Category Archives: New Utopia

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As former President Donald Trump warned about an economy thats on the verge of not just a recession, but a full-blown depression, the country should prepare for a rapid slowdown in employment, say experts.

Falling labor force participation, along with inflation, could provide the double whammy that creates an economic crisis this fall, they say.

Historic inflation, on top of the lingering effects of COVID-19 policies, has contributed to a sense of pessimism among many in America.

Democrats have relied on this self-inflicted crisis to pass unprecedented, socialist policies, the critics said.

Those policies, some critics told The Epoch Times, have served to set up the country for further crisis.

One critic worries that such a crisis will provide progressives with their latest excuse to force the country to the far-left before the November election in an attempt to buoy their electoral hopes.

Much of what they are doing is trying to mobilize their radical base and keep it mobilized for the November election, conservative business consultant and political commentator Craig Huey told The Epoch Times about Democratic economic policies.

In order to keep their voters mobilized, Democrats have come to rely on a crisis atmosphere, said Huey.

So an economic crisis, with people losing their jobs, while contrary to normal political wisdom for a party in the White House, is what is driving Democrat strategy under President Joe Biden, said Huey.

Its an ideological driven-bureaucracy that needs to drive ideological voters to the polls, Huey said about the strategy.

Similarly, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said that the Democrats are fully aware of the harm that Biden and the Democrats are doing to the economy by inflationary spending that discourages working.

For too long, the Left has pushed irresponsible, job-killing socialist policies, paired with reckless spending and tax hikes, causing higher inflation and a staggering $30 trillion in debt, said Scott in a statement to The Epoch Times.

Scott said that one consequence of Bidens policies is a labor force participation rate that is shockingly low already.

The rate at which able-bodied Americans have remained in the labor force has sagged from a post-COVID-19 high of 62.4 percent in March to 62.2 percent in July.

The decline, some argue, has diminished the gloss from the 20 percent in labor force gains the economy has made since Biden was inaugurated and the country generally gave up on COVID-19 lockdowns.

And while the employment report last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) added 372,000 jobs, the BLS household survey showed that, in fact, 315,000 fewer people had jobs in July versus June, as 353,000 people permanently left the labor force.

Jobs came in red hot for July with another 535,000 jobs added, but another 63,000 people left the labor force. Since March of this year, there are 168,000 fewer Americans with jobs according to the BLS household survey, despite the fact that month after month the BLS reports big job gains.

Its a trend that has coincided with accelerating inflation.

On Aug. 1, industry data reported by Reuters from the private employment specialist Homebase said that hours for workers declined by 12 percent in July for small business workers tracked by their company.

Earlier this week there were further signs of a cooling job market.

The BLS reported on Aug. 2 that the number of job openings decreased by about 600,000 jobs month-over-month to 10.7 million openings. Thats down from a record high of 11.9 million job openings set in March.

Fox News Charles Payne called it the biggest non-Covid19 related swoon in job openings on record, while Forbes detailed plans by major corporations to slash more jobs.

Professor Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, told The Epoch Times that its an open question about how badly the Federal Reserve wants inflation to get to its target rate of 2 percent.

He likens todays economy to the 1980s under Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, who brought inflation down from 14 percent to 3.2 percent by bringing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent.

I dont know that they are willing to keep interests so high to get inflation to 2 percent, said Morici.

Morici said that it might take an unemployment rate of 9 percent to get inflation much below 4 percent.

This is a very different economy than the pre-COVID-19 economy, said Morici.

The economy, under the Democrats vision, is willing to pay extra costs to transition to a green economy by not using oil and gas and generally paying more for labor.

It means a lot of capital is badly used, added Morici.

But Morici feels that Democrats dont want to precipitate a crisis for one simple reason: He thinks that establishment figures, including members of the Federal Reserves Open Market Committee, will do what they can to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

Thats the last thing that they want to happen, Morici concluded.

The implication is that the Federal Reserve will try not to allow unemployment to go up too much, less it improve Trumps chances to win the presidency, said Morici.

The House progressive caucus has said that disadvantaged, lower-paid, and Black and Latino workers are disproportionately harmed, by rising interest rates, pleading with central bankers to keep interest rate hikes to a minimum saying the burden of high costs is not borne equally.

With wage growth declining in recent months, our countrys lowest-paid, most vulnerable workers have endured too much already to be sacrificed in pursuit of severe rate hikes that have far too often triggered recessions, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the progressive caucus.

