris mentored a young San Francisco Radical Maoist activist, Lateefah Simon, who was a member of the STORM Revolutionary Movement; Simon currently chairs the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board. Simon has always been close friends with the founder of Black Lives Matter Marxist Domestic Terrorists, Alicia Garza, as well as STORM member and avowed Communist, Van Jones. Harris has been openly and aggressively supporting Black Lives Matter Marxists; Kamala Harris is still closely associated with Maoist Lateefah Simon and Marxist Alicia Garza.

Kamala Harris's sister Maya Harris was a student activist at Stanford University. She was a closely associated with Steve Phillips, one of the leading Marxist-Leninists on campus and a long-time affiliate with the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a pro-Chinese Communist group. Phillips came out of the Left, and in college he studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and maintained close associations with fellow Communists. Phillips married into the multi billion dollar Sandler family of the Golden West Savings and Loan Fortune. He funded many leftist political campaigns, and the voter registration drives in the Southern and South Western states in order to help his friend, Barack Hussein Obama, defeat Hillary Clinton.

Phillips has been a major financial sponsor for Kamala Harris's political campaigns for various California elective offices. Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff works for the law firm DLA Piper, which "boasts nearly 30 years of experience in Communist China with over 140 lawyers dedicated to its 'Communist China investment Services' branch. He was just appointed to Professor at Yale to school future lawyers in the fine points of Communism. When she was elected to the US Senate,Kamala Harris appointed a Pro-Communist Senate Chief of Staff, Karine Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was active with the New York-based Haiti Support Network. The organization worked closely with the pro-Communist China/Communist North Korea Workers World Party and supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the far-left Communist former president of Haiti and the radical Lavalas movement.

Fortunately for Harris, but potentially disastrous for the Republic, elected office holders are not subject to the security clearance process. If the FBI did a Background Investigation on Kamala Harris, she never would have passed, because of her 40-year close ties with Marxists, Communists, Maoists, and Communist China. Harris would never have been approved for acceptance to any of the 5 Military Service Academies, been appointed to a U.S. Government Sub-Cabinet position, or would have been approved to fill a sensitive position for a high security defense contractor. Yet, since Joe Biden was elected, Harris could be a heartbeat away from being President. The U.S. constitutional Republic is being threatened by the People's Republic of Communist China (PPC) externally, and by their very active espionage operations within the United States. The People's Republic of Communist China (PPC), with 1.4 billion people, is governed by the 90 million member Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that has been working with Russia to destroy the U.S. Constitutional Republic for over 70 years.

If the American voters read the background information (in Trevor Loudon's article) on Kamala Harris, they would never support her election as Vice President of the United States. Joe Biden is suffering from the early onset of dementia and will continue to decline in cerebral awareness; he will never be able to fill out a four-year term of office. Since Biden was elected, the Socialists, Marxists, and Communist who control Kamala Harris, are planning to enact provisions of the 25th Amendment, in order to remove Joe Biden from office, so Harris can become the first Communist President of the United States. Since Biden was elected, because Biden would not be up to it,

Kamala Harris would lead the effort to appoint very dangerous anti-American Leftist, Communist, Socialists, and Marxists to fill highly sensitive positions in the Washington Deep State Bureaucracy. She would fill all appointive positions in the US Intelligence Agencies, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Department of Defense, in The Justice Department, the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, most cabinet positions, the National Security Council, and in the White House Staff. American voters must alert their fellow Americans that Kamala Harris is a very serious National Security threat to the very survival of the US Constitutional Republic; she has been a fellow traveler of Marxists, Communists, Maoists, Socialists, Progressives, and Chinese Communists for over 35 years.

President Trump had much more background information on Kamala Harris than we presented here, and he was correct, when he accused Kamala Harris of being a Communist subverter.

Geoffrey B. Higginbotham Major General, USMC (Ret).

Ernest Rauthschild's Response

Further, Geoffrey B. Higginbotham is standing in front of the foreign corporate British Territorial United States and Vatican Municipal United States BANNER; and not our Autochthonous Preamble Posterity General Government Flag enacted by the General Congress Assembled July 14th, 1777.

None of the "presidents of the United States" in my lifetime have been elected either in accord with Art. 2, Section 1 or Amendment 12 of the United States Constitution. There is no Constitutional provision that allows the Winners of the partisan conventions, who somehow become a candidate the Electoral College Select from, to choose or pick the candidate for Vice' President.

Since Congress has never declared war during Higginbotham tenure and lifetime, his resume is merely that of a foreign corporate Indentured 13th and 14th Amendment White Negro Slave in a foreign corporate Mercenary uniform.

#blacklivesmatter #blackvotersmatters #donald trump #joe biden #naacp #blackmediamatters #blackvotersmatter #news #ados #youtube

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kny111 · 1 year

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New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Thursday.

"We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies," said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. "This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward."

The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate passed the measure hours later, and the bill will be sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for consideration.

New York would be following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.[1]

The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state governments supported the institution of slavery.[2] It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.

According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasn't implemented until 10 years later.[3]

"I'm concerned we're opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago,"[4] said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill. Gooddell, who voted against the measure, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to "continue on that path rather than focus on reparations."[5]

In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. California's state budget last year was $308 billion.[6] Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.

The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after its first meeting. The panel's recommendations, which could potentially include monetary compensation for Black people,[7] would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take the recommendations up for a vote.

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation "historic."[8]

Heastie, the governor and the legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three members to the commission.[9]

Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont, but none have passed legislation yet.[10] The Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.[11]

On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.[12]

Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.[13]

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is "presumptuous," since it's virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.[14]

He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that it should be the party that is responsible.[15]

"My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say there's no need for a federal program," Darity said. "If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed."[16] K, Blog Admin notes: [1] This is useful because it's attempting institutionalization of the divestment in needing money to solve the issue of slavery reparations and instead aims to provide a means to account for such a system by way of adhering to necessities. This seems like a legislative path to that. A formal apology is well overdue so the creation of these institutions, paired with divestment in money (which are literal enslavement notes) makes for said apology more effective and honest.

