DS9 Document EFTA00690384

From: To: Bcc: Subject: Date: Inline-Images: Gregory Brown undisclosed-recipients:; [email protected] Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 07/16/2017 Sun, 16 Jul 2017 07:40:17 +0000 image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(I4).png; image(15).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png; image(24).png; image(25).png; image(26).png; image(27).png; image(28).png; image(29).png; image(30).png; image(31).png; image(32).png; image(33).png; image(34).png DEAR FRIEND Hate in America There is a virus and our country. It's a virus called Hate. Inline image 1 On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. Within hours, the United States was awash in an unprecedented wave of hateful incidents, many of them perpetrated by people claiming to be Trump supporters. Our Republic needs serious repairs. The signs were apparent well before Donald Trump won the election on a platform that included unapologetic bigotry. We should ask, for example, why we needed to be reminded that Black lives matter. EFTA00690384 Various forms of hatred surged during Trump's campaign—especially Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and general support for white supremacy. But his election appears to have emboldened vitriol of all kinds, triggering a rash of harrowing—and sometimes violent — incidents that has left many Americans afraid. In one way of looking at it, Donald Trump did us a service by ripping the Band-Aid off deep wounds we didn't want to look at or even admit we had. He liberated misogyny, paranoia, wild conspiracy theories, racism and tribalism from political correctness. That ended polite conversation as well as any illusion that America is a nation of pure values and virtues, a shining city on the hill. Donald Trump ran a campaign marked by racism, xenophobia, crude racial stereotypes and anti- Semitic imagery. So needless to say after he was elected, many white supremacists were celebrating. Usually, white supremacists just set out elections and think that political parties are in irredeemably corrupt. The combination of his races campaign and the attacks on political correctness tell many people that the gloves are off and make an act, unfortunately, with the worst instincts. The day after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center [a Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit] put up a reporting form about hate incidents on its website and within 10 days collected almost goo internets. It exposed that the fault lines where our country has historically been weak, were reopened again. Although those fault lines opened with Obama when to some degree white supremacist went crazy after his election, but the outbreaks of hate crimes was not to this new extent. And although many Trump voters are against racism and hate groups, there were a lot of people who flock to trumps candidacy because they felt that they were strangers in their own land with the changing demographics in our country, the dislocations caused by globalization, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. All of those things contributed to his sons for many people, particularly white working-class people, of alienation. Saying that, is a far cry from painting them all as "deplorables" or suggesting that they are all out there committing a crimes. In February, the Center reported that its count of hate groups in the country increased for the second consecutive year and the number of anti-Muslim organizations had nearly tripled within a year. It attributed the growth to "Trump's incendiary rhetoric" on Muslims and the reaction to the June 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. On May 26, white supremacist kill two men and injured at third, when they defended a pair of teenage girls, one in Muslim wearing a hijab, on a Portland Oregon train. In an attacked in March, a white supremacist travel from Baltimore to New York with the goal of finding a random black purse in the kill. There is a virus and our country. It's a virus called Hate. When looking at the number of hate groups there has been a major increase in the past 15 years. When looking at people engaged in online hate, like people who are registered users of something like [A EFTA00690385 white supremacist website] Stormfront, you will see a huge increase. This fellow in Portland, he rants and raves, and many people like to dismiss him as just crazy. But we are looking at somebody who is bitter, resentful and racist. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people like that. In the 6os, these type of racist blew up the 16th St., Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama to put a whole one black progress. There was a tremendous backlash against the March on Washington in 1963. Now we are seeing a different kind of backlash to the browning of America. It is similar to what happened in the 5os and 1960s, but it's also different. In 1970 less than one and five people in the country was non-white. Today that figure is more than double in the country is having growing pains. We are not going to through a change like this without there being some sand in the gears. It is expected that the protections against hate crimes will suffer under benign neglect under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, especially immigration as more people will face deportation. And instead of dealing with the underlying issues, the Trump Administration's justice division is now focused on increasing police enforcement and running up the deportation numbers. But it is not doing anything to deal with growing divisions and subsequent hatred in the country. It impossible to deny that white supremacy is alive and well in this country. Powered by social media platforms, and encouraged by the rise of Trump-as-champion, America's hate groups have emerged from the fringes with a newfound sense of respectability. In 2015 alone, the number of homegrown hate groups jumped by 14 percent—a proliferation unprecedented in recent times. Inline image 3 Groups like — Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white nationalists — did more than talk and meet and march. They plotted to turn their hatred into violence. "They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water-treatment plants, and power grids," EFTA00690386 reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. "They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives, and grenades." Inline image 2 It would be all too easy to turn away from this reality, or consign it to the distant past. But thanks to photographs like the ones above, as evidence that white supremacist groups are thriving in America. Let these photographs serve as proof that we are far from the post racial ideal that many Americans have been clinging to. And let them remind us not to be fooled: The spread of white supremacy is not confined to the South, to states like Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee — it extends deep into the heartland, to Pennsylvania and Maryland and Ohio and Indiana. Hate groups exist all across the United States — quite possibly, to a neighborhood near you. Inline image 1 Hate is not just the propensity for violence, as anyone or any group that vilify entire groups of people for characteristics such as race, religion or their sexual orientation should be classified as hate. Groups like the Family Research Council, who promote the claim that they are really only against gay marriage, when the reality is that they spread demonizing lies about the LGBTQ community — such as the false idea that game man have a high propensity for pedophilia. When you start demonizing and talking about gay people as inherently immoral, filthy, perverted, dangerous that crosses the line into hate. As such, we should be careful when describing groups opposed to transgender people's access to EFTA00690387 bathrooms that don't match their gender — whereas when these same groups describe transgender people as inherently evil, they are hate groups. This year there has been a lot of conflict about free speech and hate speech. Plans for events with Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos have become the targets of violent clashes in Berkeley. But in our great county, under the Constitution, you have the right to hate, you just don't have the right to hurt people. And the argument of the campus protesters, that the mere presence of those kinds of words actually hurt people because it poisons the atmosphere, is a slippery slope. This is why the "liberal" Southern Poverty Law Center (who made a name for itself as a standard-bearer in the fight for civil rights since 1971) filed a lawsuit against [the neo-Nazi website] Daily Stormer, [white supremacist] Richard Spencer was in Auburn, AL, at a college and the University tried to block him for speaking, and the federal judge said that action was unconstitutional — and the judge was right. Of all the problems pointed out and all the fixes promised by political candidates last year, job number one should be dealing with hate. It's one thing for people to have different political opinions. It's another for us to disagree, sometimes violently, about human dignity, basic decency, and what America stands for. It's difficult to imagine that we can solve our other big problems unless we fix this one. And hate is not just about race or color as many Trump voters openly admitted hating Hillary Clinton as the reason for their vote. The same can be said for Kathy Griffin, who may be a wonderful satirist, but her latest antic was neither funny or thoughtful, because ten U.S. Presidents have been assassinate, with six of them surviving and four not. What Kathy Griffin did in an attempt of mock President Trump was not just stupid but hateful. A study released in February shows that social media engagement by groups labeled as "hate" organizations has been booming in the last two to three years — and the largest shares of activity are focused on anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. The study titled "Hate on Social Media: A Look at Hate Groups and Their Twitter Presence" was conducted by SafeHome.org, an organization of home security experts that conducts research aimed at making communities safer. The study used data collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit based in Montgomery, Ala., that tracks hate groups nationwide. Study authors said in the report that they wanted to see what hate groups were doing on Twitter and who is following them. "We studied these Twitter accounts to understand not just how hateful sentiment has evolved over the years, but also in which states these comments originate," reads a statement at the beginning of the study. The research showed that hate groups collected more "likes" to tweets and comments in 2016 than in any other year since 2008. From 2014 to 2015, the number of "likes" on hate group tweets and comments tripled, and from 2015 to 2016 they tripled again. The sentiment in this engagement has largely been focused against immigrants and against Muslims, according to the report. As we know, hate is nothing new. To greater or lesser degrees, it always has resided in the seamy underbelly of American society. The election of our first black president eight years ago was celebrated as an affirmation that we had finally outgrown racism. But Barack Obama has been the most threatened president in our history, the target of more than 3o potential death threats a day. During his two terms, the rate of presidential threats has increased 400%. One of the remarkable achievements of his presidency is the grace that he and his family have shown throughout, yet many EFTA00690388 American who define themselves as Trump supporters dismiss his wholesome values and will tell you that he is a Muslim who sold out the country to extremist radicals. Inline image 2 A year ago, the FBI released its numbers on hate crimes in 2015. There were more than 5,800, up 6% from 2014. Attacks against American Muslims jumped nearly 70% compared