The Federal Reserve, however, has responded to talk from economists, the stock markets, and politicians that the central bankers might not be that serious about the 2 percent inflation target by publicly reiterating that they will continue to raise interest rates until inflation moderates.

While the Federal Reserve has talked about a soft landing where they raise interest rates without a recession as they try to combat inflation, Bill Dudley, the former president of the New York Federal Reserve acknowledged recently that at this point inflation is so high that they have to push up the unemployment rate to bring inflation down.

And the Federal Reserve has made clear this week that theyll keep at higher interest rates until they get inflation back to 2 percent, even while politicians and the stock market fret about employment.

Our intentions are really about making sure that people recognize that we are not completed with our fight against high inflation because these prints of 9.1 percent [inflation] are harming American families, harming businesses trying to figure out how to do their business and expand and we are committed to getting that back down to something closer to 2% which is our price stability target, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told reporters on a conference call on Aug. 3.

The result is increasing classical tension between Federal Reserve policy that favors higher interest rates in an inflationary environmentand the consequent unemployment that will be created by higher interest ratesand the politicians who want to keep inflationary spending going.

The tension is likely to come to a head at some point.

Its time for Republicans and Democrats in Washington to wake up and stop endorsing reckless, inflation-fueling spending that is crushing American families, Scott told The Epoch Times.

Scott asserted that despite the inflationary pressure that Bidens policies have created, he has done nothing to reverse course and instead has expanded those policies in response.

Democrats only answer is another wasteful, tax hiking proposal that will kill more jobs and raise costs on families, especially our seniors, who are already struggling, said Scott.

And until the classic tension between inflationary spending and the unemployment it will create is resolved, the crisis atmosphere will, at the very least, continue, if not almost certainly expand, critics said.

In part, the crisis could continue because Democrats see rising prices and unemployment as the way by which they can continue expand government control over Americans if not over elections, Huey noted.

But the Biden administration and the left appear to be perfectly fine with inflicting this pain on Americans, experts at conservative think thank The Heritage Foundation argued in a recent commentary, saying that the Democrats Inflation Reduction Act and other Democrat policies do the opposite of what the policies titles imply.

In fact, rising energy prices are not unintended consequences of their policies, but rather the envisioned outcomes, the commentary continued.

The same could be true of unemployment if it serves the best interest of the far-left, warned Huey.

Obviously they know that when there is a crisis they can gain power and control, they can expand the scope of government over the lives of individuals, Huey said of Democrats.

They are so ideologically committed to the creation of a socialist utopia that the reality of economics means nothing to them in their quest to retain and expand power, Huey added.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.

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John Ransom is a freelance reporter covering U.S. news for The Epoch Times with offices in Washington, D.C., and Asia.

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Left Will Exploit Economic Crisis to Further Progressive Agenda, Observer Says - The Epoch Times

In 1860, a ship named the Clotilda surreptitiously slipped into the Mobile River Delta in Alabama carrying an illicit cargo of 110 enslaved Africans. While slavery was not illegal in the United States at the time, importing slaves into the country had been outlawed in 1808. To destroy evidence of the crime, the owners of the ship quickly had it burned and then distributed the Africans among themselves to work their plantations. Twelve years later, long after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, 32 of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Clotilda returned to the western banks of the Mobile River. Close to where they first set foot on this nations soil, they founded the community of Africatown, a place where they could maintain their culture and language in an otherwise foreign and hostile land. It was among the first towns established by African Americans.

Today, Africatown (also known as Africatown USA or Plateau) has been incorporated into the Mobile metropolitan area. Aside from a mural of the Clotilda on a retaining wall and a plaque at a local cemetery, there is little that signals the neighborhoods connection to this history. As with so many African American communities, Africatown has become blighted through industrial pollution and disinvestment. Abandoned and dilapidated houses and businesses define much of the built environment. A paper mill located there in the 1920s but shuttered in the early 2000s, and in the 1980s much of the land that the town occupied was seized for the construction of the Cochrane Bridge. From a peak of 21,000 residents in the early 20th century, when the paper mill was operating, the population has dwindled to approximately 2,000, about 100 of whom are thought to be direct descendants of Clotilda passengers. Despite decades of organizing and advocacy to improve these conditions, there has been little cause for hope. Now, however, it seems that the very slave ship that started it all might be the key to a brighter future for Africatown.

