#initiative center founders

[harrysonlylover]

Find Your Pleasing*

In which you have a heated meeting with the hot CEO

Wc:2.4k

Warnings: MATURE & SMUTTY CONTENT.

-----------------------------------------

The floor was buzzing with workers frantically running from one room to the other as they made sure everything was perfect and neat for him.

Mr. Harry Styles, owner, and founder of Pleasing for sex toys. He started this company from the bottom in 2017 with no one to motivate him but his own will.

Back then CEOs of big companies laughed in his face when he proposed his project, they even scoffed and made fun of him. Now they are waiting in the lobby for their turn to have a word with him. He likes- no loves how they behaved after he outsmarted them in the business field, he even enjoyed watching their face turn pale whenever they entered the headquarters because everyone knows that he’ll be reigning on the top for a very long time.

The secret to his success was the face of Pleasing which also happens to be him. He caused a revolution of some type in the sex toys world after he launched an ad making every man and woman drool for him. There were even rumors about couples breaking up thanks to Pleasing’s glorious toys. When the news reached Harry he smirked, secretly liking the idea of having power over others.

He didn’t even need to try and well the rest is history.

There are lots of things that the public does not know about the successful young man, one of which is his sex club also called “Pleasing”. It is mistaken for being inspired by the company, little do they know the devil himself built both of them.

The sound of printing machines, telephones, and employees shouting got closer as you neared the 5th floor also known as Styles’ Headquarters. You had a job interview and you were required to know some crucial details about him.

You approached the receptionist who was thankfully not so busy and she helped you reach his office, the room that was isolated from the entire floor.

She went in before you and you could faintly hear the murmur of words exchanged between them. It wasn’t long before she gave you the green light to enter.

A big mahogany desk was placed in the center of the room behind which he stood with his back to you, and you couldn’t help but notice the display of many sex toys on the counter.

At the sound of your footsteps, he turned around, his right hand still placed on his hip. He was dressed in an elegant navy suit that made sure he appears as the CEO. You caught a glimpse of his painted fingernails varying from turquoise to transparent while his hands were complimented by luxurious rings, a lion, a pearl, and his initials. You were very familiar with his hands just like the rest of the world was.

“Mrs. Y/N it’s an honor to finally meet you, have a seat please.” He signaled to the comfortable chair in front of his desk.

“Same goes for you, Mr. Styles.” You smiled as you lowered your skirt to adjust your seating while feeling his eyes raking your body.

“I know, now y/n please call me Harry. I hope this doesn’t bother you but I would rather be straightforward with this.” He was now standing in front of you leaning on his desk with his arms crossed over his chest, and you caught a whiff of his perfume. Tobacco Vanille that sent vibrations throughout your body.

“I’m a very busy man and I’m in a rush but please don’t worry I already scanned your file, so I’m being righteous with you. Which is why I prepared questions for you to answer.” He spoke fishing out a document and relaxing more on the desk, you couldn’t help but let your eyes drift to his front and you wondered if it was a bulge or just a wrinkle of his pants.

“Anything caught your attention, Miss?” You immediately straightened your posture trying not to turn red in the face.

“No nothing Mr- Harry.” He hummed and flipped the papers while you refrained from looking down again.

“So I gather that you’ve worked with big companies before, nice work indeed. How would you approach Pleasing’s designs?” He turned his gaze to you and rubbed the light stubble on his chin.

“First of all Pleasing has a wide range of items that are no doubt causing global chaos in a good way of course. No one is even thinking of designing sex toys anymore as they stand no chance but Mr. Harry did you ever ask your customers what they want.?”

He was listening to you attentively, his eyes never leaving yours and the corners of his mouth were itching to offer you a grin.

“Sometimes yes, but how do you suggest that happens?”

“You focus on the people who are against Pleasing, who do not enjoy sex toys. Dig deep into what makes them feel good, I think that the initiative you’re looking for here is not to sell more toys but to help everyone find pleasure. Even those that think they can’t.” You spoke confidently already feeling him become amused at your thoughts.

“Hm, so Miss tell me what would the motto be for this campaign?” He shifted around and stood behind your chair, his fingers lingering over the expensive leather.

“Find your pleasing.”

“And do you know what’s yours?” He leaned down and whispered in your ear and you could swear his voice suddenly became deeper.

You nodded your head and he moved forward examining the display of toys, his left hand was in his pocket while the other hovered over the items till he picked the one.

“This is a unique one, I didn’t get to try it yet but I’d love to give you the honor.” He presented it forward in front of you like a piece of candy. It was a plug or at least it looked like one but with a button on the side.

“Now?” You inquired feeling a bit surprised at his playfulness.

“Only if you feel like it Miss, I’d never push you out of your comfort zone. If you want you can take –“

“Tell me Harry do you know what’s your own ‘Pleasing’ “ you shot back at him as you watched his expression shift and eyes darken.

“Hm yes I do but I’m afraid I’m a visual demonstrator Darling.” He lowered down to your level and his hot breath was doing things to you.

“And I’m a fast learner Harry.” He wasted no time in grabbing you by the throat, managing to pull you up on the counter without hurting you just keeping a good amount of pressure on your neck.

He kissed all over your collarbone as you wrapped your heels around his torso, and his cock was being pressed into your core.

“I find my pleasing in others, so pretty girl when you get yours I’ll get mine.” He muttered hungrily over your lips pushing his tongue as his jaw flexed. His hand found its way beneath your skirt and immediately cupped your cunt with his ringed hands.

“I saw how you were looking at my hands pretty, you’re not so sly you know? What did you want, my hands to hold your cunt like this as you hump for relief? His thumb was pressed on your clit making you jolt while his buttoned nose grazed your neck.

“Yes and your thick fingers inside.” You replied quickly as you were heating up by the moment.

He suddenly pulled back and removed all of his rings, slicing his eyes up to you while smirking before placing the rings on your fingers. They were a bit lose and almost fell out.

“Tsk tsk even my rings can’t fit, how will you handle me pretty.” He chuckled pushing one finger inside making you grasp onto his shoulders.

He gently added another finger and began massaging your labia, with his forehead laid against yours. He fastened his pace going in circles and when he found your g-spot he teased you by delicately returning to his massaging technique.

You moaned against him, with your nails digging into his back. He was smiling at the sight of you falling apart on his touch.

“See this? This is my ‘Pleasing’, getting to satisfy a woman like you. Look at these pretty moans and your fucked out state already riding my fingers like a whore. Anything to get stuffed yeah?” He bit at your earlobe and when you didn’t answer him, he curled his fingers at your g-spot.

“Yes I love it, I love your thick fingers inside of me.” You continued to moan in ecstasy feeling his fingers hit deep spots and despite trying to jerk and shift around he kept a firm grip on your hips.

His thumb moved to your swollen clit lightly tapping at it before pinching it and grinning when he heard you scream due to oversensitivity.

“My favorite spot, this little pearl just like the ring yeh? Like being in heat as I play with it?” His other hand dug into your back resulting in the both of you becoming fully intertwined as you shifted closer to him.

“Please I need to cum Harry.” You begged in a rush, his fingers felt so good and the pressure in your lower stomach was getting more and more intense.

“Cum pretty, let me find my ‘Pleasing’ in yours.” And right on cue you closed your eyes shut, as you saw nothing but black, his eyes were still set on your face watching you almost black out from the mind-blowing orgasm he just gave you.

He leaned forward kissing the tip of your nose and slowly removed his fingers for a taste making you whine at the empty feeling.

“You just had an orgasm and you still need something inside you?.” He raised his eyebrows not to inquire but to make sure.

“Need you to stretch me out real good Harry.”

That was all he needed to hear before he unbuckled his pants and dropped them to his ankles, his bulge looked painful as he took his briefs off to reveal his erect cock ready and glistening with precum.

He grabbed you roughly placing you on your stomach with your ass in the air and ripped off your skirt with his bare hands effortlessly.

“My ski-“

“I’ll buy you a Skirts company.”

He mumbled through heavy pants before leaning down to your cunt and grazing his nose at it before breathing in its scent and groaning loudly.

If you could see him right now he’d probably be looking at your puffy pussy with puppy eyes and a drooling mouth.

You wiggled your ass back at him making him chuckle and bite at your ass before standing up and placing his tip at your entrance.

He plunged in slowly but easily due to your wetness, you were so warm and snug yet so fucking tight he had to grit his teeth to stop himself from coming despite having stamina.

“Perfect pussy wanna make it drip all day fucking hell.” He rolled his eyes back and moved his hips slowly before pulling you back to his chest by your hair and thrusting in at a fast pace.

The sound of skin slapping and moaning filled the room as he whispered the filthiest words in your ear.

“My Pleasing is destroying your cunt and knowing you love every second of it.”

“My Pleasing is seeing you beg to be filled with me as you tell me how much you adore being a cockslut.”

“So tight already eager to milk every drop yeah? Well, take all of it it’s yours.”

He nibbled at your earlobe and you could no longer do anything but moan and whimper at the feeling of his veins massaging your walls as he hit your g-spot repeatedly. His thick cock stretched you out and reached your insides as he poked near your belly button.

His hand was around your neck choking you, while the other pinched your clit to overstimulate you making you jolt and cry out in pleasure.

“When you beg for it, it means you should be able to take it.” He slapped your sensitive clit three times as you clenched around his cock uncontrollably letting go and reaching your second orgasm.

Harry followed you immediately too overwhelmed by your tightness, you stood chest to back with his bicep tightly wrapped around you while he spilled into you, load after the other.

“Take all of my cum, let your cunt swallow it up.”

His hips stilled inside of you until every last drop was spilled, he moved strands of your hair from around your face, allowing himself to kiss all over your skin.

He reached over grabbing the same toy from earlier. “May I?”

You nodded your head feeling eager for what he was for you, he slowly pulled out not giving the chance for any of his cum to drip before inserting the plug inside your creamy cunt.

You hissed at the feeling of it along with the sticky cum, his eyes were twinkling as he almost died from the sight.

“My ‘Pleasing’ is making pretty plugs to keep cum where it belongs.” He whispered and reached down to the button you thought about and pressed it making it vibrate with the cum inside of you allowing it to reach even deeper.

“H-harry too sensitive.” You tightened your grip on him as you could quite literally feel the cum vibrate inside of you.

He smirked and turned off the button only to push another one leaving you with a whole other feeling.

Emptiness.

“What is this?.” He laughed at your shock before pulling the plug out of you and showing you its transparent tube filled with cum.

“This one allows you to hold on to cum when you need it, fills up sluts like you when needed. Now open up.” He tipped your head backward and you didn’t get to see what he did since the cum was already spilling on your tongue.

He ordered you to take every drop and you did. You laid down on your back feeling spent out as he got a wet cloth and began cleaning your thighs and pussy gently leaving delicate kisses there.

When he was done he tossed the cloth aside and sat back down with you in his lap and head buried in his chest.

“Did my little minx like my new invention?” He asked feeling quite eager for the answer.

“Very much my love.”

