#but it's well documented how many native peoples of the americas had running water and public baths - see when you practice hygiene...

[a-typical]

American Holocaust — David E. Stannard

[tlatollotl]

As told to Scientific American

When a family member dies, we the Diné, whom Spanish conquistadors named the Navajo, send a notice to our local radio station so that everyone in the community can know. Usually the reading of the death notices—the names of those who have passed on, their ages, where they lived and the names of their matrilineal and patrilineal clans—takes no more than five minutes. It used to be very rare to hear about young people dying. But this past week, I listened to 45 minutes of death notices on KGAK Radio AM 1330. The ages ranged from 26 to 89, with most of the dead having been in their 30s, 40s or 50s.

I am in shock. The virus entered our community in March, through a Nazarene Christian revival in Arizona. They brought in vanloads and busloads of people from across the Navajo Nation for the gathering; then all those vans and buses returned them to their respective communities, along with the virus. There were immediate deaths because the medical facilities were not ready for it. More than 300 Navajos have already died of COVID-19, and the disease is still spreading.

I am a Diné storyteller and keeper of traditions. I live alone in a hogan, a traditional octagonal log house, in Chi Chil Tah, meaning “Where the Oaks Grow,” after the Gambel oaks indigenous to this region. Officially known as Vanderwagen, the community lies 23 miles south of Gallup, N.M.. The pandemic reached the area in late April. On May 1, the governor of New Mexico evoked the riot act to block off all exits into Gallup to stop the spread of the virus, and only residents could get in. The lockdown extended to May 11. It was not so bad the first week, but then we started to run out of food and water.

The groundwater in parts of Vanderwagen is naturally contaminated with arsenic and uranium; in any case, few of us have the money to drill a well. Normally, my brothers and my nephew haul water in 250-gallon tanks that are in the back of a pickup truck. At Gallup they have a high-powered well; you pay $5 in coins, put the hose in your tank and fill it up. You haul that home, dump that into your cistern, and you have water in your house. Without access to Gallup, people began to run out of water—even as we were being told to wash our hands frequently.

My hogan has electricity but no running water. My brothers bring me water, and they put it in a 75-gallon barrel. I drink that water, and I wash with it, but I also buy five gallons of water for $5, in case I need extra. I typically use a gallon of water a day, for everything—cooking, drinking and washing up. My great-grandmother used to say, “Don’t get used to drinking water, because one of these days you’re going to be fighting for it.” I have learned to live on very little.

We have a lot of cancers in our community, perhaps because of the uranium. And we have many other health issues that I think makes this virus so viable among us. We have a lot of diabetes, because we do not eat well, and a lot of heart disease. We have alcoholism. We have high rates of suicide. We have every social ill you can think of, and COVID has made these vulnerabilities more apparent. I look at it as a monster that is feasting on us—because we have built the perfect human for it to invade.

Days after Gallup reopened, I drove there to mail a letter. Every fast-food establishment—McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy’s, Burger King, Panda Express, Taco Bell, they’re all located on one strip—had long, long lines of cars waiting at their drive-throughs. This in a community with such high rates of diabetes. Perhaps there wasn’t any food available in the very small stores located in their communities, but I also think this pandemic has triggered a lot of emotional responses that are normally hidden. On the highway to Vanderwagen, there is a convenience store where they sell liquor. And the parking lot was completely full, everybody was just buying and buying liquor. There is a sense of anxiety and panic, but I also think that a lot of Navajo people don’t know how to be with themselves, because there isn’t a really good, rounded, spiritual practice of any sort to anchor them.

COVID is revealing what happens when you displace a people from their roots. Take a Diné teenager. She can dress Navajo, but she has no language or culture or belief system that tells her what it means to be Diné. Her grandmother was taken away at the age of five to a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) boarding school and kept there until she was 18. At school, they taught her that her culture and her spiritual practice were of the devil and that she needed to completely deny them. Her language was not valid: “You have a Navajo accent; you must speak English more perfectly.” Same happened to her mother. Our languages were lost, the culture and traditional practices were gone. That was also when spankings and beatings entered Diné culture. Those kids endured those horrible ways of being disciplined in the BIA schools, and that became how they disciplined their own children.

I meet kids like this all the time—who don’t know who they are. For 35 years I have been trying to tell them, you come from a beautiful culture. You come from one of hundreds of tribes who were thriving in the Americas when Columbus arrived; we had a viable political and economic system that was based on spiritual practices tied to the land. Some 500 years ago, Spanish conquistadors came up the Rio Grande into North America in search of gold. They were armed with the Doctrine of Discovery, a fearful legal document issued by the Pope that sanctioned the colonization of non-Christian territories. Then in the mid-1800s, the pioneers came from the East Coast with their belief in Manifest Destiny, their moral right to colonize the land. As their wagons moved west, the Plains Indians were moved out and put on reservations. When your spiritual practice is based on the land you’re living on, and you’re being herded away from what somebody else would call her temple, or mosque, or church, or cathedral—that’s the first place your spirituality is attacked.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather on my father’s side was captured and taken on what we call the Long Walk to Fort Sumner. Initially about 10,000 Diné were rounded up, and many died on that walk, which took weeks or months, depending on the route on which they were taken. They were imprisoned for four years at Fort Sumner, and released in 1868, because of the Civil War. At about the same time, my great-great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side escaped from Colonel Kit Carson at Canyon de Chelly and traveled north with his goats. He came back down to this area at just about the time my great-great-great-great-grandmother escaped Spanish slavery. Slavery was introduced here by the Spanish—that’s never talked about. The children born at Fort Sumner were taken into Spanish families, to be slaves.

We had the Spanish flu in the 1920s, one of many viruses to invade our community. Then in the 1930s there was the Great Depression. We didn’t know that was happening: we did not have money, but we had wealth in the form of sheep. And the government came in and killed our sheep in the Stock Reduction Program. They said the sheep were eroding the land, but I think they did it because the sheep made us self-sufficient, and they couldn’t allow that. We had spiritual practices around our sheep. Every time we developed self-sufficiency and a viable spiritual practice, they destroyed it. My mother said they dug deep trenches, herded the sheep and massacred them.

A tuberculosis epidemic in the 1940s took away my mother's parents. My great-grandmother, a healer and herbalist, had hidden my mother from the government agents who snatched Diné kids to put them into BIA boarding schools. My mother became a rancher, a prolific weaver, a beautiful woman who spoke the language. She did not speak much English. She died at 96; my great-grandmother died at 104. Now, in our community in Chi Chil Tah, there are no more traditional healers; the oldest person is my great-grand-aunt, who is 78. I am the only traditional Diné storyteller.  

Now that we are talking about issues of race in America, we need to also talk about the Native American tribes that were displaced. There is a reservation in upstate New York of the Iroquois people—all of 21 square miles. How much land were the Iroquois originally living on? Who was living in what is now Massachusetts? What about Pennsylvania? What about all the states under the umbrella of the United States? Whose land are you occupying? Abraham Lincoln ordered the massacre of 38 Dakota men the day after Christmas, the same week he signed the Emancipation Proclamation; they call him Honest Abe. They don’t talk about the dark side of things, and I think that is what COVID has revealed—the dark side. We see a police officer putting his full body weight on the neck of a black man. And suddenly everybody goes, Wow! What have we evolved to?

It seems to me that COVID has revealed a lot of truths, everywhere in the world. If we were ignorant of the truth, it is now revealed; if we were ignoring the truth, it is now revealed. This truth is the disparity: of health, wellbeing and human value. And now that the truth has been revealed, what are we going to do about it?

[nekoannie-chan]

No reasons

Pairing: Steve Rogers X Reader.

Word count: 1693 words.

Summary: Steve had made you several promises, but he made a mistake, will you forgive him?

Warnings: None.

A/N: This is my entry to the @thefanficfaerie​ ‘s Heather’s life in song with the song prompt #11:

“Don’t speak” by No Doubt.

Song lyrics are in italics and bold.

Flashbacks are in italics.

My native language is Spanish so I wanna improve my writing skills in English if you notice any mistake please let me know and I will correct it.

I don’t give any kind of permission that my fics be posted in other platforms or languages (I translate myself my work) or the use of my graphics (my dividers are included in this), I did them exclusively for my fics, please respect my work and don’t steal it. There are some people here who make dividers that anyone can use, mine is not this type, please look for the other’s people. The only exception is the ones I gifted ‘cuz now belong to someone else. If you find any of my works on a different platform and is not one of my accounts, please let me know. Reblogs and comments are always welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t own Marvel’s characters (unfortunately), except for the original characters and the story.

My other media where I publish: Wattpad, Ao3, ffnet.

If you like it please vote, comment, and give me feedback to improve my skills and reblog. 

 You and me, we used to be together Every day together, always I really feel that I'm losin' my best friend I can't believe this could be the end It looks as though you're lettin' go And if it's real, well, I don't want to know

 The tears didn’t stop running down your cheeks, you still refused to believe what was happening, all those promises now unfulfilled, all those dreams and plans were going to waste now.

If he had told the truth earlier, you would have understood and put your feelings aside, many things would have been avoided.

You didn't want to hear from Steve again in your life, you weren't the only one who thought the same thing, A simple selfish act had ruined many lives.

He had left not only you but also his best friend, what kind of person would do that?

Abandon his wife and his best friend without giving them any explanation, without caring about what they had lived together, or everything he had promised them.

"I'm with you to the end of the line" was nothing more than the vile lie with which he had deceived you, which you had long believed.

 Don't speak, I know just what you're sayin' So please stop explainin' Don't tell me 'cause it hurts Don't speak, I know what you're thinkin' I don't need your reasons Don't tell me 'cause it hurts

 "Y/N, please understand I must go," said Steve exasperated.

“Why you? Anyone else can do it, there are more team members besides you.

"It must be me," he insisted.

“Why? You haven't given me any good reason,” you claimed.

"I am the team leader."

“Which team? Steve, we don't have a team, you know that for the last seven years everything has been a disaster”.

You knew that something strange had happened in the time travel, you didn’t go with him, you went to Vormir.

After that fight, while Steve was bathing, you took his compass and opened it, when you discovered the contents you felt as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown at you, you had finally understood everything.

 Our memories, well, they can be inviting But some are altogether mighty frightening As we die, both you and I With my head in my hands, I sit and cry

 You saw the wedding photo, that day you thought was the happiest day of your life, currently, it was a memory that made you sad.

Now you understood Steve's insistence on not having children yet, he had always told you that you wanted you to enjoy your marriage a little more without those kinds of responsibilities.

“Y/N? “ Wanda knocked from the other side of the door

You wiped your tears away and looked up at the door quickly, every time you heard a noise nearby you couldn't help but maybe it was Steve.

"One moment," your voice trembled.

You got up and went to open the door to see what Wanda wanted.

"What happens?" You asked.

You hadn’t left your room in several days, Wanda was the one in charge of bringing you food, you didn’t speak to anyone and you were devastated.

"They need you in the boardroom," she said as soon as you opened the door.

You went to the place when entering as she had indicated, when entering, the rage invaded you.

"Y/N ..." Steve said when he saw you.

"I'm not going to be in the same place as him," you sentenced.

You turned around and almost collided with Bucky.

"Please, I need to talk to you," Steve asked.

"I have nothing to hear from you, unless it's to tell me you've already signed the divorce."

As soon as he told you what he was going to do you asked for the papers, you had suspicions, which were confirmed at the time he left, so you signed them.

 Don't speak, I know just what you're sayin' So please stop explainin' Don't tell me 'cause it hurts, no, no, no

You had met Steve on the first mission you had with the STRIKE team, it had been fun to see Steve and Rumlow fight because they couldn't agree”

Eventually, you and Steve became best friends, you spent a lot of time together and in all missions, they were a good team, one of the best that S.H.I.E.L.D. had.

You were afraid to confess your feelings to him and you thought that if you did Steve would walk away from you because he probably wouldn't reciprocate.

 Don't speak, I know what you're thinkin' And I don't need your reasons Don't tell me 'cause it hurts

It's all ending We gotta stop pretending Who we are

 "Are you going to deny the truth that you left for?"

"No, but I just went to the dance I promised her and came back."

Y/N and Bucky looked at each other, they knew Steve was lying, it had been much more than a dance.

"How many years were you there?” you asked.

"It was just the dance," he said, but his voice didn't sound confident.

“Do you really think you can fool us? We know you very well,” Bucky said.

"Ten years, but I couldn't stop thinking about you" he excused himself.

"You made a big mistake."

"You would have thought long before, Rogers, I don't want to crossword with you again if it's not for you to give me the signed document," you sentenced before leaving the place.

 You and me I can see us dyin' Aren't we?

 You had been sent on a mission at first it seemed disastrous, but in the end, you achieved the goal

They were in the facility that had indicated that it is fine as a shelter when finished before the extraction

“You’re ok? Did they hurt you? He asked worriedly.

"I'm fine, just a little tired and dirty," you replied.

"I think the shower works well."

“Are you suggesting we bathe together?

"N-no, it’s not what I meant, no...”

He was completely blushing, you had fun teasing him. You took a shower to clarify your ideas, it was the first time you felt nervous, and you had decided to confess your feelings.

"Hey, do you want dinner? I cook something," he said when he saw you.

You sat down to eat but it was difficult, your nerves increased.

"I like you," you finally confessed.

Steve saw you without saying anything, for a moment you thought that he would reject you or that he would leave, he got up, went to you and kissed you. 

"I like you, too," he said when you parted from the kiss.

 Don't speak, I know just what you're sayin' So please stop explainin' Don't tell me 'cause it hurts

"But Y/N I love you," said Steve.

"No, you never loved me, you just didn't want to be alone in this time, and all those words were lies."

“But you love me…”

You pressed your lips tightly, you had been holding back not to slap him or be close enough to him to convince you with his charms.

"I still love you, but I also hate you. None of this is easy, but I must worry about myself," you thought.

"Before all this yes, but now no more, you hurt me too much, you broke my heart, there is nothing that can remedy all this," you replied.

 No, no, don't speak, I know what you're thinkin' And I don't need your reasons Don't tell me 'cause it hurts

 Steve don’t waste telling you how much he loved you.

You knew that he sometimes visits Peggy, but you always thought it was out of nostalgia.

You always supported him, you didn't have much to lose so you stood by him in the Accords.

Bucky seemed a little suspicious, at first, he believed that you wanted to steal his best friend, but the three managed to form a great team.

He had even helped Steve with planning to propose to you.

 Don't tell me 'cause it hurts I know what you're sayin' So please stop explainin' Don't speak, don't speak

 1948

 Peggy threw herself into Steve's arms when she saw him at the door.

“How?”

“It is a long story”.

That night they danced for hours.

"I want you to stop being Captain America," Peggy demanded.

“What? I cannot”.

"If you love me, you will."

 Don't speak, no I know what you're thinkin' And I don't need your reasons I know you're good, I know you're good I know you're real good, oh

 1958

Steve was nervous, he would ask Peggy to marry, he had to admit that he missed his previous life, but it was something that she had asked him, he could not deny her anything.

He opened the door of the house, seemed to hear something, went to the room, the scene he saw left him frozen.

“Peggy!”

Peggy separated from the man she was in bed with.

“What are you doing here? You were supposed to be at work.

The woman covered her nakedness to go after Steve, who said nothing.

"It's not what it seems, Steve.”

“Do not? Are you going to deny that you were having sex with him?

She was trying to come up with some excuse.

"You know, I made a mistake I should never have come back, I should have stayed with my family," said Steve with deep sadness.

He left the house, he needed to go to the particles where he had stored them, he took out the box and found a separator that you had given him, a heart that you yourself made for him, you had scarred yourself by burning yourself when you emptied the material into the mold, in the center it had the inscription "I LOVE YOU" and on the another side of the date of that anniversary.

He would go back to you and Bucky and do whatever it took to forgive him, raise a family with you, and forget everything that had happened on that last trip, which had perhaps been the biggest mistake of his life.

 La, la, la, la La, la, la, la Don't, don't, ooh, ooh Hush, hush, darling Hush, hush, darling Hush, hush

 “He's going to see her, isn't he?” You asked Bucky.

After seeing the compass you had left the room in silence, in the courtyard you had met James.

"I don't know," he replied.

"Bucky is your best friend, please, I need to know that," you asked.

"Yes, he will, did he tell you?"

"He didn't want to give me any explanation, but all the signs seem to indicate it."

"What do you think about it?" Bucky questioned you.

“I would have preferred that we never would have gone out if I continued loving her, she always said that you and I were the most important thing, but this shows us that it is not true”.

The day he left you weren't there, you stayed in the room, erasing all the photos they had together, you wished it was so easy to erase all the memories and experiences they shared.

 Don't tell me 'cause it hurts Hush, hush, darling Hush, hush, darling Hush, hush

 2023

"Are you okay?" You asked Bucky.

"I'm not, but I will be, will you forgive him?"

"I can't, it's just difficult, we had made a promise but I think he didn't care in the end," you replied. "What will you do?"

"I still have to redeem myself for what I did."

"It wasn't your fault, you were under HYDRA's control," you said.

“Do you have any plans?”

"All my life I've been in this job, I guess I'll stay, but I don't plan to work with him, the less contact I have, and the better for me," you replied.

Steve had made a big mistake and he will do anything to fix it.

[blackkudos]

James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the StreJames Baldwinet (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).

Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of blacks, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, written in 1956 well before gay rights were widely espoused in America.

Early life

Baldwin was born after his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, left his biological father because of his drug abuse and moved to Harlem, New York City. There, she married a preacher, David Baldwin. The family was very poor.