In 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that the remains of the Clotilda had been found in the Mobile River Delta. The discovery sent a ripple of excitement through Africatown. Residents quickly mobilized to establish the importance of their role in the evolving narrative surrounding the illegal slave ship. The culmination of this has been the launch of The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, which aims to imbue the area with programs and architecture that demonstrate its rich, complex history.

The idea competition is one of the many ways the residents of Africatown are harnessing the power of their cultural legacy to uplift the blighted community. M.O.V.E. (Making Opportunities Viable for Everyone) Mobile~Gulf Coast Community Development Corporation commissioned designer, writer, and activist Renee Kemp-Rotan to help achieve its goal of making sure that Africatown interprets and controls its own narrative, with the huge economic opportunity it now represents because of the Clotilda. What began as a design for a museum honoring the history of one of the few African-owned settlements in America evolved into a complete creative placemaking of the Africatown/Prichard/Mobile area, steeped in the unique history that shaped it. After extensive community engagement, four sites were selected to host a total of 16 venues, each with distinct programs that honor and interpret the history of Africatown while designing for a hopeful and prosperous future for the community.

Each site selected for the competition is part of a greater whole, dubbed the Africatown Cultural Mile. The goal of the cultural mile is to provide the area with economic stimulation and a cultural heritage. We are asking designers to redefine Africatown so that it could be known and admired as a world-class cultural heritage and creative destination system, with the story of a resilient Black people at its heart, said Vickii Howell, president and CEO of M.O.V.E.

According to The Architectural League of New Yorks American Roundtable report on Africatown (also led by Kemp-Rotan and Howell), when Mobile annexed the community in the 1960s there were hopes that the city would take responsibility for its new neighborhood and halt the industrial sprawl and pollution that have plagued the area and cause high levels of cancer and autoimmune disease. Instead, the City of Mobile rezoned much of the neighborhood, shrinking its residential footprint, and opened aboveground waste storage facilities in the vicinity. The community fought back, culminating in a lawsuit against International Paper and a redrafting of the zoning code.

The design competition encompasses this more-recent history as much as it does the origins of Africatown. The competition sites stitch together the long, intricate history of the area, including the Josephine Allen public housing complex (demolished by the City of Mobile in 2019), parts of the industrial waterfront, and the cemetery where the original African founders were laid to rest. You can connect to all of this history by land and water, said Kemp-Rotan. Thats what the competition is really aboutcultural tourism as an economic development engine with really cool architecture.

The winning proposals will be picked by a jury of 16 designers, historians, and local residents. The results will be compiled in a book and given to the community to provide design inspiration and guide the redevelopment of Africatown into a thriving community. Kemp-Rotan adamantly advocates for a community-scale Afrocentric utopia that embraces the entirety of African architecture and celebrates its role in the legacy of Black spaces. Most of the stuff written about Africatown has been written about the boat and the past and the history, she said. Nobodys really talking about what the future of this place is going to become. Those wishing to participate must register by September 19. Designs must be submitted by January 19, 2023, and the winning proposals will be announced on March 19 of that year. The winning teams will be invited to Mobile for the first annual International Conference on African Monument Design and Heritage Tourism on Juneteenth (June 19) 2023.

Alaina Griffin is a regular contributor to AN.

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A design idea competition seeks to turn the troubled history of Africatown through heritage tourism - The Architect's Newspaper

OPINION: The unattractive do not earn as much as those blessed with pleasant features. I reflect on this as I look at the ageing, wrinkled and aesthetically challenged face that stares blankly back at me in the mirror while giving my yellowing teeth a perfunctory scrub.

It is a face that only a puppy could love; and then merely because I secretly feed her treats.

Life isnt fair but it is no longer solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. When the challenge for a society moves from starvation to combating obesity we are moving up the hierarchy of needs.

READ MORE:* The unreal prospect of unteaching racism* Mori, Pacific in public sector 'significantly' less likely to earn six figures* Black Lives Matter protests are about more than statues for New Zealand

To live in New Zealand today is to live in one of the wealthiest countries in all of human history; where even a plain fellow like myself can earn a pleasant living despite my self-evident physical deficiencies.

Should the divergence in my opportunities relative to the comelier in appearance be something that the state should focus its attention?

Perhaps not; but the wandering eye of those whose salaries depend on finding and solving the great social problems of our age have identified something that they believe warrants investigation. Those with a Pacific heritage earn less than their Pakeha co-workers and neighbours.