to 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks these things, counted nearly 900 active hate groups in the United States last year, about 100 more than the year before. Hate crimes reportedly have spiked since Donald Trump's election. The New York Times cites "an alarming rise in some types of crimes tied to the vitriol of this year's presidential campaign..." These data only scratch the surface. They include assaults, arsons, bombings, physical threats and property destruction; they do not include insults, intimidation, slurs, public demonstrations, ostracization, bullying and many other hateful incidents that are unreported because they stop short of breaking the law. We should not have been surprised earlier this year, when people took to the streets to declare that Trump is not their president. Neither should Trump. As commentator Van Jones pointed out during a post-election panel discussion, Trump was "one of the most explosively provocative candidates in the history of our country and there's a price to be paid for that." ****** So True Truly wise words from Lady Gaga EFTA00690389 Inline image 1 Web Link: https://www.facebook.comiladvgaganownetkideos/1522641857778302/ Lady Gaga delivers an eloquent warning against hate, which she explains divides us. It should be a must hear for everyone. Please enjoy.... ****** Nothing Has Really Changed On October 21, 1916 an African American man killed by a lynch mob in Abbeville, South Carolina. EFTA00690390 Inline image 10 On October 21, 1916 an African American man killed by a lynch mob in Abbeville, South Carolina. Anthony Crawford was born in 1965 during early in the Reconstruction Era. After the Civil War, Crawford's father became the owner of a modest acreage of cotton fields on the Little River, about seven miles west of Abbeville, which he worked with his son. Anthony was an ambitious and literate child who routinely walked seven miles to the school in Abbeville. Crawford inherited the land on his father's death, which he increased by substantial land purchases in 1883, 1888, 1899 and 1903. In the mid or late 189os, Crawford was co-founder of the Industrial Union of Abbeville County, which was devoted to the "material, moral and intellectual advance of the colored people". He was the father of twelve sons and four daughters. By 1916, his land holdings had expanded to 427 acres (as much as 6o0, according to some sources) prime cotton farm land. Many of Crawford's children had settled on plots adjoining that of their father. With a net worth of approximately $20,000 to $25,000 in 1916 dollars, Crawford was without doubt one of the richest men in Abbeville County. Crawford was also known for his refusal to tolerate disrespect or defiance in any form. Once, when his church's preacher delivered a sermon decrying Crawford's meddling in church affairs, Crawford jumped out of his seat, struck the man and fired him on the spot. This extended even to whites: "The day a white man hits me is the day I die", he was quoted as having said to his children. After his death, the Charleston News & Courier (now the Post and Courier) described Crawford as "rich, for a negro, and he was insolent along with it". EFTA00690391 On October 21, 1916, Crawford was taking two loads of cotton and a load of seed into Abbeville and had a disagreement over the price of cottonseed with W.D. Barksdale, a white store owner. After Crawford left the store, one of Barksdale's employees followed him outside and hit him on the head with an ax handle. Crawford called for help, which drew the attention of Sheriff R.M. Burts. The officer arrested Crawford, under the charge that he had cursed a white man but could also be said, for his own protection, as a mob of angry whites was already beginning to accumulate. Crawford was held at the jail briefly, and released later that day on $15 bail. The police allowed him to exit from a side door, but the mob saw him anyway and pursued him into a cotton mill nearby, where Crawford took shelter in the boiler room. A salesman named McKinny Cann entered the boiler room after Crawford, and Crawford, grabbing a hammer from some nearby tools, knocked the man unconscious. Although the mill workers attempted to stop it, Crawford was stabbed and severely beaten by the mob. Sheriff R.M. Burts appeared and arrested Crawford once more, much to the chagrin of the mob of whites. The sheriff could only get Crawford away from the mob by promising to the brothers of Cann that he would not try to sneak Crawford out of town before the full extent of McKinny Cann's injuries was known. As it happened, Cann was not badly hurt, although Crawford was. He was treated by physician C.C. Gamble, who also happened to be the mayor of Abbeville, and also happened to be a relative of a man named James Rodgers who had been shot in December 1905 during an altercation with Crawford's sons. Gamble announced that Crawford would likely die from his wounds. The fear that Crawford might die before the mob could get to him collided with the fear that the sheriff might spirit him out of town, and at 3 p.m., around 200 white men besieged the jail, captured and disarmed Sheriff Burts, and abducted Crawford. Crawford was dragged through the black section of town with a rope around his neck. The mob then stole a lumber wagon from a black driver and used it to take Crawford to a fairground nearby. Crawford was then stabbed before being hanged from a tree there, while armed whites used his body for target practice riddling his body with more than 200 bullets. The paper's headline the next day read "Negro Strung Up and Shot to Pieces". After dark, the county coroner, F.W.R. Nance, took a jury to the fairground and cut down Crawford's mutilated remains. The coroner found Crawford had died "at the hands of parties unknown". South Carolina governor Richard Irvine Manning III was quick to denounce the murder. He ordered a full investigation of the crime by both Sheriff Burts and State Solicitor Robert Archer Cooper, exhorting them to hand down indictments of the mob participants. Many Abbeville residents were held and questioned, including Cann's three brothers, but it became increasingly apparent that no resident of Abbeville would testify against any member of the mob; moreover it would be virtually impossible to select an impartial jury from the ranks of the city. Manning called for the trial's venue to be moved to a different county, although nothing came of it. And white in the area made it known to Crawford's family that if they didn't move they would be given the same fate. After numerous treats the Crawford family resettled in Evansville, Indiana. And after the Crawfords were driven out of the state, more than half or the blacks in the county followed them, fearing if someone as rich as affluent as the Crawford family feared for their lives it was wise for blacks to leave. The definition for lynching is that when three or more people, which constitutes a mob, put someone to death without legal sanction from a court and they do it for the purpose of tradition or whatever their version of justice is. Lynching started during the Revolutionary War years, named after the EFTA00690392 brother of the man who founded Lynchburg, VA when there were not too many courts or difficult to get to them as the British were in many places in the South making it difficult and dangerous to get around, as a form of local justice not condoned by a formal court. And it was not until 1886 that the number of Black lynch victims exceeded the number of White victims when this American tradition became racialized for a number of reasons. During the history of our country there is a constant struggle over the meaning of who deserves the protection and rights afforded under the U.S. Constitution. And what happens and the racial function of a stereotype is to show that someone is undeserving of first-class citizenship. And to rather recently first-class citizenship was not seen as a right but as a privilege. And it was a privilege accorded to those with a particular character and who lived their life in a particular way who enjoyed that honor. And within Conservatives there is still a big element that believe "that if we live our life a certain way, we are going to get somewhere and become first-class citizens because that's what the Constitution says." Hence it is viewed as a privilege and not a right, whatever the interpretation of the Bill of Rights. Inline image 9 In the late 19th Century there was an evolving scientific theory that human beings could be categorized and ranked by such constructs as social standing and group affiliation. Drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of biology that the fittest will survive this science called `Social Darwinism' perpetuated various myths about how so cities evolved. One destructive myth was that Black People were inferior to White People and therefore there was a justification to suppress their advancement in all areas, less the society as a whole be brought down. EFTA00690393 Inline image 8 There had always been prejudice around color ever since the first African came to the U.S. but that change in the late 19th Century with the advent of Social Darwinism and the need to think about Black People, Black labor and Black bodies in a particular way, you begin to see that Blacks are devolving down the evolutionary scale into more primitive identities. And with primitive less civility, lack of control, lack of character, lack of honor, etc. And scientist actually sort to prove these thing imperially. And from then they also began to think about the notion of what is happening to women, especially around women sexuality. Thus this need for White women to maintain this purity and the purity of the race. While there were no shortage of reasons for discrimination against Black People by Whites in this period, the emerging myth of the threat of a White Woman by a Black Man became a tense focal point and the often false accusation of rape became the chief justification for lynching. Inline image 7 One person of this period to expose this destructive myth was activist Ida B. Wells, who was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, and in 1892 a very good friend of hers was lynched in Memphis, TN by the name of Tom Moss along with two other men. And what she begins to understand that lynching EFTA00690394 is taking on a new king of face with Blacks being victimized in greater numbers. And the reason for this rise in lynching which reaches a peak in 1892 is that the accusations that Black Men are raping White Women. She sees this as new because there has been no history of this tendency. And especially in the numbers that people are professing. And she knows that the reason that Thomas Moss was lynched is because he was competing suer.essfully with a neighboring white store owner. Inline image 6 And what she does is that she becomes an investigative reporter. So when she starts taking against lynching she is not just giving an opinion, she is actually going to sites of lynchings. She using statistics that other people are using to disprove the idea/myth by simply finding out instances that when there was a charge of rape, often they were just consensual relationships between these black men and white women. And if it is consensual, these Black men are not monsters nor are the white women in need of protection which Black People are being killed in the name of and why there was a need for lynching, as it really distinguishes the difference between White and Black People — with Blacks being the victims and Whites the spectators. Inline image 5 According to Tuskegee Institute between 1882 and 1968 at least 3446 Blacks (out of 4745) were lynched in the United States. They were tortured, hanged, burned alive, dragged behind trucks and castrated, and in a number of cases their bodies were dismembered with the pieces either discarded or kept by many as souvenirs. Thirty-nine years later while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, 14- year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants—the