Baldwin spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. At the age of 10, he was teased and abused by two New York police officers, an instance of racist harassment by the NYPD that he would experience again as a teenager and document in his essays. His adoptive father, whom Baldwin in essays called simply his father, appears to have treated him — by comparison with his siblings — with great harshness.

His stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 just before Baldwin turned 19. The day of the funeral was Baldwin's 19th birthday, the day his father's last child was born, and the day of the Harlem Riot of 1943, which was portrayed at the beginning of his essay "Notes of a Native Son". The quest to answer or explain family and social rejection—and attain a sense of selfhood, both coherent and benevolent—became a leitmotiv in Baldwin's writing.

Education

James attended P.S. 24 on 128th Street between Fifth and Madison in Harlem where he wrote the school song, which was used until the school closed down. His middle school years were spent at Frederick Douglass Junior High where he was influenced by poet Countee Cullen, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and was encouraged by his math teacher to serve as editor of the school newspaper, The Douglass Pilot. He then went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronx's Bedford Park section. There, along with Richard Avedon, he worked on the school magazine as literary editor but disliked school because of the constant racial slurs.

Religion

The difficulties of his life, including his stepfather's abuse, led Baldwin to seek solace in religion. At the age of 14 he attended meetings of the Pentecostal Church and, during a euphoric prayer meeting, he converted and became a junior Minister. Before long, at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, he was drawing larger crowds than his stepfather had done in his day. At 17, however, Baldwin came to view Christianity as based on false premises and later regarded his time in the pulpit as a way of overcoming his personal crises.

Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, who inquired about Baldwin's religious beliefs. He answered, "I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since." Elijah asked, "And what are you now?" Baldwin explained, "Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone." Still, his church experience significantly shaped his worldview and writing. Baldwin reflected that "being in the pulpit was like working in the theater; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked."

Baldwin accused Christianity of reinforcing the system of American slavery by palliating the pangs of oppression and delaying salvation until a promised afterlife. Baldwin praised religion, however, for inspiring some American blacks to defy oppression. He once wrote, "If the concept of God has any use, it is to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God can't do that, it's time we got rid of him". Baldwin publicly described himself as not religious. However, at his funeral, an a cappella recording of Baldwin singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" was played.

Greenwich Village

When Baldwin was 15, his high-school running buddy, Emile Capouya, skipped school one day and, in Greenwich Village, met Beauford Delaney, a painter. Capouya gave Baldwin Delaney's address and suggested paying him a visit. Baldwin, who was at the time working after school in a sweatshop on nearby Canal Street, visited Beauford at 181 Greene Street. Beauford became a mentor to Baldwin; it was under Beauford's influence that he came to believe a black person could be an artist.

While working odd jobs, Baldwin wrote short stories, essays, and book reviews, some of them collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955). He befriended the actor Marlon Brando in 1944 and the two were roommates for a time. They would remain friends for more than 20 years.

Expatriation

During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin started to realize that he was gay. In 1948, he walked into a restaurant where he knew he would not be served. When the waitress explained that black people were not served at the establishment, Baldwin threw a glass of water at her, shattering the mirror behind the bar. As a result of being disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and gays, he left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice, but to see himself and his writing beyond an African-American context. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer". Also, he left the United States desiring to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and flee the hopelessness that many young African-American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. His work started to be published in literary anthologies, notably Zero, which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

He would live in France for most of his later life. He would also spend some time in Switzerland and Turkey. During his life and after it, Baldwin would be seen not only as an influential African-American writer but also as an influential exile writer, particularly because of his numerous experiences outside the United States and the impact of these experiences on Baldwin's life and his writing.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village. His house was always open to his friends, who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colourful portraits of Baldwin. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular house guests.

Many of Baldwin's musician friends dropped in during the Nice and Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festivals: Nina Simone, Josephine Baker (whose sister lived in Nice), Miles Davis, and Ray Charles, for whom he wrote several songs. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

I'd read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. When I got to know him better, Jimmy and I opened up to each other. We became great friends. Every time I was in the South of France, in Antibes, I would spend a day or two at his villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. We'd get comfy in that beautiful, big house and he would tell us all sorts of stories...He was a great man.

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated Baldwin's play The Amen Corner.

His years in Saint-Paul-de-Vence were also years of work. Sitting in front of his sturdy typewriter, his days were devoted to writing and to answering the huge amount of mail he received from all over the world. He wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985. It was also in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence house that Baldwin wrote his famous "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" in November 1970.

Literary career

In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work: despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African-American experience, Giovanni's Room is predominantly about white characters. Baldwin's next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the late 1950s and the early 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage.

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was eagerly consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do blacks really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation. Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street, also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s have been largely overlooked by critics, though even these texts are beginning to receive attention. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Eldridge Cleaver's harsh criticism of Baldwin in Soul on Ice and elsewhere and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk and Just Above My Head, placed a strong emphasis on the importance of black families, and he concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues, as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which was an extended meditation inspired by the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.

Social and political activism

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the Civil Rights Act of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, N.C., andPartisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American south. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross" and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Baldwin expressed the hope that Socialism would take root in the United States.

By the spring of 1963, Baldwin had become so much a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement that for its May 17 issue on the turmoil in Birmingham, Alabama, Time magazine put James Baldwin on the cover. "There is not another writer," said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South." In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy's Manhattan apartment (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting). This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon's 1999 play, "James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire" The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated," the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.

James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.

Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando. The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only known gay men in the movement were James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin's sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome (the common view of the time). The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Later on, Baldwin was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington. After a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church not long after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this "terrifying crisis." He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by—or intervened to smash a reporter's camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington—"the good white people on the hill." Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes—it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting. In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.

Nonetheless, he rejected the label "civil rights activist", or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X's assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one's civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin refuted the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it "a very peculiar revolution because it has to...have its aims the establishment of a union, and a...radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life...not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country." In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, he called it, instead, "the latest slave rebellion."

In 1968, Baldwin signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Inspiration and relationships

As a young man, Baldwin's poetry teacher was Countee Cullen.

A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as

...the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world." Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright's novel Native Son. In Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended. Interviewed by Julius Lester, however, Baldwin explained, "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself." In 1965, Baldwin participated in a debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the American dream has adversely affected African Americans. The debate took place at The Cambridge Union in the UK. The spectating student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin's favour.

In 1949 Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, aged 17, though Happersberger's marriage three years later left Baldwin distraught. Happersberger died on August 21, 2010, in Switzerland.

Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. With Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin helped awaken Simone to the civil rights movement then gelling. Baldwin also provided her with literary references influential on her later work. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting) in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation. Kennedy referred to Baldwin as "Martin Luther Queen" throughout his life.

Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet (with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothea Tanning , Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his "political relationship" with Malcolm X. He collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the book Nothing Personal, which is available for public viewing at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.

Maya Angelou called Baldwin her "friend and brother", and credited him for "setting the stage" for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986.

Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Upon his death, Morrison wrote a eulogy for Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times. In the eulogy, entitled "Life in His Language," Morrison credits Baldwin as being her literary inspiration and the person who showed her the true potential of writing. She writes,

"You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. 'Our crown,' you said, 'has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,' you said, 'is wear it.'"

Death

Early on December 1, 1987, (some sources say late on November 30) Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

Legacy

Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America two-volume editions of Baldwin's fiction and essays, and a recent collection of critical essays links these two writers.

One of Baldwin's richest short stories, "Sonny's Blues", appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

In 1986, within the work The Story of English, Robert MacNeil, with Robert McCrum and William Cran, mentioned James Baldwin as an influential writer of African-American Literature, on the level of Booker T. Washington, and held both men up as prime examples of Black writers.

In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photo-journalist from Baltimore, founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy.

In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire in the early 1980s. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from underserved communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2005, the USPS created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to Baldwin, which featured him on the front, with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper.

In 2012 James Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

In 2014 128th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, was named "James Baldwin Place" to celebrate Baldwin's 90th Birthday. He lived in the neighborhood and attended P.S. 24. Readings of Baldwin's writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher. The events were attended by Council Member Inez Dickens, who lead the campaign to honor Harlem native son, Baldwin's family, leaders in theatre and film, and members of the community.

Works

Go Tell It on the Mountain (semi-autobiographical novel; 1953)

The Amen Corner (play; 1954)

Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1955)

Giovanni's Room (novel; 1956)

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1961)

Another Country (novel; 1962)

A Talk to Teachers (essay; 1963)

The Fire Next Time (essays; 1963)

Blues for Mister Charlie (play; 1964)

Going to Meet the Man (stories; 1965)

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (novel; 1968)

No Name in the Street (essays; 1972)

If Beale Street Could Talk (novel; 1974)

The Devil Finds Work (essays; 1976)

Just Above My Head (novel; 1979)

Jimmy's Blues (poems; 1983)

The Evidence of Things Not Seen (essays; 1985)

The Price of the Ticket (essays; 1985)

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (essays; 2010)

Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems (poems; 2014)

Together with others:

Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon, photography) (1964)

A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead) (1971)

One Day When I Was Lost (orig.: A. Haley; 1972)

A Dialogue (with Nikki Giovanni) (1973)

Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (with Yoran Cazac, 1976)

Native Sons (with Sol Stein, 2004)

Music/Spoken Word Recording:

A Lover's Question (CD, Les Disques Du Crépuscule – TWI 928-2, 1990)

Wikipedia

[patriotsnet]

Did The Republicans Free The Slaves

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-the-republicans-free-the-slaves/

Did The Republicans Free The Slaves

A Teachable Moment: Dinesh Dsouza Refuses To Take Back False Claim About Republicans Owning Slaves In 1860

– See below the post for an update.

For Dinesh D’Souza watchers, this headline is as shocking as proclaiming that water is wet. I post this incident because it is a clear and convincing demonstration that D’Souza shows zero interest in academic integrity.  Let me lay out the basics. First, D’Souza claimed in a speech that no Republican owned slaves in 1860. Here is the speech:

Do you know how many Republicans owned slaves in 1860, the year before the Civil War started?

The answer may surprise you if you listen to progressive historians.

— Dinesh D’Souza June 10, 2019

He said one Republican who owned a slave in 1860 would require him to take back his claim.

Historians on Twitter, led by Princeton’s Kevin Kruse, quickly rose to the occasion and found ten. Follow the thread below for the receipts.

We’ve provided clear evidence that at least ten Republicans owned slaves in 1860, and yet D’Souza keeps retweeting this video insisting there weren’t any and promising he’d “take it back” if anyone proved otherwise.https://t.co/rbLnQDdMCM

— Kevin M. Kruse June 10, 2019

To go directly to the thread with the breakdown of the ten found thus far, .

In essence, the method of finding Republican slave owners involves an examination of those who attended the Republican convention as delegates and then comparing that list with registries of slave owners.

For his part, D’Souza said the instances offered by the historians are “invalid” and he repeated his claim this morning.

Horace Greeley Proceedings Of The First Three Republican National Conventions Of 1856 1860 And 1864 78

“Republican Party Platform of 1856,” American Presidency Project, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29619, accessed April 25, 2014.

Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Carlinville, Illinois, August 31, 1858,” in Abraham Lincoln Association, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler, at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:7.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext, accessed April 25, 2014.

Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, at United States National Archives, “America’s Historical Documents,” at http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/document.html?doc=8&title.raw=Emancipation%20Proclamation, accessed April 25, 2014.

University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, “Voting America: Presidential Election, 1864,” at http://dsl.richmond.edu/voting/indelections.php?year=1864, accessed January 9, 2014.

Kim Kardashian Talks Kanye West’s Twitter Return Says He Played Connect Four During Chicago’s Birth

Again, that’s a very simplified version of the story, but that’s the gist of it. You should also check out John Legend’s version of the story — equally helpful, and apparently already shaping Ye’s political awakening. 

Now if Kanye slides into G-Chat with Michael Bay, maybe he’ll be convinced the Transformers also helped end slavery.

The Claim: Historians Do Not Teach That The First Black Members Of Congress Were Republicans

A viral meme, posted on Instagram, features a well-known lithograph of the first Black members of Congress, with a bold statement.

“History not taught,” it says. “The first 23 Black congressmen were Republican.”

“You won’t be taught this,” wrote Ryan Fournier, the co-chair of Students for Trump, whose watermark appears on the meme, on his Instagram account. “The Republicans were the anti-slavery party.”

It is mostly accurate that the Republican Party formed to oppose the extension of slavery, although up until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans pledged not to interfere with slavery in states where it existed. And the first 23 African Americans in Congress did belong to the Republican Party, due to the GOP’s support of voting rights and the Democratic Party’s embrace of white supremacy.

But the idea that Reconstruction-era historians hid those facts – key to understanding the period – is false.

“This is just front and center in what we teach all the time,” said Kate Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern University who has written extensively about Reconstruction. “It’s not a big secret.”

A message seeking comment was sent to Fournier on Wednesday.

Fact check:Photo shows Biden with Byrd, who once had ties to KKK, but wasn’t a grand wizard

Republicans Revise The History Of Slavery To Make Themselves The Party Of Equal Rights

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Historical revisionism is a Republican and religious right practice regarding the illegitimate distortion of the historical record so certain events appear in a more favorable light to substantiate their backward positions. One of the most recent phenomena in revisionist history is the insane notion that the Founding Fathers were directed by god to form America as a Christian nation, and that when he wrote the U.S. Constitution he told them there was no need for a federal government because states were the supreme law of the land. Recently, a staunch religious right conservative attempted to revise history again and asserted that people of faith are the true advocates for equal rights to bolster his claim there is no need for a federal government to ensure every American is treated the same.

  Sat, Apr 26th, 2014 at 9:58 am

The stealth reason for the Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence was to position the slave holder dominated Continental Congress as central to the rebellion, and the major form of independence they were seeking was independence from the British legal system, foremost because of the Somersett Decision in 1772 by British Law Lord Mansfield in which he declared that any person/human being setting foot upon English soil would have the full rights and privileges of a native born Englishman. Look it up.

Republican Elites Try To Back Immigration Reform But Get Backlash From Their Voters

After the 2012 election, Republican leaders began to view the demographic changes in the country as a political crisis for their party. When Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, he got blown out among Hispanic voters — exit polls showed that 71 percent of them backed Barack Obama.

With Hispanic voters becoming a larger share of the electorate every year, GOP elites feared their chances of winning back the presidency would plummet. Their party looked like a party for white voters in an increasingly nonwhite country.

So they came up with a plan. The party would change its tone on immigration, adopting more tolerant rhetoric, and it would also embrace immigration reform. In the Senate in 2013, old hands like John McCain and rising stars like Marco Rubio collaborated with Democrats on a bill that would give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status.

The final Senate roll call vote was 68-32 — with all 32 no votes, plus 14 yes votes, coming from Republicans. But a huge backlash from the Republican Party’s predominantly white base, which views the bill as “amnesty” for people who broke the rules, ensued. As a result, the bill died in the House of Representatives, never even being brought for a vote.

What Matters: Yes Republicans Freed The Slaves They Were Not These Republicans

CNN

Republicans tried to claim their political ancestors at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, casting back to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, to argue they deserve more credit from Black voters.

The problem is that the Republicans and the politics of 1860 bear almost zero resemblance to the Republicans of today.

Back then, Republicans were, generally, a party of Northerners and Democrats were, generally, the party of the South.

Today, it’s pretty much the opposite.

Back then, a Republican President, Lincoln, tried to hold the union together after Southern states, led by Democrats, seceded.

How Republicans Made Common Cause With Southern Democrats On Economic Matters

Map: Vox. Data: Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, Wayne Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State.”

Roosevelt’s reforms also brought tensions in the Democratic coalition to the surface, as the solidly Democratic South wasn’t too thrilled with the expansion of unions or federal power generally. As the years went on, Southern Democrats increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party to try to block any further significant expansions of government or worker power.

“In 1947, confirming a new alliance that would recast American politics for the next two generations, Taft men began to work with wealthy southern Democrats who hated the New Deal’s civil rights legislation and taxes,” Cox Richardson writes. This new alliance was cemented with the Taft-Hartley bill, which permitted states to pass right-to-work laws preventing mandatory union membership among employees — and many did.

Taft-Hartley “stopped labor dead in its tracks at a point where unions were large, growing, and confident in their economic and political power,” Rich Yeselson has written. You can see the eventual effects above — pro-Democratic unions were effectively blocked from gaining a foothold in the South and interior West, and the absence of their power made those regions more promising for Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Usmb: Where Did The Conservative Republicans Who Freed The Slaves Come From

Thread starterrdean

Zone 2″: Political Forum / Israel and Palestine Forum / Race Relations/Racism Forum / Religion & Ethics Forum / Environment Forum: Baiting and polarizing OP’s , and thread titles risk the thread either being moved or trashed. Keep it relevant, choose wisely. Each post must contain content relevant to the thread subject, in addition to any flame. No trolling. No hit and run flames. No hijacking or derailing threads.

#8

Again and again I’ve heard USMB Republicans insist it was liberal Democrats who kept slaves in the south and it was conservative Republicans who marched into the south and freed the slaves.It was liberal Democrats who started the KKK.Lincoln was a conservative Republican.Now, even though Republicans say President Obama is a Marxist, communist, liberal, fascist, Kenyan, Mau Mau, man child, boi who is so weak and girly he has become a strong arm monarch like totalitarian dictator, some, a few, realize he can’t be all those things at once.Do they really believe conservative Republicans marched into the deep south and freed the slaves? You bet your 6,000 year history of the universe they do.But how is that possible? We refer to the North as the “liberal north”. So where did all those conservative Republicans come from?I’m fascinated by Right Wing history. Perhaps USMB Confederate Republicans who freed the slaves could explain their involvement in the Civil War and it’s “true” history. Educate me. I’m all “ears”.