Why? The Human Rights Commission, as fine as any government agency you will find, took it upon itself to study this very issue. They paid for a report. It was as awful as youd expect it to be.

To give the report its due, there was an analysis that found Pacific workers didnt obtain the same degree of education as Pakeha and worked in lower-paid industries. Once this was controlled for, only around a third of the pay discrepancy could be explained.

However, a degree in education was considered the equivalent to a degree in dentistry and the fact that someone who pursues a career as a teacher earns less than a dentist is considered to be unexplained.

Four reasons were provided; unobserved differences, ethnic preferences in the non-pecuniary elements of jobs, discrimination and unconscious bias. It is a consistent theme of such research that the reason for some perceived negative outcome is racism, greed or Roger Douglas.

This research provides further evidence about what weve long suspected the bulk of the Pacific Pay Gap cant be explained and is at least partly due to invisible barriers like racism, unconscious bias and workplace discriminatory practices declares Saunoamaalii Karanina Sumeo, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF

Alice Olynsma, a healthcare assistant at Ballarat Rest Home, says care and support workers deserve fair pay. (First published May 23, 2022)

It is astounding, but unsurprising, that researchers assume that those who employ staff are racist when there is no evidence from which to form this view. The gaps in their data are, literally, unexplained. Racism is an unambiguous moral wrong. It is a crime. To ascribe this sin to an entire class of New Zealanders because your analysis is deficient is, if I am being polite, disappointing.

It is also easy to disprove. You can be solvent, or you can be racist, but in business it is very difficult to be both. If the assumption behind these sorts of reports is valid; that Pacific people are being paid less than Pakeha while producing the same level of output, then I could make more profit by hiring Pacifica candidates and paying them less than I pay non-Pacific workers.

My racism would need to be intense to leave that profit on the table and if I was such a terrible person, the business owner down the road would out-compete me and I would be forced to rely on my writing to pay the bills.

A grim prospect for all concerned.

Society is complex. People make different decisions and pursue differing lifestyles. The fact that I am spending time writing this column rather than engaging in more productive and better paid work is a decision that will lead me receiving a lower income.

If your priority is community and family rather than wealth accumulation your lifes achievements will differ. Some prefer to die with seven children rather than seven houses and that isnt a bad thing and nor is it a problem that needs addressing.

The analysis of the pay gap between different population groups isnt something that is being done for academic curiosity. The Human Rights Commission is conducting the Pacific Pay Gap Inquiry to better understand why the Pacific Pay Gap exists and how it can be closed.

One of the ideas floated is mandated pay transparency; forcing firms to publish salaries by gender and race. The law of unintended consequences will ensure this will reduce employment opportunities for low qualified women and minorities and increase them for inadequate white men.

More intervention will be introduced to correct for these failures in a never-ending cycle of regression.

Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century philosopher, popularised the idea that the legitimacy of the sovereign rests on the willingness of individuals to surrender some of their freedoms in order to avoid a war of all against all; a collective social contract.

It is an elegant solution to the question of legitimacy of the states monopoly on the use of force; but where is the philosophical foundation that permits the sovereign to use that power to manufacture a utopia?

We have accepted as given that the Crown has not only the right but an obligation to embark on social engineering programmes to produce a society that confirms to the preferences of the cultural elite even if it defies the wishes and customs of the population.

Cultural change on the level envisioned cannot be achieved without Draconian intervention into the minutia of our economy and society and an unwavering certainty by those in power that the escalating costs are a necessary price to achieve their Arcadia.

Their ignorance is only matched by their determination and the lack of any willingness to confront these cultural commissars means their ambitions will be translated into policy with the inevitable, and now unavoidable, perverse outcomes.

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Are we too quick to pull the racism card? - Stuff

When the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors on July 15, the city lost one of its oldest and most important cultural institutions. The 148-year-old art school on the northeast slope of Russian Hill had been struggling for years, plagued by declining enrollment and financial woes. Yet for decades, the school known as the California School of Fine Arts until 1961 was a major force, not just on the Bay Area art scene, but on the national one. The artists and movements associated with the institution include Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Manuel Neri, the Bay Area Figurative School, the funk movement, and too many others to list.

But the most crucial period in the schools long history, when it transformed itself from a moribund finishing school for debutantes into a white-hot center of artistic experimentation and a force to be reckoned with in modern art, took place in just five years, from 1946 to 1950. During that time, the school played a significant role in the development of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. And remarkably, it was a bunch of World War II veterans who made that development possible.