white woman's husband and her brother—made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. EFTA00690395 Inline image 4 Since the Reconstruction era lynchings enforced white supremacy and intimidated blacks by racial terrorism. And not terribly long ago in America a black person was killed in public every four days for often the most mundane of infractions, or rather accusation of infractions — for taking a hog, making boastful remarks, for stealing 75 cents. For the most banal of missteps, the penalty could be an hours- long spectacle of torture and lynching. No trial, no jury, no judge, no appeal. Now, well into a new century, family after family bury their sons, daughters, fathers and mothers killed at the hands of authorities, the rate of police killings of black Americans is nearly the same as the rate of lynchings in the early decades of the loth century. About twice a week, or every three or four days, an African American has been killed by a white police officer, according to studies of the latest data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That number is said to be incomplete and likely an undercount, as only a fraction of local police jurisdictions even report such deaths — and those reported are the ones deemed somehow "justifiable". That means that despite the attention given the deaths of teenagers Trayvon Martin (killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman) and Jordan Davis (killed by a white man for playing his music too loud), their cases would not have been included in that already grim statistic — not only because they were not killed by police but because the state of Florida, for example, is not included in the limited data compiled by the FBI. Even though white Americans outnumber black Americans fivefold, black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed when they encounter the police in the US, and black teenagers are far likelier to be killed by police than white teenagers. The haunting symmetry of a death every three or four days links us to an uglier time that many would prefer not to think about, but which reminds us that the devaluation of black life in America is as old as the nation itself and has yet to be confronted. Beyond the numbers, it is the banality of injustice, the now predictable playing out of 21st Century convention — the swift killing, the shaming of the victim rather than inquiry into the shooter, the kitchen-table protest signs, twitter handles and spontaneous symbols of grievance, whether hoodies or Skittles or hands in the air, the spectacle of death by skin color. An encounter with the police officers can turn deadly within seconds, especially if you are black or brown. Even when it is captured on video with the victim either complying calmly or running away or with their back to the officer, juries overwhelming chose to believe the officers instead of "their lying eyes." With the latest example being that three times in the same week that a jury acquitted Officer Jeronimo Yanez shoot seven times into the car where Philando Castile, was sitting with his fiancée and her five year-old daughter and killing him, with a dashcam video showing the victim complying calmly, two other officers' trials ended without a conviction. EFTA00690396 On June 21, 2017 a jury cleared a former Milwaukee officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown, of wrongdoing in the death of a 23-year-old man, Sylville K. Smith, with a video showing that when the officer fired the second shot, Mr. Smith no longer had a gun and was on the ground — "hands up, with no place to go." And a day later jurors in Cincinnati told the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked in the retrial of Raymond M. Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer who faced charges of murder and voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Samuel DuBose, an unarmed motorist, in 2015. While activist groups such as Black Lives Matter have drawn attention to police shootings in recent years, acquittals of police officers have become all but expected in these sorts of incidents. According to a report by HuffPost last year, only 13 officers were convicted of murder or manslaughter in fatal on- duty shootings from 2005 to 2015. The data project Mapping Police Violence estimates that in 2015, only 1 percent of cases of on-duty shootings—over 1,000 in the United States that year alone—resulted in those involved being convicted of a crime. The vast majority of cases since 2005 have been ruled to be justified homicides. On an average, 39 black people were lynched per year under Jim Crow. In 1892, the worst year, 161 black Americans were lynched. More than a century later, the numbers have hardly improved. In 2015, 258 black people were killed by US police, representing over 26% of deaths, while only 228 black people were shot and killed in 2016. The number of Hispanics shot and killed by police was higher in 2015 as well. There were 156 people who were fatally shot by officers in 2016 while 2015 saw 16 more deaths of Hispanic people, amounting to 172 Hispanics shot and killed by cops. Inline image 3 Although it has been 36 years since the last lynching (Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama in 1981), it is evident that the continued unbridled killing of people of color by police officers is as equal a scourge. Like lynching it involves death caused by "race prejudice" without due process of the judicial system. And although Social Darwinism is no longer viewed a science, the myth of color is real, as it seems that trained police can get exonerated by just claiming they fear for their lives even if the victim is unarmed running away. Yet, Jessie Murray was denied the use of "stand your ground" as a defense in his murder trial, the same defense that George Zimmerman used in his acquittal for killing the unarmed Trayvon Martin. Shockingly, the judge stated that the reason Murray could not use the defense was because he said his gun fired by accident during the struggle with the victim and his three friends. Court documents described Murray as being assaulted by the Nathan Adams, a former police officer, and three of his friends. Despite this threat, the court seems to be saying that Murray should have allowed himself to be beaten first and then used his gun as a last resort. EFTA00690397 Inline image 2 And this is how police treat our children. Web Link: https:/hrww.facebook.com/polic ethepoliceACPAideos/1736706443013011/ As Elie Mystral in a recent article about the Jessie Murray trial mused — "Can black people also defend legally ourselves against white people, if we are afraid of them? Hahaha that was a rhetorical question. OF COURSE a black person can't legally "defend himself' against a white man. Every brother in here knows that black people can't legally use force against a white person, no matter how threatening and dangerous that white person maybe. Every black person I know knows that if they have to defend themselves against any white person out there, they'd best be willing to catch a homicide/attempted homicide charge. We don't get to "stand your ground." We don't get to have "self-defense." We get to run, or die. If we fight back, we get the full weight of the legal system crashing down on our heads." White guy open carrying an AR-15 Web Link: https://youtu.be/rihlogXCxAs In 2015 a Libertarian 2nd Amendment group did an experiment where two men — one white, one black — walk down the street strapped with AR-15s. The white man, Warren Drouin, is a well-known fixture in the open-carry movement. In fact, he and police in his small Oregon town are on a first-name basis because of the scores of complaints from scared neighbors over Drouin's exercises. The camera shows Drouin being approached by a police officer and a polite exchange about his right to carry a gun in public. The encounter is so cordial that the officer shows Warren his AR-15, even though Warren refuses to give his sir name and other information. Inline image 1 The next clip follows an unnamed black man as he carries the same weapon strapped across his back. A police car approaches and out jumps a white officer who pulls his gun and orders the man, "Get down on the street. Now!" The officer also orders the man's wife, who is recording the incident, to get EFTA00690398 on the ground. "I'm seven months pregnant," she replies. "I am being held at gunpoint," the man says from the ground. "I am merely open carrying." Two men carrying the same weapon get very different reactions with the only big difference being the color of their skin. See the difference when you are Black -- Web Link: https://youtu.be/E6jzzh-F2gs So please don't tell me that race isn't a factor when according to Propublica young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts. As you can see there is this really that much difference today, than what happened to Anthony Crawford a century ago? And if you are not Black or Hispanic you probably don't feel it but be assured one of the great privileges of a white skin, is that police are less inclined to immediately assume the worse which an easily result in one's death. And the Blue Line, that honest cops, their superiors and union representatives, as well as public officials and our judicial system refuse to cross to castigate the rotten apples, only make things worse Hence the anger of Black Lives Matter supporters and minority communities as a whole. While We Were Fighting for Healthcare The EPA Dismantled A Rule That Protects Drinking Water For 117 Million "This proposal strikes directly at public health," an environmentalist group warns. Inline image 1 EFTA00690399 The Environmental Protection Agency is set to undo yet another Obama-era environmental regulation after releasing a proposal on Tuesday meant to dismantle a rule protecting rivers and streams from pollution. The latest target from the notably anti-environmental administration of President Donald Trump is the Clean Water Rule, which in 2015 updated a longstanding act passed during the advent of the EPA to clean up heavily polluted federal waterways. The rule, passed under former President Barack Obama, expanded federal authority to include all "navigable" waters under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. It ultimately protected the drinking water of more than 117 million Americans. The Clean Water Rule was introduced in 2015 to update a longstanding act passed during the advent of the EPA to clean up heavily polluted federal waterways — one of which was so fouled with sewage, it burst into flames in the late 1960s. The Clean Water Rule was the result of more than 400 meetings with stakeholders and a review of more than 1 million public comments. However, Trump has long called the update that environmentalists hailed a "disaster." He signed an executive order shortly into his term, urging the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to dismantle the rule. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt released a 42-page plan to do just that on Tuesday, the first step in a complicated, rule-making process experts have described as a "huge task." The New York Times notes the process would require the White House to craft a legal reason for the rollback, and environmental groups have announced they are prepared to fight such plans. "We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation's farmers and businesses," Pruitt said following the proposal's release. Inline image 2 Inline image 3 The Natural Resources Defense Council on Tuesday lambasted the move, calling it a "big mistake." Rhea Suh, the environmental nonprofit's president, declared the Trump administration's action a EFTA00690400 "reckless attack on our waters and health" and vowed to stand up to the president. "This proposal strikes directly at public health," Suh said in a statement. "It would strip out needed protections for the streams that feed drinking water sources for one in every three Americans. Clean water is too important for that. We'll stand up to this reckless attack on our waters and health." WI Inline image 4 Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, also said Pruitt is "smashing everything he touches in the EPA,"and called the move "gratuitous," "vindictive"and "and-clean water." If we want to keep government protections for clean water we better move soon. As the EPA under Scott Pruitt has signaled that he is intent on getting rid of many of them, starting with The Clean Water Rule an Obama-era federal regulation that prohibits companies polluting our waterways and protecting 1/3 of America's drinking water, even though 78% of the American public say that we need to do more to protect our clean air and clean water. Additionally, Pruitt's budget takes money from the Great Lakes Clean Up Fund even though io% of Americans get their drinking water from the Great Lakes. The good news is that so far 4o Democrat and 28 Republican lawmakers have publically written to President Trump to not slash this project. ****** America's global standing plummets under Donald Trump A new survey from Pew Research Centre shows sharp drops in approval EFTA00690401 Inline image 1 America and the world: Could do better The world does not much like Donald Trump. A new survey of 40,447 people in 37 countries shows that trust in the president pales in comparison with that invested in Barack Obama. Of all the countries surveyed, Mr Trump's worst ratings come from Mexico; just 5% of Mexicans say they are confident in him. At the other extreme is Russia, where only ii% liked Mr Obama, but 53% say that they like Mr Trump, with the only other country where Trump's approval is higher than Obama is Israel. IT IS no surprise that a fast-tweeting, pugnacious president, with little regard for diplomatic niceties or enthusiasm for treaty obligations, is not much liked outside his borders. Nonetheless, the magnitude of the change in global opinions on America's leadership since Donald Trump took office is still remarkable. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre of 40,447 people in 37 countries shows that trust in Mr Trump pales in comparison with Barack Obama's final ratings. Whereas 64% of those surveyed had confidence in Mr Obama to do the right thing, just 22% are similarly optimistic about his successor, whom they described as "arrogant" (75%), "intolerant" (65%) and "dangerous" (62%). Citizens in Western Europe put no more stock in Mr Trump — who took office just five months ago — than they did in George W. Bush, the architect of the highly unpopular war in Iraq, when he limped out of the White House in 2008. Respondents' approval rating for America overall has also slumped, from 64% to 49%. EFTA00690402 Inline image 2 Of all the countries surveyed by Pew, Mr Trump's worst ratings come from Mexico, America's southern neighbor. The president has characterized its immigrants to his country as rapists, and promised to force its government to pay for a wall on their shared border. Sure enough, just 5% of Mexicans say they are confident in him. At the other extreme, respondents in only two countries prefer Mr Trump to his predecessor. Israelis are fonder of him by seven percentage points, perhaps because he has sounded, at times, friendlier toward settlements and harsher towards Iran. A far greater gain comes from Russia, where only ii% liked Mr Obama, but 53% say that they like Mr Trump. The FBI is currently investigating whether anyone involved in Mr Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election on his behalf. Even in countries where he is mostly despised, Mr Trump still found some support from those who share his ideology. Across Europe, people with favorable views of their hometown populist party have much higher appraisals for Mr Trump — though, even among them, confidence was not above 50%. Of those who approve of the National Front, 39% express confidence in Mr Trump; for those who disapprove of Marine Le Pen's party, that number is just 6%. America's president is often described as the "leader of the five world". Mr Trump may be making that moniker an anachronism. Given his reluctance to reiterate America's commitment to NATO's collective-defense policy, it is little wonder that Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor and a staunch defender of liberal internationalism, inspires more confidence than Mr Trump does. However, he also fell short of leaders with far weaker democratic credentials. Even autocrats like Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin scored better. EFTA00690403 Inline image 4 For my Trump supporter friends, this is not Fake News or an indictment of the President but there is a consequence when any country or its leader loses standing internationally. This slide of lost trust didn't just start with President Trump, as Americans have been losing trust in our greatest intuitions, especially after Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981 that "Government is the problem." Continuing on with this soundbite, Republican Conservatives then used this mantra to justify the largest redistribution of wealth in history, through pushing for tax cuts that favor the wealthy and large corporations at the cost of cutting services to the Middle Class, Poor, Children and the Elderly, as well as cut funding for the country's education. With the latest example of this skullduggery, being the current Congressional Republican's healthcare bill dubbed the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) which is really a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in health care funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled and working middle-class Americans and described by many as Ruthless, Soulless, Vicious and Mean. And the truth is that the President Trump, has shown himself to be a shallow, vindictive, cruel, self- serving man who lies so effortlessly that he probably no longer can tell what is true or not. From his unfounded `birther' acquisitions against President Obama, to his misogynistic behavior which would have disqualified a candidate for school office in a middle-school, to his absolutely unwillingness to say anything negative against Vladimir Putin or Saudi Arabia's monarchy. This is a leader who refuses to acknowledge the greatest assault against America since 9/11, the hacking of the recent Presidential election by the Russians, which if you or I had done the same thing we would be jailed for decades. But his real failing is that he has been exposed as a blowhard, who will bomb Syria because they can't really respond but has changed policies on a dime, when confronted with the realities that f@#king with the Chinese, Russian or Israel, like every bully, he will suffer a beat down. As German Lopez wrote in VOX on May 16, 2017 — Trump could damage public trust in government for generations — His actions threaten public trust not just in his administration but in the White House as an institution: It's a startling reality of the current White House: You can't believe anything President Donald Trump and his staff say. The latest example came this week — after a Washington Post report on Monday found that Trump had leaked highly classified information about ISIS during a meeting with Russian officials. Reportedly, the gaffe came because Trump was bragging about the quality of his intelligence. "I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day," he reportedly said. EFTA00690404 At first, White House officials insisted that the report was "false," offering a non-denial denial that claimed "at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed." (The allegations never had to do with intelligence sources or methods, but rather the substance of the intelligence itself.) Then within 24 hours, Trump effectively refuted the White House press shop's line — seemingly acknowledging on Twitter Tuesday that he had given classified intel to Russians and arguing that he was allowed to do it. Lopez: Before the FBI scandal, there was the very first time that White House press secretary Sean Spicer went to the podium. Then, he argued that Trump's Inauguration Day drew bigger crowds than President Barack Obama's — a claim that was easily disproved by looking at two pictures of the crowds. Shortly after, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway infamously defended Spicer by arguing that the administration was merely offering "alternative facts." This is not how the presidency normally works. It's normal, if unfortunate, that all presidents and their staffs have misled the American public on occasion. But the Trump administration's habit of lying even about basic facts is simply not normal. All of this has led me to a question: Could Trump's lies and scandals damage the White House as an institution — not just while he's in office, but in the long term? It's not unprecedented. Political historians and scholars widely agree, for example, that the pervasive dishonesty of the Johnson and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal damaged faith in the government in the long term. "If you have an administration where it becomes clear over time that the president is lying, that the president is manipulating the truth, [and] that the president is abusing power, that can have an extraordinarily damaging effect not just for him, not just for Republicans, but for overall confidence in government institutions," Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, told me. Like many who were Hillary supporters, I sort of believed that Donald Trump was not really a hardline Conservative or even a Libertarian and would pragmatically work more to the middle. Instead, he has made his number one priority, to erase President Obama's legacy, instead of building on its accomplishments. Among many things, this included opting out of the Paris Climate Accords, castigating NATO and insulting some of our staunchest allies to the point that Angela Merkel felt the need to say that Germany could no longer rely on Donald Trump's America: "we Europeans much take our destiny into our own hands." With CNN writing, "German Chancellor Angela Merkel uttered a single sentence that speaks to how fundamentally President Donald Trump has reshaped -- and will continue to reshape — the world, and America's place in it." As a candidate, Donald Trump that he would push for a great healthcare bill that covers everyone and would not touch Medicaid. To get a win at any cost, he has pushed Congressional legislators to pass the current GOP healthcare bill which does neither. But more importantly, Trump's comments and decisions over his first six months in office raise real questions as to whether he can be trusted, especially with our[GB1] allies. On the campaign trail, he promised a fundamental reshaping -- both domestically and in foreign policy -- of how America is perceived. He appears to be making good on that promise in ways many people never imagined. The problem is that as Trump acts, the rest of the world necessarily reacts. And his contradictory `policy tweets' often at odds to with people within his own administration, and how they impact what other leaders and other countries do, could well have lasting influence on America in the world that stretch well beyond the four or eight years Trump will be president. Such is why President Trump's international approval ratings are so low and once trust is lost it is hard to recapture. So for my Trump supporter friends, this is truly a big thing and this news is EFTA00690405 not good news, 'alternative facts' or Fake News as it not only affects the President but also the standing of the country and our fellow citizens, around the world and this is my rant of the week.... WEEK's READINGS This isn't Fake Media.... These are the Facts.... The White House puts out lies, lies, and more lies. How about an apology Inline image 2 Three weeks ago President Trump sent the following two tweets: EFTA00690406 Inline image 1 It was a telling example of the astonishing narcissism of our president. Everything is about him and his fragile ego: the country be damned. Indeed, if