After The War Radical Republicans Fight For Rights For Black Americans

When states ratified the 14th Amendment. Republicans required some Southern states to ratify it to be readmitted to the Union.

For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress.

The Radicals drove Republicans to pass the country’s first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North.

Furthermore, Republicans twice managed to amend the Constitution, so that it now stated that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, that all citizens should have equal protection of the law, and that the right to vote couldn’t be denied because of race. And they required Southern states to legally enact many of these ideas — at least in principle — to be readmitted to the Union.

These are basic bedrocks of our society today, but at the time they were truly radical. Just a few years earlier, the idea that a major party would fight for the rights of black citizens to vote in state elections would have been unthinkable.

Unfortunately, however, this newfound commitment wouldn’t last for much longer.

Black People Kept Civil Rights At Gop Forefront In Late 19th Century

African Americans remained active in the Republican Party and, for a time, kept voting and civil rights at the forefront of the party’s agenda. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act in 1883, several Northern state governments controlled by Republicans created their own civil rights laws. John W.E. Thomas, a former enslaved person who was the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly, introduced the 1885 Illinois Civil Rights Act.

But white Southern intransigence made it impossible to enact any meaningful protections at the federal level. That, combined with the rise of a new generation of white Republicans more interested in big business than racial equality, cooled GOP ardor for Black civil rights.

“Republicans started taking the Black vote for granted, and the Republicans were always divided,” Foner said. “There were those who said, ‘We’ve really got to defend the Black vote in the South.’ And others said ‘No, no, we’ve got to appeal to the business-minded voter in South as the party of business, the party of growth.’”

Fact check:Devastating 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t worst U.S. riot, isn’t ignored in books

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South, which began just before the United States’ entry into World War I, brought many Black people into cities where they could vote freely and put them in touch with local Democratic organizations that slowly realized the potential of the Black vote.

Kanye West Doubles Down On Pres Trump Support: ‘he Is My Brother’

So when did things start to change?  When Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat from New York, instituted the New Deal to fight the Great Depression in the 1930s, the parties shifted in a big way. The Democratic Party were now supporting a movement marked by mass job creation, checks on big business, and overall workers’ rights. Those are all “big government” sorts of things, which shook the Democrats from their roots.

In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, wanted to pass sweeping civil rights legislation , including the end of segregation in the South. After his assassination, Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. This was essentially the final nail in the coffin; the majority of white Southerners — resistant to the changes enacted by the Civil Rights Act — abandoned the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party, establishing a link between big business favoritism and backwoods racism that endures to this day.

Yes Republicans Freed The Slaves They Were Not These Republicans

Republican Partyracismcivil rightspolitical historyDemocratic PartyDonald Trump

– Republicans tried to claim their political ancestors at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, casting back to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, to argue they deserve more credit from Black voters.

The problem is that the Republicans and the politics of 1860 bear almost zero resemblance to the Republicans of today.

Back then, Republicans were, generally, a party of Northerners and Democrats were, generally, the party of the South.

Today, it’s pretty much the opposite.

Back then, a Republican President, Lincoln, tried to hold the union together after Southern states, led by Democrats, seceded.

The Clinton Years And The Congressional Ascendancy: 19922000

Newt GingrichHouse SpeakerBill Clinton

After the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, the Republican Party, led by House Minority WhipNewt Gingrich campaigning on a “Contract with America“, were elected to majorities to both Houses of Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994. It was the first time since 1952 that the Republicans secured control of both houses of U.S. Congress, which with the exception of the Senate during 2001–2002 was retained through 2006. This capture and subsequent holding of Congress represented a major legislative turnaround, as Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the forty years preceding 1995, with the exception of the 1981–1987 Congress in which Republicans controlled the Senate.

In 1994, Republican Congressional candidates ran on a platform of major reforms of government with measures such as a balanced budget amendment and welfare reform. These measures and others formed the famous Contract with America, which represented the first effort to have a party platform in an off-year election. The Contract promised to bring all points up for a vote for the first time in history. The Republicans passed some of their proposals, but failed on others such as term limits.

Pietistic Republicans Versus Liturgical Democrats: 18901896

Voting behavior by religion, Northern U.S. late 19th century % Dem 90 10

From 1860 to 1912, the Republicans took advantage of the association of the Democrats with “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Rum stood for the liquor interests and the tavernkeepers, in contrast to the GOP, which had a strong dry element. “Romanism” meant Roman Catholics, especially Irish Americans, who ran the Democratic Party in every big city and whom the Republicans denounced for political corruption. “Rebellion” stood for the Democrats of the Confederacy, who tried to break the Union in 1861; and the Democrats in the North, called “Copperheads,” who sympathized with them.

Demographic trends aided the Democrats, as the German and Irish Catholic immigrants were Democrats and outnumbered the English and Scandinavian Republicans. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Republicans struggled against the Democrats’ efforts, winning several close elections and losing two to Grover Cleveland .

Religious lines were sharply drawn. Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Scandinavian Lutherans and other pietists in the North were tightly linked to the GOP. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially prohibition. Both parties cut across the class structure, with the Democrats more bottom-heavy.

On This Day The Republican Party Names Its First Candidates

  On July 6, 1854, disgruntled voters in a new political party named its first candidates to contest the Democrats over the issue of slavery. Within six and one-half years, the newly christened Republican Party would control the White House and Congress as the Civil War began.

For a brief time in the decade before the Civil War, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his descendants enjoyed a period of one-party rule. The Democrats had battled the Whigs for power since 1836 and lost the presidency in 1848 to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. After Taylor died in office in 1850, it took only a few short years for the Whig Party to collapse dramatically.

There are at least three dates recognized in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, built from the ruins of the Whigs. The first is February 24, 1854, when a small group met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to discuss its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The group called themselves Republicans in reference to Thomas Jefferson’s Republican faction in the American republic’s early days. Another meeting was held on March 20, 1854, also in Ripon, where 53 people formally recognized the movement within Wisconsin.

On July 6, 1854, a much-bigger meeting in Jackson, Michigan was attended by about 10,000 people and is considered by many as the official start of the organized Republican Party. By the end of the gathering, the Republicans had compiled a full slate of candidates to run in Michigan’s elections.

The Republican Party Was Founded To Oppose The Slave Power

PBS: American Experience

For the first half-century after the United States’ founding, slavery was only one of many issues in the country’s politics, and usually a relatively minor issue at that. The American South based its economy on the enslavement of millions, and the two major parties — which by the 1850s were the Democrats and the Whigs — were willing to let the Southern states be.

But when the US started admitting more and more Western states to the Union, the country had to decide whether those new states should allow slavery or not. And this was an enormously consequential question, because the more slave states there were, the easier it would be for the slaveholding states to get their way in the Senate and the Electoral College.

Now, the issue here wasn’t that Northern politicians were desperate to abolish slavery in the South immediately, apart from a few radical crusaders. The real concern was that Northerners feared the “Slave Power” — the South — would become a cabal that would utterly dominate US politics, instituting slavery wherever they could and cutting off opportunity for free white laborers, as historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her book .

The Republican Party Becomes The Party Of Rich Northerners

US History Scene

All this while, economic issues were growing more important to Republican politicians. Even before the Civil War, the North was more industrialized than the South, as you can see from this map of railway lines. After it, this industrialization only intensified.

And during the war, the federal government grew a lot bigger and spent a lot more money — and that meant people got rich, and owed their wealth to Republican politicians. The party’s economic policies, Cox Richardson writes, “were creating a class of extremely wealthy men.”

Gradually, those wealthy financiers and industrialists took more and more of a leading role in the Republican Party. They disagreed on many issues, but their interests — rather than the interests of black Southerners — increasingly started to become the party’s raison d’etre.

Juneteenth The Day Republicans Freed The Democrats Slaves

TMH

Our history and our heritage are being shoved by rioters, looters, and anarchists down the memory hole. This is year zero on their calendar. Everything that came before and every struggle for freedom and human dignity by patriots of all colors is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is now. The only thing that matters is what they tell you. How we got here and what makes us who and what we are may not be pretty or politically correct but it is important. We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t remember where we’ve been.

The canceling of American history by anarchists, encouraged by cowering Democratic governors and mayors is necessary if they intend on propagating the lie that America is and always has been irredeemably racist. The Republicans are labeled white supremacists and it’s being pushed that only liberal progressive Democrats can create social justice, which means the absence of resistance to groups like Black Lives Matter, which among other goodies on its website endorses the elimination of the nuclear family. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the progressive police state they are hoping to establish on Nov. 3, 2020.

The day after Sen. Elizabeth Warren was rebuked while making a speech critical of Sen. Jeff Sessions , Sen. Ted Cruz blasted Democrats, saying their party is the one rooted in racism.

He also happens to be a former card-carrying member of the KKK. In fact, he created his own chapter along with 150 of his friends and colleagues.

The Obama Years And The Rise Of The Tea Party: 20082016

John BoehnerHouse SpeakerBarack Obama

Following the 2008 elections, the Republican Party, reeling from the loss of the presidency, Congress and key state governorships, was fractured and leaderless.Michael Steele became the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, but was a poor fundraiser and was replaced after numerous gaffes and missteps. Republicans suffered an additional loss in the Senate in April 2009, when Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party, depriving the GOP of a critical 41st vote to block legislation in the Senate. The seating of Al Franken several months later effectively handed the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, but it was short-lived as the GOP took back its 41st vote when Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010.

Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives in the November general election, with a net gain of 63 seats, the largest gain for either party since 1948. The GOP also picked up six seats in the Senate, falling short of retaking control in that chamber, and posted additional gains in state governor and legislative races. Boehner became Speaker of the House while McConnell remained as the Senate Minority Leader. In an interview with National Journal magazine about congressional Republican priorities, McConnell explained that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for Obama to be a one-term president”.

Mitt RomneyMormon

Juneteenth Recalling End Of Slavery Is Marked Across Us

Selena Quinn, from left, LaVon Fisher-Wilson and Traci Coleman perform during a free outdoor event organized by The Broadway League as Juneteenth’s celebrations take place at Times Square Saturday, June 19, 2021, in New York.

Parades, picnics and lessons in history were offered Saturday to commemorate Juneteenth in the U.S., a day that carried even more significance after Congress and President Joe Biden created a federal holiday to observe the end of slavery.

Political Parties And A Complicated History With Race

Black people who could vote tended to support the Republican Party from the 1860s to about the mid-1930s. There were push-and-pull aspects to this. Republicans pledged to protect voting rights. African Americans viewed the party as the only vessel for their goals: Frederick Douglass said, “The Republican Party is the ship; all else is the sea.”

And the sea was perilous. The Democratic Party for most of the 19th century was a white supremacist organization that gave no welcome to Black Americans. A conservative group of politicians known as the Bourbons controlled Southern Democratic parties. For instance, well into the 20th century, the official name of Alabama’s dominant organization was the Democratic and Conservative Party of Alabama.

Fact check:U.S. didn’t reject an earlier version of Statue of Liberty that honored slaves

The Bourbons called their Republican opponents “radicals,” whether they warranted the label or not, Masur said.

“The Democrats were often called conservative and embraced that label,” she said. “Many of them were conservative in the sense that they wanted things to be like they were in the past, especially as far as race was concerned.”

“In consequence of this intolerance, colored men are forced to vote for the candidate of the Republican Party, however objectionable to them some of these candidates may be, unless they are prevented from doing so by violence and intimidation,” he said.

Never Trumpers Will Want To Read This History Lesson

In the 1850s, disaffected Democrats made the wrenching choice to leave their party to save American democracy. Here’s what happened.

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, is the author of . Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

“I was educated a Democrat from my boyhood,� a Republican delegate confided to his colleagues at Iowa’s constitutional convention in 1857. “Faithfully, I did adhere to that party until I could no longer act with it. Many things did I condemn ere I left that party, for my love of party was strong. And when I did, at last, feel compelled to separate from my old Democratic friends, it was like tearing myself away from old home associations.�

As often seems the case today, American politics in the 1850s were nearly all-consuming and stubbornly tribal. So it was hard—and bitterly so—for hundreds of thousands of Northern Democrats to abandon the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy.

Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts.

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Republican Voters Turn Against Their Partys Elites

Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights

The Tea Party movement, which sprang into existence in the early years of the Obama administration, was many things. It was partly about opposing Obama’s economic policies — foreclosure relief, tax increases, and health reform. It was partly about opposing immigration — when Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson interviewed Tea Party activists across the nation, they found that “immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern” those activists expressed.

But the Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didn’t always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.

Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their party’s national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.

Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their party’s politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.

Compensated Emancipation: Buy Out The Slave Owners

The thirteenth amendment to abolish slavery, which Lincoln ultimately sent to the states provided no compensation but earlier in his presidency, Lincoln made numerous proposals for “compensated emancipation” in the loyal border states whereby the federal government would purchase all of the slaves and free them. No state government acted on the proposal.

President Lincoln advocated that slave owners be compensated for emancipated slaves. On March 6, 1862 President Lincoln, in a message to the U.S. Congress, stated that emancipating slaves would create economic “inconveniences” and justified compensation to the slave owners. The resolution was adopted by Congress; however, the Southern states refused to comply. On July 12, 1862 President Lincoln, in a conference with Congressmen from Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri, encouraged their respective states to adopt emancipation legislation that gave compensation to the slave owners. On July 14, 1862 President Lincoln sent a bill to Congress that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds at 6% interest to states for slave emancipation compensation to the slave owners. The bill was never voted on by Congress.

In his December 1, 1862 State of the Union Address, Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment that would provide federal compensation to any state that voluntarily abolished slavery before the year 1900.

[halfmarathonhistories]

Born to Run on the 4th of July

This tour is also available as an audio tour

I will always have an affinity for the United States of America. I suppose it is hard to explain why. I just quite like American things…

Steph and I travelled across America in 2013 and have been back a few times since. When we travelled we couch surfed which meant staying with strangers, all of whom were amongst the nicest people we ever met. For my 30th Birthday we went to Boston, where we got to see Salem on Halloween and saw the Chicago Bulls vs The Boston Celtics. Something I had wanted to do since I was a child. 

I am fascinated by America; how different it all is yet how it’s all connected. It’s extremely distressing to see what a hellscape it has become. Especially for all the good people who live there.  With this fascination in mind, I decided to look into Belfast’s historical connections to the US and how I could link these together into a route to run on the 4th July. I have been able to orchestrate a route of just over 14km (1km for each of the original 13 colonies and 1 for Belfast) that encompasses American history from ancient times to the present day. Including links to American slaves, US Presidents, Civil Rights activists and just regular Americans. The full route is below:

Route map for July 4th by Jonny Murray on plotaroute.com

We begin at Belfast’s Thanks-Giving Square, home of the 2nd largest outdoor sculpture in Belfast, the ‘Beacon of Hope’, also known as ‘Nuala with the Hula’ and ‘The Angel of Thanksgiving’. Sculpted by artist Andy Scott based upon an idea by Myrtle Smyth who was inspired by the Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas. The purpose of the Thanks-Giving Square was to provide a public space in which to give thanks. Our Thanks-Giving Square is more secular than its sister square in Dallas. With a focus more on the universal concept of gratitude and hope through positivity and acceptance. The sculpture has become an important landmark for Belfast since its construction in 2007 and serves as a symbol for Belfast’s international connections. 

We then make our way towards the Waterfront Hall where the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama addressed the Northern Irish people in June 2013. His speech echoed the sentiments of Thanks-Giving Square, calling for unity and peace in the city. Obama also called for the removal of the peace walls that divide the city, which we will get to a little later on the run.

We now turn right down Chichester Street which becomes Wellington Place and past the Belfast City Hall where the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton addressed the people of Belfast while switching on the city’s Christmas lights in 1995. Much to the dismay of Belfast’s youngsters who were expecting the Power Rangers to have the honour of flicking the switch that year.

We now take a right at the Linen Hall Library, the oldest library in Belfast. Within the archives of the Linen Hall library is one of the oldest printed versions of the US Declaration of Independence which was published by the Belfast Newsletter in August 1776. This is not the only connection Northern Ireland has with the Declaration of Independence. John Dunlap was a native of Strabane in County Tyrone who moved to Philadelphia in 1757 at the age of 10 to work as an apprentice for his uncle who was a printer and bookseller. During the American Revolutionary war, Dunlap fought alongside George Washington and was awarded the contract of printing for the Continental Congress. After the Declaration of Independence had been signed, John Hancock ordered Dunlap to print 200 copies. These became known as the Dunlap Broadsheets and are the first published versions of the Declaration of Independence. The legend goes that a ship carrying the copy that was intended for King George III found itself in stormy waters and had to dock in Derry. This allowed the journalists of the Belfast Newsletter access to the document which led to The Belfast Newsletter being the first newspaper outside of America to publish a copy of the Declaration of Independence in full.

We now run down Fountain Street, right at Castle Street, left at Royal Avenue and onto Lower Garfield Street. Lower Garfield Street is named for the 20th President of the United States, James A. Garfield. Garfield was a veteran of the American Civil War, fighting for the Union Army. A strong abolitionist who had lobbied for strong punishments for those who fought on the side of the Confederacy. Garfield was seen as an American success story, having been born into extreme poverty but rising to the office of President through hard work and strong beliefs. During his presidency he had pushed for universal education to allow the newly freed slaves to have access to education that would ensure they would avail of equal rights. Garfield only served in office for 6 and a half months, as he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau in July 1881 and died from his injuries in September 1881.