[2] Correct, slavery is handled and supported to this day at a state and federal level. Any strategies aimed at changing this enslavement system requires changes at both state and federal levels, otherwise what's the point? [3] Legislature like the one in 1817 what it did was make enslavement go covert while continuing to operate with the same engine. Which is why we need to correct any semblance of it existing by abolishing institutions that were created from slavery and repurpose ones sabotaged by past and existing pro slavery legislature. Reparations fixes itself to do just that.

[4] Read [3] because slavery's door was never shut. There's never been enough evidence, something I hope this legislature corrects, with regards to presenting when this "end of slavery" ever occurred. As far as everyone experiencing this god awful system is concerned slavery continued just fine.

[5] Slavery as a system created such a historical inequivalence for all involved that a path has never honestly been formed to claim we're all equal. How can we "continue" on something we've never even established?

[6] Translation: The enslavers who own this system over us and invested so much in slavery can't put their money where their labor is. This is our issue how? Legislature like this will help correct that.

[7] I would hope that this conversation around monetary compensation and reparations from enslavement systems involves a divestment plan from a currency note that has factual connections to and will continue to be looked at as an enslaver note to those who study slavery historically. So this might look like an institution that can help communities divest from ever even needing to use money due to their systemic connections to slavery.

[8] This legislature is needed and overdue, I wouldn't call it historic yet. People within government tend to have a low bar for what's historic and epic.

[9] Not enough people. 3 is not enough. This is a ridiculously low amount considering how easy it can be to sabotage this work as they have in the past, this increases that chance. They need more community input. Otherwise, what's the point?

[10] Further implicating these states with systemic slavery.

[11] Not enough for similar reasons that a slaver creating their own paper and telling you to live off of it is not enough to stop slavery.

[12] So the one thing that did have a semblance of working, you let it rock there, doing nothing? Seems like an institutional trend.

[13] How? Explain using evidence in the same way we abolitionists use evidence to prove slavery is not needed.

[14] Agreed, and they don't have the capacity to make their enslaver dollars mean much into the future. Money temporarily becomes pay outs which are like the apology letter you include system changes with otherwise its just enslavers recycling their image.. AGAIN.

[15] Agreed, but I hope this doesn't mean shift in focus from what needs to structurally change at a state level and what these types of legislature can do. I think federal changes should come with state strategizing as well.

[16] see [14] and [15]

#reparations #thoughts #news #policy #legislature #trans atlantic slave trade #slavery #abolish slavery #abolish police #abolishment #black lives matter #new york #nyc #new yorkers #black new yorkers

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mariacallous · 10 months

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Early last month, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, the special climate envoys representing the United States and China, held talks in southern California ahead of the Xi-Biden summit. The location—Sunnylands, a desert estate near Palm Springs—was symbolic. It was there that Xi Jinping and Barack Obama first met as presidents in 2013 and secured a climate breakthrough: a commitment to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, a group of powerful greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air conditioners.

As Kerry and Xie arrived in Sunnylands 10 years later, they found themselves in more perilous circumstances, and with a finite window of opportunity. Friction between the U.S. and China disrupted climate talks in 2022, and new tensions—whether from the South China Sea or Taiwan’s upcoming January election—could slam the window shut again. Plus, Xie, China’s lead climate negotiator for the better part of two decades, will reportedly retire later this month.

The two envoys wasted no time during their summit, according to two climate experts familiar with the discussions. Kerry, who is 79, and Xie, who is 74 and recently recovered from a stroke, stayed up until 2 or 3 a.m. every night, hashing out plans. When the meetings reached their scheduled end, Kerry and his team drove west to Los Angeles with Xie, checking in to the Chinese team’s hotel to continue talking until their flight’s departure.

Climate has become a rare area of in-depth coordination between the two superpowers; the joint statement that would emerge from Sunnylands was the latest of three such statements from Xie and Kerry in the past three years. They are the elder statesmen of the climate circuit—Xie’s ruddy, round face as familiar as Kerry’s gaunt silhouette at international conferences. The extent of U.S.-China cooperation, former Chinese and U.S. officials as well as climate experts told Foreign Policy, is partly attributable to the two envoys and their bond, developed over decades of negotiations.

“This is a very good example of how personal leadership can transcend national differences,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “I think both Xie and Kerry, they are pushing that potential to the limit.” The two men have known each other for 25 years, and for both, climate diplomacy is far more than a job—it is a mission.

Born the same year as the People’s Republic of China, 1949, Xie’s early years were similar to those of many officials of that generation. During the Cultural Revolution, he was “sent down” to the countryside along with millions of other young people—to the northeastern tip of China, bordering Siberia. “My sense is the people who had that experience came back with a profound sense of the need for development, but [Xie] always coupled it with this view that the environment needs to be protected,” said Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University who was formerly an environmental counselor at the U.S. Embassy in China.

Xie went on to study engineering at Tsinghua University and became an environmental official in the 1980s. By 1993 he was head of China’s version of the EPA. He held that position through the height of China’s economic boom—a difficult time to be in charge of protecting the environment. In 2005, Xie resigned from his position after a major chemical spill in the northern Songhua River. Though he had taken the fall for the crisis, he proved resilient. In 2007, he was appointed vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, a powerful post given the department’s role in economic planning. At the same time, he became China’s lead international climate negotiator—and it was then that his path intertwined with Kerry’s

Kerry’s own interest in environmentalism was sparked early on. “Carson instilled in me and a whole generation a sense of moral urgency,” Kerry wrote in his 2018 autobiography, referring to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published his freshman year at Yale, which documented rampant pesticide pollution. As a Massachusetts senator starting in the ‘80s, Kerry promoted environmental legislation and attended international climate negotiations. “All through the years when he was a senator, if one senator would show up at the COP meetings at the end of the year, it was John Kerry,” Todd Stern, the lead U.S. climate negotiator during the Obama administration, said in a 2021 interview, referring to the annual U.N. climate summits called Conference of the Parties.