anyone deserves an apology it is the American people — from Donald Trump. And not just for the incessant lying about his campaign staffs contact with Russian officials intent on disrupting the 2016 presidential election, but also for peddling such obvious, self-refuting nonsense about those contacts. This week in Paris, Trump answered a reporter's question for the first time since the New York Times revealed Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian attorney peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton. He said the meeting was one that "everybody" in politics would have held. That's consistent with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus's statement last week that the sit-down was a "nothing burger." If that's true, why didn't the White House reveal the meeting months ago? Why did Donald Trump Jr. go on television six weeks after the June 2016 meeting and say that allegations of Russian support for Trump's campaign were "phony" and "disgusting"? Why did Trump Jr. and Trump's top aide and son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who also attended the meeting), let the president and White House aides consistently deny that there had been any contact between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign when they knew it wasn't true? EFTA00690407 And why would the Trump campaign and now the Trump administration spend the last year lying about an issue that they now claim is no big deal? Why subject the president to a constant drumbeat of Russia collusion stories if they could have just cleared things up months ago? If one wants to be both charitable and naive, one could argue that the Trump camp didn't want to deal with the embarrassment that would come from such revelations. But does anyone really believe that? Does anyone seriously believe that the June 2016 meeting with Trump Jr., Kushner, and then- campaign manager Paul Manafort was the only time that Trump aides ever spoke to Russian officials about the campaign? And does anyone truly believe that somehow Trump himself was out of the loop? We know that the president fired FBI director James Comey because of the Russia investigation — he admitted it publicly. This week, we know why he did it. Until recently, the Russian collusion story always struck me as a bit far-fetched. I figured some level of cooperation was possible, perhaps by some of the hangers-on to the Trump campaign, but if it was something bigger, why hadn't the evidence leaked out sooner? I found it hard to imagine that Trump and those around him could possibly be this clueless. This week's revelations are a reminder that underestimating the incompetence and corruption of the Trump clan is a fool's errand. It's not just the growing mountain of evidence that suggests active collusion. It's the incessant lying. To be sure, this president and this White House lie all the time. It's what they do. But it's the scope of deception on Russia that is so striking. Mike Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner have all lied about their contacts with Russian officials — and repeatedly so. The White House and the president have consistently peddled a false narrative about Russia — one that those within Trump's inner circle could at any time have corrected. When you combine these facts with Trump's stubborn refusal to acknowledge Russia's role in the 2016 election hacking and his bizarre solicitousness with Russian President Vladimir Putin, I think we all know where this story is going to end. In many ways, American politics has become something of a waiting game — waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next revelation, and the next story that provides conclusive evidence that the Trump campaign actively colluded with a foreign government to win a US presidential election. When that happens, Trump should not just apologize; he should beg the American people for forgiveness. Just don't hold your breath on that happening. Michael A. Cohen — Boston Globe — July 14, 2017 Which countries have the best healthcare? EFTA00690408 lit Inline image 1 Neither Canada nor Japan cracked the top 10, and the United States finished a dismal 35th, according to a much anticipated ranking of healthcare quality in 195 countries, released Friday. Among nations with more than a million souls, top honors for 2015 went to Switzerland, followed by Sweden and Norway, though the healthcare gold standard remains tiny Andorra, a postage stamp of a country nestled between Spain (No. 8) and France (No. 15). Iceland (No. 2), Australia (No. 6), Finland (No. 7), the Netherlands (No. 9) and financial and banking center Luxembourg rounded out the first 10 finishers, according to a comprehensive study published in the medical journal The Lancet. Of the 20 countries heading up the list, all but Australia and Japan (No. 11) are in Western Europe, where virtually every nation boasts some form of universal health coverage. The United States — where a Republican Congress wants to peel back reforms that gave millions of people access to health insurance for the first time — ranked below Britain, which placed 3oth. The Healthcare Access and Quality Index, based on death rates for 32 diseases that can be avoided or effectively treated with proper medical care, also tracked progress in each nation compared to the benchmark year of 1990. Virtually all countries improved over that period, but many — especially in Africa and Oceania — fell further behind others in providing basic care for their citizens. With the exceptions of Afghanistan, Haiti and Yemen, the 3o countries at the bottom of the ranking were all in sub-Saharan Africa, with the Central African Republic suffering the worst standards of all. "Despite improvements in healthcare quality and access over 25 years, inequality between the best and worst performing countries has grown," said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and leader of a consortium of hundreds of contributing experts. Furthermore, he added in a statement, the standard of primary care was lower in many nations than expected given levels of wealth and development. The biggest underachievers in Asia included Indonesia, the Philippines, India and tiny Brunei, while in Africa it was Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho that had the most room for improvement. Regions with healthcare systems underperforming relative to wealth included Oceania, the Caribbean and Central Asia. EFTA00690409 Among rich nations, the worst offender in this category was the United States, which tops the world in per capita healthcare expenditure by some measures. Within Europe, Britain ranked well below expected levels. "The UK does well in some areas, including cerebrovascular disease," noted co-author Mann McKee, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "But it lags behind in outcomes of some cancers." The gap between actual and expected rating widened over the last quarter century in 62 of the 195 nations examined. "Overall, our results are a warning sign that heightened healthcare access and quality is not an inevitable product of increased development," Murray said. Between 1990 and 2015, countries that made the biggest improvements in delivering healthcare included South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China and the Maldives. The 32 diseases for which death rates were tracked included tuberculosis and other respiratory infections; illnesses that can be prevented with vaccines (diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and measles); several forms of treatable cancer and heart disease; and maternal or neonatal disorders. How to stop trigger-happy cops lnline image I In a seemingly endless stream of police shooting videos, the case of Philando Castile stands out. The Minnesota man bled to death before our eyes last summer. The image was livestreamed by his girlfriend while a police officer held the pair at gunpoint and her 4-year-old daughter watched from the back seat of their car. The uncensored anguish of those moments, viewed by millions on Facebook, was supposed to be a game changer in a national conversation about dead black men and trigger-happy cops. But one year later, the game hasn't changed. Despite damning videos and police dash-cam accounts, officers are rarely held accountable for what looks like criminal use of lethal force. The officer who EFTA00690410 killed Castile was found not guilty of manslaughter on June i6. Jeronimo Yanez told the jury he feared for his life when Castile reached for what the girlfriend said was his license and Yanez presumed was a gun. A few days later, a jury in Milwaukee acquitted an officer of reckless homicide. Video showed him shooting a suspect at point-blank range, after the man had dropped his gun and was lying on the ground. That same week, a Cincinnati jury couldn't agree on a verdict in the second trial of a university cop charged with manslaughter and murder for shooting an unarmed motorist in the head during a traffic stop. And in May, Officer Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Okla., was acquitted of manslaughter in the death of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed man who was high on drugs and standing alongside his car. In all four cases, the deaths were captured on police videos. It turns out that video evidence isn't the magic remedy for police shootings we'd like it to be. But it does give us insight into what is needed: better training to prevent sloppy, unwise and ultimately dangerous policing. The officers on trial — Latino, black, white, male and female — all had the same rationale for shooting: They feared for their lives and responded as they'd been trained to do. But even jurors who voted for acquittal were troubled by the tactical blunders, poor judgment and inconsistencies the videos revealed. After the Shelby trial in Tulsa, the foreman wrote a four-page letter conveying the jury's distress: "The jury wonders and some believe that she had other options available to subdue Mr. Crutcher." Shelby testified that her tactical training "didn't allow for a Taser" at the point she pulled her gun. But just as Shelby was firing the bullet that killed Crutcher, an officer behind her was firing a Taser round. Many of the Tulsa jurors, despite their final decision, "could never get comfortable with the concept of Betty Shelby being blameless for Mr. Crutcher's death," the foreman's letter said. Several jurors cried in the courtroom when the "not guilty" verdict was read. Still, trial after trial has shown that jurors are inordinately reluctant to convict if that means second-guessing the officer's account. The multiracial juries in Minnesota, Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Tulsa were trying to do the right thing but were hamstrung by guidelines that focus only on the moment of the shooting, and require them to divine what a "reasonable" officer in that moment might have done. Yanez, for example, must have seemed reasonable enough, as he wept on the stand and told the jury, "I thought I was going to die.... I had no other choice." But he did have choices. He could have ordered Castile to place his hands on the steering wheel or get out of the car, once Castile had politely announced, "Sir, I do have to tell you I have a firearm on me." Instead Yanez melted down, began shrieking and fired off seven shots. Castile died trapped between contradictory commands — "Do you have your license and insurance?" "Don't pull it out!" — from a young officer who stopped the car because he thought Castile's "wide-set EFTA00690411 nose" matched the nose of a black robbery suspect, then viewed Castile's every move through that criminal prism. That dysfunctional encounter reflects issues endemic to many police departments: implicit bias, inexperience, a warrior culture, inadequate training of officers. Often those factors don't come to light until agencies are forced to conduct shooting postmortems. The Los Angeles Police Department — which registered more fatal police shootings in the last two years than