In 1945, few expected the California School of Fine Arts to even survive, let alone become a center of cutting-edge art. Founded in 1874, the CSFA was a typical fine-arts college of its era, attracting large numbers of female students who wanted to acquire accomplishments to make themselves more marriageable. In the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Candida Smith writes in Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California, it had the reputation of having the most conservative curriculum in the state, with a faculty that steadfastly clung to the beaux-arts academic tradition.

The Great Depression and World War II hit the school hard, and by the 1940s it was on life support. Enrollment plunged, and in 1942 the schools director quit because there was no money to pay his salary. Most of the faculty soon followed. In 1944, the board of trustees considered closing the dying school and selling off the real estate.

At that moment, salvation appeared in the form of 32-year-old Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. MacAgy offered to run the school, on the condition that he be allowed to revise the curriculum and hire faculty as he saw fit. The board agreed, and MacAgy was appointed director on July 1, 1945. It was a momentous hiring.

MacAgy and his then-wife, Jermanyne, who was acting director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, quickly became the most important champions of contemporary art in the Bay Area. Jermanyne MacAgy staged the first Jackson Pollock exhibition in San Francisco in 1942, following that with one-artist shows by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.

The last question: After benches were installed in Golden Gate Park around 1880, what supposed crisis erupted?

Answer: An epidemic of hugging.

This week's question: What San Francisco intersection was known in the late 19th century as "Cape Horn," and why?

For his part, Douglas MacAgy set about remaking the staid CSFA into a center of artistic experimentation. To make up the core of the new painting faculty, he hired four painters he had met as curator Edward Corbett, David Park, Hassel Smith and Clay Spohn. The next year, he hired Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still. In 1948, he added Richard Diebenkorn. Ansel Adams was brought in to head the photography department, with Minor White as principal instructor. MacAgy engaged Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, Ad Reinhardt, Man Ray and Salvador Dali to teach, and even tried to convince Marcel Duchamp to come out of retirement and join the faculty.

MacAgy swept out the cobwebs at the venerable school. He got rid of its old pedagogy, which stipulated that students had to take courses in a prescribed order. He ordered that the studios be kept open 24 hours a day, so that students could work whenever they wanted. He brought in jazz musicians and poetry readings. And symbolically, he hung a curtain over the Rivera mural in the schools exhibition hall.

MacAgy was not only a passionate believer in artistic modernism, he was also sure that his avant-garde vision would attract students. As Smith writes, MacAgy was convinced that only by making the school the center for the most advanced thinking in the visual arts would it be able to survive.

This remarkably idealistic plan Jackson Pollock as a business model? would probably have crashed and burned, had it not been for perhaps the most unusual crop of new students in the history of liberal arts education in the United States: a flood of military veterans.

What led more than two million U.S. veterans between 1945 and 1956 to put down their M-1s and start studying Abstract Expressionism, or Samuel Beckett, or Karl Marx, was an epochal piece of legislation: the GI Bill of Rights. Passed by Congress in 1944, the GI Bill offered generous educational and other benefits to returning World War II veterans. Congress did not stipulate what type of education veterans would receive; in fact, it voted down a plan that would have restricted benefits to courses of study focused on employable skills. Neither politicians nor educators expected that the veterans would prefer a liberal arts education over professional training and certainly not that they would pour into art schools.

But in that era, when the military was a true cross-section of America, they did. As Smith notes, a 1946 UCLA survey found that veterans were more likely to take humanities courses than non-veterans. Veterans were driven far less by practical concerns than non-veterans: 44% of veterans in a 1946 survey of 25 institutions of higher learning said their principal aim in returning to school was self-improvement, compared to only 12% of non-veterans. The veterans also got better grades than the non-veterans.

Thanks to the GI Bill, veterans swelled the ranks of liberal arts colleges and proportionally, still more of them enrolled in art schools. As Smith points out, between 1946 and 1952, the percentage of veterans who were full-time students at the five most important art schools in California the CSFA, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and three in Los Angeles was never less than 70%. At CSFA, veterans in 1947 and 1948 made up 74% of full-time students; in 1949, a staggering 87%.

The first veterans began enrolling in fall 1945; by the following spring term, enrollment had grown to 1,017 full- and part-time students, 350% greater than in 1944, and far greater than the schools previous high in 1929. Registration and school income increased every year through 1949.