Xie’s first meeting with Kerry as head of the Chinese delegation, at the Bali COP in 2007, was a fiery standoff, said Qian Guoqiang, a Chinese climate diplomat in attendance. “Xie was sitting down and Kerry opened up the talk in a very tough way,” telling China what to do, Qian said. Xie replied, “‘We aren’t going to talk in this way. You first need to realize you have your problems,’” Qian recalled. “They were like two lions fighting with each other.” Eventually, Kerry moderated his tone, Qian said.

That early meeting shows not only how far the diplomats’ relationship has come since, but also how far the two countries have moved toward consensus on climate action. At the time, there was a divide under the Kyoto Protocol, the prevailing climate agreement, between developed countries and developing countries, with the latter free of any binding obligations. The U.S. and other major countries didn’t support that framework—particularly after China became the world’s largest emitter in 2006. Meanwhile, Xie and other Chinese officials argued that China’s per-capita emissions remained much lower than those of developed countries—the largest historical emitters—which still hadn’t met their climate promises. The argument came to a head at the 2009 COP in Copenhagen, which was supposed to produce a new global climate framework but failed to yield consensus.

In those years, Xie was known to publicly air his frustration with developed countries. At the 2011 COP in Durban, South Africa, he gave a widely broadcast speech in the final hours of the negotiations. “You’ve talked for 20 years, but you haven’t honored your commitments,” Xie said, pounding his fist. “We’ve done what we should do, but you haven’t. What qualifications do you have to lecture us?” The hall of delegates erupted in applause.

“He’s a canny negotiator,” said Jonathan Pershing, a former lead U.S. climate diplomat in the Obama and Biden administrations. “He uses a combination of charm—he’s completely charming—and bluster.”

As another former senior Obama-era climate negotiator described Xie, “He’ll pound his fist on the table, and then give you a hug. But part of the reason that works is because I think nobody ever questions … [whether] he’s genuinely committed.”

Despite the fireworks, the U.S. and China started to move toward one another behind the scenes. Stern told Foreign Policy that after Copenhagen, China “wanted to find a way forward in general, but also in particular with the United States.”

China saw that climate action could be in its interest, allowing it to develop competitive green industries and reduce air pollution. “If you talked to Xie at that point, what you got from him was we’re doing climate, but we’re doing it on the back of these other issues,” Pershing said.

In order to bridge their countries’ differences, Stern and Xie also set about building their relationship. Stern and other leading U.S. climate diplomats traveled to Xie’s hometown, Tianjin, for climate meetings and rode the shiny, new high-speed rail there at their host’s invitation. Back in the U.S., Stern gave Xie the full American hot-dog-and-cracker-jacks experience at a Chicago Cubs game. “I sort of liked him right away,” Stern said. “I mean, he’s a very colorful guy.”

While Stern led the U.S. negotiations in those years, he credits Kerry for driving the process forward as secretary of state. According to his autobiography, Kerry made it his personal mission to help forge a new climate deal. He knew “the essential first step was finding a way to cooperate with China.” Kerry had witnessed the acrimony at Copenhagen and talked with Xie frequently in the following years. “We met in China, in the United States, at conferences around the world, all of which steadily built a trusting, personal relationship,” Kerry wrote.

Through this flurry of personal diplomacy, a major breakthrough came in 2014. The U.S. and China put forward new national emissions targets together, and in doing so, paved the way for the Paris Agreement, which all the COP countries agreed to the following year. Recalling the moment Obama announced the bilateral deal with Xi in the Great Hall of the People, Kerry wrote, “I finally felt we had reached a moment of turning. … In Beijing, there was a real sense of possibility.”

That U.S.-China climate consensus turned out to be short-lived, of course. Donald Trump soon pulled the U.S. out of the freshly inked agreement. But China stayed in the pact and went on to set a new goal on its own terms. In 2020, before the United Nations General Assembly, Xi announced that China would strive to be carbon neutral by 2060—a boost for the world’s climate hopes.

The pledge took the world by surprise, but Xie had been lobbying for it for years. He had taken a post as president of Tsinghua’s new climate institute; there he coordinated dozens of think tanks to model China’s pathways to carbon neutrality. Xie presented the results of that research to China’s highest-level policymakers ahead of Xi’s announcement, according to Zou Ji, president of Energy Foundation China, which funded the research. “I would say Minister Xie played a very important role to push—to facilitate—that process; otherwise, I saw no one else pushing that at such a high level.”

Joe Biden’s election and decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement revived hope—as well as questions about U.S.-China climate cooperation. Could the two countries pick back up where they had left off? And if so, what would successful U.S. climate diplomacy look like now that the two countries had set their respective targets?

Both presidents knew who to turn to for answers. Biden appointed Kerry the first U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. Subsequently, Xie, who had left government for Tsinghua, was brought back as a special envoy on the Chinese side. “The two of them were absolutely the best choices for their two governments to be the climate envoys in this difficult period,” said John Holdren, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who served as Obama’s top science advisor.

The old lions returned to a harsher political landscape. The Biden administration sought areas of cooperation but maintained a tough-on-China stance. China, in turn, didn’t accept the U.S. framework of overall “competition” between the two countries. Temperatures flared at the first bilateral meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

Nonetheless, both sides seemed to agree that climate cooperation was in their best interest. A month after the Anchorage meeting, Kerry became the first Biden official to visit China. Later in 2021, after meeting 30 times, the two envoys reached a breakthrough during the Glasgow COP. In a joint declaration, they made some important new contributions: China had previously pledged to start decreasing its coal use in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)—at Glasgow it agreed it would make “best efforts” to decrease its coal use earlier; both countries would work together to reduce potent, short-lived methane emissions this decade; and China would publish its own methane action plan.

That deal reflected some of the limits of China’s cooperation. For instance, China agreed to the softer methane language with the U.S. after declining to sign on to an international pledge to cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. “I always have the sense that [Xie’s] caught … between officially representing the interests of his country as defined by a system that’s bigger than him. … But also, within that context, genuinely pushing for positive progress with the belief that engagement and cooperation and joint leadership works,” said the former Obama-era U.S. negotiator.

Pershing, who was the no. 2 climate diplomat in Biden’s first year, credited Kerry for moving the conversation forward. “He’s indefatigable—the guy doesn’t seem to need to sleep very much. … I go to meetings, and around three o’clock in the morning, I’m going, ‘I think we’re not getting anywhere.’ And John is still out there continuing to say, ‘No, no, we can fix this. We can make this happen,’ and my experience is that he’s actually right.”