We now leave Lower Garfield Street and take a right at North Street and then a left onto Warring Street. Warring Street, Donegall Street, North Street and Bridge Street make up what is known as ‘The 4 Corners’, this is one of the oldest parts of the city of Belfast. As it was a hive of United Irishmen activity during the Irish Rebellion of the 1790s it gave Belfast the nickname, ‘Boston of the North’ after the American city that became the birthplace of the American Revolution. Just off Warring Street is Sugarhouse Entry, where once stood the Benjamin Franklin Tavern, named for the American founding father who had visited Ireland and stayed at Hillsborough Castle before the American war of Independence. The United Irishmen would hold secret meetings in the Benjamin Franklin Tavern calling themselves The Muddler’s Club to avoid suspicion. A nearby restaurant is named in their honour and oil paintings of their meetings in the Benjamin Franklin Tavern can be seen at the entrance to the Premier Inn on Warring Street. 

At the top of Warring Street, we turn right down High Street and left at the Albert Clock onto Queen Street and Custom House Square. This was once the site of Chichester Quay, the home of the first US Consulate in Belfast. Belfast is the 2nd oldest running US Consulate in the world after Bordeaux, France. The first U.S Consul General in Belfast was James Holmes, who is commemorated by a blue plaque on the wall of McHugh’s bar. George Washington personally signed the papers that elected Holmes as the US Consul for Belfast on May 27th 1796. The current US Consulate is located in Danesfort House, off the Stranmillis Road. Danesfort House sits upon one of the oldest continually inhabited sites in Belfast, with artefacts dating back 5,000 years unearthed during its construction.

We now cross the road towards the Big Fish and join the Maritime Trail to run beside the river Lagan. We follow the path until we reach the CEA building, where we will turn left through the car park towards Princes Dock Street which will lead us to The American Bar. The American Bar has been located at its current premises since the 1860s. Although there is no consensus as to how the bar, formerly The American Inn, got its name there is belief that it was named for the many emigrants leaving Ireland for the New World. The bar was also one of the first sites American GI’s would see when they arrived in Belfast during World War 2, acting as both a farewell and a welcome to Irish Americans.

We now run past The American Bar and left onto Dock Street. We come to the corner of Dock Street and Garmoyle Street. Here, above the door of the Stella Maris Hostel for the Homeless, is a tile mural titled ‘At Sea’. It depicts one of the oldest connections Ireland has to America, the fabled crossing of the Atlantic by St. Brendan in 600AD. The story goes that while St. Brendan was in his late 80s, he built a ship and sailed it across the Atlantic Ocean in search of the Garden of Eden with a crew of between 80 – 150 men depending on which version of the story you’re told. Brendan recorded seeing pillars of ice rise out of the water, sheep the size of oxen and giants throwing balls of fire at them that smelt of sulphur. He also came across birds who would sing psalms, before finally landing on a country of lush green vegetation. After 7 years an angel advised Brendan and his crew to return home to Ireland. When they returned, they recounted their tale to everyone, and people would come from all over Ireland to hear Brendan’s tales of the new world. Historians began recording Brendan’s voyage and the island he described was included on maps. Christopher Columbus even used the legend as a basis on his journey to the Americas. While Brendan’s story may seem like fantasy, it has been interpreted to contain some elements of truth; the pillars of ice would have been ice bergs, the Faroe Islands are known to have large sheep and the singing birds and fireballs of sulphur could have come from Iceland’s volcanoes. As well as this, in 1976, adventurer Tim Severin recreated Brendan’s journey. By building a boat to the medieval specifications and setting off from the Dingle peninsula he successfully arrived in Newfoundland. So perhaps it is not a complete fantasy that an elderly Irish monk arrived on the shores of ancient America. 

We now continue down Dock Street, take a left at York Street and take a right past The City Side Centre to go down Henry Street, at the top of Henry Street we will take a left and cross the road towards the steps at North Queen Street. Head straight up these steps and follow the path round to Henry Place. This brings us past Clifton Street Graveyard, one of the oldest graveyards in the city and burial ground of the Irish Revolutionaries, Henry Joy and Mary Anne McCracken. Within this graveyard also lies William Brown, a black American who escaped slavery in America in the early 19th century and worked as a labourer in Belfast. The Clifton Street Cemetery records indicate that his wife and children remained as slaves in America at the time of his death in 1831.

We now head towards Clifton Street and then right towards Carlisle Circus and cross over towards Denmark Street. We will follow Denmark Street until we reach North Boundary Street. Here, turn right down Shankill Parade and then take a left down Boundary Way. At the end of this residential street is a community mural. Formerly a mural depicting the 7th President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, it now bears a quote from the President of the Louisiana Justice Institute, Tracie Washington (Not ‘Jackson’ as is depicted on the mural), “Stop calling me resilient,” “Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.” Tracie Washington delivered this statement as a response to the New Orleans City Resilience Strategy in 2015 and their plans to tackle the continuing environmental crisis in Louisiana, which did not address the root cause of the issues. Her argument was succinctly summed up by Maria Kaika, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester; “if we took Tracie Washington’s objection seriously, we would stop focusing on how to make citizens more resilient ‘no matter what stresses they encounter,’ as this would only mean that they can take more suffering, deprivation or environmental degradation in the future. If we took this statement seriously, we would need to focus instead on identifying the actors and processes that produce the need to build resilience in the first place. And we would try to change these factors instead.” This statement has been adopted by the people of the Shankill who feel the problems that face their community are not addressed due to a perceived resilience of the people. 

We then take a left to return to North Boundary Street and take a right onto Shankill Road. We follow the Shankill Road up to the corner of Lanark Way. We follow Lanark Way toward Cupar Way where we will take a left to run along the Belfast Peace Wall. On this wall we will see the message of President Bill Clinton, “Strength and wisdom are not opposing values”. 

Bill Clinton visited Belfast in 1995, becoming the first sitting US President to visit the province. He was greeted as a rock star with thousands of people lining the streets to get a glimpse of him. Below is a video of him visiting with Gerry Adams in a small office on the Falls Road. The Presidential cavalcade making its way down the Falls Road is a truly surreal sight.

We follow the Peace Wall down to the end of Cupar Way and take a left onto North Howard Street, a right onto North Howard Link and right at Northumberland Street. Here we come to the Solidarity Wall and the mural depicting the freed slave and American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. Douglass visited Belfast many times during his life to speak to the city at the invitation of the United Irishmen. He would use Belfast as an example of a Western city where racism was not as prevalent as it was in America and would speak to large crowds in the city and received a warm welcome. A handwritten copy of a speech he delivered in Belfast is available to view on the Library of Congress website. The rest of the mural depicts individuals involved in the American Civil Rights movement, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. It is interspersed with figures of international civil rights such as Nelson Mandela and Mary Anne McCracken. As well as a quote from Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. Douglass’s placement in the centre of the mural illustrates how the struggles for civil rights began with the abolition of the slave trade. He is also facing the Peace Wall, a reminder that unity and civil liberties have still not been achieved. 

We follow the Solidarity Wall left onto Divis Street. Here we see the most recent addition to the wall, a Black Lives Matter mural, depicting the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota. This murder sparked international protests during the pandemic of 2020 and has led to calls for sweeping changes to American policing and self-reflection about race relations in America and across the world.

We continue on Divis Street before turning right onto Ardmoulin Street, left toward Clonfaddin Street and right onto Cullingtree Road, we will then cross over the pedestrian bridge toward Durham Street. We take a right on Durham Street, a left on College Square North and then a right onto College Avenue. We will follow this road as it becomes Great Victoria Street and we pass the Grand Opera House. The Grand Opera played host to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, although at the time he was in Belfast as a General during World War 2. He was in attendance at the Grand Opera House in 1944 during a production of Irvine Berlin’s ‘This Is The Army’ performed by the US Army. Eisenhower was also presented with the Freedom of the City of Belfast later that year. 

We now follow Great Victoria Street towards Bradbury Place and on to University Road towards Queen’s University Belfast where former US Secretary of State and Presidential nominee, Hilary Clinton was made Chancellor in January 2020. 

We then take a left into Botanic Gardens. Now this a somewhat tenuous link to the United States, but bear with me… Charles Blondin was a French tight-rope walker who found his greatest fame in America when he walked across the Niagara Falls on a tight rope, 1,100ft long, 3.25inches in diameter and 160ft above the water. He would walk back and forth across the rope, each time performing a different stunt such as pushing a wheelbarrow before him and even stopping midway to cook and eat an omelette. Abraham Lincoln compared himself to Blondin during the 1864 Presidential election claiming he was like ‘"Blondin on the tightrope, with all that was valuable to America in the wheelbarrow he was pushing before him’.

Blondin lived in America for most of his life but toured Britain and Ireland extensively. While in Dublin in 1860, a rope broke during his performance which led to the collapse of the scaffolding that was holding the rope in place. This led to the death of 2 workers who were on the scaffolding at the time. Due to this incident, Blondin began using rope made at the Belfast Rope Works and did so for the rest of his career. He performed in Botanic Gardens many times throughout his career, the first time being in 1861. He even had his last ever professional performance in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens in 1896. Where he walked across a tight-rope at age 72 while blind in one eye. 

We now leave Botanic Gardens and onto Stranmillis Embankment and over King’s Bridge. King’s Bridge suffered structural damage during World War 2 caused by heavy American Military Vehicles crossing over it. After the bridge we turn left and run down Annadale Embankment towards Ormeau Park. American GI’s were stationed in Ormeau Park during World War 2. It acted as a camp and training ground for the American military.  We then head up the Ormeau Road with the park to our left, as we take a left down Park Road, down Ravenhill Park and finishing at the corner of Ravenhill Park and Onslow Parade, the site of Kingspan Stadium, formerly Ravenhill Stadium. Here is where the first games of American Football and Baseball were played in Ireland. On 14th November 1942, American soldiers played the first game of American football to a crowd of over 10,000 people. They competed under the team names ‘Yarvard’ and ‘Hale’ with the American Col. Maurice J Meyer introducing the game and providing running commentary for those in attendance. Hale won the game 9-7 with a field goal sealing the points. 

The first baseball game took place in April 1942 between US 2nd Battalion and 3rd Battalion in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. Major General Russel P Hartle, Acting Commander of the US Army in Northern Ireland threw out the first pitch. Like the football game, running commentary was provided over loud speakers for the audience. 3rd Batallion emerged victorious with Corporal Leo J Robinson becoming the first serviceman to hit a home run in Europe during World War 2.

And so we have come to the end of our 4th July run. Hopefully you aren’t too tired, though it’s understandable as you have just run the length of American history. When researching the connections America has with Belfast, I found it interesting that America is somewhat of a unifying force in such a divided city. All parts of the city enjoy some notable connection the US. It can even bring politicians together, with Sammy Wilson sitting beside Gerry Adams during Barack Obama’s speech. This is ironic, because America itself is so divided, arguably it’s broken. As has even been illustrated on the walls of Belfast with the highlighting of racial and social inequalities that continue to exist in America. Inequalities that have been magnified during the current pandemic. With that in mind, I would urge everyone to educate themselves on these issues and find ways for you to make little changes that can contribute to addressing and solving these issues. As has been seen from this run, our countries have an impact on each other so let’s make the impact positive.

After the run, I recommend putting your feet up and watching Hamilton on Disney+. Probably the best way to spend your 4th July.

Sources: https://wartimeni.com/,https://extramuralactivity.com/, Weird Belfast by Reggie Chamberlain-King, Wikipedia, https://www.inyourpocket.com/belfast, https://edgeeffects.net/stop-calling-me-resilient/, BBC, https://www.culturenorthernireland.org/

[misswilma]

internet questions. | 028

27.04.2020 | 1.1k words

— are the 20s cursed?

This year began with memes of World War III and the plagues of the 20s, only one of those seems to be a joke though. For a few centuries now, … [The Oredigger]

    DURING SELF-ISOLATION I HAVE A lot of free time, and during this free time I realised something: the 20s are cursed.

The 20s for the last five centuries seem to have started with an outbreak or a plaque.

1620s: unknown disease in colonised america & bubonic plague in italy The furthest back an outbreak plagued the second decade was during the 1620s (The Oredigger, 2020).

A series of plague had struck the southeastern coast of the present-day United States, leaving many Native Americans dead. However, as this outbreak was not well-documented, the disease that caused the deaths is unknown, although smallpox and yellow fever has been suggested (The Oredigger, 2020).

In the same decade, an outbreak of the bubonic plague swept Italy, killing around 300,000 (The Oredigger, 2020).

1720s: the great plague of marseille In Marseille, France, a plague struck the city in 1720. Similarly to that of the Black Death, it spread through fleas and contact with infected victims. Victims developed painful swellings forming bombs, located in the groin, armpit and neck area. As the victim’s state worsened, symptoms included painful muscle cramps, gangrene, bloody vomiting, coma, and finally, death (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

Again, similarly to the Black Death, the disease arrived in Marseille via ship in May 1720. The ship had arrived from the Levantine coast with a carbo full of silk fabrics and cotton. The outbreak was slow, first showing up around the beginning of July when two women in the city died after displaying symptoms of the plague. Later, doctors attended a gravely ill eight-year-old boy. The boy was diagnosed with the plague, and the doctors alerted a city alderman who quickly spread the word to the rest of the city. Around two months later, every district in Marseille was affected (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

Hospitals quickly became overwhelmed and infirmaries ran out of room to hold the dead. Bodies were tossed out on the streets, worsening the situation. They tried in a futile attempt to throw the dead bodies into mass graves filled with quicklime (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

At one point the situation turned so dire the provincial court of the nearby city of Aix passed legislation making any communication with anyone from Marseille punishable by death (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

By the autumn of 1721, the plague started to loosen its grip on Marseille because of the colder weather. By winter, “only” one person per day died from the plague. The plague, however, returned in the spring of 1722, causing panic and more deaths (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

As a whole, it took twenty-six months for the plague to run its course and by the end of it, an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children had succumbed to the disease (Europe Between East And West, 2017).

1820s: the cholera pandemic In September 1817, the first of several cholera pandemics would outbreak in Asia. It began near the city of Calcutta, located in what was then down as British India. The next year the disease was found in Bombay. Then it spread quickly to other parts of Asia, by March 1820 it had reached Siam (now known as Thailand), in spring of 1821 Java, Oman and China, in 1822 Japan, Baghdad, Syria, and by 1823 Russia (Wikipedia).

Then, in 1824, it suddenly stopped. It is not entirely known why the disease suddenly stopped spreading, although some researchers believe this was due to the cold winters of 1823--1824. Bacteria in the water supplies would later be found out as the cause of the outbreaks, and the cold, harsh weather would have killed the bacteria which stopped the spreading of cholera (Wikipedia).

As for the cause of the quick spreading of the disease, the British Army and Navy personnel are believed to have contributed. The British troops carried it overland to Nepal and Afghanistan, and the Navy ships carried infected people to the shores of the Indian Ocean, from Africa to Indonesia, China and Japan (Wikipedia).

The total deaths from this pandemic are unknown. It has been estimated that in Bangkok 30,000 people died and in British India, around 1–2 million died (Wikipedia). 1920s: the spanish flu pandemic The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls the 1918 flu pandemic, more commonly known as the Spanish Flu, “the most severe pandemic in recent history,” and for good reason. Though mortality was high in any age group—people younger than five, twenty to forty and older than sixty-five—, what was unique to the pandemic was that even a healthy person could succumb to the disease.

In the spring of 1918, the first wave of the flu occurred and the sick got symptoms like chills, fever and fatigue, but they usually recovered. The number of deaths was low. However, in the autumn the same year, it came back with a vengeance. A victim died within hours of developing symptoms, skin turned blue and lungs filled with fluid suffocating them (History, 2010).

The Spanish Flu was caused by the H1N1 influenza virus, but it is not entirely known where this particular flu originated. English virologist John Oxford theorised that the United Kingdom troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France was the source of the pandemic (Wikipedia). The United States has also been theorised as pandemic’s origin, where the first case was reported in Fort Riley, Kansas in March 1918 (History, 2010).

When the Spanish Flu came to the United States, scientists and doctors were not sure what caused it and how to treat it. There was no vaccine or antivirals to combat the virus. This was also during the First World War, so there was a shortage of physicians and other health workers available in the U.S. mainland, as many had been sent to Europe (History, 2010).

Hospitals were overloaded with patients that schools, private homes and other buildings had to be made into makeshift hospitals. Some community officials imposed quarantine, told people to wear masks and shut down public spaces (schools, churches, etc.), people were advised to stay indoors (History, 2010).

In the summer of 1919, in the United States, the flu started to come to an end. The Spanish flu took a heavy toll on society. Husbands lost their wives, parents lost their children, funeral parlours were overwhelmed and many families retorted to digging graves for their dead family members. The economy was affected, businesses were forced to shut down, and basic services, like mail delivery, were hindered as many of the workers were struck with the flu (History, 2010).

The Spanish Flu infected around 500 million people worldwide and killed anywhere from 17 million to 50 million people, becoming one of the deadliest pandemics in human history (Wikipedia).

_____ REFERENCES

“are the 20s cursed - Google Search”, Google Search.

1620s

Kelley, Rachel. “The curse of the 20s: a centurial outbreak |”, The Oredigger.

1720s

“Marseilles Plague 1720 -1722 | Europe Between East And West”, Europe Between East and West.

1820s

“1817–1824 cholera pandemic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, Wikipedia. (English)

1920s

“1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus) | Pandemic Influenza (Flu) | CDC”, Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“Spanish Flu - Symptoms, How It Began & Ended - HISTORY”, History. 

“Spanish flu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, Wikipedia (English) 

_____ PUBLICATION HISTORY 

30.04.2020

[malinallispeaks]

Day 7 - Big Trouble in Little Xochimilco

We said goodbye to Greg that morning, and wished him a good trip. He was San Fransisco bound, and then there were three. 

Glen and I started the morning with some coffee at a popular coffee joint and a walk around the neighborhood. 