It was a unique cohort. Smith calls it a special group of students, those veterans who, for absolutely no practical reason, turned to art when they were given the opportunity to achieve their educational dreams. When they entered the CSFA, they threw themselves into the world of art. They devoured the intense, demanding, at times quasi-religious courses offered by Still, Smith and others. And they saved the school.

In the years to come, the CSFA evolved. Still and other faculty members departed. MacAgy resigned in 1950. Abstract Expressionism was followed by the Bay Area figurative movement, which was followed by funk, which was followed by pop, and on and on, in a pattern of change as old as art itself.

The long run of the San Francisco Art Institute, formerly the California School of Fine Arts, came to an end this year. But while mourning that loss, its worth remembering the five unique years when the schools modern era began driven by brilliant artists and administrators of vision, and by a bunch of veterans who wanted to expand their lives.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. His most recent book is Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.

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How veterans and avant-garde art saved the California School of Fine Arts - San Francisco Chronicle

Taking the mic at the Local Progress national meet-up at the Colorado Convention Center on August 5, Denver City Councilmember Robin Kniechhighlighted some regressive moments in Colorado's recent history with the progressive politicians, advocates and government workers who'd gathered there.

"In 1992, Colorado was dubbed the 'Hate State' because our voters passed a measure prohibiting anti-discrimination ordinances for gay and lesbian individuals. Now, it was overturned by the Supreme Court, but our divided state government also passed laws targeting immigrants, excluding them from government. And we have also had we still have a quasi-right-to-work state that's anti-labor," Kniech recalled.

But then she began to talk about more contemporary progressive victories in Denver and the state: earmarking significant city dollars for affordable housing, enacting a minimum wage in Denver and across Colorado, and giving undocumented immigrants the right to access unemployment benefits.

After two years of Zoom meetings, the return of the Local Progress convention to an in-person format was an opportunity for progressives such as Kniech to share what they've accomplished with people who'd flown in from across the country, including Teresa Mosqueda with the Seattle City Council, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union.

Local Progress, which was founded in 2012, describes itself as a "movement of local elected officials advancing a racial and economic justice agenda through all levels of local government." The organization has a network of over 1,300 local elected officials in 48 states; over 200 people showed up for the three-day convention in Denver, including 24 from Colorado.

The August 5 session focusing on "abusive state preemption" came on the second day of the gathering, and was the only one open to the press.

During Colorado's "Hate State" days, local municipalities were preempted by the state from establishing anti-discrimination ordinances related to LGBTQ individuals. But while that preemption went away when the amendment was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, local officials have had to battle against many other measures over the past few decades.

"We were preempted from local minimum wages, inclusionary housing, lots of other things," said Kniech, who'd lobbied for the convention to come to Denver during her last year as an at-large council rep.

In 1999, Colorado passed a minimum wage preemption law that prevented municipalities from enacting their own minimum wage levels. In 2019, however, the Colorado Legislature repealed that law. Led by Kniech, Denver City Council soon approved a new minimum wage, which hit $15.87 per hour in 2022. Starting next year, the city's minimum wage will increase in line with the Consumer Price Index.

Joe Neguse, the Democratic representing Colorado's 2nd Congressional District, was at the event, and praised Kniech for leading Denver's efforts to increase the minimum wage.

"That does not happen. It does not happen without Robin Kniech," Neguse said.

Lizeth Chacon, the founder of the Colorado People's Alliance who recently transitioned to a job as co-executive director of the Workers Defense Project in Texas, discussed the 2016 campaign to raise the minimum wage statewide through a ballot initiative. That effort ultimately resulted in the minimum wage hitting $12 in Colorado at the start of 2020.

"We were really clear that $12 an hour was not enough. We also knew that $15 was not going to do in a state like Colorado," Chacon said. "We made a commitment that we actually needed to continue the fight."

That led to a "big preemption fight" in the Colorado Legislature that lasted three years, until lawmakers passed the preemption repeal bill in 2019. "Local elected officials really shifted the narrative of this campaign," Chacon said, noting that they were able to say what their cities and counties needed.

Many of the elected officials at the conference work in blue cities in red states, where preemption fights are heating up. The issue of abortion, for example, will continue to be a major battle for some states and municipalities.