There are lots of things that the public doesn’t know about the young successful man, one of them is his love life…

#harry styles fanfiction #harry smut #harry styles smut #harry styles imagine #harry styles drabble #harry styles oneshot #harry styles blurb #harry styles boyfriend #harry styles story #harry fic #harry styles fic #harry styles fanfic #harry fanfic #ceorry #domrry #harry x reader #harry styles series #harry styles angst #harry styles x you #harry styles writing #harry styles tumblr #older harry #dilfrry

[racefortheironthrone]

OK, I'll bite - what's the deal with the United Farm Workers? What were their strengths and weaknesses compared to other labor unions?

It is not an easy thing to talk about the UFW, in part because it wasn't just a union. At the height of its influence in the 1960s and 1970s, it was also a civil rights movement that was directly inspired by the SCLC campaigns of Martin Luther King and owed its success as much to mass marches, hunger strikes, media attention, and the mass mobilization of the public in support of boycotts that stretched across the United States and as far as Europe as it did to traditional strikes and picket lines.

It was also a social movement that blended powerful strains of Catholic faith traditions with Chicano/Latino nationalism inspired by the black power movement, that reshaped the identity of millions away from asimilation into white society and towards a fierce identification with indigeneity, and challenged the racist social hierarchy of rural California.

It was also a political movement that transformed Latino voting behavior, established political coalitions with the Kennedys, Jerry Brown, and the state legislature, that pushed through legislation and ran statewide initiative campaigns, and that would eventually launch the careers of generations of Latino politicians who would rise to the very top of California politics.

However, it was also a movement that ultimately failed in its mission to remake the brutal lives of California farmworkers, which currently has only 7,000 members when it once had more than 80,000, and which today often merely trades on the memory of its celebrated founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez rather than doing any organizing work.

To explain the strengths and weaknesses of the UFW, we have to start with some organizational history, because the UFW was the result of the merger of several organizations each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Origins of the UFW:

To explain the strengths and weaknesses of the UFW, we have to start with some organizational history, because the UFW was the result of the merger of several organizations each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

In the 1950s, both Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez were community organizers working for a group called the Community Service Organization (an affiliate of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation) that sought to aid farmworkers living in poverty. Huerta and Chavez were trained in a novel strategy of grassroots, door-to-door organizing aimed not at getting workers to sign union cards, but to agree to host a house meeting where co-workers could gather privately to discuss their problems at work free from the surveillance of their bosses. This would prove to be very useful in organizing the fields, because unlike the traditional union model where organizers relied on the NRLB's rulings to directly access the factory floors, Central California farms were remote places where white farm owners and their white overseers would fire shotguns at brown "trespassers" (union-friendly workers, organizers, picketers).

In 1962, Chavez and Huerta quit CSO to found the National Farm Workers Association, which was really more of a worker center offering support services (chiefly, health care) to independent groups of largely Mexican farmworkers. In 1965, they received a request to provide support to workers dealing with a strike against grape growers in Delano, California.

In Delano, Chavez and Huerta met Larry Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which was a more traditional labor union of migrant Filipino farmworkers who had begun the strike over sub-minimum wages. Itliong wanted Chavez and Huerta to organize Mexican farmworkers who had been brought in as potential strikebreakers and get them to honor the picket line.

The result of their collaboration was the formation of the United Farm Workers as a union of the AFL-CIO. The UFW would very much be marked by a combination of (and sometimes conflict between) AWOC's traditional union tactics - strikes, pickets, card drives, employer-based campaigns, and collective bargaining for union contracts - and NFWA's social movement strategy of marches, boycotts, hunger strikes, media campaigns, mobilization of liberal politicians, and legislative campaigns.

1965 to 1970: the Rise of the UFW:

While the strike starts with 2,000 Filipino workers and 1,200 Mexican families targeting Delano area growers, it quickly expanded to target more growers and bring more workers to the picket lines, eventually culminating in 10,000 workers striking against the whole of the table grape growers of California across the length and breadth of California.

Throughout 1966, the UFW faced extensive violence from the growers, from shotguns used as "warning shots" to hand-to-hand violence, to driving cars into pickets, to turning pesticide-spraying machines onto picketers. Local police responded to the violence by effectively siding with the growers, and would arrest UFW picketers for the crime of calling the police.

Chavez strongly emphasized a non-violent response to the growers' tactics - to the point of engaging in a Gandhian hunger strike against his own strikers in 1968 to quell discussions about retaliatory violence - but also began to employ a series of civil rights tactics that sought to break what had effectively become a stalemate on the picket line by side-stepping the picket lines altogether and attacking the growers on new fronts.

First, he sought the assistance of outside groups and individuals who would be sympathetic to the plight of the farmworker and could help bring media attention to the strike - UAW President Walter Reuther and Senator Robert Kennedy both visited Delano to express their solidarity, with Kennedy in particular holding hearings that shined a light on the issue of violence and police violations of the civil rights of UFW picketers.

Second, Chavez hit on the tactic of using boycotts as a way of exerting economic pressure on particular growers and leveraging the solidarity of other unions and consumers - the boycotts began when Chavez enlisted Dolores Huerta to follow a shipment of grapes from Schenley Industries (the first grower to be boycotted) to the Port of Oakland. There, Huerta reached out to the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and persuaded them to honor the boycott and refuse to handle non-union grapes. Schenley's grapes started to rot on the docks, cutting them off from the market, and between the effects of union solidarity and growing consumer participation in the UFW's boycotts, the growers started to come under real economic pressure as their revenue dropped despite a record harvest.

Throughout the rest of the Delano grape strike, Dolores Huerta would be the main organizer of the national and internal boycotts, travelling across the country (and eventually all the way to the UK) to mobilize unions and faith groups to form boycott committees and boycott houses in major cities that in turn could educate and mobilize ordinary consumers through a campaign of leafleting and picketing at grocery stores.

Third, the UFW organized the first of its marches, a 300-mile trek from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento aimed at drawing national attention to the grape strike and attempting to enlist the state government to pass labor legislation that would give farmworkers the right to organize. Carefully organized by Cesar Chavez to draw on Mexican faith traditions, the march would be labelled a "pilgrimage," and would be timed to begin during Lent and culminate during Easter. In addition to American flags and the UFW banner, the march would be led by "pilgrims" carrying a banner of Our Lady of Guadelupe.

While this strategy was ultimately effective in its goal of influencing the broader Latino community in California to see the UFW as not just a union but a vehicle for the broader aspirations of the whole Latino community for equality and social justice, what became known in Chicano circles as La Causa, the emphasis on Mexican symbolism and Chicano identity contributed to a growing tension with the Filipino half of the UFW, who felt that they were being sidelined in a strike they had started.

Nevertheless, by the time that the UFW's pilgrimage arrived at Sacramento, news broke that they had won their first breakthrough in the strike as Schenley Industries (which had been suffering through a four-month national boycott of its products) agreed to sign the first UFW union contract, delivering a much-needed victory.

As the strike dragged on, growers were not passively standing by - in addition to doubling down on the violence by hiring strikebreakers to assault pro-UFW farmworkers, growers turned to the Teamsters Union as a way of pre-empting the UFW, either by pre-emptively signing contracts with the Teamsters or effectively backing the Teamsters in union elections.

Part of the darker legacy of the Teamsters is that, going all the back to the 1930s, they have a nasty habit of raiding other unions, and especially during their mobbed-up days would work with the bosses to sign sweetheart deals that allowed the Teamsters to siphon dues money from workers (who had not consented to be represented by the Teamsters, remember) while providing nothing in the way of wage increases or improved working conditions, usually in exchange for bribes and/or protection money from the employers. Moreover, the Teamsters had no compunction about using violence to intimidate rank-and-file workers and rival unions in order to defend their "paper locals" or win a union election. This would become even more of an issue later on, but it started up as early as 1966.

Moreover, the growers attempted to adapt to the UFW's boycott tactics by sharing labels, such that a boycotted company would sell their products under the guise of being from a different, non-boycotted company. This forced the UFW to change its boycott tactics in turn, so that instead of targeting individual growers for boycott, they now asked unions and consumers alike to boycott all table grapes from the state of California.

By 1970, however, the growing strength of the national grape boycott forced no fewer than 26 Delano grape growers to the bargaining table to sign the UFW's contracts. Practically overnight, the UFW grew from a membership of 10,000 strikers (none of whom had contracts, remember) to nearly 70,000 union members covered by collective bargaining agreements.

1970 to 1978: The UFW Confronts Internal and External Crises

Up until now, I've been telling the kind of simple narrative of gradual but inevitable social progress that U.S history textbooks like, the Hollywood story of an oppressed minority that wins a David and Goliath struggle against a violent, racist oligarchy through the kind of non-violent methods that make white allies feel comfortable and uplifted. (It's not an accident that the bulk of the 2014 film Cesar Chavez starring Michael Peña covers the Delano Grape Strike.)

It's also the period in which the UFW's strengths as an organization that came out of the community organizing/civil rights movement were most on display. In the eight years that followed, however, the union would start to experience a series of crises that would demonstrate some of the weaknesses of that same institutional legacy. As Matt Garcia describes in From the Jaws of Victory, in the wake of his historic victory in 1970, Cesar Chavez began to inflict a series of self-inflicted injuries on the UFW that crippled the functioning of the union, divided leadership and rank-and-file alike, and ultimately distracted from the union's external crises at a time when the UFW could not afford to be distracted.

That's not to say that this period was one of unbroken decline - as we'll discuss, the UFW would win many victories in this period - but the union's forward momentum was halted and it would spend much of the 1970s trying to get back to where it was at the very start of the decade.

To begin with, we should discuss the internal contradictions of the UFW: one of the major features of the UFW's new contracts was that they replaced the shape-up with the hiring hall. This gave the union an enormous amount of power in terms of hiring, firing and management of employees, but the quid-pro-quo of this system is that it puts a significant administrative burden on the union. Not only do you have to have to set up policies that fairly decide who gets work and when, but you then have to even-handedly enforce those policies on a day-to-day basis in often fraught circumstances - and all of this is skilled white-collar labor.

This ran into a major bone of contention within the movement. When the locus of the grape strike had shifted from the fields to the urban boycotts, this had made a new constituency within the union - white college-educated hippies who could do statistical research, operate boycott houses, and handle media campaigns. These hippies had done yeoman's work for the union and wanted to keep on doing that work, but they also needed to earn enough money to pay the rent and look after their growing families, and in general shift from being temporary volunteers to being professional union staffers.

This ran head-long into a buzzsaw of racial and cultural tension. Similar to the conflicts over the role of white volunteers in CORE/SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement, there were a lot of UFW leaders and members who had come out of the grassroots efforts in the field who felt that the white college kids were making a play for control over the UFW. This was especially driven by Cesar Chavez' religiously-inflected ideas of Catholic sacrifice and self-denial, embodied politically as the idea that a salary of $5 a week (roughly $30 a week in today's money) was a sign of the purity of one's "missionary work." This worked itself out in a series of internicene purges whereby vital college-educated staff were fired for various crimes of ideological disunity.