On our walk, we stumbled upon the oldest church in the Americas,

And the fabled, La Malinche house. The place where she reportedly lived in the years following the conquest. 

There were no signs, no plaque, there were no people, it had been bought by a private investor and it lay lifeless. We wondered if we were even in the right spot. After some researching, we verified that she did indeed live in this neighborhood until 1524, and since no other house claimed to have belonged to her, once more we have to defer to silence. It was unsettling how much of our investigation of her has resulted in silence, shrugs, or lack of any answers or any significant information. Here we were, at the foot of the door she must have walked through on a daily basis, and yet, there was nothing to preserve her memory here. 

The street to the north bears her name, Malintzin. Her name, in fact, is everywhere. Sadly, not many people know what it means. It’s almost as if it has become devoid of meaning. 

Across the square was a more decorated and visited building: the Cortes Hacienda.

It was bright, almost gaudy, and filled with a mishmash of anachronistic iconography and decor. There were regal lions posted up next to Aztec shrines, friars next to Mayan calendars. It was a tortilla soup of Mexican culture, and then it hit me. Here we were, in the home of a ruthless conqueror, a man known for decimating the natives’ way of life and butchering millions, an invader often seen as public enemy number one by Mexicans, in a place that he once lived, a place that was once the Spanish seat of power in the transition to the colonial model of New Spain, and yet… it was a quaint exploding palette of quintessential Mexican culture. It was a shrine to mestizaje, the often times contradictory mixing of all of the traditions, bloodlines, and cultures that still call Mexico home. 

Cortes is probably rolling in his grave since the “savage” gods he tried so hard to eradicate now stand proudly in the courtyard of his former home. Here is a man who used to demolish ancient temples to build Catholic churches. The irony is that this space: his own home has been swallowed up by the very own mestizaje he helped create. After all he and Malintzin had Martin, the first well-documented mestizo in the history of Mexico. 

I cringed a bit at this revisionist history. Do people walk in here and nod happily, not seeing what’s strange about this landscape? Is it easier to swallow the truth that Mexico is more Frida Kahlo than Martin? What does it mean to be rewrite the horrors of indigenous oppression and the racial caste system in favor of a Mexico where a shared culture is celebrated? Is it possible to celebrate our mestizo culture while still holding a light to the divisions that once existed and still continue to exist?

 I sure hope so. 

 Next, we went to Xohimilco, 

a section of the city that is as close to how the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan used to be: a series of man-made islands called chinampas. These were used to farm or build on. Canals ran alongside the islands that the locals use to get around, much like the Aztec once did. 

As we approached the entrance to the docks where the gondolas waited, a guy on bike warned us that the road ahead was closed due to construction and that we should take a right up ahead. We thanked the man and turned. Another man on a bike pointed us to the same new route, he showed us a Mexican board of tourism badge on a lanyard and told us to follow him to the best route to the boats. We followed him to the docks

 where we parked, and were lead down to the boats that were tied together on the water to hear the prices of the trips. 

The for the mini trip: 1,500, the medium, 2,500, the full trip, 3,000 (all in pesos of course). The prices were steep, reeeallly steep, especially considering the fact that most other costs regarding tourist attractions and museums were very low. We almost said no, but then realized we had come this far and Xochimilco was one of the most important places to see for our research since we could see chinampas up close and use the pictures and videos as sources in our classroom. 

We almost left to shop around but they insisted that these were the prices. They were hardworking boaters and they were offering an exclusive tour of Xochimilco that would allow us to disembark on all the good spots. They even offered us 2,500 for the full trip, and we budged and agreed to it, but said we’d have to take cash out.

“That’s okay, we can walk with you to the nearest bank afterwards and you can pay us there!” 

Great! It was pricy, but we were excited to ship off.

A mariachi boat immediately pulled up to us and started playing music. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves now.

A replica of the  “Island of Dead Dolls.” As much as I wanted to see the original, it was still an 8 hour boat ride away.

We interviewed asked the boat drivers about La Malinche, neither of them knew who she was, but had heard the name many times. Later, one of them mentioned legends about La Llorona having lived here in one of these Chinampas and that her ghost still wanders here. 

Looks like La Antigua and Xochimilco are going to have to fight for her.

His story was unique in that his reasoning for her drowning her kids was because she wanted to protect them from her Spanish husband’s constant abuse and beatings. She eventually snapped for the abuse and killed her children, then herself. 

He added a particularly skin crawling detail, which is that the closer you hear her weeping, the farther away she is, but the farther you heat her weeping, the closer she is. Also, if you see her, or hear her scream close up, you will die immediately of the fright. 

On our way back, the ever resourceful Glen looked up the prices online. He showed me that the prices were far lower, and the government protected price for ANY Xochimilco boat ride was no more than 350 pesos an hour. We grimaced, but we’d agreed to the initial price and felt like idiots. 

We hopped off the boats and the drivers hurried us along a back route, away from the main pier and back to the main street where they would take us to an ATM. I stopped, snooped around, and saw this.

The woman at this booth made silent hand gestures, warning us not to go with them. I went towards the booth and the men told me to stop and follow them. The women explained to me that they could not leave the booth, but they handed me a flyer with the government protected prices. I told her we took a 2 hour trip and she told me “Don’t pay more than 700! It doesn’t matter what you originally agreed to!”

That’s when things started getting hairy.

I saw a lot of commotion around the parking lot, and men started to communicate to each other. I walked over to Glen and Roberto and told them what was up, then I told the boat driver that he was ripping us off and that we’d pay 1,000 since that was still a hefty tip on top of the maximum amount they were allowed to charge tourists. 

He refused, and said he would call the “dispatcher” and I could deal with him. 

Then I saw the bike guy again, the guy who was “nice enough” to show us the way and realized this was all a racket. They saw our Guadalajara plates and diverted us away from the main entrance and towards their own parking lot. He also said we’d have to wait for the dispatcher since he didn’t deal with the money.

When the other men were distracted, I told Roberto to get the car out of the parking lot and wait for us on the main street while Glen and I walked the other way toward the booth and said we’d wait for the dispatcher there. They tried to pull us away but we stayed in front of the booth where the women were also calling for backup. They told us these guys operate on intimidation and that’s why they couldn’t leave the booth to warn tourists, since last time they did, they got threatened to be beaten. 

The boat driver was getting nervous, he saw that we were not budging form the booth and I heard him talking to other people that we might leave. They were all trying to call others on the phone telling them to “come quick.”

The boat driver finally approached and I told him I should not pay him more than 700 since they lied to us from the beginning and were intimidating us, but that we’d give him 1,000 since we did originally agree to a bigger price (like the pendejos we were). 

He looked around, and accepted, taking the money and we bolted. As Glen and I walked towards the car where Roberto was waiting at the wheel, a man in a chair lifted a cell phone to his ear and said “they’re leaving, they’re leaving!”

We bolted through the muddy streets and laughed our nerves away. We fell for a very elaborate racket and were lucky enough to get out of it thanks to some solid teamwork. 

Afterwards we went back to Coyacan and walked around the streets and markets, had some amazing tostadas, and some of the most elaborately crafted coffee I’d ever seen. 

Afterwards, we had to stop by taqueria la Malinche.

We asked the woman who was running it what she thought about La Malinche and she said: “Me encanta!” I told her that was the first positive opinion we’ve heard about La Malinche, and when I asked her why, she froze.

She thought I was talking about her taco shop.

On closer inspection, I see that it was named after the women who fought against the Mexican government during the revolution. 

These women fought, cooked, healed, and were all around badasses. They are most commonly known as adelitas, but in many instances are also referred to as “las Malinches,” a title many bold women wore proudly for their bold defiance of the powers that be in their attempts to overthrow them. 

But once again, we are left empty handed in terms of the original Malinche.

[badthingstrumpdidtoday]

A Summary of Bad Things Trump Did This Week, 2/26/17-3/4/17

We’re entering a new month of 2017, and with March comes a new round of bad things Trump has done. Here are some of the most notable from the past week.

A majority of Trump’s claims in his speech to Congress were lies

Source: The Independent

Despite some bold statements in his speech to Congress on Tuesday, The Independent has found that much of what he claimed was untrue:

While much of the speech was focused on the same rhetoric that Mr Trump led his campaign with – including a commitment to bring jobs back to the US and boost the military – he also made a number of factual claims about his work as president.

Here are some of those false claims in full, as fact checked by the Associated Press.

The article goes on to cover those claims in-depth, and why many of his statements were false.

White House plans major cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency

Source: The Washington Post

These cuts are included in a new budget proposal for 2018, which outline massive increases to defense funding at the cost of federal programs, including many EPA projects:

The funding level proposed, which the document says “highlights the trade-offs and choices inherent in pursuing these goals,” could have a significant impact on the agency. Its annual budget would drop from $8.2 billion a year to $6.1 billion. And because much of that funding already goes to states and localities in the form of grants, such cuts could have an even greater effect on the EPA’s core functions.

Though President Trump professes to care strongly about clean air and clean water, almost no other federal department or agency is as much in the crosshairs at the moment. As a candidate, he vowed to get rid of the EPA “in almost every form,” leaving only “little tidbits” intact. The man he chose to lead the agency, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, sued it more than a dozen times in recent years, challenging its legal authority to regulate such things as mercury pollution, smog and carbon emissions from power plants.

The plan reflects those past sentiments. As proposed, the EPA’s staff would be slashed from its current level of 15,000 to 12,000. Grants to states, as well as its air and water programs, would be cut by 30 percent. The massive Chesapeake Bay cleanup project would receive only $5 million in the next fiscal year, down from its current $73 million.

In addition, 38 separate programs would be eliminated entirely. Grants to clean up brownfields, or abandoned industrial sites, would be gone. Also zeroed out: the radon program, climate change initiatives and funding for Alaskan native villages.

Private email account used by Pence during his term as governor was hacked

Source: The Washington Post

Pence’s staff confirmed that a private AOL account he used while governor had been hacked in 2016, which may have compromised confidential information:

Pence had used the AOL account since the mid-1990s and continued to use it throughout his time as governor until early 2016, when the account was compromised by a hack. Hackers leveraged his contacts to launch a phishing attack against his contact lists, sending an email claiming that Pence and his wife were stranded in the Philippines and needed financial help.

After the account was hacked, it was shut down and Pence began using a second AOL account, an aide said.

The use of a private email account is not prohibited by law in Indiana. However, public officials cannot use state accounts for political business.

Security experts noted to the Indy Star that some of Pence's emails were apparently confidential and sensitive enough that they could not be turned over in response to public records requests.

Trump’s team turned down ethics training for White House staff and officials

Source: Politico

Several political appointees at agencies said they received very little training and that the period between the election and Inauguration Day was hectic. There has also been little contact between the political appointees at agencies and the longtime civil servants because of a lack of trust, several of these people said.

The lack of training likely fueled a series of early missteps in the presidency, as aides fired off executive orders and new rules without briefing Congress or their peers at agencies.

Keystone pipeline under no obligation to use all American steel, despite Trump’s recent comments

Source: Politico, CNN

The wording in Trump’s recent “buy American” Executive Order would exempt Keystone XL from needing to use only US steel:

Trump signed the order calling for the Commerce Department to develop a plan for U.S. steel to be used in “all new pipelines, as well as retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipelines” inside the U.S. projects “to the maximum extent possible.”

By the White House’s judgment, that description would not include Keystone XL, which developer TransCanada first proposed in 2008.

“The Keystone XL Pipeline is currently in the process of being constructed, so it does not count as a new, retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipeline,” the White House spokeswoman said.

CNN provides additional coverage of this HERE, as well as information regarding the materials being used for the Keystone construction:

TransCanada said late Friday it has already has purchase agreements for the steel pipe it will use on Keystone. It said half of the pipe will come from the Arkansas plant of India-based steelmaker, Welspun. Another 10% will come from a Welspun plant in India, the rest will be imported from Canada and Italy. In addition, it has already purchased about $800 million worth of other goods from U.S. manufacturers.

"This project will support U.S. energy security, create thousands of well-paying U.S. jobs and provide substantial economic benefits," the company said in the statement.

But most of those jobs are short-term. Once the pipeline opens it would require only 35 full-time permanent jobs to run it, according to an government estimate that TransCanada does not dispute.

White House proposes dramatic cuts to foreign aid budget and the State Department

Source: The Guardian

The proposed budget would slash foreign aid and State Department budgets by one third in order to increase military funding. The cuts have drawn ire from both both sides of the aisle, as well as from retired military leaders:

The US spends just over $50bn annually on the state department and USAID, compared with $600bn or more each year on the Pentagon. Several Republicans this week raised concerns about the planned cuts to the state department.

“I am very concerned by reports of deep cuts that could damage efforts to combat terrorism, save lives and create opportunities for American workers,” said Ed Royce, the chairman of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee.

Furthermore, more than 120 retired US generals and admirals – including George Casey, former chief of staff of the army, and David Petraeus, former CIA director and commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – sent a letter to Congress, urging it fully fund diplomacy and foreign aid.

“Elevating and strengthening diplomacy and development alongside defense are critical to keeping America safe,” they said. “We know from our service in uniform that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone.”

Want to learn more about how we can stop more bad sh*t from happening?

Donate to charities dedicated to fighting against the Trump agenda.

Learn from former congressional staffers on best practices for making your representative listen to you.

Register to vote in the November 6, 2018 Congressional midterm elections, save the date, and vote!

Learn how to run for office or get involved in your local political party.

Attend peaceful political protests and know your rights as a protestor.

Support organizations dedicated to investigative journalism and protecting our First Amendment rights.

Be sure to follow for tomorrow’s Bad Things Trump Did Today.

[allineednow]

<p>Fire Key to Prehistoric Survival in Arid Southwest USA Claims Archaeologist</p>

Traditional wisdom holds that ancient villagers planted corn, and lots of it, to endure the dry and hostile states of the American Southwest.

But University of Cincinnati professor Alan Sullivan is challenging that notion, asserting that people burned the understory of forests to grow wild plants .

"There has been this orthodoxy concerning the importance of corn," said Sullivan, director of graduate studies in UC's Department of Anthropology in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. "It's been widely considered that ancient peoples of Arizona between A.D. 900 to 1200 were reliant on it.

"But if corn is lurking out there in the Grand Canyon, it is hiding successfully because we have looked all over and haven't found it."

Sullivan has published a dozen papers outlining the evidence of corn agriculture in more than 2,000 sites where they have found artifacts of ancient settlement and pottery sherds. He summarized his findings in a presentation last month in Boston University.

Corn that ancient people grew in the Southwest 1,000 years ago looked nothing like the sweet corn people eat.

Credit: Joseph Fuqua II/UC Creative Services

Sullivan has spent more than two decades leading archaeological field study to Grand Canyon National Park and the region's Upper Basin, home to the 1.6-million-acre Kaibab National Forest.

When you consider the Grand Canyon, you might picture desert vistas and cliffs. But the Upper Basin, where his pupils and Sullivan work, is home to forests of juniper and pinyon trees stretching as far as you can see, he explained.

"When you look down into the Grand Canyon, you do not see any forest. But on either rim you will find deep, dense woods," he said.

On such high-elevation plateaus, his pupils and Sullivan have discovered evidence of ancient life along with ceramic jugs adorned with corrugated patterns. Sullivan is particularly interested in the cultural and social practices of growing, sharing and eating food called a foodway.

"What would constitute evidence of a corn-based foodway?" he asked. "And if experts agree it should look like that but we do not find evidence of it, that would seem to be an issue for that model."

Sullivan has pieced together clues from scientific analysis and firsthand to produce a persuasive argument that people used fire to foster the growth of nuts, seeds and edible leaves of plants like amaranth and chenopodium, wild relatives of quinoa. These plants are called "ruderals," which are the first to grow in a forest disturbed by fire or clear-cutting.

"It's definitely a paradigm-threatening opinion," Sullivan said. "It's not based on wild speculation. It's theorizing that is evidence-based. It has taken us about 30 years to get to the stage where we can confidently conclude this."

Lab analysis identified pollen in clay pots that were used before Sullivan from dirt and his students found them.

"They've identified 6,000 or 7,000 pollen grains and only six [grains] were corn. Everything else is dominated by these ruderals," Sullivan said.

Today the corn itself looked nothing like the hearty ears of sweet corn individuals enjoy at barbecues. The ears were puny, about the size of a typical cob, with tiny, hard kernels, Sullivan said.

So if corn was not being grown by people, what were they eating? Sullivan found clues around his excavation sites that people set fires large enough to burn away the understory of grasses and weeds but small enough not to harm important sources of calorie-rich berries and nuts, the pinyon and juniper trees.

Evidence for this theory has been found in trees. Raging wildfires leave burn scars in growth rings of living trees. In the absence of frequent smaller fires, forests would accumulate vast sums of wood to make conditions ripe for an inferno triggered by a lightning strike. But examinations of ponderosa pine trees and early juniper found no scars, suggesting big fires are a relatively new phenomenon in Arizona.

"To me that affirms there were not massive fires back then," Sullivan said.

Sullivan also analyzed the geologic layers in these sites. Like a time capsule, the intervals were captured by the stratigraphic analysis before and after people lived there. He found higher concentrations of wild edible plants. And when people abandoned the sites, the place they left behind saw fewer of these plants.

But it was only this year that Sullivan found contemporary evidence supporting his theory by setting fires that ancient people generated a spring bounty. Sullivan returned to the Grand Canyon to examine forest destroyed by a 2016 fire. Touched off by a lightning strike, the blaze called the Scott Fire laid waste to 2,660 acres of sagebrush, junipers and pines.

Regardless of the level of the forest fire, Sullivan discovered plants growing thick everywhere underfoot only weeks later.