The nascent era of climate cooperation wasn’t insulated fully from the broader tensions, though. In August 2022, after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, Chinese officials cut off cooperation across the board, including on climate change.

As diplomats in the U.S. tried to repair the bilateral relationship, Kerry and Xie quietly went back to work. After meeting frequently over the past year, and following their meeting in southern California last month, the envoys published the Sunnylands Statement, the longest and, in Stern’s opinion, strongest statement yet. China, for the first time, agreed to include all sectors of the economy and all greenhouse gases in its next Paris targets, due in 2025. Another critical, albeit wordy, goal on China’s side was to achieve “post-peaking meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” in the 2020s—a significant goal because it “indicates [China’s] growing confidence in early peaking,” Li wrote. Both sides also supported the international goal to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.

The Sunnylands Statement is also notable for what it was lacking—for one, any clear commitment from China to stop building coal plants. Republicans have criticized Kerry for being soft on China and not forcing the country to take more aggressive measures in line with U.S. climate targets.

The reality is that the U.S. has a limited ability to push China these days. In July, right as Kerry was visiting Beijing for talks with Xie, Xi said that China was committed to its climate goals, but the pathway and pace for meeting them “should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others.”

Climate experts acknowledged that the declaration is far from perfect, but they said it is significant, nonetheless. Referring to China’s commitment to establish an all-encompassing set of targets in 2025, Pershing said, “That’s a big thing. It doesn’t read like a big thing because we assumed that that would be true. But don’t assume. It’s not trivial. Making these statements alters the domestic action.”

Experts also said these statements have teed up progress in international climate talks. According to Pershing, unless the U.S. and China collaborate effectively ahead of negotiations, “the system kind of grinds, and maybe doesn’t move.” China also helps push forward recalcitrant countries, he added. “If you get China, which is a big partner for many places, you can move the rest of the world.”

At a press conference last month on the eve of COP28, Kerry echoed his sentiment, stating, “Without China and the United States aggressively moving forward to reduce emissions, we don’t win this battle.”

After the current round of climate negotiations in Dubai wraps up next week, Xie is expected to retire from government. Kerry has also previously discussed retirement, Axios reported, although he hasn’t announced a date.

Liu Zhenmin, who most recently served as undersecretary-general of economic and social affairs at the United Nations, is expected to replace Xie. Climate experts are waiting to see whether Liu’s style and approach will align with Xie’s. Liu notably brings deep experience, having led China’s early U.N. climate negotiations, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in his career with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Despite renewed U.S.-China cooperation, the hardest work lies ahead. In China’s case, this includes actually reducing emissions. By 2025, all countries are expected to set their climate targets for 2035—which for China means determining a pace for emissions reduction for the first time. So far, China has only committed to peaking its emissions before 2030. At COP last week, Xie said China would submit new climate targets for 2030 along with its goals for 2035, signaling that the government may be willing to step up its ambition.

The U.S., meanwhile, has been implementing the Inflation Reduction Act—the most significant climate bill in U.S. history—but it must reduce its emissions at a faster rate to meet its 2030 targets. It has also yet to provide developing countries with the full financial support it has pledged—let alone what experts say is needed.

“What happens in the post-Kerry-Xie era is a huge question mark,” said the former senior U.S. climate diplomat who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. “I sense that both Kerry and Xie are seriously in legacy-cementing mode,” fighting “as hard as they can to lock in as much progress as they can before they ride into the sunset.”

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the-eternal-quest-for-balance · 10 months

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knunyas · 1 month

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PRAY, PRAY, PRAY!

GOD WILL BE THE DECIDING FACTOR IN THIS ELECTION.

This is a long article for being posted to Tumblr and well worth the time.

The History and Inconvenient Truth of Kamala Harris

For your knowledge and interest about Kamala Harris. Here is a timely editorial that exposes the hidden background of Kamala Harris from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee that is posted here with permission of the author. CVFC PAC supports the election of US military combat veterans to the US Senate and House of Representatives. The editorial begins:

The group's leader, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), mentored two young Afro-American Association members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; they created the Maoist inspired Black Panther Party which gained strong support from Communist China; the Black Panther Party served as the model for creation of the Black Lives Matter Marxist organization Khalid al-Mansour subsequently went on to arrange financing and facilitated for Barack Hussein Obama to be accepted as a student to matriculate at Harvard Law School.

Brown was elected as Mayor of San Francisco, and strongly endorsed Harris' Marxist political philosophy; he guided Harris' political rise in California politics, leading to her election as California's Attorney General. Willie Brown, Jr. was a well-known long-time Communist sympathizer. Willie Brown, Jr. was initially elected to public office with the substantial help of the Communist Party USA.

Today, Willie Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party's best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris mentored a young San Francisco Radical Maoist activist, Lateefah Simon, who was a member of the STORM Revolutionary Movement; Simon currently chairs the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board. Simon has always been close friends with the founder of Black Lives Matter Marxist Domestic Terrorists, Alicia Garza, as well as STORM member and avowed Communist, Van Jones. Harris has been openly and aggressively supporting Black Lives Matter Marxists; Kamala Harris is still closely associated with Maoist Lateefah Simon and Marxist Alicia Garza.

Phillips came out of the Left, and in college he studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and maintained close associations with fellow Communists. Phillips married into the multibillion-dollar Sandler family of the Golden West Savings and Loan fortune. He funded many leftist political campaigns, and voter registration drives in the Southern and South Western states in order to help his friend, Barack Hussein Obama, defeat Hillary Clinton. Phillips has been a major financial sponsor for Kamala Harris's political campaigns for various California elective offices plus Cory Booker, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams to name a few.

Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff works for the law firm DLA Piper, which "boasts nearly 30 years of experience in Communist China with over 140 lawyers dedicated to its 'Communist China investment Services' branch. He was just appointed Professor at Yale to school future lawyers in the fine points of Communism.