This all would have been survivable if Chavez had shown any interest in actually making the union and its hiring halls work. However, almost from the moment of victory in 1970, Chavez showed almost no interest in running the union as a union - instead, he thought that the most important thing was relocating the UFW's headquarters to a commune in La Paz, or creating the Poor People's Union as a way to organize poor whites in the San Joaquin Valley, or leaving the union altogether to become a Catholic priest, or joining up with the Synanon cult to run criticism sessions in La Paz. In the mean-time, a lot of the UFW's victories were withering on the vine as workers in the fields got fed up with hiring halls that couldn't do their basic job of making sure they got sufficient work at the right wages.

Externally, all of this was happening during the second major round of labor conflicts out in the fields. As before, the UFW faced serious conflicts with the Teamsters, first in the so-called "Salad Bowl Strike" that lasted from 1970-1971 and was at the time the largest and most violent agricultural strike in U.S history - only then to be eclipsed in 1973 with the second grape strike. Just as with the Salinas strike, the grape growers in 1973 shifted to a strategy of signing sweetheart deals with the Teamsters - and using Teamster muscle to fight off the UFW's new grape strike and boycott. UFW pickets were shot at and killed in drive-byes by Teamster trucks, who then escalated into firebombing pickets and UFW buildings alike.

After a year of violence, reduced support from the rank-and-file, and declining resources, Chavez and the UFW felt that their backs were up against a wall - and had to adjust their tactics accordingly. With the election of Jerry Brown as governor in 1974, the UFW pivoted to a strategy of pressuring the state government to enact a California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that would give agricultural workers the right to organize, and with that all the labor protections normally enjoyed by industrial workers under the Federal National Labor Relations Act - at the cost of giving up the freedom to boycott and conduct secondary strikes which they had had as outsiders to the system.

This led to the semi-miraculous Modesto March, itself a repeat of the Delano-to-Sacramento march from the 1960s. Starting as just a couple hundred marchers in San Francisco, the March swelled to as many as 15,000-strong by the time that it reached its objective at Modesto. This caused a sudden sea-change in the grape strike, bringing the growers and the Teamsters back to the table, and getting Jerry Brown and the state legislature to back passage of California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

This proved to be the high-water mark for the UFW, which swelled to a peak of 80,000 members. The problem was that the old problems within the UFW did not go away - victory in 1975 didn't stop Chavez and his Chicano constituency feuding with more distinctively Mexican groups within the movement over undocumented immigration, nor feuding with Filipino constituencies over a meeting with Ferdinand Marcos, and nor escalating these internal conflicts into a series of leadership purges.

Conclusion: Decline and Fall

At the same time, the new alliance with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board proved to be a difficult one for the UFW. While establishment of the agency proved to be a major boon for the UFW, which won most of the free elections under CALRA (all the while continuing to neglect the critical hiring hall issue), the state legislature badly underfunded ALRB, forcing the agency to temporarily shut down. The UFW responded by sponsoring Prop 14 in the 1976 elections to try to empower ALRB, and then got very badly beaten in that election cycle - and then, when Republican George Deukmejian was elected in 1983, the ALRB was largely defunded and unable to achieve its original elective goals.

In the wake of Deukmejian, the UFW went into terminal decline. Most of its best organizers had left or been purged in internal struggles, their contracts failed to succeed over the long run due to the hiring hall problem, and the union basically stopped organizing new members after 1986.

#history #u.s history #labor history #ufw #united farm workers #cesar chavez #dolores huerta #trade unions #social history #social movements #unions

[mariacallous]

CHICAGO (JTA) — Earlier this month, 40 people gathered in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood to design a sukkah.

But they hadn’t come together only to build a hut for the upcoming Jewish festival of Sukkot, which begins on Friday evening and revolves around Jews erecting and dwelling in temporary structures for a week.

For this interfaith, intergenerational group, constructing the impermanent space was a step forward in what they hope is an enduring relationship between a Jewish community on Chicago’s North Side and a Black-led church on the West Side.

“Interfaith, interracial, cross-city, cross-neighborhood relationship building does not happen overnight,” said Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann of Mishkan Chicago, the Jewish prayer community partnering on the project. “It’s taken over a year for us to get together three times, four times. This sustained effort of people to continue to build relationships takes a long time.”

The sukkah project is part of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, which was launched last year and aims to build connections between the predominantly Black West Side community of Lawndale and the city’s Jewish community, which was once centered in that neighborhood. As part of the festival, which will take place in Lawndale from Oct. 1-15, architects partner with local neighborhood organizations to build the sukkahs, which are repurposed as permanent structures following the festival.

This year, six organizations are building sukkahs, which will later become sites ranging from a pavilion for meditation or a tool library. Mishkan is the only synagogue participating in the festival, and it is building its sukkah in collaboration with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, a legal services initiative founded by the Lawndale Christian Community Church.

Through building the sukkah, which will later serve as a memorial to 41 victims of gun violence who were part of the legal center, the communities hope to reckon both with present tragedy and historical pain.

The sukkah’s design will address the departure of Jews from Lawndale during the postwar “white flight” era, when white residents left newly integrated urban neighborhoods en masse for the suburbs. Lawndale once had 60 synagogues and 75,000 Jewish residents. By the mid-1950s, only 500 were left.

“It’s a sad, hard, important-to-reckon-with piece of Jewish history in Chicago,” said Heydemann, who delivered a sermon on that topic to the church on a Sunday last year. That Sunday was also Tisha B’Av, the Jewish fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Holy Temples in Jerusalem.

“There are people from the congregation who remember when Jews and Black people both lived in the neighborhood before Jews moved out of the neighborhood, and that was a powerful conversation,” said Diana Collymore, a deacon who has been active in Lawndale Christian Community Church since 2014. “That’s one of the strongest pieces that stayed with people. There were people from Mishkan who remembered what street the grandpa or mom or dad grew up on here.”

The communities are collaborating with two firms: Architecture for Public Benefit and Trent Fredrickson Architecture, whose architects also hope to honor that shared history and create something that is responsive to the community’s needs, backgrounds and experiences.

“One of the community members was talking about this old Jewish restaurant that now doesn’t exist anymore and whenever she would go there she would feel welcome and at home,” said Chana Haouzi, the founder of Architecture for Public Benefit. “We just spoke of feeling invited and like that you could stay as long as you like.”

The relationship between Mishkan and Lawndale Christian began when Heydemann and the church’s lead pastor, Jonathan Brooks, who is also known as Pastah J, participated in a program for early-career clergy at the University of Chicago Divinity School. They have spoken to each other’s congregations and hope for the sukkah-building process to bring their members closer together.

Members are already finding commonalities between the two congregations.

“The Jewish community that came here from Europe, they were driven here from trauma and harm, and the African-American community that came from the South in the Great Migration, they too were fleeing trauma,” Collymore said. “And both have faith and they believe in a God, and their faith brought them and encouraged them and directed them and kept them and settled them in this space.”

One way the communities are connecting and confronting the past is through shared scripture. The group designing the sukkah found meaning in a well-known passage from Ecclesiastes, which is read in synagogue on Sukkot and relates how there is a time and a season for everything under the sun.

The two groups studied the passage, interpreting and analyzing the Hebrew and translated versions. Its text will later be emblazoned on the sukkah’s walls in Hebrew script, transliterated Hebrew and English.

“There’s appreciation around that Ecclesiastes passage,” Collymore said. “Having scripture out of both of our faiths, and especially the kind of passage so appropriate for the way things have changed here, I think this is a catalyst for more deeper conversations.”

The sukkah will have three main walls, which will feature shelves lined with vessels that contain artifacts contributed by the community to share stories and create moments of connection. At one gathering, participants painted and decorated rocks with designs and messages inspired by the passage from Ecclesiastes.

“We’ve documented a lot of the discussion, and I think ultimately it was this idea of understanding how these two communities work together and seeing the points of commonality and the focus on loving and caring for each other and putting people first and also God,” Haouzi said. “It’s really that idea that ends up being manifested in the design itself.”

In addition, Mishkan members have participated in a walking tour of the church’s community spaces and initiatives. In addition to the health center and the legal aid center, the church has a fitness center, a café with a roof deck, an organic farm, a recovery center for men who were recently incarcerated or are in recovery, and other community programs.

“It’s important for predominantly white Jewish people who have been told that they’re not safe in parts of Chicago that don’t look white and Jewish, even if these parts of Chicago used to be their grandparents’ homes, to just come there and see that this neighborhood has incredibly interesting, dynamic people who live here and projects they’re taking on,” Heydemann said. “There’s an incredible amount of [the] neighborhood investing in itself and, beyond the neighborhood, outside people looking and saying, ‘How can we be part of that?’”

When the sukkah design festival opens, the church and Mishkan will host a shared prayer service for the community. They also hope the sukkah provides a space for both shared meals and independent reflection.

“Not only will it be a physical manifestation of this collaboration between both groups but it will also invite other people to join and to host both communities to continue building on their collaboration,” Haouzi said.

Heydemann says her community’s partnership with Lawndale Christian Legal Center has led to members becoming regular monthly donors to the center and reading books that speak to its work. When the sukkah becomes a memorial to victims of gun violence, it will stand in a memorial garden whose design is being led by the legal center.

Heydemann says she hopes that when Jews come to the Sukkah Design Festival, they will feel motivated to do something “to try to reverse the decades of disinvestment.”

“I would hope that Jews across Chicago come to the festival and feel a sense of reawakened connection to this neighborhood, whether or not they have family who ever lived here,” she said. “I would also hope that Jewish people would see the sukkot and understand their own tradition, Judaism, is this beautiful, dynamic, interesting platform for relationship building across traditions.”

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The United States has returned to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years after a privately-built spacecraft named Odysseus capped a nail-biting 73-minute descent from orbit with a touchdown near the moon’s south pole.

Amid celebrations of what NASA hailed “a giant leap forward,” there was no immediate confirmation of the status or condition of the lander, other than it had reached its planned landing site at crater Malapert A.

But later Intuitive Machines, the Texas-based company that built the first commercial craft to land on the moon, said the craft was “upright and starting to send data.”

The statement on X said mission managers were “working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface.”

The so-called “soft landing” on Thursday, which Steve Altemus, the company’s founder, had given only an 80% chance of succeeding, was designed to open a new era of lunar exploration as NASA works towards a scheduled late-2026 mission to send humans back there.

“Welcome to the moon,” Altemus said when touchdown when the 5.23pm touchdown was eventually confirmed, after about 10 minutes in which Odysseus was out of contact.

It was the first time any US-built spacecraft had landed on the moon since NASA’s most recent crewed visit, the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, and the first visit by commercial vehicle following last month’s failure of Peregrine One, another partnership between the space agency and a private company, Astrobotic.

“Today, for the first time in more than a half century, the US has returned to the moon. Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company, an American company, launched and led the voyage up there,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said.

“What a triumph. Odysseus has taken the moon. This feat is a giant leap forward for all of humanity.”

There was no video of Odysseus’s fully autonomous descent, which slowed to about 2.2mph at 33ft above the surface.

But a camera built by students at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University was designed to fall and take pictures immediately before touchdown, and NASA cameras were set to photograph the ground from the spacecraft.

The 14ft (4.3 metres) hexagonal, six-legged Nova-C lander, affectionately nicknamed Odie by Intuitive Machines employees, is part of NASA’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative in which the agency awards contracts to private partners, largely to support the Artemis program.