"This burned area was covered in ruderals. Just covered," he said. "That to us was confirmation of our theory. Our argument is there is this dormant seed bed that is activated by any sort of fire."

Archaeologists with the National Park Service have found evidence that corn grew below the rim of the Grand Canyon, said Ellen Brennan, cultural resource program manager for the national park.

"It does seem that the early people of the Grand Canyon never pursued corn agriculture to the extent that other ancestral Puebloan peoples did in other areas of the Southwest," Brennan said. "From the Grand Canyon, it appears that there continued to be persistent use of native plants as a primary food source rather than corn."

The National Park Service hasn't examined whether ancient people used fire to improve conditions for native plants. But given what is known about civilizations at the moment, it is likely they did, Brennan said.

The initial assumptions about what life was like in the Southwest 1,000 years ago came from more recent observations of Native Americans like the Hopi, said archaeologist for Kaibab National Forest, Neil Weintraub. He worked at some of the sites in the Upper Basin alongside Sullivan.

"Corn is still a big part of the Hopi culture. A good deal of dances they do are about water and the fertility of corn," he said. "The Hopi are seen as the descending groups of Puebloan."

Weintraub said while corn was elsewhere in the Southwest no doubt relied on by peoples, him has convinced that citizens of the Upper Basin relied on wild food -- and used fire to cultivate it.

University of Cincinnati archaeology students study a site near Grand Canyon National Park.

"It's a fascinating idea because we really see that these people were highly mobile. On the margins where it is very dry we believe they were taking advantage of different areas of the landscape at different times of the year," Weintraub said.

"It's been well documented that Native Americans burned the forest in different areas of the nation. I see no reason why they would not have been doing the same thing 1,000 years ago," he said.

The area around the Grand Canyon is particularly dry, going many weeks without rain. Life persists. Weintraub said if you know where to look, the forest generates a surprising bounty of food. The pinyon trees produce a bumper crop of nuts some years.

"In a good year, we did not have to bring lunch in the area when we were out at our archaeological surveys. We would be cracking pinyons daily," Weintraub said.

Weintraub researched the forest burned in last year Scott Fire. The ground was thick with undergrowth that was new, especially a wild relative of quinoa he said.

"Goosefoot has a minty odor to it, particularly in the fall. We actually started chewing on it. It was pretty nice," Weintraub said. "It's a high-nutrient food. I'd be curious to know more about how indigenous peoples processed it for food."

UC's Sullivan said this land management can teach us today, particularly when it comes to preventing devastating fires.

"Foresters call it 'the wicked issue.' All of our woods are anthropogenic [man-made] because of fire suppression and fire exclusion," Sullivan said.

"These woods are unnatural. They are alien to the world. They have not had any significant fires in them in decades," he said. "The fuel loads have built up to the point where you get a small ignition source and the fire is catastrophic in a sense that they rarely were in the past."

The National Park Service often lets fires burn in areas when they do not threaten property or people. But people are building businesses and homes adjacent to or within woods. Forest managers are reluctant to run burning so close to population, Sullivan said.

Eventually so much dry wood builds up that a dropped cigarette or unattended campfire can result in devastating fires like the 2016 blaze that killed 14 people and destroyed 11,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains or the fires in California this year that killed 40 people and caused an estimated $1 billion in property damage.UC professor Alan Sullivan's research is challenging the assumption that ancient people subsisted on corn in America's Southwest. Instead, he said evidence indicates they used fire to cultivate foods.

Credit: Joseph Fuqua II/UC Creative Services

"It's a chronic issue. How can you fix it?" he asked. "The U.S. Forest Service has experimented with different methods: prescribed burning, which creates a good deal of irritating smoke, or thinning the forest, which creates a disposal issue."

Fire also seems to increase the diversity of forest species. Sullivan said than he found in his archeological samples, surveys find biodiversity in forests today.

"That is one measure of how devastating our direction of passion has been to these woods," he said. "These fire-responsive plants have basically disappeared from the landscape. Species diversity in certain cases has collapsed."

Today, controlled burns are conducted by federal land managers when practical to tackle this issue in national parks like the Grand Canyon.

"The fire management program for Grand Canyon National Park attempts to reintroduce fire as a natural agent of the surroundings," the park's Brennan said. "That is to decrease ground fuels through prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, and wildland fire."

Scientists also are studying how to adjust forest management techniques she said.

"Program managers are working to understand how climate change affects forest management and how to restore forests to the point where fire could follow a more natural yield interval given a specific forest type," she said.

Climate change is predicted to make wildfires more frequent and severe with humidity and increasing temperatures. Meanwhile, public lands are under increasing pressure from interests like mining and tourism, putting more people at risk Sullivan said.

"Rather than create more uranium mines or establish more tourist cities in our woods, it's far better to spend our money on addressing 'the wicked problem,''' Sullivan said. "Unless we solve that, all of these other ventures will only increase the severity of the risks."

University of Cincinnati 

[giarts]

What You Gonna Do When the World is on Fire?

Submitted by Eleanor Savage on May 8, 2020

Reflecting on: How can funders apply an equity framework in this moment that’s based on need, lack of access to resources, etc.? Is this moment inherently different from responses to previous crises?

Earth Day 2020. I am sheltering in place in Minneapolis, MN, working from home. I have a Zoom meeting coming up on my calendar, but there’s time to squeeze in at least half of the Facebook Live event for Toshi Reagon’s concert version of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, produced by New York University Abu Dhabi. Toshi begins softly chanting “What you gonna do? What you gonna do? What you gonna do?” The chanting builds to the song “What You Gonna Do When This World’s On Fire.” A perfect exhortation for this time.

Before COVID-19, I had planned to be in New Orleans on this day with my partner, taking time away to memorialize the one year anniversary of my mom’s death and immerse myself in my community of family, friends, and artists during Jazz Fest. NPR reported that Coronavirus is now responsible for more deaths in Louisiana than when the levees broke after Katrina. I can’t help but think that what the 2005 flood revealed about America’s epic lack of preparedness, government dysfunction, failed leadership, and entrenched racism is mirrored once again in our response to this pandemic — not just for New Orleans, but for the whole country.

What you gonna do?

As the reality of Coronavirus dawned, we as grantmakers collectively and urgently jumped into action to provide emergency support to grantees: sending emergency funding out to artists and arts organizations; changing project support to general operating support; dropping matching requirements; expediting payments; extending deadlines; and shifting timelines for reporting and implementation.

Many of the relief funds being launched are prioritizing support for the communities most impacted by COVID-19, including African, Latina/o/x, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA), disabled, immigrant, and women-identifying artists, as well as those at high risk, including elderly and immunosuppressed artists. While these measures are providing support for many, many artists and arts organizations, it is important to remember that the majority of philanthropic dollars are not distributed equitably.

My question for grantmakers is: how can we fully build an equity framework into our work, both during these times and beyond?

What you gonna do?

Acknowledge and Validate the Reality of Inequity

Economic disparities, a lack of access to healthcare, housing, and food, and the politics of racism and xenophobia all mean that artists of color, native artists, and immigrant artists — as well as the arts organizations by and for these communities — are facing disproportionately devastating effects from coronavirus, from racist incidents to higher rates of contagion and death.

Racial inequality is rooted in historic and systemic discrimination and further perpetuated by policy. The gaps in resources are not accidental, and are not due to any one individual or organization’s behavior. As our sector responds to unprecedented unemployment and extended closures, it is more vital than ever before that we ground our efforts in equitable racial justice practices. Organizations and artists that have been chronically under-resourced are deeply vulnerable — we need to value them as essential contributors to our cultural landscape.

What you gonna do?

Participatory Decision-Making

Conversations among grantmakers are already moving beyond relief to recovery. We know the pandemic will require long-term investments and new infrastructure from government and philanthropy. We know that the way out of this will require extraordinary measures. We know that there is no “return to normal.” We must engage the people most affected by inequity as decision-makers in our efforts to solve the problems in front of us: Nothing about us, without us, is for us.

Arts leaders of color and Native leaders are speaking directly to concerns and needs across many online platforms. Artist Rania El Mugammar facilitated a Town Hall on Equity & Access in the time of COVID-19 organized by Jennifer Kessler, from International Contemporary Ensemble. She challenged us to confront:

The notion of inevitability, that "inevitably" organizations will fold, that we'll run out of money, that some places won't survive.

The myth of scarcity, that there isn't enough money to fund innovation, creativity, the arts, and artists.

The illusion of objectivity, which discounts the experiences of communities not in the mainstream.

These paralyzing approaches serve to divide and dispirit us. Trust that artists and arts organizations have tools and knowledge — resilience and resourcefulness are standard operating procedures for artists of color. Don’t give in to inevitability, helplessness, and resignation — now is the time to activate, to partner, and to create the world we want to see.

Though not arts specific, the NAACP’s Equity Implications offers a powerful call to action with key considerations and documentation of specific concerns. Deepa Iyer from Solidarity Is and the Building Movement Project recently hosted a webinar with four women of color leaders to hear how COVID-19 affects communities of color and immigrants; to understand how organizations serving these communities are pivoting and what is required from government, policy makers, and philanthropy; and to imagine what a post-COVID-19 society could look like.

What you gonna do?

Amplify the Power of Arts and Artists

Artist Favianna Rodriguez from The Center for Cultural Power eloquently expresses the vital role of artists during this time:

“We live in a contentious period defined by a clash of grand narratives: on the one hand, a narrative of fear and national decline, and on the other, a narrative of hope and national becoming. What is at stake in this current iteration of culture wars are opposing visions that describe how we will learn to—or refuse to—live together. The narrative of fear and national decline is largely perpetuated by think tanks, media conglomerates, corporate interests, and other top-down institutions interested in maintaining their power. But those of us who believe in justice and liberation have just as much ability to impact culture and corresponding social behavior if we turn our attention to it, investing in cultural strategy as a real field. Our nation urgently needs the infrastructure, pedagogy, practices, ideas and frameworks for a sustained and vibrant cultural transformation. Artists and storytellers can lead the way.”

The case-making for the value of arts and culture needs to be centered in racial equity, amplifying the narratives of oppressed communities. Beyond funding, grantmakers can use our non-monetary resources, including networks and social position, to advocate for the leadership of artists and the resources they need to do their work.

What you gonna do?

Engage in Radical Action — No Business as Usual

When I first started work for a foundation (following 25 years of work in non-profit arts), one of the most startling realizations was the complete lack of trust in artists and arts organizations by people working in the field of philanthropy. Equity conversations frequently center on moving from transactional interactions with grantees to relationship-based connections — survival mode requires an accelerated but nevertheless authentic speeding up of trust. There is no time to carefully tread the waters of equity; we need to be fully immersed, all systems go. Our emergency responses — relaxed requirements and expectations, simplified applications, prioritizing people over profit and control of the money — required grantmakers to make the leap of trust. Let us hold onto this beyond this difficult moment and move these practices forward. Let us make radical trust for the artists and arts organizations we serve the new normal.

What you gonna do?

Just before I had to leave Toshi Reagon’s live stream for my Zoom meeting, she and the stellar ensemble of performers started singing “There’s A New World Coming!” a song originally written and recorded by her mother, Bernice Reagon Johnson.

There’s a new world coming! Everything’s gon' be turning over. Everything’s gon' be turning over. Where you gon' be standing when it comes?

A new world is coming. It is hard to know, at this moment, what this new world will bring for artists, but I do know I want to be standing with them. As GIA’s President Eddie Torres stated so eloquently, “Our consciences should be the guide for distributing the future more evenly.”

Eleanor Savage is program director at the Jerome Foundation.

Posted by Eleanor Savage on May 08, 2020 at 01:00AM. Read the full post.

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic: Trinity – When Soviet Time-Traveling Robot Armadillos Attack

Written by Joe Pranevich

In Trinity, we traveled to the dawn of the nuclear age and attempted to change history. We failed and became trapped in a time loop with our mischievous roadrunner friend. I suppose there are worse ways to go. In the words of one famous time traveler, “Great Scott!”

But what if the game didn’t end that way? Unlike most of the games we played, this is not just a rhetorical question. Infocom has always had a special place in the hearts of digital archeologists and a level of attention that arguably exceeds their real contribution to computer game history. This is in part thanks to Infocom’s own newsletters, but also the preservation of memos and documents from the company itself. That gives us a view on just about everything from sales performance to standings within the local softball leagues. As recently as 2019, source code was placed online for most of the classic Infocom games. This would be fun all by itself, but in Trinity’s case we are fortunate to have preserved notes on three separate versions of the game, starting from something akin to “Time Police” and ending with the version that we explored together. I had hoped to include this material with the Final Rating, but that post was long enough. Let’s close out our coverage of Trinity with a look at three versions of the game that might have been.

Mirai Sentai Timerenger!

Trinity 0.1 – The Time Police

It all started with a dead bird. A cat proudly deposited the carcass on the doorstep of her owner, a Japanese school teacher who had received enough of these little offerings to recognize something out of the ordinary. She sealed the corpse in a plastic bag and brought it to a biologist at the nearby medical school. The remains were identified as Geococcyx californianus, a species native to the southwest corner of North America. What a roadrunner was doing in the vicinity of Nagasaki’s Heiwa Koen (Peace Park) was anybody’s guess.

The first of the three pitches is undated but likely written sometime in 1985, although it may have been during or after the development of Wishbringer. It shows the game at an embryonic stage, but already elements were coming together that we immediately recognize as the core of Trinity. Nuclear blasts, in addition to all of the damage that we can see, also pierced holes in the fabric of space and time. These holes connected the sites of those blasts in an as-yet unknown way, allowing a New Mexico roadrunner to end up in Nagasaki, whirlpools of coconut-filled boiling water to appear spontaneously over Utah, and many other such events. Scientists discovered and investigated these holes, but the military saw them as being little more than a curiosity. Without military application, who cares if reality is becoming Swiss cheese? That was until a defector revealed that the Soviets had not only discovered the holes, but that they had a plan of their own to use them.

I’ll let Moriarty’s own words describe the next part:

Such were the humble beginnings of Classified Defense Project #43112. Its official code name is Termite. But the people who got it going and keep it running like to call themselves the Time Police.

You play the role of a Sentry on duty at Project Termite’s Alamogordo Station. It’s your duty to monitor the Hole created by the first atomic explosion, and to make sure nobody is in there mucking around with the original Manhattan Project. You wouldn’t want some other country to get The Bomb before we did, would you?

Grand Moff Who?

The pitch continues into a brief description of gameplay. Rather than directly interact with history, you have an “array of technological gadgets” resembling real birds and small mammals that act as your eyes and ears in the past. Your job is to ensure that history (and a very large bomb) go off without a hitch, without being spotted and potentially changing history yourself. On one fateful day, it is your responsibility to defend the United States from a two-fold attack by the Soviet Union. You have to defend both the Trinity site on the morning of the blast as well as “present day” Alamogordo Station. It sounds like a lot of fun, even if it is unclear how you would solve two sets of problems at once.

Back to Moriarty:

Meep, your trusty Electric Roadrunner, has detected an army of stainless steel armadillos closing in on the shot tower at Ground Zero. And there’s something else lurking in that pre-dawn desert; a mysterious Presence that will eventually lock you in a bizarre three-way struggle against time. The future history of the world — perhaps the fate of the universe itself — depends on your courage and resourcefulness. No matter what happens, you MUST make sure that the first atomic bomb detonates precisely on schedule! It is 5:00 AM on July 16, 1945. You have twenty-nine minutes.

I understand why this pitch didn’t get made, but boy does it sound fun. The mix of robotic avatars and having to balance two separate modes of play at once sounds a bit too much like Suspended and A Mind Forever Voyaging, but there is something perfect about the idea of the Soviets using an army of time-traveling robotic armadillos. Would the tone have been jarring against its premise? How much fun can you have in a story about nuclear armageddon? And both of those previous games struggled with balancing the multiple aspects of their gameplay; could Trinity have done better? It is also not clear how many of the “termite holes” you would explore, and Moriarty may not even have worked out those details yet. This pitch represents a great start and could have been a fun– if very different– game if it had come to fruition. I especially like the hard science fiction approach and the structure that being a part of “Time Police” could bring to the story.

You can read the full first proposal here: https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity/blob/master/tr1.txt

“Bridgeport?” Said I. “Camelot,” Said he.”

Trinity 0.5 – Magical Kingdom

The next version of the game, dated September 1985, takes us much closer to the Trinity that we know. The hard science fiction and robotic armadillos are gone, as is the “Time Police”. Instead, the game takes a hard turn into straight up fantasy. The start of the game feels quite similar to the final product: you are an American tourist in London on the day that the bombs fell. You will have to “solv[e] a lighthearted puzzle or two” to escape from London. While the pitch does not say so explicitly, it’s likely that Moriarty had already worked through much of the Kensington Garden experience. When the bomb drops however, the game takes a turn from what we would come to know:

“Inside” the duct, you discover a bizarre fantasy world where space and time are interchanged. The magical inhabitants of this twilight zone are wringing their 4-dimensional hands because our atom bomb tests are blasting big, unsightly holes in their otherwise peaceful universe. The only way to prevent the collapse of the entire kingdom is for some foolhardy adventurer to journey backwards in time to the first A-bomb test at Trinity, and prevent it from going off.

Armed only with the 3-D map of the Hole Matrix provided in the game package, the player ventures through a bewildering variety of exotic locations, solving puzzles, meeting unlikely characters and casting magic spells. But unknown forces are at work to foil your quest, and you soon find yourself caught up in a multidimensional war between two great empires who seek to control the Matrix. It all comes together during a spectacular climax in the New Mexico desert, where you must single-handedly decide the course of history in just 29 minutes of real playing time.