When she was elected to the US Senate, Kamala Harris appointed a Pro-Communist Senate Chief of Staff, Karine Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was active with the New York-based Haiti Support Network. The organization worked closely with the pro-Communist China/Communist North Korea Workers World Party and supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the far-left Communist former president of Haiti and the radical Lavalas movement.

The US constitutional Republic is being threatened by the People's Republic of Communist China (PPC) externally, and by their very active espionage operations within the United States. The People's Republic of Communist China (PPC), with 1.4 billion people, is governed by the 90 million member Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that has been working with Russia to destroy the US Constitutional Republic for over 70 years.

Since Biden was elected, the Socialists, Marxists, and Communist who control Kamala Harris, are planning to enact provisions of the 25th Amendment, in order to remove Joe Biden from office, so Harris can become the first Communist President of the United States.

Since Biden was elected, because Biden would not be up to it, Kamala Harris would lead the effort to appoint very dangerous anti-American Leftist, Communist, Socialists, and Marxists to fill highly sensitive positions in the Washington Deep State Bureaucracy. She would fill all appointive positions in the US Intelligence Agencies, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Department of Defense, in The Justice Department, the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, most cabinet positions, the National Security Council, and in the White House Staff.

American voters must alert their fellow Americans that Kamala Harris is a very serious National Security threat to the very survival of the US Constitutional Republic; she has been a fellow traveler of Marxists, Communists, Maoists, Socialists, Progressives, and Chinese Communists for over 35 years.

President Trump had much more background information on Kamala Harris than we presented here, and he was correct, when he accused Kamala Harris of being a Communist subverter.

Geoffrey B. Higginbotham

Major General, USMC

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sunaleisocial · 2 months

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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes nine new faculty

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/school-of-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences-welcomes-nine-new-faculty/

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes nine new faculty

Dean Agustín Rayo and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed nine new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Sonya Atalay joins the Anthropology Section as a professor. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices, and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, a newly established National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. She has expertise in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and served two terms on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, first appointed by the Bush administration and then for a second term by the Obama administration. Atalay has produced a series of research-based comics in partnership with Native nations about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under NAGPRA law. Atalay earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Anna Huang SM ’08 joins the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Music and Theater Arts as assistant professor. She will help develop graduate programming focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (which powered the Bach Google Doodle). She was a judge and organizer for the AI Song Contest. Anna holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in music composition, a BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Elena Kempf joins the History Section as an assistant professor. She is an historian of modern Europe with special interests in international law and modern Germany in its global context. Her current book project is a legal, political, and cultural history of weapons prohibitions in modern international law from the 1860s to the present. Before joining MIT, Kempf was a postdoc at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley and a lecturer at the Department of History at Stanford University. Elena earned her PhD in history from UC Berkeley.

Matthias Michel joins the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy as an assistant professor. Matthias completed his PhD in philosophy in 2019 at Sorbonne Université. Before coming to MIT, he was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. His research is at the intersection between philosophy and cognitive science, and focuses on philosophical issues related to the scientific study of consciousness. His current work addresses questions such as how to distinguish entities with minds from those without, which animals are sentient, and which mental functions can be performed unconsciously.

Jacob Moscona PhD ’21 is a new assistant professor in the Department of Economics. His research explores broad questions in economic development, with a focus on the role of innovation, the environment, and political economy. One stream of his research investigates the forces that drive the rate and direction of technological progress, as well as how new technologies shape global productivity differences and adaptation to major threats like climate change. Another stream of his research studies the political economy of economic development, with a focus on how variation in social organization and institutions affects patterns of conflict and cooperation. Prior to joining MIT, he was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. He received his BA from Harvard in 2016 and PhD from MIT in 2021. Outside of MIT, Jacob enjoys playing and performing music.

Sendhil Mullainathan joins the departments of EECS and Economics as the Peter de Florez Professor. His research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018. He received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard.

Elise Newman PhD ’21 is a new assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Her forthcoming monograph, “When arguments merge,” studies the ingredients that languages use to construct verb phrases, and examines how those ingredients interact with other linguistic processes such as question formation. By studying these interactions, she forms a hypothesis about how different languages’ verb phrases can be distinct from each other, and what they must have in common, providing insight into this aspect of the human language faculty. In addition to the structural properties of language, Newman also has expertise in semantics (the study of meaning) and first language acquisition. She returns to MIT after a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, after completing her PhD in linguistics at MIT in 2021.

Oliver Rollins joins the Program in Science, Technology, and Society as an assistant professor. He is a qualitative sociologist who explores the sociological dimensions of neuroscientific knowledge and technologies. His work primarily illustrates the way race, racialized discourses, and systemic practices of social difference impact and are shaped by the development and use of neuroscience. His book, “Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of The Violent Brain” (Stanford University Press, 2021), traces the evolution of neuroimaging research on antisocial behavior, stressing the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social inequality. Rollins’s second book project will grapple with the legacies of scientific racism in and through the mind and brain sciences, elucidating how the haunting presence of race endures through modern neuroscientific theories, data, and technologies. Rollins recently received an NSF CAREER Award to investigate the intersections between social justice and science. Through this project, he aims to examine the sociopolitical vulnerabilities, policy possibilities, and anti-racist promises for contemporary (neuro)science.

Ishani Saraf joins the Program in Science, Technology, and Society as an assistant professor. She is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research studies the transformation and trade of discarded machines in translocal spaces in India and the Indian Ocean, where she focuses on questions of postcolonial capitalism, urban belonging, material practices, situated bodies of knowledge, and environmental governance. She received her PhD from the University of California at Davis, and prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoc and lecturer at the University of Virginia.

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jcmarchi · 2 months

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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes nine new faculty

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/school-of-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences-welcomes-nine-new-faculty/

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes nine new faculty

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weather-usa · 3 months

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Heat waves are becoming more prolonged and intense. Here’s why relying on your AC might not offer sufficient relief anymore.

When Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana with catastrophic flooding and powerful winds in August 2021, over 1 million people were left without power. Following the storm came a heat wave, pushing temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This posed a serious challenge to those enduring the sweltering heat at home, unable to use air conditioning due to prolonged power outages lasting for days.

