Today’s 26 deaths mark the deadliest day of the outbreak, and 15 of them took place in the community.
Category Archives: Viva!
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History
viva! 
About 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.
“She was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions,” says the film’s director, Matt Wolf.
The year 1980 brought the launch of CNN, and the 24-hour news cycle. Soon, three, four, five, and sometimes as many as eight tapes were spinning away at once in Stokes’s apartment, recording news broadcasts, commercials, and everything in between on multiple networks. While many people assumed that television networks held on to everything they aired, that wasn’t the case. Studios were constantly erasing and recycling broadcast tapes in order to save money and free up storage space.
“We’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes.”
Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer. From 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband. Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day.
“Our vision is really aligned with Marion’s,” says Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive. “It’s really bold and ambitious: universal access to all knowledge.” Marion’s son had contacted the Internet Archive when he was trying to find a home for her tapes in 2013. Macdonald immediately seized the opportunity. Within 20 minutes, the two were on the phone.
Macdonald recalls asking Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”
In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television. She would also involve them in active conversations, asking those around her what they thought about how the issues of the day were being handled on broadcast television.

Having been surveilled by the government for her early political activism––she and her first husband, Melvin Metelits, had attempted to defect to Cuba together before splitting up––Stokes was exceedingly cautious about her recordings while she was alive. She eschewed Tivo, and although she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Inc., she never sent an email in her life. She even managed to convince the rest of the already-wealthy Stokes clan to buy Apple stock, which paid off in spades. She funneled these funds into her recording project and the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it.
“She’s already excluded from power and established institutions, so it makes sense that she’d want to pursue her life’s work privately,” says Wolf.
Now, Stokes’ work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history––and perhaps to set the record straight.
Trump accuses New York state of trying to ‘take down’ NRA
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Leader of New Mexico armed group denied bail
Naty Botero – Indios (La Historia)
via Blogger http://bit.ly/2J2VPSg
Monday Open Thread | The real reason the Republicans are suddenly starting to admit Russia rigged Florida for Trump in the 2016 election
Hat tip- Palmer Report
No way Ron DeSantis or Rick Scott won in Florida. And DeSantis sure as hell didn’t win the Black women vote.
If you’ve been paying attention for the past two and a half years, or if you’ve been awake and conscious during that time, you’re well aware that Russian government hackers took steps to alter the vote totals in Donald Trump’s favor in key swing states in the 2016 election. The only people not willing to acknowledge this are Trump and the Republicans – yet suddenly, the leading Republicans in Florida are acknowledging it.
You don’t have to take our word for it that Russia rigged key swing states in Trump’s favor in 2016. The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee quietly released a bipartisan report in May of 2018 which acknowledged that Russian government hackers penetrated the voter registration databases of these swing states, and were in a position to delete voter registration data. This essentially exposed how Russia managed to alter the outcome: by strategically deleting the voter registrations of people who were most likely to vote for Hillary Clinton.

This crucial Senate report got very little media attention at the time, even though it’s the closest we’ve gotten to a smoking gun when it comes to Russia having rigged the election so that Donald Trump “won” instead of Hillary Clinton. Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida, is on that committee, so he knows full well what really happened. Finally, a year later, he’s suddenly talking about it.
Mario Rubio admitted in an interview yesterday that Russian hackers were “in a position” to change voter roll data in Florida during the 2016 election. In fairness to Rubio, he has stated multiple times in the past that America should be worried about Russian election interference in general, citing the rationale that for all he knows, next time some other foreign country could try to meddle in the election for the other side. But it’s nonetheless eye popping that Rubio is suddenly putting a focus on the fact that Russian hackers broke in and gained the ability to alter the outcome of the 2016 election.
At first blush, one might suspect that Marco Rubio – who has long had presidential ambitions of his own – has taken a look at the inevitable impeachment of Donald Trump and is now trying to position himself as the 2020 Republican nominee for president. One efficient way to do that would be to help expose that Trump didn’t actually win in 2016. But the kicker is that Rubio isn’t the only prominent Florida Republican who suddenly cares about this issue.