NASA contributed $118m to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding a further $130m ahead of its February 15 launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

The IM-1 mission, like the doomed Peregrine effort, is carrying a payload of scientific equipment designed to gather data about the lunar environment, specifically in the rocky region chosen as the landing site for NASA’s crewed Artemis III mission planned for two years’ time.

It is a hazardous area – “pockmarked with all of these craters,” according to Nelson – but chosen because it is believed to be rich in frozen water that could help sustain a permanent lunar base crucial to future human missions to Mars.

Scientists announced last year that they believed tiny glass beads strewn across the moon’s surface contained potentially “billions of tonnes of water” that could be extracted and used on future missions.

The risks are worth it, Nelson told CNN on Thursday, “to see if there is water in abundance. Because if there’s water, there’s rocket fuel: hydrogen, and oxygen. And we could have a gas station on the south pole of the moon.”

The planned operational life of the solar powered lander is only seven days, before the landing site about 186 miles from the moon’s south pole moves into Earth’s shadow.

But NASA hopes that will be long enough for analysis of how soil there reacted to the impact of the landing.

Other instruments will focus on space weather effects on the lunar surface, while a network of markers for communication and navigation will be deployed.

“Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched upon a SpaceX rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments, is bearing the dream of a new adventure in science, innovation, and American leadership in space,” Nelson said.

Through Artemis, NASA’s return-to-the-moon program that also has longer-term visions of crewed missions to Mars within the next two decades, the US seeks to stay ahead of Russia and China, both of which are planning their own human lunar landings.

Only the US has previously landed astronauts in six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, while five countries have placed uncrewed spacecraft there.

Japan joined the US, Russia, China, and India last month when its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (Slim) made a successful, if awkward touchdown after a three-month flight.

Two further Intuitive Machines launches are scheduled for later this year, including an ice drill to extract ingredients for rocket fuel, and another Nova-C lander containing a small Nasa rover and four small robots that will explore surface conditions.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/22/us-moon-landing-odysseus-intuitive-machines

US returns to lunar surface with for first time in over 50 years

23 February 2024

A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based company Intuitive Machines landed near the south pole of the moon, the first US touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century, and the first ever achieved entirely by the private sector.

Communication with Odysseus seemed be lost during the final stages of the landing, leaving mission control uncertain as to the precise condition and position of the lander, according to flight controllers heard in the webcast.

US returns to lunar surface for first time in over 50 years: ‘Welcome to the moon.’

#Odysseus #Intuitive Machines #Youtube #NASA #Malapert A #moon #moon landing #spacecraft #Steve Altemus #lunar exploration #Bill Nelson #Nova-C lander #Odie #commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) #Artemis #Kennedy Space Center #Falcon 9 #Elon Musk #SpaceX #IM-1 mission #Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM) #lunar lander #earth

[balanchine-ballet-master]

The Story of the Original "Tea" Dancer

There was a delightful story in the Times on February 4th about George Lee, on whom Balanchine created the Tea variation in The Nutcracker. Here it is.

From Ballet to Blackjack, a Dance Pioneer’s Amazing Odyssey

George Lee was the original Tea in “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.” A documentary filmmaker found him and a lost part of ballet history in Las Vegas.

By Siobhan Burke Feb. 4, 2024

Among the blaring lights and all-hours amusements of downtown Las Vegas, in a sea of slot machines at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, George Lee sits quietly at a blackjack table, dealing cards eight hours a day, five days a week, a job he’s been doing for more than 40 years.

Lee, 88, was likely in his usual spot when the filmmaker Jennifer Lin was sifting through old photos at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2022, wondering what had become of a dancer with a notable place in ballet history. Pictured in a publicity shot for the original production of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” in the role known as Tea, was a young Asian dancer identified as George Li.

For Lin, a veteran newspaper reporter turned documentarian, the picture raised intriguing questions. In 1954, when the photo was taken, it was rare to see dancers of color on the stage of New York City Ballet, the company Balanchine co-founded. Who was this young man, this breaker of racial barriers, this pioneer? Was he still alive? And if so, what was he up to? “I became absolutely obsessed with trying to find out what happened to George Li,” Lin said in a video interview.

In just over a year, that obsession has blossomed into a short film, “Ten Times Better,” that chronicles the unexpected story of Lee’s life: from his childhood in 1940s Shanghai, where his performing career began; to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where he fled with his mother, a Polish ballet dancer, in 1949; to New York City and the School of American Ballet, where Balanchine cast him in “The Nutcracker” to “Flower Drum Song” on Broadway, his first of many musical theater gigs; and ultimately, to Las Vegas, where he left dance for blackjack dealing in 1980. (He changed the spelling of his last name in 1959, when he became a United States citizen.)

The film will have its premiere on Feb. 10 as part of the Dance on Camera Festival at Film at Lincoln Center. Lee, who last visited New York in 1993, will be in town for the occasion, an opportunity for long-overdue recognition.

“So many years I haven’t done ballet,” Lee said over coffee at the Four Queens on a recent Sunday, after his shift. “And then suddenly Jennifer comes and tries to bring everything up. To me, it was like a shock.”

George Lee today. He has been a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas for more than 40 years. Photo: Saeed Rahbaran for The New York Times

But Lin’s interest has been welcome. “Jennifer is so perfect, she knows exactly everything,” he said. “She knows my background more than I do.”

Lin was not the only one who had been searching for Lee. In 2017, while organizing an exhibition on “The Nutcracker,” Arlene Yu, who worked for the New York Public Library at the time and is now Lincoln Center’s head archivist, was puzzled by the relatively few traces of him in the library’s vast dance collection.

“I think I’d tracked him down to 1961, but after that, it was really hard to find anything,” she said. “Whereas if you look at some of his peers in ‘The Nutcracker’ in 1954, they went on to careers where there was a lot more documentation.”

Lin’s fascination with Lee emerged through her work on another film, about Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, the founders of Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative focused on ending offensive depictions of Asians in ballet. The role of Tea, a divertissement historically rife with such stereotypes—in Balanchine’s canonical version of “The Nutcracker” and others—has been a flashpoint in those efforts. Chan, too, had been struck by the 1954 images of “The Nutcracker,” which he came across during a library fellowship in 2020.

“I’m like, wait, there’s actually a Chinese guy,” he said — as opposed to a non-Chinese dancer with the saffron makeup or heavily painted eyes or even the artificial buck teeth worn in some old productions. “Who is this guy? And why do I not know about him?”

The "Tea" variation in The Nutcracker at City Ballet in 2015. The dancers are Ralph Ippolito, Claire Von Enck, and Baily Jones. Photo: Andrea Mohin for The New York Times

Lee, in his heyday, was a dancer to know. At just 12, he was already winning public praise. In a preview of a recital of the King-Yanover School in Shanghai, the North China Daily News called him an “extremely promising young Chinese boy, whose technique is of a very high standard.” A reviewer wrote that he “already may be said to be the best Chinese interpreter of Western ballet.” (Lee saved these newspaper clippings and shared them with Lin when they eventually met.)

Born in Hong Kong in 1935, Lee moved to Shanghai with his mother in 1941, when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. During World War II, his father, a Chinese acrobat, was in Kunming in western China; he died in an accident on his way to visit Lee in 1945.

Lee’s mother, Stanislawa Lee, who had danced with the Warsaw Opera, was his first ballet teacher; as a child, he would follow along with her daily barre exercises. Shanghai had a significant Russian population, and with that a robust ballet scene. To earn money, Stanislawa arranged for her son to perform in nightclubs—“like a polka dance, or Russian dance, or sailor dance,” Lee said. The clubs would pay them in rice.

Little George Li in his Shanghai days. Photo: George Lee private collection via the NY Times

Fearing the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover in 1949, the two evacuated to the Philippines. An expected four months as refugees turned into two years. In 1951, an American friend of Lee’s father sponsored them to come to New York, where he introduced Lee to the School of American Ballet, City Ballet’s affiliated school.

As Lee narrates these twists and turns in the film, one memory anchors his recollections. Before they immigrated, his mother issued a warning. “You are going to America, it’s all white people, and you better be 10 times better,” he recalls her saying. “Remember that: 10 times better!”

The footage of Lee in his 20s suggests he took that advice to heart. In television appearances — with the company of the ballet star André Eglevsky, and in a number from “Flower Drum Song” on the Ed Sullivan Show — his power and precision dazzle.

“He was good; he was really good,” Chan said. “Clean fifth, high jump, polished turns, stick the landing—the training is all there. He’s already 10 times better than everybody else.”

In a 1979 interview heard in the film, the former City Ballet soloist Richard Thomas, who took over the role of Tea, raves about Lee’s peerless acrobatic jumps: “He was wonderful! Balanchine choreographed a variation for him that none of us have ever been able to equal.”

As Lee remembers it, Balanchine spent 15 minutes with him in the studio. “He said, ‘What can you do good? Show me what you can do good,’ so I show him something,” Lee said. “I did things like splits and double turns, down and up, turn again like a ball, and that’s it. He picked up some things and put them together.”

George Li as a student at the School of American Ballet. Photo: George Lee private collection via the NY Times

He recalled that during a “Nutcracker” dress rehearsal, the City Ballet makeup artist put him in full yellowface, and Balanchine insisted he take off the makeup. “He is Asian enough! Why do you make him more?” he remembers Balanchine saying. Lee was costumed in the Fu Manchu mustache, queue ponytail and rice paddy hat often associated with the role, now widely critiqued as racist caricatures. But he said he didn’t take offense. “Dancing is dancing,” he said.

Lee performed in “The Nutcracker” as a student; he was never invited to join City Ballet. But he clearly excelled in his classes and onstage. For that, he credits his strong foundation of Russian training in China — and his mother’s exacting standards. He can still see her standing in the studio doorway at the School of American Ballet, observing closely.

“She was watching the class and then would go home and tell me, ‘You did this wrong or that wrong, you got to do it this way,’” he said. “So I really worked hard, and I was good.” (His favorite teacher at the school was the demanding Anatole Oboukhoff: “He always wanted more, and that’s why I liked him very much.”)

To make a living Lee turned to musical theater, performing in shows like “Baker Street” on Broadway and the cabaret “Carol Channing with her 10 Stout-Hearted Men,” which opened in London. He pieced together jobs for more than 20 years, often unsure of what would come next.

Lee in flight in a production of “Flower Drum Song” in Las Vegas in the early 1960s. Photo: George Lee personal collection via the NY Times

He was dancing in a Vegas revue, “Alcazar de Paris,” now in his 40s, when a blackjack dealer friend suggested he go to dealer school. “I can’t dance all my life,” he remembers thinking. He decided to give dealing a try and soon landed a job at the Four Queens. Aside from four years at another casino, he has worked there ever since.

In December 2022, he got a voice mail message from Lin. With her reporting skills and some crucial assists from Yu, she had determined that he lived in Las Vegas. Of the five phone numbers she found for George Lees, four led nowhere; his was the last she tried.