“My name is Peabody. I suppose you know yours.”

The game sounds much more “Zorkian” with exotic locations and magic spells; in fact, I cannot help but wonder if the bombs wouldn’t have opened the door just a smidge to the actual Great Underground Empire. This is all speculation, but Trinity’s internal development code was “Z7”. All of the previous codes (from “Z0” to “Z6”) were for the Zork and Enchanter series, plus Wishbringer, which also took place in the same universe. “Z8” and “Z9” would later be given to Beyond Zork and Zork Zero. Trinity is the only game in that series of codes to not be a Zork game. Why? Could they have been aiming for a more generic fantasy game while using the “Z” code? Absolutely. Could they have left the door open for it being an implicit Zork sequel? Also yes, especially as this version of the pitch suggests that it was to be the first game in a new fantasy trilogy. We don’t know, but it feels like there could be a truth hidden in there someplace.

The “Hole Matrix” hinted at in the description, plus the fantasy kingdom itself, feels like an alternate or early form of the “wabe” from the final game. It seems that you would explore many different areas all connected by the nuclear explosions to solve puzzles. Except for the lack of spells and explicit fantasy elements, most of the zones that we traveled to in the final game could have worked with this pitch. Only the “hub” that connected them, plus the lack of magical solutions, could be different from the game that we know.

The final open question for this version has to do with the endgame: how would a “real-time” ending sequence work? Would touch typists and faster computers automatically have an edge? This must have been a major goal because Moriarty mentions the real-time nature of the ending more than once in his summary, and yet he doesn’t appear to have found a way to make it work. This is also the only version of the pitch to not include the roadrunner; I cannot but think that somehow these two problems are related! Other than being a humorous fantasy (rather than dour magical realism), this game has all of the elements of “our” version of Trinity. The puzzles and worlds may have differed, but this is recognizably the same game.

You can read the full second version of the pitch here: https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity/blob/master/tr2.txt

“My patience is wearing thin. I’m banishing you to a time warp from which you will never return!” – Oroku Saki

Trinity 0.9 – Almost There!

The final draft summary we have is from November 1985 and it is essentially the game that we came to play in digest form. In fact, this is the shortest pitch of the three and is detailed enough that Moriarty must have been fairly far along in his development process. The beginning and middle of the game appear to be exactly as we have played it:

The door transports you to a Zorkish fantasy world, centered around an enormous sundial that casts a long, moving shadow across the landscape. This improbable universe is littered with lots of giant toadstools, each equipped with its own magic door. Whenever the dial’s shadow passes over a toadstool, the magic door opens, and you can visit a “real” historical place where somebody is about to explode an atomic bomb. Locations include an underground test site, a Siberian wilderness, a tropical atoll, a “Star Wars” orbital battlefield and a playground in Hiroshima.

The player has to explore every square inch of the fantasy world, figure out how to control the giant sundial, visit all the magic doors (in the right order) and solve a bunch of interconnected puzzles before he or she can tackle the seventh and final toadstool … the Trinity test.

So far so good. I especially like the nod to my theory that he was explicitly aiming for “Zorkian”, even if not the Great Underground Empire itself. And yet, Moriarty appears not to have cracked the final nut, how he would have run the end-game. This is not the three-way battle with robot armadillos from the earliest version, nor the real-time puzzles of the second, but something wholly different:

The player materializes in the test tower, only twenty-nine minutes before the Gadget is scheduled to detonate. The site is heavily guarded, and danger lurks behind every cactus. If you survive long enough to reach the control bunker, you’ll meet a Who’s Who of famous scientists, all intent on vaporizing your only way home. Can you stop the Bomb from going off? What will happen if you do? And what about those mysterious beings who keep making snide comments in the corners of your video screen? Are you being used?

I love the mystery being implied here, even if it is frustrating that we never got more than sniffs of it in the final version of the game that we played. Who was the mysterious voice in our ear? We never found out and it seems like perhaps Moriarty may have changed his mind about it more than once during development. Alas, we also never saw the “Who’s Who” of famous scientists as the final endgame pivoted back towards the earlier ideal of causing as few ripples in history as possible. In fact, other than listening to humans on the radio, we interacted directly with absolutely no one in the endgame as we played it. There is not one “famous scientist” in there at all!

You can read the full third version of the pitch here: https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity/blob/master/tr3.txt

“Okay, um, how do I explain this concisely? This is Tuesdays… and also July.” “And sometimes, it’s never.”

Moving On

I hope you enjoyed these brief looks at alternate versions of Trinity. I am glad that we were able to experience the final version of the game, but there are many neat ideas presented across these several drafts that would have been fun to experience in some way. Ultimately, the ending of Trinity isn’t perfect. The puzzles are too difficult and too many elements are left unexplained and unresolved. The nature of the time loop doesn’t give us a sense of finality, especially after we looted our own paradoxical corpse. It seems from these documents that while the only aspect of Trinity that did not change from draft to draft was the final confrontation in the desert, the actual mechanics of that endgame experience did not come into focus until late in his design process. I wish we had these documents for more games to give us a basis for comparison, but what we have is a fascinating, if all too brief, window into how the sausage was made.

With this last side avenue explored, I am finally ready to tackle some Leather Goddesses. You can expect a mini-review of that soon.

With the spread of Coronavirus around the world, I want to take this moment to wish for safety and health for all of our readers and their families. Stay well.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-trinity-when-soviet-time-traveling-robot-armadillos-attack/

[divorceyourring]

Funny How The Second Amendment Is Absolute And All-Encompassing, But The Fourteenth Amendment Can Be Basically Line-Item Vetoed

“You’re gonna need congressional approval and you don’t have the votes / Such a blunder sometimes it makes me wonder why I even bring the thunder.” — Lin-Manual Miranda, “Cabinet Battle #1” (Hamilton)

As I was driving through Mississippi on Devil’s Night, Maureen Corrigan’s book review of Let the People See The Emmett Till Story, by Elliott Gorn, broadcasted over the local National Public Radio (NPR) station. It was a haunting reminder of the legacies we have all inherited. As I was passing through Mississippi’s endless-night horizon, Corrigan’s bone-chilling narrative bled through my car speakers:

‘Let the people see what they did to my boy.’ Those were the words spoken by Emmet Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, after viewing the brutalized body of her son.

During his night of torture near the Delta town of Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Till’s right eye had been dislodged from its socket, his tongue choked out of his mouth, the back of his skull crushed and his head penetrated by a bullet.

Shortly after Corrigan’s Fresh Air segment, NPR commentators and their guests spoke about the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, yet another act of domestic terrorism in a seemingly endless string of mass shootings our country has witnessed this decade. With a sense of foreboding, the on-air commentators and their guests were not only concerned about Robert Bowers’s 11 executions via his AR-15 rifle and three handguns on October 27, but the broader, recent rise and empowerment of white nationalism throughout our country.

In 2015, prior to the most recent presidential election, I warned:

Maybe it’s hard for me to stomach the recently renewed attack on the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because I fear the root cause of these sentiments. As Mark Twain supposedly said, ‘History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’

The strong anti-foreigner feelings of past generations are being revived as a rationale to make our country great again. At what cost?

I fear America’s deep legacy of anti-Asian racism will continue to haunt our future generations. Now the anti-immigrant rhetoric — of ‘sanctuary cities,’ ‘border walls,’ and ‘anchor babies’ — is bringing xenophobia to the front of our country’s consciousness once again.

In the seminal Citizenship Clause case involving Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court stated: ‘We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in the constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.’

Back then, some politicians argued that the Chinese were so different in so many ways that they could never assimilate into American culture, and they represented a threat to the country’s principles and institutions.

Just last year, I documented the harrowing death of Aylan Kurdi and the refugee crisis:

Since the conflict in Syria began in 2011, until the photography date of Aylan Kurdi’s [three-year old] lifeless body, the United States had taken in only about 1,500 Syrian refugees. That is not a typo: 1,500 Syrian refugees total. When Obama raised the Syrian ceiling to 10,000 — a more reasonable number I suppose, but still an unbearably low moral figure, he faced a massive outcry from conservatives. Last week, many politicians paid tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day and the millions of innocent lives lost, and these politicians pledged, ‘Never again.’ Yet they turn a blind-eye to our current refugee crisis….

Whereas Canada has accepted almost 40,000 refugees to much celebration by its citizens, Obama’s 10,000 target has now become, under Donald Trump, a complete and total shutdown of Syrian and Muslim refugees.

The current refugee crisis is the issue of our lifetime and we have met it with little to no fanfare. America was once viewed as a beacon of hope. Lady Liberty represented freedom and opportunity. But now we have plans to build a much vaunted wall while we permit our most at-risk communities to drown in lead-contaminated water.

We pledge to never let millions of innocent lives suffer again or deprive our communities of their most basic needs. But how easily we forget. Humanity washed along the shore, and we walked by. We are witnessing so many refugee hands reach out, but we refrain from reaching back. For the first time in my life, I don’t recognize this country.

Shortly after Kurdi’s death, his relatives were admitted into Canada as refugees. At least, in Canada, Aylan Kurdi did not die in vain.

Now, with only days until the midterms, the Trump administration is continuing to amplify its dog-whistle propaganda campaign on immigration and crime, to dehumanize migrants and others and arrest asylum seekers. Meanwhile, acts of domestic terrorism receive much less consternation. For too many of our country’s leaders, it’s always “too early to talk about gun control regulation” and “too soon to react, politically or otherwise, to the latest mass murder.”

They deem the Second Amendment to be absolute and interpret its words — “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to mean that citizens have every right to tote around AR-15s. Surely many would protest, one hand on the heart and the other hand’s finger on a trigger, if any president declared he alone could change this interpretation and the law with an executive order.

Yet the Fourteenth Amendment is much less sacred to those same people who pledge such loyalty to the Constitution. Its words — “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside” — have been interpreted the same way for the past 150 years. With one fell swoop of the pen, Trump believes he alone can change this. And so do many of his loyal followers.

This would be funny, if it weren’t so sad… and scary as hell.

My ATL colleague Elie Mystal opined on the subject recently in his column Post Runs White Nationalist Propaganda Masquerading As Law-Talkin’:

WHERE IS THE MISINTERPRETATION? These white assholes keep saying that we’re misreading the Fourteenth Amendment. HOW? The writers of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to do a thing. They did it in the only way they could. THEY WROTE IT DOWN. Where’s the freaking confusion?

If you pin one of these jerks down, they’ll start talking about Native Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment didn’t confer citizenship to Native Americans, who were clearly born here, and thus, they argue, citizenship wasn’t meant to be a birthright. I have little patience for people who use our racism towards the First Americans to justify racism towards New Americans, but there you go. If you think that our treatments towards Native Americans was a feature instead of a bug, that’s your argument.

This excerpt doesn’t do Mystal’s piece justice. I highly suggest you check out his full article to see how he systematically breaks down the entire misinterpretation argument. If you are a legal nerd, you will thoroughly enjoy it.

In June, for World Refugee Day, I wrote about the harrowing historical acts of the current administration:

We are directly violating Article 31 of the Refugee Convention. Instead of addressing this issue, the Trump administration is aiming to amplify its wanton and reckless ignorance of historical precedent. The Department of Justice now plans to send Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) Officers to our southern border to prosecute migrants. Maybe this administration should do better to understand the rule of law before it deploys JAG Officers, who specialize in military justice and military law, to interpret and enforce immigration laws.

The vaunted wall that the Trump administration so desperately plots to build is already being constructed brick by brick. Even if we refuse to admit it to ourselves. A separation of families’ strategy was executed on our borders, while the separation of society continues to happen within them.

Our country’s withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the current administration. I’ve spoken to so many others who also feel within and without. When did we get here… while America slept?

The United States Constitution may be color blind, but our leaders certainly are not. The vast majority of the murders in our country are done with the accomplice of the Second Amendment, not the Fourteenth Amendment.

If we’re talking about how we have misinterpreted an amendment the wrong way for quite some time, let’s focus on the one that has been such a god-awful enabler of mass murders in our country.

People can talk all day about their Second Amendment rights, but we need to begin the discussion about our responsibilities. How many more mass shootings in schools, synagogues, and churches can we endure before we accept some responsibility?

Reminder: The 2018 mid-term elections will be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Make sure to vote!

Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

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[touristguidebuzz]

U.S. Destinations Preparing For Overtourism Burst During Total Solar Eclipse

Cities such as Madras, Oregon in the path of next month's total solar eclipse are preparing for large influxes of tourists eager to experience the spectacle. Amy Meredith / Flickr

Skift Take: Cities like Madras, Oregon and others in the path of next month's total solar eclipse have lessons to offer other destinations about hosting once-in-a-lifetime events and the kinds of decisions and processes that it takes to welcome throngs of visitors.

— Dan Peltier

On Monday morning, August 21, a 70-mile-wide swath of America from Oregon to South Carolina will plunge into darkness during daytime hours.

The total solar eclipse—the first fully visible from the U.S. since 1979 and the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years—will reveal plasma flares on the sun visible from earth as the moon passes directly between them.

It will also drive an expected 100,000 people to the tiny town of Madras, Ore.—current population a little more than 6,000.

Twenty-four of the visitors will stay at Lysa Vattimo’s house.

“It’s organized chaos,” Vattimo said with a laugh. She is the lead member of the City of Madras Solar Eclipse Planning Group, a team formed more than two years ago after city organizers realized they could have a serious logistics problem on their hands. Their first tip-off was even earlier—four years ago when a travel agency called Continental Capers bought out the entire Inn at Cross Keys in anticipation of this year’s event. In such a tiny locale, such a purchase generated plenty of curiosity.

“Apparently, some astronomer said that Madras was the premier location for viewing the eclipse based on its high altitude, big plateau, and the weather compared to other locations across the path,” Vattimo said. “He could barely get anybody [here] to pay attention to him. But when all the hotels started booking up years in advance, we realized this was a big deal.”

The Premier Viewing Spot

Madras is far from the only location along the flight path. Idaho Falls, Idaho; Lincoln, Neb.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Columbia, S.C., are among the nine other cities NASA lists as ideal for watching. The first point of contact will be Lincoln Beach, Ore., at 9:05 a.m. local time; “totality,” as astronomers call it, begins there at 10:16 a.m. Over the next 90 minutes, the darkness will cross through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina, ending in Charleston at 2:48 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Its longest duration will be near Carbondale, Ill., where the moon will block the sun for two minutes and 40 seconds.

As the smallest and some say optimal viewing spot along the route, the ranching town 12 miles from Warm Springs Indian Reservation will experience the onslaught of eclipse chasers quite dramatically. With its high elevation, flat plateau land mass flanked by pristine snow-covered mountains, and crystal clear desert skies, it’s perfectly suited to stargazing.

As for the eclipse itself, ask a science lover why it’s compelling, and he or she will respond in disbelief that you even have to ask.

“It hasn’t happened like this in a century, and it’s the only one we’ll see in our lifetime,” said Molly Baker, the head of communications at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory. “It’s going to be incredible when it gets dark and to see the nocturnal animal activity.”

Lowell Observatory and Oregon State University are sending dozens of scientists to Madras to observe and record the event; NASA is sending a cadre of astronomers. They expect to observe and document unusual animal activity in addition to the plasma flares and other celestial activity during the eclipse. (When unexpected darkness falls, many animals, such as birds, think night has fallen and take to roost.)

Baker and her 30 colleagues attending, plus additional volunteers, plan to stay mostly in campgrounds and RVs. She did admit to some trepidation.

“I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also nervous,” said Baker, who will arrive a couple days prior to the event. “It going to be pretty hectic.”

Handling the Hoards

On their side of things, Vattimo and her team didn’t waste time. They contacted the Oregon state police, transportation authorities, and local business owners and residents to talk about how the region would sustain such an influx. “We knew we needed to lock arms, get to know each other really well, and get prepared,” she said.

Madras’s chamber of commerce has held dozens of town meetings to urge business owners to stockpile cash, gas, and wares. The town and surrounding campsites have rented nearly 700 portable toilets, including some from Idaho, to meet demand, with garbage trucks scheduled to run nearly 24 hours a day to transport trash to huge dumpsters before it begins to smell in the summer heat.

St. Charles Medical Center of Madras & Bend has loaded up on such supplies as gauze, bandages, painkillers, and other sundry items that medics would need to treat the general casualties frequent at any other large gathering, such as a music festival, say, or Burning Man. Doctors there have canceled vacations; pregnant women close to their due dates are being told to leave to avoid getting stuck, according to local reports. Restaurants such as regional favorite Black Bear Diner have bought five-weeks’ worth of supplies for one week of customers.

(Speaking of Burning Man, yes, there are multiple more free-spirited festivals planned for near Madras during the time of the eclipse. Expect those to have the same free-living energy—minus the corporate baggage—as the annual Black Rock Desert retreat.)

Where People Are Staying

Since area hotels sold out long ago, many farmers are renting out camping spaces on their land in plots with such names as Sunset Solar Campground, Solar Celebration, Solar Eclipse on the Farm, and Totality Awesome. Campsite rates run roughly $300 a night, with a three-night minimum; RV packages are running scheduled shuttles will move campers from the farms to restaurants and grocery stores in town. Music, food, and entertainment are all planned for display at a nearby fairground.

Christina Carpenter has 275 reservations to stay on her 100-acre farm, Organic Earthly Delights —and could accommodate twice that if she had to. She has hired 40 people to build decks, fences, bunks, tables, outdoor showers, and the like. Her Organic Earthly Delights will feature sustainable farming and bee keeping sessions, cooking demonstrations, movie screenings, and host Joel Salatin, the popular holistic farmer, author, and lecturer, during the week of the event.

She’s also importing experts for guided astrology lessons.