In New Orleans, it was the heat that proved most lethal, contributing to at least nine of the city’s 14 hurricane-related fatalities.

This convergence of a hurricane, heat wave, and extended power loss represents a nightmare scenario, increasingly likely as global warming fuels more frequent and severe extreme weather events. It also highlights a stark truth about the limitations of air conditioning, often seen as humanity’s ultimate defense against heat.

Air conditioning, while essential against increasingly severe heat, is far from perfect. It consumes vast amounts of energy, primarily sourced from planet-warming fossil fuels, thereby exacerbating the very climate issues it aims to alleviate. Moreover, its availability remains a privilege mainly for those who can afford it, deepening social inequalities.

See more:

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Yet, AC serves as a vital defense against the deadliest form of extreme weather—intense heat. It enables habitation in regions where temperatures approach survival limits and where scorching heat persists day and night.

The demand for air conditioning is skyrocketing, projected to triple globally by 2050 due to rising global temperatures and economic growth. However, the reliability of AC hinges entirely on electricity. With increasing instances of extreme weather and soaring cooling needs, many electrical grids are strained to their limits.

Weather-related factors caused 80% of major power outages in the US between 2000 and 2023, according to a Climate Central report. "Every facet of weather is stress-testing the already vulnerable grid," noted Jen Brady, a senior data analyst at Climate Central.

In the US, the aging grid was designed with past weather patterns in mind, not the increasingly extreme weather patterns of the future, as highlighted by Michael Webber, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

The primary threat comes from storms, which can down transmission wires and poles. Additionally, heat plays a significant role: in extreme temperatures, the system operates less efficiently, akin to how a person might struggle while running a marathon in hot weather—eventually breaking down. Moreover, when everyone cranks up their AC simultaneously to combat high temperatures, the grid can buckle under the strain of such demand.

According to Brian Stone Jr., a professor specializing in urban environmental planning and design at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the number of major outages in the US—impacting over 50,000 customers and lasting at least an hour—doubled between 2017 and 2020. Stone highlighted that this increase predominantly occurs during summer months, indicating a lack of resilience in these systems.

During an August 2020 heat wave in California, soaring demand for cooling prompted the state’s main grid operator to implement rolling blackouts for the first time in two decades, affecting hundreds of thousands of homes.

Similarly, in 2021, during a blistering heat wave across the Pacific Northwest, power equipment faltered in the intense heat, leading to rolling blackouts that affected tens of thousands as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

These challenges are not unique to the US. In June, as temperatures soared above 104 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Europe, parts of Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro experienced lengthy blackouts due to spiking electricity demand.

Climate and Average Weather Year Round in 20886 - Montgomery Village MD:

youtube

Even brief power outages can pose significant dangers. "If the grid goes out during a heat wave, the situation can escalate from uncomfortable to life-threatening very quickly," remarked Webber.

Heat has profound effects on the body, potentially leading to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and even fatalities. Conversely, during cold outages, people can layer clothing, start fires, and huddle together for warmth. "But in extreme heat, the only effective cooling method is electricity," added Webber.

The combination of a heat wave and power outages represents one of the most lethal climate-related scenarios imaginable, according to Stone. He and his team studied the potential impacts of such events in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and Phoenix, focusing on indoor exposure—the main driver of heat-related illnesses during outages.

Phoenix stood out in their findings. During a three to four-day heat wave coupled with an outage, nearly half of the city's population—close to 800,000 people—would require hospital treatment for heat-related illnesses, with over 13,000 fatalities projected.

Stone noted that Phoenix faces a particularly dramatic shift in heat-related illness during outages due to its extreme climate, exacerbated by residents' heavy reliance on air conditioning. Ironically, widespread AC usage may reduce residents' resilience, as they become acclimatized to cooling environments.

Authorities in Phoenix stress preparedness despite these risks. Mayor Kate Gallego highlighted existing emergency response plans and the city's reliable electric grid. She noted that while Stone's study raises concerns, it doesn't consider current mitigation efforts.

Arizona Public Service, a major energy provider in Phoenix, echoed this sentiment, citing robust preventive measures and regular grid maintenance. However, Stone emphasized that while the likelihood of prolonged outages during heat waves in Phoenix remains low, it is increasing amid worsening climate conditions.

Weather Forecast For 42301-Owensboro-KY:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/200190561/Weather-Forecast-For-42301-Owensboro-KY

Reducing planet-heating pollution significantly is crucial for long-term defense against heat and extreme weather, but according to Stone, the world is already committed to decades of rising temperatures.

In the short term, there are ways to minimize vulnerabilities. Stone emphasizes the importance of making the grid more robust and resilient through repairs and upgrades that consider future climate conditions. Webber adds that expanding and modernizing the grid, including diversifying energy sources and adding more power plants, will enhance its strength.

However, Stone also underscores the necessity of contingency plans, recognizing that grids are increasingly susceptible to failure. This involves rethinking urban design, where heat-absorbing materials like concrete and asphalt replace cooling green spaces. Designing greener, cooler urban areas can bolster grid resilience without solely relying on grid investments, he explains.

Brady from Climate Central highlights community solar projects as another effective measure. These initiatives enable local power continuity during grid failures, as demonstrated by Babcock Ranch in Florida, which maintained power during Hurricane Ian in 2022 while nearby towns experienced outages.

Improving home efficiency is crucial too, notes Webber. Homes designed to withstand extreme weather can reduce electricity demand during heat waves, contributing to grid stability.

See more:

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-90016

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-90017

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-90018

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-90019

https://weatherusa.app/zip-code/weather-90020

Ultimately, Webber points out that our dependency on conditioned air has made us vulnerable, especially in regions where life would be unsustainable without it. The strain that extreme weather places on the grid underscores the urgency of addressing climate change effectively.

#weather #usa #climate #weather app #Youtube

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 months

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youtube

The Brain Washing of My Dad (Family Non-Fiction Film) | Real Stories

Jen Senko, a documentary filmmaker, looks at the rise of right-wing media through the lens of her WWII vet father who changed from a life-long, nonpolitical Democrat to an angry, right-wing fanatic after his discovery of talk radio on a lengthened commute to work.