When they finally connected, she put her other project on hold to focus on his story; she and her small creative team had a final cut by November. “George is 88, and I wanted him to be able to enjoy this moment, where people recognize him for his dancing,” she said.

As he prepares to return to New York, Lee said he felt gratified, most of all, for his mother.

“I’m proud for her that I didn’t let her down,” he said. “It makes me feel better to look up at her and say: ‘Look, mother, now you see what’s happening, what you did for me. You gave me all the good foundation, everything. Through you, I’m here now.’”

George Lee today. Photo: Saeed Rahbaran for The New York Times

#Balanchine #George Lee #George Li #Nutcracker ballet #Balanchine's Nutcracker #Asian stereotypes #Nutcracker Chinese Dance #New York City Ballet #NYCB #Ten Times Better #ballet film #Saeed Rahbaran #Andrea Mohin

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Confederate monuments bear what the anthropological theorist Michael Taussig would call a public secret: something that is privately known but collectively denied. It does no good to simply reveal the secret — in this case, to tell people that most of the Confederate monuments were erected not at the end of the Civil War, to honor those who fought, but at the height of Jim Crow, to entrench a system of racial hierarchy. That’s already part of their appeal. Dr. Taussig has argued that public secrets don’t lose their power unless they are transformed in a manner that does justice to the scale of the secret. He compares the process to desecration. How can you expect people to stop believing in their gods without providing some other way of making sense of this world and our future?

Swords Into Plowshares might have been the first to propose melting, but other communities are working out their own creative visions for Lee’s afterlife. One of the biggest changes so far has been at Arlington House, the historic plantation mansion at the center of Arlington National Cemetery, which is the official national Robert E. Lee Memorial. In 2021, Arlington House reopened with displays not only about Lee’s family, who lived there after they inherited it from Lee’s father-in-law, but also about the lives of the families enslaved there. Even Lee’s burial site at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. — where he served as president after the war — has changed. The university decided to focus on Lee the civilian rather than Lee the general, for example by moving a prominent portrait of him in uniform. And it constructed a wall to enclose the large sculpture of Lee that once claimed an insistent place in the university’s chapel.

Covering this story over the past few years, I’ve come to realize two things. First, when a monument disappears without a ceremony to mark why it is coming down, a community has no chance to recognize that it has itself changed. (Ideally the ceremony is public, but because of safety concerns, the melting I attended was not.) Second, if you are outraged that something’s happening to your community’s heroic statue of Lee, you’re not going to be any less outraged if the statue is moved to some hidden storeroom than if it’s thrown into a landfill. So if all changes, large or small, will be resisted, why not go for the ones with the most symbolic resonance?

That’s why the idea to melt Lee down, as violent as it might initially seem, struck me as so apt. Confederate monuments went up with rich, emotional ceremonies that created historical memory and solidified group identity. The way we remove them should be just as emotional, striking and memorable. Instead of quietly tucking statues away, we can use monuments one final time to bind ourselves together into new communities.

...

When the remaining legal barriers were cleared (including a last-minute lawsuit that sought to have the statue reassembled), Lee was finally ready to surrender to the furnace. The foundryman turned on the propane supply and laid Lee’s sword across the hole in the lid. He told the spectators that the metal had to get hot enough to release any moisture before he maneuvered it down through the hole into the crucible.

When he did, its blade stuck up out of the furnace for a moment, then melted down “like a stick of butter,” as Dr. Schmidt put it.

Lee’s face was the last piece to go into the crucible. Given how often the monument and its ideals were celebrated with flames — from Klansmen’s torches to the tiki torches of white nationalists in 2017 — it seemed fitting for flames to close over the monument.

...

Dr. Douglas, Swords Into Plowshares’ other co-founder, apologized that the ceremony could not be public. She thanked those in attendance, telling us we were witnessing it on behalf of Charlottesville’s residents, including those long gone who lived under slavery. Someday, she said, when we think of Civil War heroes, we will imagine not Lee but, instead, those who fought for their freedom against him.

The man in the protective visor dropped the red-hot piece of metal that once represented Lee on the ground. It fell to pieces, which he fed into the crucible. A line of cameras faced him, making new images of history as the old image finally disappeared in flames.

- Erin Thompson, "The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace." New York Times. October 24, 2023. Photo by Eze Amos.

#swords into plougshares #confederate monuments #robert e. lee #tear them down #historical monuments #american civil war #historical memory #united states history #united states politics

[mckitterick]

Seek Wonder, Not Happiness

We have so many types of initiatives – self-help books, programs, and even careers – centered around achieving happiness. This is a problem, as it forces us to interpret our experiences through a single – often overrated – emotional lens.

In this video (full transcript at link), Monica Parker argues that we should instead should pursue wonder, which is neither wholly positive nor wholly negative.

Parker likens the feeling of wonder to watching a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis – it is beautiful, complex, and even a little scary. This profound mix of awe, curiosity, and fear, is something that, when achieved, can expand our resilience and deepen our interpretation of the world around us.

The key to wonder? Slowing down. She argues that tuning into our three types of “wonderbringers” – natural, social, and cognitive – and incorporating “slow thought” activities into our lives, can help us be more receptive to wonder and the benefits it provides.

Rather than single-mindedly pursuing happiness, we ought to instead fill our days with things that spark wonder and fuel our curiosity and passions, which can help us overcome emotional barriers and live truly fulfilling, wonder-full lives.

The foundation of speculative fiction (to my mind) is what has long been called "Sensawunda," the opening of doors in the reader's mind they didn't even know were there. Fiction that evokes this sense puts the reader in a position from which they can see humankind from a new perspective.

In fiction, the sense of wonder can lead to conceptual breakthroughs inspired through paradigm shifts or shifts in perspective - time, distance, fantastic worlds, vast or microscopic scales, the Other, and so forth - that lead the audience to see things and even themselves in a fresh light.

In life, this kind of perspective shift can open our minds to the wonders of the cosmos, from its most minute building blocks that shape matter itself to the hidden structure of the universe and beyond into the multiverse. Shifts in perspective are necessary to understanding the natural world as well - science rises from the foundation of sensawunda. Personally, this feeling reveals aspects of the human condition inaccessible to the self-centeredness that can be difficult to see beyond in our mundane lives.

As a child, this is what drew me to watching ant hives do their thing, to reading books about dinosaurs and astronomy, to buying my first telescope to explore the universe first-hand, and to forming a high school science club. Once I discovered it was a thing, seeking the sense of wonder drew me to reading science fiction, then writing it, and eventually teaching it.

Even if I wasn't aware of it, I think seeking the sense of wonder shaped my whole life - it's what brought me to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1992 to begin studying with SF Grand Master James Gunn, then to helping him run his SF Center for decades, and recently to forming the nonprofit Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination (@adastra-sf here on Tumblr) to better focus on sharing the sensawunda with others, including helping writers do the same, creating as big a wave of sharing this sense with more people through the fiction my students write.

I hadn't thought of it as an alternative life-path to seeking happiness until reading Parker's piece, but she's onto something important. Happiness is elusive and fleeting, while sensawunda opens the mind and grows our individual universe.

If happiness is what you seek - or at least the absence of unhappiness or freeing yourself from the kind of emptiness that comes with depression or existential dread - seeking the sense of wonder is possibly your best path in life. And far more reliable than directly seeking nebulous "happiness."

Watch those bugs and imagine their lives. Watch birds fly and imagine how the air feels to them as they use it to control their world. Watch meteor showers and picture the billions of years those grains of comets have been orbiting the Sun. Study the layers of sediment laid down over millions of years and touch the fossilized remains of beings who lived long before humans walked this planet. Explore the human world to see new places and meet new people unlike those in your prior world. And, yes, read fiction that shifts your perspective like this wrapped in exciting and compelling narratives.

Open your world to new perspectives, open your mind, open your heart, and feel your soul soar on wings you didn't know you have. Seek the sense of wonder, not because it'll make you happy (though it might), but because you have no idea what you'll find.

And what you discover could be the most wonderful treasure in the universe.

#sense of wonder #sensawunda #happiness #life advice #my life #nebulae #science fiction #my edits

[boobpancakes]

say hello to valerie azula, the founder of my playthrough of the star sign legacy challenge by @ginovasims

generation one: aries traits: hot-headed, adventurous, self-assured aspiration: extreme sports enthusiast

valerie has always been inspired by the sights and the natural landscape of mt komorebi. if she is a bit of a weeb and has an unhealthy obsession with manga, that's her own secret to sleep with and yours to leave her alone about. after selling her mother's property back home after years of living in it alone, she has found a cushy little home centered right in downtown. a devoted activist by day, she uses her free time to unwind by going skiing and climbing the steep mountains in her new home town.

Requirements:

Any partner must be a good friend before you start romancing them

Never cheat on a partner

You must never initiate a breakup or divorce, but your partner can if it fits the story

Never go down without a fight - if anyone is negative towards you first, you must use at least three mean or mischievous actions straight away

Master any extreme sport 

Have at least two tattoos

Dye your hair a bright colour at least twice in your YA life

Get pregnant/get someone pregnant from public woohoo

When your first born child is a toddler, adopt a puppy. When this dog becomes an elder, adopt another puppy so you have two dogs in your household. You should keep repeating this so your children always have at least two dogs in the house. 

Reach at least level 7 of the politics career

Reach at least level 3 of the extreme sports enthusiast aspiration

Optional Requirements: 

Master all of the extreme sports

Woohoo in 5 different locations (hot tub, bush, sauna, etc.)

Have the adrenaline seeker lifestyle 

Make sure you have enough household funds to give your heir 30k when they move out

Reach level 10 of the politics career 

Complete the extreme sports enthusiast aspiration 

Give children winter themed names

#the sims 4 #ts4 #ts4 legacy challenge #ts4 gameplay #star sign legacy challenge #starsign #starsign gen1

[jgroffdaily]

The Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” has partnered with the Harriet Tubman Effect (HTE), a human resource center and social justice advocacy organization, for an accessible ticketing initiative. Part of the organization’s work to dismantle systemic oppression, HTE’s Lantern Tix initiative makes a Broadway experience possible for families and individuals in communities who normally would not have access.

Beginning with the Feb. 7 performance, 550 tickets were made available via Lantern Tix for performances of “Merrily” throughout the remainder of its run. The revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical is slated to complete its twice-extended limited engagement on July 7.

“Merrily” company manager, Brittany Weber, worked to create a strategic ticketing system specifically for this program. Using feedback from the communities in question, Weber created a community engagement ticketing system that allows for flexibility, patron autonomy and a minimal amount of urgency in acquiring tickets, while also allowing for the same theatergoer communication offered by standard ticketing systems (pre- and post-show messaging, partner discounts and digital tickets). Using a unique promo code for the ticket allocation, HTE communicates directly with members of the communities it hopes to bring to Broadway.

In 2023, HTE provided 10,500 admissions to Broadway and Off-Broadway productions via the $30,000 raised by HTE’s Lantern Fund to underwrite ticket costs. Past participating shows include “Sweeney Todd,” “Fat Ham,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Leopoldstadt” and “Into the Woods,” the latter for which HTE founder Nicole Johnson served as the production’s diversity, equity and inclusion director.