any force in the country — has taken a necessary and laudable first step toward a culture shift. Last year, the department's oversight commission found tactical errors in half of the 46 police shootings it reviewed. This year the commission adopted a new use-of-force policy directing officers to try to defuse tense encounters without using deadly force. Officers can be punished if their poor choices lead to someone getting shot. It's too soon to know how much effect the policy will have. Other cities with similar commitments have seen mixed results. In Salt Lake City, police shootings virtually stopped. But in Seattle, where deescalation training began two years ago, a mentally ill mother of four was shot to death in June when she called to report a robbery at her home and met police with a knife. The officer who killed her had left his mandated Taser in his locker; it took up too much space on his weapons belt, he said. Improved training must go beyond directives and address the role of implicit bias in the judgments officers make. Race can shape the actions of officers in even the most anodyne situations. A recent study of body camera footage in Oakland found officers treated black motorists with less respect in routine traffic stops. And it didn't matter whether the officer was white, Latino, Asian or black. Use-of-force statistics reflect more lethal repercussions: A third of the people killed by police during traffic stops are black. The death rate for young black men at the hands of police is five times higher than for white men of the same age. Police officers have a difficult and dangerous job. We rely on them to do the right thing in extreme situations to keep themselves and others safe. But as we've seen in fuzzy videos and unsatisfying verdicts, if we want to avoid legally sanctioned but morally tragic deaths, we need officers who are temperamentally suited to their jobs, culturally aware and appropriately trained. Unless we overcome the stereotypes that research shows we all carry around in our heads, "dangerous" will be the default label that black bodies wear, and fear will drive the choices that police EFTA00690412 officers make. By Sandy Banks — The Washington Post — July 2, 2017 ****** Inline image 1 The convention couldn't sound less rock-and-roll — the National Association of Music Merchants Show. But when the doors open at the Anaheim Convention Center, people stream in to scour rows of Fenders, Les Pauls and the oddball, custom-built creations such as the 5-foot-4-inch mermaid guitar crafted of 15 kinds of wood. Standing in the center of the biggest, six-string candy store in the United States, you can almost believe all is well within the guitar world. Except if, like George Gruhn, you know better. The 71-year-old Nashville dealer has sold guitars to Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. Walking through NAMM with Gruhn is like shadowing Bill Belichick at the NFL Scouting Combine. There is great love for the product and great skepticism. What others might see as a boom — the seemingly endless line of manufacturers showcasing instruments — Gruhn sees as two trains on a collision course. "There are more makers now than ever before in the history of the instrument, but the market is not growing," Gruhn says in a voice that flutters between a groan and a grumble. "I'm not all doomsday, but this — this is not sustainable." The numbers back him up. In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody's downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month. What worries Gruhn is not simply that profits are down. That happens in business. He's concerned by the "why" behind the sales decline. When he opened his store 46 years ago, everyone wanted to be a guitar god, inspired by the men who roamed the concert stage, including Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page. Now those boomers are retiring, downsizing and adjusting to fixed incomes. They're looking to shed, not add to, their collections, and the younger generation isn't stepping in to replace them. EFTA00690413 Gruhn knows why. "What we need is guitar heroes," he says. He is asked about Clapton, who himself recently downsized his collection. Gruhn sold 29 of his guitars. "Eric Clapton is my age," he says. How about Creed's Mark Tremonti, Joe Bonamassa, John Mayer? He shakes his head. "John Mayer?" he asks. "You don't see a bunch of kids emulating John Mayer and listening to him and wanting to pick up a guitar because of him." Guitar heroes. They arrived with the first wave of rock-and-roll. Chuck Berry duckwalldng across the big screen. Scotty Moore's reverb-soaked Gibson on Elvis's Sun records. Link Wray, with his biker cool, blasting through "Rumble" in 1958. 'Rock is the Devil's music' Inline image 2 Living Colour's Vernon Reid and The Post's Geoff Edgers deconstruct some of rock's most iconic guitar riffs, from "Cult of Personality" to "Back in Black." That instrumental wasn't a technical feat. It required just four chords. But four chords were enough for Jimmy Page. "That was something that had so much profound attitude to it," Page told Jack White and the Edge in the 2009 documentary "It Might Get Loud." The '6os brought a wave of white blues — Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards — as well as the theatrics of the guitar-smashing Pete Townshend and the sonic revolutionary Hendrix. McCartney saw Hendrix play at the Bag ONails club in London in 1967. He thinks back on those days fondly and, in his sets today, picks up a left-handed Les Paul to jam through Hendrix's "Foxy Lady." "The electric guitar was new and fascinatingly exciting in a period before Jimi and immediately after," the former Beatle says wistfully in a recent interview. "So you got loads of great players emulating guys like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and you had a few generations there." He pauses. EFTA00690414 "Now, it's more electronic music and kids listen differently," McCartney says. "They don't have guitar heroes like you and I did." Nirvana was huge when the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, 38, was growing up. "And everybody wanted a guitar," he says. "This is not surprising. It has to do with what's in the Top 20." Living Colour's Vernon Reid agrees but also speaks to a larger shift. He remembers being inspired when he heard Santana on the radio. "There was a culture of guitar playing, and music was central," adds Reid, 58. "A record would come out and you would hear about that record, and you would make the journey. There was a certain investment in time and resources." The spell of Hendrix and Santana The two guitar icons influenced his playing style. Vernon Reid found the music of Jimi Hendrix after he discovered Carlos Santana. He talks with The Post's Geoff Edgers about how the two guitar icons influenced his playing style. Lita Ford, also 58, remembers curling up on the couch one night in 1977 to watch Cheap Trick on "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert." She was 19 and her band, the Runaways, had played gigs with them. "It was just a different world," Ford says. "There was 'Don Kirshner's Rock Concert,' Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and they would have one band on and you would wait all week to see who that band was going to be. And you could talk about it all week long with your friends — `Saturday night, Deep Purple's going to be on, what are they going to play?' — and then everybody's around the TV like you're watching a football game." By the '8os, when Ford went solo and cracked the Top 40, she became one of the few female guitar heroes on a playlist packed with men, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen. Guitar culture was pervasive, whether in movie houses ("Karate Kid" Ralph Macchio outdueling Steve Vai in the 1986 movie "Crossroads"; Michael J. Fox playing a blistering solo in "Back to the Future" and co-starring with Joan Jett in 1987's rock-band drama "Light of Day") or on MTV and the older, concert films featuring the Who and Led Zeppelin on seemingly endless repeats. But there were already hints of the change to come, of the evolutions in music technology that would eventually compete with the guitar. In 1979, Tascam's Portastudio 144 arrived on the market, allowing anybody with a microphone and a patch cord to record with multiple tracks. (Bruce Springsteen used a Portastudio for 1982's "Nebraska.") In 1981, Oberheim introduced the DMX drum machine, revolutionizing hip-hop. So instead of Hendrix or Santana, Linkin Park's Brad Delson drew his inspiration from Run-DMC's "Raising Hell," the crossover smash released in 1986. Delson, whose band recently landed atop the charts with an album notably light on guitar, doesn't look at the leap from ax men to DJs as a bad thing. "Music is music," he says. "These guys are all musical heroes, whatever cool instrument they play. And today, they're gravitating toward programming beats on an Ableton. I don't think that's any less EFTA00690415 creative as playing bass. I'm open to the evolution as it unfolds. Musical genius is musical genius. It just takes different forms." An industry responds Tell that to Guitar Center, now $1.6 billion in debt and so fearful of publicity that a spokeswoman would only make an executive available for an interview on one condition: "He cannot discuss financials or politics under any circumstances." (No thanks.) Richard Ash, the chief executive of Sam Ash, the largest chain of family-owned music stores in the country, isn't afraid to state the obvious. "Our customers are getting older, and they're going to be gone soon," he says. Over the past three years, Gibson's annual revenue has fallen from $2.1 billion to $1.7 billion, according to data gathered by Music Trades magazine. The company's 2014 purchase of Philips's audio division for $135 million led to debt — how much, the company won't say — and a Moody's downgrading last year. Fender, which had to abandon a public offering in 2012, has fallen from $675 million in revenue to $545 million. It has cut its debt in recent years, but it remains at $100 million. And starting in 2010, the industry witnessed a milestone that would have been unthinkable during the hair-metal era: Acoustic models began to outsell electric. Still, the leaders of Gibson, Fender and PRS say they have not given up. "The death of the guitar, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is greatly exaggerated," says Fender's chief executive, Andy Mooney. He says that the company has a strategy designed to reach millennials. The key, Mooney says, is to get more beginners to stick with an instrument they often abandon within a year. To that end, in July the company will launch a subscription-based service it says will change the way new guitarists learn to play through a series of online tools. Paul Reed Smith, the Maryland-based guitar designer, says the industry is just now recovering from the recession that struck in 2009. He points to PRS's sustained revenue — the company says they're between $42 million and $45 million a year — and an increased demand for guitars. "This is a very complicated mix of economy versus market, demand versus what products are they putting out, versus are their products as good as they used to be, versus what's going on with the Internet, versus how are the big-box stores dealing with what's going on," Smith says. "But I'll tell you this: You put a magic guitar in a case and ship it to a dealer, it will sell." Then there's Henry Juszldewicz, the biggest and most controversial of the music instrument moguls. When he and a partner bought Gibson in 1986, for just $5 million, the onetime giant was dying. "It was a failed company that had an iconic name, but it really was on its last legs," Ash says. "[Juszkiewicz] completely revived the Gibson line." Juszkiewicz, 64, is 'mown for being temperamental, ultracompetitive and difficult to work for. A former Gibson staffer recalls a company retreat in Las Vegas punctuated by a trip to a shooting range, where executives shot up