In trying to understand how this happened, she not only finds this to be a phenomenon, but also uncovers some of the forces behind it: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon to create a media for the GOP; the Lewis Powell Memo, urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion – especially the universities – the media and the courts; and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine – all of which helped to change the entire country's direction and culture, misinformed millions, divided families and even the country itself.

From The Brain Washing of My Dad (2015)

___________________________________

9:35 The 1960’s: The Right is Pronounced Dead

Reagan

10:00 Claire Conner author of “Wrapped in the flag: What I learned growing up in America’s Radical Right, how I escaped, and why my story matters today.”

The John Birch Society

10:40 Ike

11:18 David Brock author of “The Republican Noise Machine. Right Wing media and how it corrupts democracy” author of “Confessions of a Right-Wing hit man”

Accuracy in Media – Reed Irvine

12:15 1970 – Meet Roger Ailes The Memo: A Plan for putting the GOP on TV news

12:26 Craig Unger Journalist and author during interview with Bill Moyers, PBS

12:45 Gabriel Sherman author of “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the brilliant, bombastic Roger Ailes built Fox News – and divided a country”

15:35 Reese Schonfeld Founding President and CEO of CNN

16:46 Richard Nixon – The Politics of Division

16:50 Rick Perlstein Historian and journalist author of “Nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of America”

17:11 George Lakoff author of “Don’t Think of and Elephant!: the essential guide for progressives”

17:58 The Southern Strategy

18:20 Noam Chomsky Professor Emeritus, Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT

19:38 Conservative Populism

20:00 1971 The Confidential Lewis Powell Memo

20:22 Thom Hartman #1 Progressive Radio Talk Show Host in the U.S.

20:40 Jeff Cohen Associate Professor of Journalism, Ithaca College co-author of “The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error”

21:30 Noam Chomsky author of “OCCUPY: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion, and Repression”

23:00 Some Effects of the Lewis Powell Memo

Confidential Memorandum August 23, 1971 Attack on American Free Enterprise System https://archive.org/details/PowellMemorandum-AttackOnAmericanFreeEnterpriseSystem

23:06 The Grover Norquist Wednesday morning meetings

Grover Norquist: The Soul of the New Machine in Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/grover-norquist-soul-new-machine/

Right Wing – Strength in numbers

24:30 The Daily Show – Health care

25:00 Think Tanks

26:00 Thomas Medvetz Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

26:42 The Reagan Revolution The Beginning of the ‘Smaller Government’ Mantra

27:00 Trickle down economics, “The only thing I have seen trickle down is meanness”

28:00 Rick Perlstein author of “The Invisible Bridge: The fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan”

28:42 Claire Conner author of “Wrapped in the flag”

30:45 Supply-Side Economics

40:00 “Champion of the Overdog”

Top Ten Limbaugh Lies 10. There are more Native Americans alive today than when Columbus arrived. 9. The government is going to have the right to get into your bank account with the health care bill and make transfers without you knowing it. 8. Egyptian husbands will soon be able to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. 7. President Barack Obama shut down NASA space flights and turned the agency “Into a Muslim outreach department.” 6. The U.S. has more forestland than it did in 1787. 5. President Obama wants to mandate circumcision. 4. There’s no conclusive proof that nicotine’s addictive… and the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease. 3. If the ice caps melted, the oceans level wouldn’t rise 2. Styrofoam is biodegradable. 1. I’m not making this stuff up, folks!

45:00 Rush Limbaugh paid $35million per year, partly paid by the Heritage Foundation

The 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act

October 1996 Fox News Launched

49:30 Gabriel Sherman

50:40 Rick Perlstein

51:10 Edward S. Herman Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

51:55 David Brock author of “The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine”

53:48 Eric Boehlert Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America

54:07 Fox News median audience is 69 years old

55:19 Matthew Saccaro Freelance writer, “I was a teenage Fox News robot”

Brainwashing by Stealth

59:00 Dr Kathleen Taylor Neuroscientist, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford author of “Brainwashing”

59:54 George Lakoff author of “Don’t Think of and Elephant!: the essential guide for progressives”

1:00:28 “You can’t win because it does not make any difference how many facts you put out there. It is all about the emotion of anger and hate and fear”

1:00:45 Dr Kathleen Taylor: “Five important factors in the belief change:

Isolation

Control

Uncertainty

Repetition

Use of strong emotions

“It often seemed that my dad was addicted to these angry emotions. He couldn’t wait to shut himself off and listen to Rush Limbaugh for three hours and get all pissed off.”

Addicted to Anger?

1:01:12 John Montgomery, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor, Psychology Department, SUNY, New Platz

1:02:00 TACTICS Tactic 1: Lie and Skew Tactic 2: Create Confusion and Doubt: The Noise Machine! Tactic 3: Blame and Divide Tactic 4: Brand and Label Tactic 5: Language and Framing Tactic 6: Fear Mongering and the Use of Emotion Tactic 7: Bullying and Shaming 1. shuts the guest up 2. fake outrage Tactic 8: In Your Face! It’s everywhere and it’s overkill Tactic 9: Non-verbal Manipulation Tactic 10:

1:16:21 What has this onslaught of right-wing media wrought?

________________________________

#Youtube

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dertaglichedan · 10 months

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Economics professor John Strauss from the University of Southern California is teaching remotely for the rest of the term in a controversy that has serious free speech implications. Strauss was made the subject of a protest after confronting protesters on campus and calling for all Hamas terrorists to be killed. A deceptively edited videotape was posted that made it sound like Strauss was calling for all Palestinians to be killed. The move is part of a disturbing trend limiting free speech on campuses.

The controversy began on Nov. 9th during a pro-Palestinian protest on the USC campus and Strauss walked by near the Tommy Trojan statue on campus. He had words with the protesters and, in the course of their exchange, Strauss said that he walked toward the students and inadvertently stepped on flyers showing Palestinians killed in Gaza. The students said it was intentional.

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therosespitznogle · 1 year

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Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Annemarie Davidson Enamel On Copper Plate Ghostling Jewels Blues Copper & Yellow.