HTE research indicates many individuals only have seen a Broadway show through a school trip. The Lantern Tix partnership hopes to extend Broadway access beyond traditional school-sponsored audience engagement programs.

#jonathan groff #merrily we roll along

[yournextflame]

The downfall of Fundamentalism

Playing devil’s advocate for the outer gods wasn’t enough, here I’m going to explain why Golden Order Fundamentalism isn’t synonymous to religious fanaticism, but originally it was... a magic maths. One of the most interesting themes of the Elden Ring for me is the eventual corruption of what once was great, and I think Fundamentalism is a good example of initially amazing concept degrading into the parody of itself with the flow of time.

This post branched out from my observation of the Elden Ring sigils and originally I planned to write a big summary of all “holy” spells, but the size of the essay was becoming enormous even by my standards and some topics such as the Erdtree’s changes over time were covered in other posts.  [if you’ve seen similar comment on certain hellsite, well, it was me]

Instead, I decided to focuse on the Golden Order Fundamentalism, one of the most “wronged” aspects of the Elden Ring lore. 

Fundamentalism usually has a religious connotation that indicates unwavering attachment to a set of strict beliefs. However, In the context of the Elden Ring definition of fundamentalism has different meaning:

Fundamentalism is scholarship in all but name. Scales incantations using both intelligence and faith (Golden Order Seal)

Golden Order and Golden Order Fundamentalism are used interchangely by fandom, the latter bears the derogatory meaning of blind fanatism, but this is plain wrong.

Golden Order refers to: 

 - the particular shape of the Elden Ring (The Golden Order was created by confining Destined Death -  Mending Rune of the Death-Prince), 

- religion centered around worship of Marika (The Golden Order is founded on the principle that Marika is the one true god - brother Corhyn) 

  - a historical period of Marika’s reign, but usually it’s called “age of the Erdtree”

Meanwhile, as you can see in the description of the Golden Order Seal, Fundamentalism is a scholarship centered around metaphysics of the Elden Ring runes via the Laws of Causality and Regression. There is a religious influence in play, especially later on, but initially Fundamentalism derived from the blind belief in the Erdtree and was build around the idea of structural study of the fundamentals of the world. 

Speaking of Fundamentalism, it is impossible not to mention its founder - Radagon.

As the husband of Rennala of Caria, the red-haired Radagon studied sorcery, and as the husband of Queen Marika, he studied incantations. Thus did the hero aspire to be complete One the first things that we learn about Radagon is that he was interested in magic, both sorcery and incantations, as result Fundamentalists spells are utilizing int and faith, and sometimes int only. However, Fundamentalism isn’t solely dedicated to spellcraft; engineering, craftsmanship and maths also played important role in its foundation. Notably, idea to take the best from the both worlds and improve it with “scientific” approach fascinated him from the very beginning:

One-of-a-kind enchanted crossbow of exquisitely detailed craftsmanship. Made to celebrate the matrimonial union, and reconciliation, between the houses of the Erdtree and the Full Moon, Leyndell and Raya Lucaria. The two rings dance when reloading the weapon. Reveals true worth when used with holy-infused bolts (Full Moon Crossbow)

And even after he divorced Rennala, he still pursued knowledges and better understanding of the laws of the world.

I don’t want to turn this post in analyzes of Radagon’s character, I already have like five of them in my drafts and argued a lot on hellsite, but there is an interesting and really overlooked detail about him - he naturally lacks talent for magic. If you pay attention to the description of Marika/Radagon’s scarseals, you may notice that their stats are split, while Marika is leaning towards int, faith and arcne, Radagon’s main attributes are physical. 

An eye engraved with an Elden Rune. Said to be the seal of King Consort Radagon. Raises vigor, endurance, strength, and dexterity (Radagon's Scarseal)

This, and description of Fire Giant’s braid, together with the description of Radagon’s icon are painting pretty clear picture - Radagon was looking for a way to improve himself, to overcome his more primal and unrefined nature in comparison with more “civilized” Marika. There are many characters, who are rejecting their true nature in the Elden Ring: Godfrey uses Serosh to supress his bloodlust, Malenia quite literally loses herself, Morgott cuts off his horns and hates his Omen origin. But Radagon, while struggles from self-esteem issues, doesn't go full on "woe is me" and goes on the long quest to develop qualities he is lacking.

Also, leave the mantle of the hardcore Erdtree hugger to Morgott because Radagon literally removes Erdtree as a symbol of the Erdtree worship from Fundamentalism sigil as you can see on the OP pic. Not to mention, he is not a huge fan of people fighting in favor of the dying tree

A talisman patterned after swords used in ritual combat held to honor the Erdtree. The practice had died out by the age of King Consort Radagon, but remains of the arenas where ritual combat took place can still be found in every land (Ritual Sword Talisman)

Carian sorcery was based on fate reading via astrology. Golden Order faith borrowed the power from runes and the Erdtree. Fundamentalism united both types of magic and advanced it even futher with a help of maths study. The Erdtree was way past the age of flourishment and people needed to develop new spells. In fact, Fundamentalism is the most populated group of spells in so-called Golden group, but on top of that - it’s the most diverse. The Crucible/ancient Erdtree spells and Erdtree’s worships categories are mainly focused on healing and defence, while Fundamentalism provides all variety of miracles. And, of course, we shouldn’t forget about maths:

Golden Order Principia (reference to Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, a work expounding Newton's laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation)

A dense and complex academic treatise that contains the Order's fundamental principles.

Pulley Bow:  Longbow which utilizes a series of pulleys and springs. The complex mechanism, which required advanced mathematical and mechanical understanding to craft, was likely made by a certain genius who learned Golden Order fundamentalism.

“Scholary” part of the Fundamentalism also represented by the naming of the fundamental laws in Japanese.

Law of Regression is 回帰性原理 where kanjis 回帰 is a mathemathical statistical technique that relates a dependent variable to one or more independent (explanatory) variables.  

On the countrary 因果 in Law of Casualty means “karma” in Buddihsm, karma refers to action driven by intention (cetanā) which leads to future consequences. Those intentions are considered to be the determining factor in the kind of rebirth in samsara, the cycle of rebirth.

Even kanji Order 律  - “vinaya” originated from Buddihsm, it is often translated as 'discipline' and 'doctrine” and used to refer Buddha's complete teachings.

Again, I believe it’s important to separate art from inspirations, but by mentioning maths and other references I want to show that Miyazaki’s creativity isn’t limited to the “Catholisism is bad for dummies” and “I read one manga in my life and it’s Berserk” (please, someone tell Berserk fans that Miyazaki also loves oldschool shojo manga). Golden Order Fundamentalism definitely was inspired Christianity - to a degree, but just like in game it’s a mix of sorcery and incantations, in terms of real life inspiration it isn’t limited to the only religion majority of Westerners ever heard about. 

This brings up the complexity of Fundamentalism and Miyazaki’s take on the religion in the Elden Ring. His critics of organized cults was a big part of Dark Souls (I hate clerics - Patches) and Bloodborne, but usually it was shown from “there is no god in your church” angle: the prophecy of Way of White was fabricated, Gwyn and his kind weren’t actually gods, members of the Healing Church barely had any idea what they are doing. 

Elden Ring, however, raises another question:

Should there be a god at all?

(According to the Buddhist scriptures, the sunflower is the flower of the Buddha. The seeds inside the sunflower represent the Buddhist faith and the flowers represent the virtues of the Buddha)

Ever Brilliant Goldmask is another prominent Fundamentalist character, he is a Tarnished, who searches in the mysteries of the Golden Order. 

Goldmask is not the most talkative fellow in game, but from Corhyn we can learn that he is calculating what’s going on, which means that he leans towards “scholary” side of the Fundamentalism, while his companion represents blind fanatism to the point where he rejects book of Two Fingers and calls it heresy.

While still a precise calculus, the rhythms grew increasingly wild Or at least, such is all I can interpret from the rhythm and calculus of his finger.

[interesting, Corhyn is basically Goldmask’s "Finger Maiden“]

It is worth noting that Goldmask is the one, who adresses the huge issue with Fundamentalism that happened after the Night of the Black Knives, when Ranni broke Cursmark of Death in half, the Erdtree got infected and the souls stopped to return to the roots. 

Discrimination of Those Who Live in Death is a dark page in the history of Fundamentalism, a turning point when religious origin of the Golden Order and ideology based on the concept of immortality overcame common sense. 

The noble Goldmask lamented what had become of the hunters. How easy it is for learning and learnedness to be reduced to the ravings of fanatics; all the good and the great wanted, in their foolishness, was an absolute evil to contend with. Does such a notion exist in the fundamentals of Order?

Goldmask, despite his low opinion on hunters, still believed that Fundamentalism was a great idea that was screwed by fanatics. He holds similar opinion on the Order, in the end Elden Ring is just an instrument, but gods are imperfect and shouldn’t influence it.

The imperfection of the current Golden Order, is otherwise its instability of ideology. It is unnecessary for Gods to have emotions like humans. That was the flaw of the Order

I guess my question should have been how much gods were involved in the persecution of Those Who Live in Death? Most certainly, Radagon was, for example incantation Order's Blade shares design with his Golden Order Greatsword. We can also find golden centipedes - hunters fetishes, near his statue in Liurnia.  Surprisingly enough, Miquella, who is usually known for his more liberal and open-minded views and acceptance of the shunned and ostracized, wasn’t in fond of Those Who Live in Death as well. 

His sword, Golden Epitaph, allows to use the skill named Last Rtes:

Raise the epitaph to grant the effect of Sacred Order to yourself and allies in the vicinity. Particularly effective at laying to rest Those Who Live in Death.

As you can see, it uses Haligtree sigil, which means that Miquella at that moment already abandoned Fundamentalism and was working on his own plan, however, this spell still utilizes power of Radagon’s Sacred Order. 

[I am really curious about the timeline, it is commonly believed that Godwyn was killed right before the Shattering. However, Japanese supports that this line is right:  

It happened during the Golden Age of the Erdtree [age of abudance?], long before the shattering of the Elden Ring

While this line -  Soon, the Elden Ring was smashed, - is wrong, there is no mention of timeline in JP.

It’s a bit offtopic, but there is a thing - Radagon couldn’t be Fundamentalist before marrying Marika as he didn’t studied incantations properly yet. However, Those Who Live in Death couldn’t be a thing without Godwyn’s death. But if Godwyn died during the age of abudance, does it mean that Radagon still lived in Liurnia, therefore Ranni’s motivation for the Night of Black Knives didn’t revolved around vengeance for Rennala? Time is convoluted]

Eventually, Fundamentalism developed into the opposition of what it originally was, what once started as in-depth study of the fundamental laws degraded into a raving fanatism. It followed the fate of the Golden Order as a whole:

The battle art you've learned is of the glintstone family. They were conceived at the great Academy of Raya Lucaria, to the north of this castle. In the past, they obeyed laws which contravened the Golden Order, or so I'm told. Fascinating, isn't it? That the Golden Order was pliable enough to absorb practices that itself in the past. With the Order broken, twisted, and in need of repair, such adaptability is more important now than ever (Rogier)

P.S. I posted bits of this post on r//dit, which spiraled into interesting, albeit heated discussion, so there is a thing - I’m lore blog, I’m discussing lore of fictional universe from Japanese game, I’m not interested in american puritan trauma and what comes with it; if you want to argue with me - let’s stick to the lore.