a Fender Stratocaster. In recent years, Juszkiewicz has made two major EFTA00690416 pushes, both seemingly aimed at expanding a company when a product itself — the guitar — has shown a limited ability to grow its market. In 2014, he acquired Philips's audio division to add headphones, speakers and digital recorders to Gibson's brand. The idea, Juszkiewicz says, is to recast Gibson from a guitar company to a consumer electronics company. There's also the line of self-tuning "robot" guitars that Gibson spent more than a decade and millions of dollars developing. In 2015, Juszkiewicz made the feature standard on most new guitars. Sales dropped so dramatically, as players and collectors questioned the added cost and value, that Gibson told dealers to slash prices. The company then abandoned making self-tuners a standard feature. You can still buy them — they call them "G Force" — but they're now simply an add-on option. Journey's Neal Schon says he battled with Juszkiewicz when he served as a consultant to Gibson. "I was trying to help Henry and shoo him away from areas that he was spending a whole lot of money in," Schon says. "All this electronical, robot crap. I told him, point blank, 'What you're doing, Roland and other companies are light-years in front of you, you've got this whole building you've designated to be working on this synth guitar. I've played it. And it just doesn't work.' And he refused to believe that." Juszldewicz says that one day, the self-tuning guitars will be recognized as a great innovation, comparing them with the advent of the television remote control. He also believes in the Philips purchase. Eventually, he says, the acquisition will be recognized as the right decision. "Everything we do is about music," Juszkiewicz says. "It doesn't matter whether it's the making of music with instruments or the listening of music with a player. To me, we're a music company. That's what I want to be. And I want to be number one. And, you know, nobody else seems to be applying for the job right now." The search for inspiration If there is a singular question in the guitar industry, it's no different from what drives Apple. How do you get the product into a teenager's hands? And once it's there, how do you get them to fall in love with it? Fender's trying through lessons and a slew of online tools (Fender Tune, Fender Tone, Fender Riffstation). The Music Experience, a Florida-based company, has recruited PRS, Fender, Gibson and other companies to set up tents at festivals for people to try out guitars. There is also School of Rock, which has almost 200 branches across the country. On a Friday night in Watertown, Mass., practice is just getting started. Joe Pessia runs the board and coaches the band. He's 47, a guitarist who once played in a band with Extreme's Nuno Bettencourt and has worked at School of Rock since 2008. Watching practice, it's easy to understand why. With Pessia presiding, the school's showcase group blasts through three songs released decades before any of them were born. The Cars' "Bye Bye Love" blends quirky, new-wave keyboards and barre chords. Journey's "Stone in Love" is classic '8os arena rock punctuated by Schon's melodic guitar line. Matt Martin, a 17-year-old EFTA00690417 guitarist wearing white sneakers, jeans and a House of Blues T-shirt, takes the lead on this. The band's other Stratocaster is played by Mena Lemos, a 15-year-old sophomore. She takes on Rush's "The Spirit of Radio." As they play, the teenagers dance, laugh and work to get the songs right. Their parents are also happy. Arezou Lemos, Mena's mother, sees a daughter who is confident and has two sets of friends — the kids at School of Rock and her peers at Newton South High School. "There are a lot of not-easy times that they go through as teenagers," she says, "and having music in her life, it's been a savior." Julie Martin says her son Matt was a quiet boy who played in Little League but never connected with sports. She and her husband bought him his first guitar when he was 6. "It was immediate," she says. "He could play right away. It gave him confidence, in the immediate, and I think long term it helps him in every aspect of his life." She remembers her own childhood in working-class Boston. "I know exactly what he could be out doing," Martin says. "That enters my mind. We are so lucky to have found School of Rock. He's there Thursday, Friday and Saturday every week, all year." Rush's prog-metal is not for beginners, with its time shifts and reggae twist. "They've never played this before," Pessia says, turning to whisper in awe. "The first time." So who are these kids? The future? An aberration? It's hard to know. But Matt Martin didn't need to think long about why he wanted to play a Strat as a kid. "Eric Clapton," he says. "He's my number one." To Phillip McKnight, a 42-year-old guitarist and former music store owner in Arizona, the spread of School of Rock isn't surprising. He carved out space for guitar lessons shortly after opening his music store in a strip mall in 2005. The sideline began to grow, and eventually, he founded the McKnight Music Academy. As it grew, from two rooms to eight, from 25 students to 250, McKnight noticed a curious development. Around 2012, the gender mix of his student base shifted dramatically. The eight to 12 girls taking lessons jumped to 27 to 59 to 119, eventually outnumbering the boys. Why? He asked them. Taylor Swift. Nobody would confuse the pop star's chops with Bonnie Rain's. But she does play a guitar. Andy Mooney, the Fender CEO, calls Swift "the most influential guitarist of recent years." "I don't think that young girls looked at Taylor and said, 'I'm really impressed by the way she plays G major arpeggios." Mooney says. "They liked how she looked, and they wanted to emulate her." EFTA00690418 When McKnight launched a video series on YouTube, he did an episode called "Is Taylor Swift the next Eddie Van Halen?" He wasn't talking about technique. He was talking about inspiring younger players. The video series, in the end, grew faster than guitar sales or lessons. Earlier this year, McKnight shut down his store. The videos? He'll keep doing them. They're making money... By Geoff Edgers — The Washington Post — June 22, 2017 Five myths about beer No, it's not a man's drink, and craft beer isn't a recent trend. a Inline image 1 Summer for Americans is a time of backyard barbecues, baseball and beer. Memorial Day weekend is a perfect chance to sit outside with the season's first sixer, and the varieties of beer you can pick up at the local grocer have multiplied. "This is a golden age for beer lovers," as The Washington Post reported in 2016. Yet the sheer number of options could confuse even the most enthusiastic consumer. No wonder myths about beer's past and present abound. Here are five. MYTH NO. 1 American beer is a product of the Midwest. EFTA00690419 Beer calls to mind the great cities of the American heartland, where 19th-century workers slaughtered pork, processed grain and brewed. They created iconic brands with staying power, such as Anheuser- Busch, Miller, Pabst and Schlitz. For several months last year, St. Louis's Anheuser-Busch even renamed Budweiser "America," making the country's most-consumed beer brand synonymous with the nation itself. Budweiser is "an icon of core American values like optimism and celebration," its makers tout. Yet American beer has a much longer and more geographically diverse history. Archaeological evidence indicates that indigenous peoples in North and South America produced fermented beverages from corn, fruits and other plants long before Europeans arrived. The continent's first commercial brewery opened in what's now Manhattan in 1612. Barrels of English ale supplied hydration and nutrition to the Pilgrims as they sailed west in 1620. In the late 1700s, hops grew at George Washington's Mount Vernon. When Gold Rush hopefuls and railroad builders looked west in the 1800s, German immigrants brewed for them in New Orleans, Denver and San Francisco. As the nation grew, beer went with it. But when Prohibition began in 1920, it shuttered American breweries. Only a few big producers, most in the Midwest (plus Colorado's Coors), survived. Their size allowed them to adapt, redirecting factories and refrigerated trucks toward the production of soft drinks, ice cream and even ceramics during years when they couldn't brew. They would come to dominate the market and shape Americans' palates. In these ways, ties between the Midwest and American beer are products of a more recent past. MYTH NO. 2 Beer is a man's drink. In 19th-century America, men brewed in modernizing factories and drank in rowdy saloons, becoming the public face of beer production and consumption. In print and on TV, loth-century ads broadcast beer's masculine image to a wide audience. By 2016, 74 percent of American men drank beer each week, whereas only 26 percent of women did. Nevertheless, history shows that beer has always been a woman's drink, too. In colonial and early republic America, women and enslaved people brewed beer as a domestic task. Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, wrote in her diary on May 18,1786: "A Clear day. we Brewd a barll & II2 Beer." Nineteenth-century women, especially widows, operated boarding houses where they served beer and food to travelers. And, as women entered wage-earning jobs at the turn of the loth century, they, too, came to patronize urban saloons. Soon, however, advertisers' nearly exclusive focus on male drinkers reduced its popularity among women. Petite bottles, low-calorie styles and Miller's declaration that it was the "champagne" of beers sought to bring women back into the fold. Yet their consumption never equaled men's. EFTA00690420 Contemporary beer culture offers a slowly changing story. In 1983, the American Homebrewers Association tapped a woman, Nancy Vineyard, as its Homebrewer of the Year (a feat not repeated until 2013). Since 2008, the Pink Boots Society, a charitable organization with 5o chapters in to countries, has awarded educational scholarships to women in the industry. An increasing number of women are studying brewing and founding breweries. American women's relationship to beer has been equally, if not more, long-lasting than men's ties to the drink. It has just been more likely to occur out of the public eye. MYTH NO. 3 Craft breweries are small breweries. What is craft beer? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "a beer made in a traditional or non- mechanized way by a small brewery." Merriam-Webster says it's "a specialty beer produced in limited quantities." Similarly, the Brewers Association (BA), the not-for-profit trade association that promotes craft beer, designates a craft brewery as "small, independent and traditional." Size seems key. Yet the BA also considers eight of the 15 largest beer companies in America to be "craft." What's going on? According to the BA's definition, a craft brewer produces 6 million or fewer barrels of beer every year. Six million sounds like a lot, especially in contrast to early micro-breweries that typically made a few thousand barrels, at most. Yet despite the success of big craft companies such as Yuengling, Boston Beer and Sierra Nevada, their sales volume counts for a drop, or a few, in the proverbial bucket. According to the BA's math, even the largest craft brewer produces no more than 3 percent of the volume of beer sold to Americans in a year. In 2016, craft beer counted for 12 percent of the total American beer market, by volume. The takeaway is not that some craft breweries are very small and others less small, but that companies on top of the beer market — Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors and Pabst — are extremely, gigantically big. Ask consumers to define craft beer, and they'll name a variety of factors other than size that appeal to them. The brewers often concoct new styles that let drinkers experiment; they run taprooms where customers can relax with their friends and neighbors; they build ties to their local communities. Some craft breweries are active in philanthropy, others emphasize environmental sustainability, still others employ innovative management practices such as employee stock ownership plans, and many pursue collegial, collaborative ties with other breweries. Market share, ultimately, is the wrong way to define a beer. MYTH NO. 4 Craft beer is a recent invention. EFTA00690421 The explosive pace of brewery openings and eclectic new offerings could convince anyone that craft beer is a 21st-century innovation. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of American breweries, most of them craft, leapt from 1,460 to 5,301, exceeding the pre-Prohibition total. As of early 2017, two new American breweries were opening each day. Craft beer's surge fits with consumers' enthusiasm for artisan foods and the inclination to "revitalize" formerly industrial neighborhoods across the nation. Yet American craft beer is much older than that nano-brewery down the block. Loose collectives of home brewers began to tinker in West Coast basements in the 1960s and early 1970s, when home brewing was still illegal. Bored by light lagers, they found inspiration in English, Belgian and German styles during military or educational travels abroad. Motivation came, too, from the California wine industry, Fritz Maytag's reborn Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco (1965) and Jack McAuliffe's New Albion Brewing Company in Sonoma County, Calif. (1976). Brewing-science classes at the University of California at Davis trained people who would transition from home brewing to professional, starting a craft beer revolution. Early craft brewers elbowed their way into a market dominated by big beer. They changed consumers' palates by introducing porters, stouts and hoppy styles, like Sierra Nevada's iconic pale ale. Initial generations' success paved the way for today's brewers, who find eager investors and consumers as they experiment with wild yeasts, barrel aging and more. MYTH NO. 5 Wine is for aging. Beer is for drinking fresh. Cool cellars evoke images of dusty wine bottles, their contents mellowing and growing in value the longer they sit. Beer, on the other hand, should be consumed fresh, right? There's even an iPhone app that calculates a beer's age, using codes printed on the bottle or can, lest the drinker be fooled by something that has been sitting on the shelf too long. For many beers, fresh is better. Certain styles, such as pilsners and most saisons, should be enjoyed close to the date of production. Others, especially hop-forward beers like IPAs, require uninterrupted refrigeration and timely consumption to preserve the volatile flavors of hops. Nevertheless, certain beers improve in character if aged and cellared. American brewers have long experimented with holding beers in wine and liquor barrels, aging them before they reach the consumer. High-alcohol- by-volume styles, such as barley wines, benefit especially from collaring at home. Aging a beer softens the high-alcohol edge and allows a complex set of characteristics and flavors (toffee, straw, wood, wine) to emerge. So how should a consumer cellar beer? First, choose the right styles. If you begin with a six-pack, drink one bottle fresh to understand its initial flavor profile. Keep the beer in a cool, dark space. Store it standing up or on its side; conflicting opinions abound. Sample aging beers regularly, perhaps once EFTA00690422 a year, to catch a brew that threatens to age past its peak. When it's time to enjoy it, serve it in the correct glassware and at the proper temperature. Cheers. Theresa MeCulla — Washington Post — May 26, 2017 THIS WEEK's QUOTE lit Inline image 1 People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. James Baldwin Nobody Knows My Name THIS IS BRILLIANT EFTA00690423 Dance Troup tight Balance' Inline image 1 Web Link: https://www.facebook.com/agtauditions/videos/10155076768969760/ and httprilvoutu.be/3oUNIkoKEcyc Ukraine dancers snag the coveted Golden Buzzer on America's Got Talent.... thanks to Tyra Banks THINK ABOUT THIS EFTA00690424 lit Inline image 1 We Live in a World Where Trained Cops Can Panic; Act On Impulse But Untrained Civilians Must Remain Calm With A Gun In Their Face.... BEST VIDEO OF THE WEEK 93 year-old grandpa wins open-mic night with his `Love Hurts' story... EFTA00690425 Mine image 1 Truly a wonderful storyteller Web Link: https://wwwfacebook.corniviralthreadivideos/764407773731908/ Enjoy.... THIS WEEK's MUSIC Carole King Inline image 1 EFTA00690426 This week you are invited to enjoy the music of the great Carole King. Since writing her first number i hit "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" at the tender age of 17, Carole King has arguably become the most celebrated and iconic singer/songwriter of all time. Along the way, Carole wrote "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" for the Shirelles with then-husband Gerry Coffin. The dozens of chart hits Coffin & King wrote during this period have become part of music legend, including "Take Good Care Of My Baby"(Bobby Vee, 1961), "The Loco-Motion" (Little Eva, 1962), "Up On The Roof (The Drifters, 1962), "Chains" (The Cookies, 1962; The Beatles, 1963), "One Fine Day" (The Chiffons, 1963), "Hey Girl" (Freddie Scott, 1963), "I'm Into Something Good" (Herman's Hermits, 1964), "Just Once In My Life" (with Phil Spector for The Righteous Brothers, 1965), and "Don't Bring Me Down"(The Animals, 1966). In 1960 Carole made her solo debut with a song called "Baby Sittin'" and, two years later, her demo of "It Might As Well Rain Until September" made the Top 25 in the United States, climbing all the way to No. 3 on the British chart. In 1967 Goffin and King's "Natural Woman" was immortalized by Aretha Franklin. Carole's 1971 solo album, Tapestry, took her to the pinnacle. While she was recording Tapestry, James Taylor recorded King's "You've Got A Friend," taking the song all the way to No. 1. In a first for a female writer/artist, Tapestry spawned four GRAMMY Awards — Record, Song and Album Of The Year as well as Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female honors for Carole. With more than 25 million units sold worldwide, Tapestry remained the best-selling album by a female artist for a quarter century, and Carole went on to amass three other platinum and eight gold albums. Tapestry was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in 1998. In 1987 Carole was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and, a year later, Goffin and King were awarded the National Academy of Songwriters' Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1990 the duo was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2002 Carole was honored with the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Two years later, Goffin and King received the Trustees Award from The Recording Academy. The past five years have been among the busiest and most successful of Carole's career. S he's been the recipient of a number of esteemed awards and honors, and remained active in the public's eye with musical and literary work. Carole's many late-career achievements include a Both anniversary Troubadour reunion run with James Taylor that became the RIAA gold- certified Live At The Troubadour, inspiring the pair's 60- concert Troubadour Reunion world tour in 2010. The Troubadour shows also inspired the Morgan Neville-directed feature-length documentary Troubadours: Carole King/James Taylor & The Rise Of The Singer-Songwriter, and premiered on PBS' American Masters in 2011 shortly after being released on DVD. In 2012 Carole received the BMI Icon Award and an Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of Music. The following year brought her The Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, and she became the first woman to be awarded The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, presented by President Barack Obama at an all-star White House gala. Carole published her memoir, A Natural Woman, in 2012, which debuted on The New York limes best-seller list at no. 6 and prompted Vanity Fair to say, "America is having a Carole King moment." EFTA00690427 On January 12, 2014, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opened on Broadway. Audiences were amazed by her deep musical catalog, and captivated by her life story. The show became the hit of the season and won a GRAMMY for Best Musical Theater Album and two Tony awards. In 2015 it opened on London's West End, garnering 2 Olivier Awards. More productions are planned around the world. In the same month, Carole was honored as MusiCares Person Of The Year and a special gala was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in which several of today's most popular artists, including Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Kacey Musgraves, performed many of her classics. To end the night, Carole herself came out to perform "Home Again", Vazzman", and "Sweet Seasons"/"Hey Girl" with James Taylor; after all these years, she proved that she could still captivate an entire audience. Carole received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015. The tribute performance included James Taylor, and a show-stopping performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman" by the incomparable Aretha Franklin that brought President Barack Obama to tears. King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry, which held the record for most weeks at No. 1 by a female artist for more than 20 years. Her most recent non-compilation album was Live at the Troubadour in 2010, a collaboration with James Taylor that reached number 4 on the charts in its first week and has sold over 600,000 copies. Her records sales were estimated at more than 75 million copies worldwide. To date, more than 400 of her compositions have been recorded by more than 1,000 artists, resulting in too hit singles making Carole King is one of the greatest singer- songwriters ever placing her on the front row in the Pantheon in America popular music. With this you are again invited to enjoy the wonderful musk of Ms. Carole King.... Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King Carole King — Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow -- https://youtu.be/KLLYOLKvU9il — It's Too Late -- https://voutu.be/Msmnb676Rx1 - (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman -- https://youtu.be/MOyvYnkdEcc — Up on the Roof -- https://youtu.be/fHzMeEf3rMo - Been to Canaan -- https://youtu.be/dBuXb13oRMY - I Feel The Earth Move -- https://youtu.be/hoHuxa4h48 - Beautiful -- https://youtu.be/GEoTatICLHxo - Jazzman -- https://youtu.be/OuNSrgLV648 - One Fine Day -- https://youtu.be/LIFITKOQKQA - One To One -- https://youtu.begfU5M7apw - Chains -- https://youtu.be/pfotGvZN aOk - Loving You Forever -- https://youtu.be/zyoTZIJL -Q - Where You Lead, I Will Follow -- https://youtu.bek jiiIILQ - Locomo lion -- https://youtu.baGRVWCzY EFTA00690428 Carole King — Smackwater Jack -- https://youtu.be/Ze8MToURBjc Carole King — Pleasant Valley Sunday -- https://youtu.be/svPwhNNym A Carole King — Nobody Wants to Be Lonely -- https://youtu be 4a-ICSUzqmaY Carole King — Hard Rock Café -- https://youtu.be/pOnY31 wPw Carole King - Love's Been a Little Bit Hard on Me -- https://youtu.be/KaXzznxDvAg Carole King, Celine Dion, Shanaia Twain and Gloria Estefan - You've Got A Friend https://youtu.be/rJPgzEizBM8 Carole King & James Taylor — So Far Away -- https://youtu.be/Szx6JsgukS8 Carole King & James Taylor - Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow -- https://youtu.be/pB8Mu rnbLc Carole King — Beautiftd https://youtu.he/i6FitKef8Y8 Carole King performs with the Cast of Beautiful — https://youtu.be/NjiMvmD6XHq BONUS Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman -- https://youtu.be/XHsnZT7ZzyQ James Taylor — Up On the Roof -- https://youtu.be/vm7XEUH6JXo I hope that you have enjoyed this Weekend's Readings and wish you and yours a great week... Sincerely, Greg Brown Gregory Brown Chairman & CEO GlobalCast Panne'. LLC EFTA00690429 EFTA00690430