“The astronomers are so excited,” Carpenter said on the phone. She had just finished planting a cover crop of grass perfectly timed to flourish by the time of the eclipse. “They’re coming in from Hawaii, and they already sent their telescope ahead of them.”

Other residents as far away as Bend (43 miles away) and Prineville (30 miles away) are making a killing on Airbnb and VRBO bookings, either renting out rooms in their homes or renting the whole house for the weekend in a matter of minutes. Rates on Airbnb range from $500 to $1,500 for a room for one night; entire houses are listed for $2,000 and more. You can stay on a pontoon boat in a nearby lake for $2,850, though you must bring your own lifejacket, which is required for the stay.

“There is a sense of panic,” said Beth Rasmussen, a Bend native. Rasmussen and her husband, Jesse, are the language arts and social studies teacher at Pilot Butte Middle School and vice principal of Jewell Elementary, respectively. As the parents of two young girls, they plan to stay put for the event, if only to avoid an anticipated six- or eight-hour drive back home along Highways 97 or 26.

“ They are telling us to expect one million people to come to Central Oregon,” Rasmussen said. “Everybody knows about it. There is definitely a lot of hype.”

The Deluge

In fact, large billboards along the two-lane highway into and out of town have advertised the event for years. Rick Hickmann, who has lived in nearby Bend since 1976, said he was dumbfounded when the billboards appeared two years ago. “I laughed when I saw it,” he said. “The sign was in the middle of nowhere, in the hot desert, with not a tree in sight. I thought, who in the world would go to Madras for that ?”

Fast-forward to July 2017 and the Oregon Department of Transportation is predicting “the biggest traffic even in Oregon history” and posting humorous bulletins in efforts to stave off vehicular calamity. (Two examples: Don’t be a luna(r)-tic: Arrive early, stay put, and leave late; If travelers plan ahead and come prepared, we’ll all dance together for two unforgettable minutes as the sun throws the moon’s shadow over us. If travelers don’t plan ahead, we’ll all go nowhere together for many forgettable hours probably throwing shade at each other.”

How to Do It Right

Not scared off yet? It’s not too late to get to Oregon to see the event. Flights into the nearest airport of any size, Redmond, the Saturday prior can still be had. They don’t cost as much as you might expect—nearly $700 from New York and $600 from Los Angeles, which is up slightly from routine fares but not, say, double what travelers might usually pay.

But don’t expect to get anywhere fast, and travel with plenty of water, gas, food, and any essential prescriptions. There’s plenty of room once you get there, as long as you’re OK with a lot of fresh air.

“You just have to be willing to camp,” Vattimo said. “There is glamping, or you can rent an RV and bring it out, or pitch a tent.”

On some of the farms around town, a friendly rancher will even set up the tent for you. It’ll beat staying with 23 others in a crowded home—though that might be a lunatic time, too.

    This article was written by Hannah Elliott from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

[rollinbrigittenv8]

U.S. Destinations Preparing For Overtourism Burst During Total Solar Eclipse

Cities such as Madras, Oregon in the path of next month's total solar eclipse are preparing for large influxes of tourists eager to experience the spectacle. Amy Meredith / Flickr

Skift Take: Cities like Madras, Oregon and others in the path of next month's total solar eclipse have lessons to offer other destinations about hosting once-in-a-lifetime events and the kinds of decisions and processes that it takes to welcome throngs of visitors.

— Dan Peltier

On Monday morning, August 21, a 70-mile-wide swath of America from Oregon to South Carolina will plunge into darkness during daytime hours.

The total solar eclipse—the first fully visible from the U.S. since 1979 and the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years—will reveal plasma flares on the sun visible from earth as the moon passes directly between them.

It will also drive an expected 100,000 people to the tiny town of Madras, Ore.—current population a little more than 6,000.

Twenty-four of the visitors will stay at Lysa Vattimo’s house.

“It’s organized chaos,” Vattimo said with a laugh. She is the lead member of the City of Madras Solar Eclipse Planning Group, a team formed more than two years ago after city organizers realized they could have a serious logistics problem on their hands. Their first tip-off was even earlier—four years ago when a travel agency called Continental Capers bought out the entire Inn at Cross Keys in anticipation of this year’s event. In such a tiny locale, such a purchase generated plenty of curiosity.

“Apparently, some astronomer said that Madras was the premier location for viewing the eclipse based on its high altitude, big plateau, and the weather compared to other locations across the path,” Vattimo said. “He could barely get anybody [here] to pay attention to him. But when all the hotels started booking up years in advance, we realized this was a big deal.”

The Premier Viewing Spot

Madras is far from the only location along the flight path. Idaho Falls, Idaho; Lincoln, Neb.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Columbia, S.C., are among the nine other cities NASA lists as ideal for watching. The first point of contact will be Lincoln Beach, Ore., at 9:05 a.m. local time; “totality,” as astronomers call it, begins there at 10:16 a.m. Over the next 90 minutes, the darkness will cross through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina, ending in Charleston at 2:48 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Its longest duration will be near Carbondale, Ill., where the moon will block the sun for two minutes and 40 seconds.

As the smallest and some say optimal viewing spot along the route, the ranching town 12 miles from Warm Springs Indian Reservation will experience the onslaught of eclipse chasers quite dramatically. With its high elevation, flat plateau land mass flanked by pristine snow-covered mountains, and crystal clear desert skies, it’s perfectly suited to stargazing.

As for the eclipse itself, ask a science lover why it’s compelling, and he or she will respond in disbelief that you even have to ask.

“It hasn’t happened like this in a century, and it’s the only one we’ll see in our lifetime,” said Molly Baker, the head of communications at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory. “It’s going to be incredible when it gets dark and to see the nocturnal animal activity.”

Lowell Observatory and Oregon State University are sending dozens of scientists to Madras to observe and record the event; NASA is sending a cadre of astronomers. They expect to observe and document unusual animal activity in addition to the plasma flares and other celestial activity during the eclipse. (When unexpected darkness falls, many animals, such as birds, think night has fallen and take to roost.)

Baker and her 30 colleagues attending, plus additional volunteers, plan to stay mostly in campgrounds and RVs. She did admit to some trepidation.

“I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also nervous,” said Baker, who will arrive a couple days prior to the event. “It going to be pretty hectic.”

Handling the Hoards

On their side of things, Vattimo and her team didn’t waste time. They contacted the Oregon state police, transportation authorities, and local business owners and residents to talk about how the region would sustain such an influx. “We knew we needed to lock arms, get to know each other really well, and get prepared,” she said.

Madras’s chamber of commerce has held dozens of town meetings to urge business owners to stockpile cash, gas, and wares. The town and surrounding campsites have rented nearly 700 portable toilets, including some from Idaho, to meet demand, with garbage trucks scheduled to run nearly 24 hours a day to transport trash to huge dumpsters before it begins to smell in the summer heat.

St. Charles Medical Center of Madras & Bend has loaded up on such supplies as gauze, bandages, painkillers, and other sundry items that medics would need to treat the general casualties frequent at any other large gathering, such as a music festival, say, or Burning Man. Doctors there have canceled vacations; pregnant women close to their due dates are being told to leave to avoid getting stuck, according to local reports. Restaurants such as regional favorite Black Bear Diner have bought five-weeks’ worth of supplies for one week of customers.

(Speaking of Burning Man, yes, there are multiple more free-spirited festivals planned for near Madras during the time of the eclipse. Expect those to have the same free-living energy—minus the corporate baggage—as the annual Black Rock Desert retreat.)

Where People Are Staying

Since area hotels sold out long ago, many farmers are renting out camping spaces on their land in plots with such names as Sunset Solar Campground, Solar Celebration, Solar Eclipse on the Farm, and Totality Awesome. Campsite rates run roughly $300 a night, with a three-night minimum; RV packages are running scheduled shuttles will move campers from the farms to restaurants and grocery stores in town. Music, food, and entertainment are all planned for display at a nearby fairground.

Christina Carpenter has 275 reservations to stay on her 100-acre farm, Organic Earthly Delights —and could accommodate twice that if she had to. She has hired 40 people to build decks, fences, bunks, tables, outdoor showers, and the like. Her Organic Earthly Delights will feature sustainable farming and bee keeping sessions, cooking demonstrations, movie screenings, and host Joel Salatin, the popular holistic farmer, author, and lecturer, during the week of the event.

She’s also importing experts for guided astrology lessons.

“The astronomers are so excited,” Carpenter said on the phone. She had just finished planting a cover crop of grass perfectly timed to flourish by the time of the eclipse. “They’re coming in from Hawaii, and they already sent their telescope ahead of them.”

Other residents as far away as Bend (43 miles away) and Prineville (30 miles away) are making a killing on Airbnb and VRBO bookings, either renting out rooms in their homes or renting the whole house for the weekend in a matter of minutes. Rates on Airbnb range from $500 to $1,500 for a room for one night; entire houses are listed for $2,000 and more. You can stay on a pontoon boat in a nearby lake for $2,850, though you must bring your own lifejacket, which is required for the stay.

“There is a sense of panic,” said Beth Rasmussen, a Bend native. Rasmussen and her husband, Jesse, are the language arts and social studies teacher at Pilot Butte Middle School and vice principal of Jewell Elementary, respectively. As the parents of two young girls, they plan to stay put for the event, if only to avoid an anticipated six- or eight-hour drive back home along Highways 97 or 26.

“ They are telling us to expect one million people to come to Central Oregon,” Rasmussen said. “Everybody knows about it. There is definitely a lot of hype.”

The Deluge

In fact, large billboards along the two-lane highway into and out of town have advertised the event for years. Rick Hickmann, who has lived in nearby Bend since 1976, said he was dumbfounded when the billboards appeared two years ago. “I laughed when I saw it,” he said. “The sign was in the middle of nowhere, in the hot desert, with not a tree in sight. I thought, who in the world would go to Madras for that ?”

Fast-forward to July 2017 and the Oregon Department of Transportation is predicting “the biggest traffic even in Oregon history” and posting humorous bulletins in efforts to stave off vehicular calamity. (Two examples: Don’t be a luna(r)-tic: Arrive early, stay put, and leave late; If travelers plan ahead and come prepared, we’ll all dance together for two unforgettable minutes as the sun throws the moon’s shadow over us. If travelers don’t plan ahead, we’ll all go nowhere together for many forgettable hours probably throwing shade at each other.”

How to Do It Right

Not scared off yet? It’s not too late to get to Oregon to see the event. Flights into the nearest airport of any size, Redmond, the Saturday prior can still be had. They don’t cost as much as you might expect—nearly $700 from New York and $600 from Los Angeles, which is up slightly from routine fares but not, say, double what travelers might usually pay.

But don’t expect to get anywhere fast, and travel with plenty of water, gas, food, and any essential prescriptions. There’s plenty of room once you get there, as long as you’re OK with a lot of fresh air.

“You just have to be willing to camp,” Vattimo said. “There is glamping, or you can rent an RV and bring it out, or pitch a tent.”

On some of the farms around town, a friendly rancher will even set up the tent for you. It’ll beat staying with 23 others in a crowded home—though that might be a lunatic time, too.

This article was written by Hannah Elliott from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

[paulatoo]

A letter to my Governmental Representatives

Below is the text I have emailed my Congressman, it is very similar to an email to my Senator.  If you agree the issues I have brought up should be receiving more attention feel free to use this as a template for your own messages to your representatives.  If you agree entirely feel free to copy it outright to message them as well(perhaps run it through WordPad to strip the coding though):

I have been waiting to hear more about the action being taken regarding President Trumps illegal hire of his son in law.  What actions are being taken to address this situation?  

As an unaffiliated voter I enjoy being free to choose to support the best ideas for our country, and the best candidate, or at least seemingly best candidate for a position. It is rapidly becoming my wish we move to a party less political system that allows the best ideas to be instituted instead of the chicanery we have been seeing.  Until then it is my hope that the Democratic party doesn’t follow the Republican lead of the last 8 years, but I understand how hard the current administration is making not appearing as if they are.  

It should be obvious that President Trump has significant mental health issues and I would hope extra precautions would be instituted for all of our safety.  He has proven to be a loose cannon with all the daily 180’s, as if the same people that watch the official statement from him can’t see his tweets or follow up remarks.  Egotism aside, the nearly constant claims that fact is fiction, his claims the mainstream media is inaccurate or unfair therefore untrustworthy, the pro alternative news, alternative facts, alternative reality positions are dangerous & scary.  Especially considering the number of under informed or otherwise mentally incapacitated voters that turned out this election.  Meanwhile he seems to have been allowed to enter office breaking the law & very little has been said about this especially in comparison to all that is being said about other problems the administration is causing.

His cabinet picks have been less than great to say the least, I understand the best people may not be answering his calls, but honestly many of these picks seem like the opposite of the kind of individual that should be selected for the position.  I hope that they all will be thoroughly vetted and receive a fair hearing, despite the fact other better qualified people were denied that opportunity as recently as last year.   I would also point out that moving from repeal & replace to replace & repeal would probably ease the minds of the majority of our countrymen, health insurance companies, health care workers, drug companies & hospitals.

Back on the subject of fake news, does it seem like a good idea to anyone else to find the real leak in the briefing document leak situation?  I would really like to know if the FBI, CIA, or any other governmental agency is leaking documents, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was really leaked by the current administration in an attempt to further discredit the FBI & CIA along with the news media. Is there any current investigation into the leak?  

As a civilian Mr. Trump spent a lot of time utilizing at best shock jock, smoke & mirror tactics to keep himself in the public eye while treating people unfairly & committing crimes. Hopefully we can all remain vigilant against this during his hopefully short term, and further protections will be put in place for the safety of our nation.  I am sure it is hard on all the elected officials that have stayed on the right side of the law or kept up appearances to keep their eligibility to run for office to have someone with such a long history of breaking it in office.  Hopefully you will be able to hold him to the same standards as prior presidents. Although I am not going into detail here about the financial conflicts of interest, I do hope that soon he can get his stuff back & go home.  I would of course like for him to release his tax records, but that is mostly as a lesson to the Trumpies, obviously if he had been paying taxes there would be no hesitation in releasing them with some braggadocios statement about all the taxes he paid.

I would however like to address the Electoral College situation that we really need to modify or do away with.  Although George W. Bush was a more fitting president, the Electoral College win in that case may have contributed to the decline of our economy.  I know that many of the recipients of this letter are Republicans, but if you are saying to yourself ‘It was a win for our side.’, I see that as a large part of the real problem in America(along with voters not seeming to understand the problem with reelecting problem representatives that don’t do their jobs),  party loyalty, no matter how misguided, seems to surpass loyalty to the best ideas for our nation.  When the Electoral College votes contrary to the popular votes cast for a candidate better suited to the job, it is working against our country not for it.  I would suggest a requirement that Electoral College voters have the additional burden of protecting the people from the people and be required to consider fitness for the position and be educated that the position of President is primarily diplomatic, but requires a person of at least high moral character, a  thoughtful, considerate & fair tempered person with an abundance of self-control, that makes well informed decisions.

A point President Trump and I agree on is that Presidential, and potentially all candidates should have to pass a medical evaluation, I just include mental health evaluation in the whole of the medical evaluation.  It isn’t that I 100% disagree with every point of his platform, it is more a difference in the implementation in some cases.  For example: the southern border wall.  If the goal of one’s campaign is to keep more jobs in America & create more American jobs, why not hire more border patrol agents and add a fleet of electric vehicles, solar charging stations, video surveillance by day, infrared at night instead of building an ugly wall that will need continuing maintenance?  The world is watching why not move to a more innovative model?

The cost of hiring an additional 1,500 patrol agents would not only be less than the construction estimates, but have the added benefit of lasting cash flow back into border communities.  Decreases in unemployment, increases in tax flow would of course follow & continue as well.  Unfortunately the wall will not stop the criminal element or drug flow because they will just find another way, only the good people fleeing danger & looking for a better opportunity like many of our fore fathers were.

Even his executive action banning travel without allowing for a smooth implementation was something that handled differently could have been a good thing.  Instead it just seems to be creating more enemies where there may have been a few. I agree there is caution needed, but we know there are already processes in place.  We have paused immigration before, but it was done much more smoothly. Not consulting with the traditional heads of security & the military is dumb & dangerous as well. Perhaps they could have pointed out the issues with such a swift & sloppy implementation.

I also believe if we are building pipelines for anything it should be to transport water.  With the increase of bad weather, droughts & flooding events, it seems we should be able to prevent some of the flooding by setting diversion pipelines, ditches and lakes then move the water to resupply drought stricken areas.  I am opposed to the DAPL and any oil or gasoline pipelines that cross water supplies.  It’s beyond time we get our priorities in proper order, there are more alternatives to oil than fresh water alternatives.  I am saddened that the president that spends so much time claiming to be the champion of the ‘forgotten people’ is allowing the DAPL project to move forward despite the objections of the most forgotten people of all.  Haven’t the native peoples & small farm owners suffered enough?  Is the risk to the water supply really worth it?

Research I did last summer indicates the safest, most job creating way to transport oil is via train with a 100 car limit observing the safe speeds for the area.  The whole rail industry has seen growth from using rail to transport the oil.  Sure we all like paying less, but it has been proven we will all pay more at the pump so why not go the safer, long term job producing route?

I have expressed more than enough for now, since it is unlikely to be read in it’s entirety, I will break it down by topic & send separate messages by topic.  I am however looking forward to a reply to my questions, especially the ones related to the illegal hire & “fake news” leak.  I am also praying you do not allow this situation that seems like he is receiving special treatment to go on for long, he may have won, but it was a strategic minority win therefore it would have been non Trump voters that have put you in or back in office and all of us are your constituents, the majority of us will be continuing to call for change until things improve.

Praying for us all, Paula