#elden ring #radagon #goldmask #miquella #elden ring lore #lore theories

[mariacallous]

Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights group,” was supposed to help the Republican Party regain the White House. In July, former president Donald Trump called the anti-LGBTQ group with 300 active chapters across the county a “grassroots juggernaut.” They are credited with forcing schools to lift mask mandates, banning books featuring LGBTQ characters, and supporting anti-trans laws and policies across the country. The group was on track to be instrumental to the GOP in the 2024 election.

But, over the course of the past five months, the group has begun to unravel.

Experts have questioned the claims about the size of the group’s membership, and individual members have been exposed as sex offenders and acolytes of the Proud Boys. Then, last month, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler admitted in a police interview to being in a relationship with her husband and another woman. The interview was conducted after the woman in question alleged that Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, had raped her.

Ziegler’s husband has denied the allegations and refused to resign from his position as GOP chair, despite calls from Florida governor Ron DeSantis and other state Republicans to do so. Ziegler is also a member of the Sarasota County School Board, and has been instrumental in ushering in Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, pushing a Christian agenda in public schools, and banning the teaching of critical race theory. On Tuesday night, the board voted 4–1 in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling for her to resign, marking a rapid fall from grace for Ziegler and a potential fatal blow to Moms for Liberty.

“The impact of the Zeigler scandal has been enormous on the Moms for Liberty structure,” Liz Mikitarian, the founder of the activist group STOP Moms for Liberty, which closely tracks the group’s activities, tells WIRED. “We see chapters moving away or taking a break, chapter leadership questioning their roles and scrambling at the national level to save their ‘mom’ brand. The organization is trying to distance itself from the Zieglers, but this is impossible because the Zieglers are interwoven into the very fabric of Moms for Liberty.”

The group was founded in late 2020 by Ziegler, Tina Descovich, and Tiffany Justice. Ziegler’s close ties to the GOP establishment both locally and nationally helped the group get recognition, propelling their grassroots efforts quickly to the national stage. Initially founded to counter mask mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic, the group’s plans were straightforward: They wanted to support school board candidates who pushed their anti-LGBTQ agenda while advocating for the banning of books that feature people of color or members of the LGBTQ community. The group’s growth was extraordinary. In three years, Moms for Liberty claims to have established 300 chapters in 48 states, with a membership of 130,000 parents. While Ziegler resigned from the group in 2021, she has remained a close ally of the group, speaking at its annual conferences and pushing its agenda from her school board seat.

In a sign of just how coveted an endorsement from the group had become in GOP circles, Trump was joined at their convention this summer by GOP presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur and great replacement conspiracy proponent Vivek Ramaswamy.

The group’s support from the GOP came despite widespread reports about the harassment and intimidation campaigns that Moms for Liberty members conducted against school board members, teachers, superintendents, and even other parents. These allegations led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label Moms for Liberty an extremist group earlier this year.

But in recent months, controversies and closer scrutiny of the group’s claims have significantly tarnished the group’s image.

Just days after the Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia, Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at the City University of New York, wrote on Medium that while Moms for Liberty claims to be a national movement, the vast majority of its membership is concentrated in just four states: South Carolina, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida.

“This suggests that the political power is considerable and expanding in some states, but nearly absent and even waning in others,” Brown wrote.

Research from the Brookings Institution published in October confirmed this, and found that while Moms for Liberty was attracting members in Democratic strongholds, it was winning school board elections only in staunchly conservative regions of the country.

While its rapid growth may have suggested that Moms for Liberty would sweep school board races nationwide in November, 70 percent of its endorsed candidates lost their races, according to an analysis from the American Federation of Teachers. Weeks after the embarrassing election losses, the group was forced to remove two Kentucky chapter chairs from leadership positions after the women posed for photos with members of the Proud Boys militia. The group has a long history of associating with members of the Proud Boys, and Ziegler herself had to deny links to the group after she posed with two members at a victory party after she was elected to the Sarasota County School Board.

Then, the group removed Phillip Fisher Jr., a pastor who coordinates faith-based outreach for Philadelphia’s Moms for Liberty chapter, after it was revealed he was a registered sex offender.

Then came the revelations about the Zieglers.

Initially, the Moms for Liberty groups circled the wagons and slammed the media attention on the story, claiming in a statement on X that the sexual assault allegation made against Christian Ziegler was ​​”another attempt to ruin the reputation of a strong woman fighting for America.”

But in early December, a chapter chair in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, who was also the state legislative lead for the group, announced she and the other members were splitting from the national group to form their own organization because of the leadership’s response to the scandal.

In the weeks since, those who are closely tracking the group’s activities say chapters have gone quiet. Some, including several chapters in Maryland, have been removed from the Moms for Liberty website and their online activity has slowed to a crawl.

“Moms for Liberty has been repeatedly exposed as hypocrites over the past months, but I believe these new issues will be insurmountable to them,” Karen Svoboda, cofounder of Defense of Democracy, a group created to counter Moms for Liberty’s actions, tells WIRED. “Moms for Liberty, the powerhouse that wreaked such havoc on our communities and schools, is becoming undone by their own hubris.”

Despite the vote against her on Tuesday night, Ziegler did not resign, and said the resolution “has no teeth” given that the only person who can remove a school board member is the governor. And given that DeSantis has not asked Ziegler to resign from her position on a Disney oversight board he appointed her to, it’s unlikely he will force her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.

However, Ziegler has resigned from her position as vice president of School Board Leadership Programs at the Leadership Institute, the highly influential conservative group led by Morton Blackwell, who also cofounded the secretive Council for National Policy. The Leadership Institute has been a major funder of Moms for Liberty since its inception, and Blackwell’s apparent lack of faith in Ziegler could spell trouble for her and Moms for Liberty.

“There are a lot of signs that Blackwell holds the ultimate power over Moms for Liberty,” Maurice Cunningham, a former political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who has tracked Moms for Liberty’s growth closely, tells WIRED. “He will decide Moms for Liberty’s future, and Moms for Liberty cannot continue if he pulls the plug.”

Moms for Liberty did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the impact the Ziegler scandal is having on the group or on their membership numbers. Instead, a spokesperson for the group pointed WIRED to a statement issued by Descovich and Justice in the days after the Ziegler scandal broke, distancing the group from Ziegler while also praising her for “remaining an avid warrior for parental rights across the country.”

[mightyflamethrower]

Rivian Automotive, a market leader in producing electric pickup trucks, has struggled with producing electric vehicles (EVs) that can accomplish tasks their gasoline engine counterparts handle with ease. A new report from the Wall Street Journal shows the company also struggles with profitability. The company reportedly loses an average of $33,000 for every truck it sells.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Rivian Automotive has positioned itself as a trailblazer in the electric vehicle sector, aiming to deliver an unparalleled driving experience by combining sports-car handling, advanced features, and robust design in its pick up trucks and other models. But not everything is working out according to the company’s plans.

Workers assembly components of a Rivian R1T electric vehicle (EV) pickup truck at the company’s manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois, US., on Monday, April 11, 2022. Rivian Automotive Inc. produced 2,553 vehicles in the first quarter as the maker of plug-in trucks contended with a snarled supply chain and pandemic challenges. Photographer: Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg

Rivian’s vehicles, with an average selling price exceeding $80,000, have not resulted in profits. In fact, the company suffered a loss of $33,000 on every vehicle sold in the second quarter. The financial strain is evident, but Rivian Founder and Chief Executive RJ Scaringe claims, “We’re competing to build something that’s truly better than all the alternatives, and to try to do that on a limited budget would be detrimental to us achieving our mission.”

Rivian’s journey has been marked by a juxtaposition of financial success and operational struggles. The company made a splash in the market with its IPO in 2021, raising nearly $12 billion and momentarily achieving a valuation surpassing some established automakers. However, the operational side painted a different picture. Rivian grappled with manufacturing troubles, burning through half of its $18 billion cash pile in two years and operating at less than one-third of its build capacity. The company’s ambitious launch of three models in quick succession further complicated the production dynamics.

Breitbart News previously reported on the poor performance of Rivian’s electric pickups in the real world. In one case, an owner’s “honeymoon phase” ended when his truck got stuck in the snow:

In an interview with Insider, Merrill explains that he was initially overjoyed with his new R1S, saying: “I was in a honeymoon phase. It’s an incredible car, and it handles unlike anything I’ve ever driven.” However, when the car got stuck in 2.5 feet of snow, his love affair with the truck promptly ended. Merrill commented on his expectations, stating: “I had seen all the Rivian marketing campaigns with the cars just eating through the snow, so it was kind of like, man, this is disappointing.” When the Rivian truck became stuck in the snow, a safety feature immobilized the vehicle. The vehicle displayed a critical error and indicated it would have to be taken to a service center. Merrill later suggested that a straightforward reset might have fixed the problem, but Rivian’s customer service did not mention that option during his initial call.

Recently, CEO RJ Scaringe made comments mocking the purchase of gasoline vehicles, seemingly forgetting the problems his electric pickups are constantly running into.

As Breitbart News reported:

Electrek reports that Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe, recently compared the purchase of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to “building a horse barn in 1910.” Rivian exceeded market expectations by delivering 12,640 EVs in the second quarter of this year. The company is on track to meet its annual production guidance of 50,000 vehicles. “The performance and drivability of an EV makes it so much more desirable than an alternative,” Scaringe said. He added, “Buying a non-EV just feels very old,” adding that while the environmental responsibility is a factor, he also feels that regular ICE cars are boring.

[balanchine-ballet-master]

Suzanne Farrell Teaching

Above: students at Florida State University rehearse Balanchine's Serenade, staged by Suzanne Farrell. Photo by Meagan Helman for the Florida State Univ. News

Suzanne Farrell is Krafft Professor of Dance at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She gave an interview to the FSU News that was published on November 16, 2023.

Legendary ballerina Suzanne Farrell reflects on career, 20 years as Krafft Professor at FSU

BY: ANNA PRENTISS, JAMIE RAGER, JASMINE HUR

Florida State University’s School of Dance Krafft Professor Suzanne Farrell, an internationally recognized New York City Ballet principal dancer, a 2005 Kennedy Center Honoree and the founder of Suzanne Farrell Ballet, has long been regarded as one of the most extraordinary and influential ballerinas of the late-20th century.

Farrell, who performed with the New York City Ballet for 28 years, is considered the last muse and protégé of choreographer George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet.

This year, Farrell set an excerpt of “Divertimento No. 15,” a choreographic piece by Balanchine. This classical ballet was featured in the school’s annual “An Evening of Dance,” which highlighted a diverse lineup of seven live works restaged by retired and current faculty.

“One of my dreams as a dancer was to perform the choreography of George Balanchine,” said Associate Professor Ilana Goldman, who served as the rehearsal director for this work. “When I finally did, it felt sublime, as if I was the physical embodiment of the music. I am so thrilled that our students had the opportunity to not only perform Balanchine’s choreography but to have been coached by his muse, Suzanne Farrell — it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Farrell has been a member of the School of Dance faculty for more than 20 years and continues to work with and mentor students, hosting master classes and workshops at FSU each semester.