While the 2016 election saw statistically suspicious results in numerous key swing states, the 2018 election was different in that these kinds of suspicious results were largely limited to Florida. In fact Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and Republican Senator Rick Scott both won in Florida in 2018 in bizarre upsets that stood in sharp conflict with the overall voting and polling accuracy trends that played out across the rest of the nation.
Yet suddenly, DeSantis and Scott – two politicians who appear to have directly benefited in 2018 from Russia’s ongoing pro GOP election hacking efforts – are expressing earnest concern about how Russia hacked Florida. These are the last two Republicans, other than Donald Trump, who would want anyone focusing on Russian election interference. So what are they up to?
Generally speaking, you only start to show “concern” about this kind of thing if you think it’s about to get a whole lot uglier, and you’re trying to get out ahead of it. If it’s about to come to light that someone cheated on your behalf, the best thing you can do is try to act like you’re really upset that someone cheated at all. That way you can then claim that you had no idea anyone was trying to meddle in your favor. This whole thing strongly suggests that we’re about to see another shoe drop in the Russian election rigging scandal, specifically with regard to what the Russians did in Florida in 2016 an 2018. Stay tuned.
Sigourney Weaver Surprised the High School Cast of Alien: The Play
“I saw a bit of your production of Alien. I just want to say it looked incredible. You put so much heart and soul into that and the alien, I must say, looked very real to me,” Weaver said in the video. “I just want to send our compliments, not only from me, but from James Cameron and the original screenwriter, Walter Hill. We all say bravo, well done. And just one more thing — you know, the alien might still be around. So when you’re opening your locker, just do it very slowly.”
Source: Sigourney Weaver Surprised the High School Cast of Alien: The Play
‘It’s the Grannies!’ New Voices Rise Against Austria’s Populists
A group of older women is galvanizing protests against the conservative-nationalist government in Vienna. But why stop there?
Texan court strikes down anti-BDS law as unconstitutional
PNN/ Washington/
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) won a lawsuit on behalf of a speech language pathologist who lost her job because she refused to sign a “No Boycott of Israel” clause.
The CAIR Legal Defense Fund filed the lawsuit in December 2018 challenging Texas Anti-BDS Act, H.B. 89. This afternoon Judge Pitman of the Western District of Texas issued a 56-page opinion striking down H.B. 89, the Texas Anti-BDS Act, as facially unconstitutional.
According to CAIR, the Court held that the Texas Anti-BDS Act “threatens to suppress unpopular ideas” and “manipulate the public debate” on Israel and Palestine “through coercion rather than persuasion.” The Court concluded: “This the First Amendment does not allow.”
Every single “No Boycott of Israel” clause in every single state contract in Texas has today been stricken as unconstitutional. The Attorney General of Texas is no longer permitted to include or enforce “No Boycott of Israel” clauses in any state contract.
“We thank our legal team for this major victory and we thank the community for supporting this work,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad, saying they are gearing up for the fights in the other 26 states where anti-BDS laws have been passed and we are certain that we are on the right side of the constitution and history.
“Arabic-speaking schoolchildren in Texas have been deprived of critical services from Bahia Amawi for almost this entire schoolyear because of this unconstitutional law,” said CAIR National Litigation Director Lena Masri. “Today we welcome a victory for the First Amendment.”
“This is a complete victory of the First Amendment against Texas’s attempts to suppress speech in support of Palestine,” said CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas. “More importantly, it’s a complete victory for all Texans, to engage in political speech without government censorship.”
“The First Amendment blocks any effort by state governments or the federal government from forcing their citizens to take sides in the widespread international debate about the relationship between Israel and Palestine,” said CAIR Trial Attorney Carolyn Homer. “This is a lesson all public servants should remember when considering Anti-BDS measures around the country.”
CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.
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