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nbmsports · 1 year

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How the Hollywood Shutdown Will Affect Los Angeles

Los Angeles County has 88 cities. Ten million people. Two hundred-plus languages spoken.And a nine-letter sign that, for much of the world, defines the entire region: HOLLYWOOD.Los Angeles has long been regarded as the global “company town” for show business, and as a rare actors’ strike upended the signature industry this week, the potential for cascading economic impacts across Southern California has emerged as a critical local issue. But economists disagree on just how extensively the simultaneous actors’ and writers’ strikes will be felt.Even by the most generous estimates, Hollywood has never supported more than about 5 percent of employment in a region where many more people work in trade, health care, government and even Southern California’s diminished manufacturing sector. Yet Hollywood pervades Los Angeles life in ways as big as a movie backdrop or as small as a street detour on some awards night.For many, the ceased productions and darkened premieres are not just a threat to the flow of dollars to restaurants and retailers that cater to film crews, but also a blow to the region’s cultural heart.“To the extent that Hollywood defines America’s idea of where I live, Hollywood’s troubles become my troubles,” said D.J. Waldie, a cultural historian in Southern California. “When Hollywood stops, a great many things stop here, and not just a few studios.”During the 2007 screenwriters’ strike, the California economy lost $2.1 billion, according to one study. The last time unionized screenwriters and actors staged dual walkouts, in 1960, the strikes did not settle for nearly six months.Economists on Friday said the length of the two strikes will largely determine its financial impact on Los Angeles, though some were more optimistic than others.Lee Ohanian, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively about California, estimated that about 20 percent of the local economy could be hit, in part because the industry generates so much revenue and has so many highly compensated local employees.Chris Thornberg, a founding partner at the Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics, said the strikes might not be felt locally for a long time because so much of show business has been focused on exploiting and distributing existing content.“As long as people are paying for Hulu and buying Disney movies online, we’re making money,” Dr. Thornberg said. “Eventually, there will come a time when the lack of content will start to pinch, but this is a slow boil, not a rapid one.”The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, made it clear that she considered the labor standoff to be an urgent local issue and called on the studios and unions to “work around the clock” to reach an equitable agreement.“This affects all of us and is essential to our overall economy,” Mayor Bass said.Less tangible is the potential impact on Southern California’s self image. Show business is wrapped up in the region’s civic identity in ways that are unparalleled in less-renowned cities.An audience of 18.7 million people this year tuned in to the Academy Awards, Los Angeles’ best known office party. Backdrops from Venice Beach to the Sixth Street Viaduct are regarded locally with pride as stars in their own right. Homeowners from the San Fernando Valley to South Pasadena run lucrative side hustles, renting their houses for film shoots and ads.Though most of the famous names live in mansions behind gates, few Angelenos, even in far-flung exurbs, are without a celebrity story — the producer spotted in Joshua Tree, the famous face in the next lane in traffic.“Everywhere I go, people ask me the same question: What stars have I met?” said Stephen Cheung, the president and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. “Nobody would ask me that if I were from another city.”Born in Hong Kong, Mr. Cheung, 44, said that he saw his first real celebrity in Los Angeles when he was about 10, through a car window. “We were near the convention center in downtown, and all of a sudden, a car pulled up and I saw Madonna get out.”Many also know stars the way anyone knows anyone in the nation’s second-largest city: as neighbors or fellow parents or people walking their dogs. Entertainers sponsor local schools, embark on second careers as politicians, stump for state ballot initiatives and occasionally get into scrapes with the mayor for trying to fill their own potholes.Democratic leaders throughout the liberal state have long been supportive; earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California extended a $330 million-a-year film and television tax credit program to encourage studios to keep productions at home. Certain communities share a special bond.“We have a lot of studio people who live in Burbank,” Mimi House, a retired medical clinic administrative worker, said on Thursday while lunching with a group of fellow retirees in the Los Angeles suburb’s “beautiful downtown” shortly after leaders of the actors’ union, known as SAG-AFTRA, announced the walkout. Without the entertainment industry, Burbank would be a “ghost town,” added Virginia Bohr, a retired accountant at the table with Ms. House. Local officials recently renamed their airport Hollywood Burbank, though Hollywood is technically a neighborhood in Los Angeles, a separate city.The region has long attracted show business aspirants from around the world who hope to catch their big break. Many scrape by for years before they find work outside the entertainment industry.Thomas Whaley, a veteran teacher who for 23 years has coordinated an extensive visual and performing arts curriculum at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, credited the entertainment community for drawing him to the region and helping to ensure the longstanding success of his program, which has become a statewide model for the breadth and quality of its offerings. Were it not for the local concentration of talent, he said, he might never have ended up in the job he has come to cherish.“I moved to L.A. to play trombone for film and TV in 1990,” said Mr. Whaley, who grew up in Rhode Island and studied to become a studio musician on full scholarships at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Miami. “My mother kept saying, Come home, Rhode Island’s great, and I was like, Mom, they don’t have what I need.”Other Angelenos feel a disconnect with an industry whose workers have long been concentrated in parts of the city that are more affluent and white.In Mid-City, a Los Angeles neighborhood several miles south of Hollywood that is predominantly Latino and Black, Rachel Johnson and Rosario Gomez, both 17, were more interested in frozen fruit treats from the local paleta shop than in the demands of Hollywood strikers.“It’s the least of our concerns,” Ms. Johnson said of the picket lines, noting the struggling mom-and-pop businesses on their streets, rising rents and persistent homeless encampments.“Yeah, there are bigger problems here, like gentrification,” Ms. Gomez added.Nearby at La Cevicheria, a tiny eatery on Pico Boulevard, Yejoo Kim, 29, who works in geopolitics, agreed that Hollywood “can feel worlds apart,” even for Angelenos who were born and raised in the city, as she was.But she and her roommate, David Choi, 27, also pointed to the large immigrant communities in Los Angeles that have been reflected with care in recent years in film and television.“I feel a sense of solidarity,” said Mr. Choi, a novelist interested in the pay standards that Hollywood sets for its writers. “I’d be happy to participate in a boycott of a show.”Corina Knoll contributed reporting from Los Angeles and Vik Jolly from Burbank, Calif. Source link Read the full article

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