“The opportunity to work with a legendary performer like Suzanne Farrell is an amazing experience for our students,” said Anjali Austin, professor and chair of the School of Dance. “Her dedication to our program throughout the past 20 years has made an indelible mark on many.”

In an interview, Farrell re-lived her history with the New York City Ballet, working with Balanchine and how she came to Florida State University to teach.

“Initially, I was not going to teach at a college level,” Farrell said. “I had just been giving young dancer auditions in Miami but came to FSU on my sister’s request and met many nice dancers that made me rethink. It’s a beautiful atmosphere, and I love working here. I give everything when I teach.”

Even early in her career, Farrell thought teaching was not a path she intended to take.

“When I was a young dancer, I thought I had forever,” she said. “Mr. Balanchine once said, ‘One day, you will all teach.’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m not going to teach. All I want to do is dance.’”

That moment of retirement came sooner than Farrell thought, so she began staging and teaching Balanchine’s ballets around the world.

“In a nice way, it extended my dance life,” she said. “I’m not dancing, but I’m still doing what I love to do.”

Farrell noted that the transient nature of a dance career instills a sense of immediacy in a dancer.

“Dance is a young profession; we retire at a young age because the body has to stop,” she said. “Therefore, you have to positively profit from everything you do and every moment you do it. You can’t say, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ because before you know it, it’s time to retire.”

Farrell explained, “In ballet, we are our own technology. It’s not like sending someone a text and it’s done — it’s a constant evolution of getting the choreography to where it should be.”

“I like bringing my stories into my teaching because it’s not just the technological aspect, it’s also passing on stories from one person to the next,” she said.

Farrell learned to use visual aspects to provide dancers with a mental image when correcting inaccuracies.

“I’d say ‘move your arms like the leaves when the wind comes, the leaves turn over, they don’t resist.’ Moving with nature is what ballet is all about.”

When asked about the evolution of ballet since she first began her professional career, Farrell highlighted the inheritable legacy left by previous generations.

“We are the beneficiaries of every dancer that came before us. Nobody can do it by themselves,” Farrell said. “There are stories you inherit from someone who maybe danced it first or before you were alive. There’s so much legacy and it’s not just in the past. Just because someone isn’t alive anymore doesn’t mean they are not influential and inspiring in spirit.”

This academic year, the School of Dance is celebrating 90 years of dance, 60 years of dance degrees and 20 years of the Maggie Allesee Center for Choreography at FSU. Recently ranked as one of the top five dance programs in the nation by Backstage Magazine, the School of Dance is dedicated to providing the highest caliber of training to its students.

Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine, 1963. Photo: Fred Fehl for the Associated Press via the NY Times

#Suzanne Farrell #Balanchine #Serenade #FSU #Florida State Univ. #New York City Ballet #NYCB

[lara-prism-light]

Ninjago Rewrite - World Building

For worldbuilding, thanks to new information provided by Dragons Rising, we have a better idea of ​​how the other realms came to be, but in this case it's important to focus on Ninjago in the moment.

The worldbuilding is a problem because it's as if every supposedly important new place in Ninjago was only introduced in the season in which they are important. For example, ninjas have no way of not knowing about Shintaro since, Apparently...

Shintaro is located close to Sticks City and The Waling Alps! Both locations introduced in Possession!

[This map could very well be wrong, so don't take it too seriously, this was just the easiest map to analyze]

There's nothing wrong with new locations being introduced in different seasons, but it's a problem because it ends up being inconsistent.

And I know world-building wasn't on the show's writers' minds as it was initially only supposed to be two seasons, but that will be taken into consideration as I'm rewriting Ninjago as if the lore and world-building were already planned.

A more concrete way to introduce these elements that would be important later is to actually give a basis that this universe is broader than we know. Like, we don't know much about the culture of these different kingdoms, just the little that was shown to us and for me it wasn't quite good enough.

Just a mention of other realms like Shintaro and the jade palace might work, speaking of the jade palace...

Man, how I hate the poorly explained inclusion of the palace and the royal family! Like, just including them in the story as background and world-building information would be enough for the inclusion of the palace to be realistic!

We will do it this way, the palace has existed there since the founding of Ninjago, the royal family are the founders who initiated the city and that is why they are so important. The palace is not in the center but very close to the people, they are the ones who guarantee unity in the city, the mayor is the one who maintains order and the Borg family is the one who provides technology over the years. Thus creating a sense of importance for the three groups, thus making their roles as important figures in Ninjago City that much more important, Because ther ancestors were important to the founding of Ninjago City. Both in politics and technological advancement.

Another form of worldbuilding would be an engagement of social statuses for the inhabitants of Ninjago. We only see people from the lower states in Sons of Garmadon and Master of the Mountain, but other than that we haven't seen much of the rest of Ninjago.

Maybe Sticks is a poorer city because it has no connections to Ninjago City and therefore doesn't have the same resources, which would make Ronin steal to bring some of there to his beloved city.

What about the serpentines? We know that they created a society in the sewers of Ninjago City, but even after having helped defeat villains several times, they still live in the sewers?? Why didn't they try to fight for their rights to live with humans on the surface? Honestly this would be a very interesting story line to explore in the show, it could be a message about racism and discrimination, I mean, their story is already about discrimination!

They were discriminated against and treated like monsters for being different, it's no wonder they were ok with the serpentine war!

One more thing is that the island of darkness is very generic and even though it is the same size as Ninjago, it is very empty in comparison. Why after the events of the first seasons don't they try to explore more of the place? Why not become a meeting point for villains? Wouldn't it be interesting to have the villains making a base there already? Since no one goes to that place, much less the ninjas who seem to have simply forgotten about the place? I just think the island needs some use other than decoration at this point.

Why are most important places only known to ninjas or other important characters? Why not other people? Why not Cluth Powers? He's an explorer, isn't he??(and yes I will be rewriting him completely because I think it's ridiculous that they took an iconic Lego character and just made him egotistical asshole!!)

Well, in conclusion I plan to reimagine the world of Ninjago as a whole, kingdoms, cities, culture, important locations, realms etc.

That's it for now, the next part will be about elemental powers and elemental masters.

#ninjago rewrite #ninjago lego #lego ninjago #ninjago #rewrite #worldbuilding

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Sarah Rumpf-Whitten

Published: Dec 28, 2023

Tech giants, like Google and Meta, have slashed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in 2023 despite their commitments following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

According to data provided by job site Indeed, cited by CNBC, DEI-related job postings in 2023 have declined 44%.

In November 2023, the last full month for which data was available, DEI job postings dropped 23% year over year.

Layoffs at Google and Meta also included employees who held leadership roles in Black employee resource groups (ERGs), CNBC said.

Devika Brij, CEO of Brij the Gap Consulting, which works with tech companies’ DEI efforts, told CNBC that some companies have cut nearly 90% of their DEI budget by midyear 2023.

“When George Floyd began to become the topic of conversations, companies and executives doubled down on their commitments and here we are only a couple years later, and folks are looking for opportunities to cut those teams,” Brij said.

Melinda Briana Epler, the founder and CEO of Empovia, said that the cuts in DEI in 2023 were “stark” compared to previous years.

“Whenever there is an economic downturn in tech, some of the first budgets that are cut are in DEI, but I don’t think we’ve seen such stark contrast as this year,” Epler told CNBC.

The layoffs come just three years following the boom in DEI initiatives that came during the Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

At this time, tech companies made a commitment to the promotion of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

In a June 2020 letter to Google employees, CEO Sundar Pichai vocally committed to improving support for Black workers.

“The events of the past few weeks reflect deep structural challenges,” Pichai wrote. “We’ll work closely with our Black community to develop initiatives and product ideas that support long-term solutions- and we’ll keep you updated.”

In a similar June 2020 letter to Meta employees, COO Sheryl Sandberg committed to having 30% more people of color, including 30% more Black people in leadership by 2025.

“Achieving racial justice and equity is a goal all of us share – and a goal that will take real work to achieve,” Sandberg wrote.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a Meta spokesperson said that the tech giant remains committed to their DEI initiatives.

“Our commitment to DEI remains at the center of who we are as a company,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We continue  to intentionally design equitable and fair practices to drive progress across our people, product, policy and partnerships pillars.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, an Amazon spokesperson echoed Meta’s sentiments and said that their “DEI priorities have not changed.”

“Our DEI priorities have not changed, and we remain committed to building a more inclusive and diverse Amazon,” Margaret Callahan, a spokesperson for Amazon, said.

In a statement, Google said that their “workforce reductions” were to “sharpen” their focus.

“Our workforce reductions and company-wide efforts to sharpen our focus span the breadth of our business,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“To be absolutely clear, our commitment to this work has not changed and we invested in many new programs and partnerships this year,” the Google spokesperson said.

Big Tech Layoffs in 2023

Several tech giants have tightened their workforce in 2023 after over-hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meta, Microsoft Corp., Amazon and Google-parent Alphabet Inc. have also cut thousands of jobs throughout the year.

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, cut over 10,000 jobs in May 2023.

“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

Microsoft announced in Jan. 2023 that it would cut 10,000 positions.

The move, which took place at the end of the third quarter, was “in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities,” according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  

Amazon said in early January that it would lay off more than 18,000 employees in what would be its largest workforce reduction to date.

Google parent company Alphabet Inc. announced that it cut 12,000 jobs to weather the current economy.

Google CEO Pichai said the cuts affected teams globally, including recruiting and some corporate functions as well as some engineering and products teams.

==

Expect DEI to become "that which shall not be named" during 2024.

Good news for the downturn in DEI nonsense, not so good for the actual productive tech side of it, although many of these companies are bloated and often wasting time on peripheral crap anyway. e.g. Twitter 1.0 focused on policing pronouns rather than removing child porn.

One troubling issue is that DEI cultists have their eye on AI. Reports of DEI downturn have been floating around in the last couple of days, but a few of them mention that DEI apparatchiks are adamant about needing to be part of the development of AI, to make sure the AI models comply with their fundamentalist religion. The same kind we've seen from Harvard, which lies, gaslights and calls people names.

Imagine Xians saying that they need to be included in the development of AI, to make sure it's infused with Xian values and biblical scripture, and you'll understand why an AI infused with intersectionality, "other ways of knowing," and hiring for diversity optics rather than merit (see: Claudine Gay) is such a concern.

Keep in mind also that many of these organizations tout their DEI bona fides in order to cover for their own larger sins. Such as Disney working with and thanking the Uyghur concentration camps in the credits for the live-action Mulan.

For such companies, DEI was always a relationship of convenience, providing cover - "wokescreen" (or "woke washing") - for their darker secrets, and DEI parasites were happy to suck millions of dollars out of them for their snakeoil. But DEI is no longer financially or politically convenient, and the "reckoning" that activists manufactured is over and done.

#DEI #DEI bureaucracy #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI must die #DEI apparatchiks #diversity hire #virtue signaling #virtue signal #virtue signalling #religion is a mental illness