Throughout the years, state preemption has been used to prevent progressive achievements, according to Courtnee Melton-Fant, an assistant professor in the Division of Health Systems Management and Policy at the University of Memphis. "Its being used to maintain the tool thats already there," Melton-Fant said of state preemption being employed to maintain homophobia and racism.

Jamie Torres, who just became president of Denver City Council, told Local Progress members of her sponsorship of a land acknowledgment that's now read at council meetings.

"It would be a disservice, it would be offensive, for these words to be left to symbolism. They have to spur action, or we should not say them. After adopting this acknowledgment, we were able to convert Denver's annual bison public auction to an annual bison donation program, exclusively to tribes re-establishing their bison herds throughout the country," Torres added, noting that she's witnessed two transfers of nearly fifty bison through the program.

But while progressives have enjoyed successes in Denver, Torres and Kniech acknowledged that the city still has issues.

"Denver is not utopia. Police use of force, housing-price increases and displacement, homelessness these challenges are as bad as theyve ever been," Kniech said. "We have a lot of work to do. And we have a lot to learn from all of you."

As the session wrapped, Smalls, the keynote speaker for the Local Progress convention, offered one major takeaway.

"We all have to be Davids versus Goliaths," said the man who stood up to Amazon.

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Local Progress Convention Brings Progressive Politicians Together in Denver | Westword - Westword

We're all familiar with hard-boiled Christian clergy who rail against the sins of other people and with culture-wars lobbyists who push restrictive laws against what they see as society's larger evils.

What often strikes their critics is the disconnection between the gospel they claim they're defending and the human foibles so visible in their own lives.

Of course, outspoken Christians aren't the only people to preach one thing and do another. That's a problem endemic to the human race. It's just more noticeable when it comes from self-proclaimed spokespeople for God.

One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr, addressed this problem recently in a series of devotions taken from his earlier writings.

In these devotions, Rohr suggests a radical path for the religious: learn to live your beliefs so fully you don't have to talk about them -- and then let others infer from your example what they will, without direct input from you. I offer up his observations as food for thought.

The core principle of Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation is taken from the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi (11821226): "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better."

In one devotion, "The Joy of Not Counting," Rohr hearkens back to Francis, who chose a remarkable approach to improving himself and maybe in the process quietly nudging the larger culture toward its own betterment as well. See tinyurl.com/3z8b7ra3

Francis arrived on the scene "in the pivotal period when Western civilization began to move into rationality, functionality, consumerism, and perpetual war," Rohr writes.

He was the product of that same complicated culture, but as his faith developed, he began to rethink his assumptions.

"Rather than fighting the systems directly and risk becoming their mirror image, Francis just did things differently," Rohr says. "He moved from the common economy of merit to the wondrous economy of grace, where God does not do any counting, but only gives unreservedly."

As the West entered a long, still ongoing cycle of economic production and consumption that would, by our time, threaten the whole planet, Francis chose to love nature and go about barefoot.

"Francis didn't bother questioning Church doctrines and dogmas," Rohr says. "He just took the imitation of Christ seriously and tried to live the way that Jesus lived."

To him, serious believers should function primarily as living, breathing, organic practitioners of Christ-likeness rather than what the contemporary Pope Francis has called "word police," "inspectors" or "museum curators."

Rohr summarizes Francis' tenets: "As the popular paraphrase of a line from Francis's Rule goes, 'Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.'"

In a subsequent devotion, "Living What We Are 'For,'" Rohr takes this idea a step further. See tinyurl.com/yeyphksr

To become spiritually effective, he suggests, people who claim to be followers of Jesus should practice what Rohr calls "non-idolatry ... the withdrawing of our enthrallment from all kingdoms except the kingdom of God."

This nonattachment is more peaceable, and more effective to boot, than constantly lashing out at everybody who isn't part of your particular sect or political party.

"Nonattachment (freedom from loyalties to human-made, domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior," Rohr writes.

Mainly, Christians shouldn't be obsessed with all the things they're against.

That's a pet peeve of mine, if you want to know: those activists, religious or not, Right or Left, who define themselves by the people and things they hate, never by what they love.

"There is nothing to be against," Rohr argues. "Just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!"

We've gotten so much of Christianity backward, he says.

In the New Testament, St. Paul taught that Christians "were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness 'go to the world,'" Rohr says.

"Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender -- and sometimes 'go to church.' This doesn't seem to be working!"

This could be why church membership and attendance are declining:

"Some new studies indicate that Christians are not as much leaving Christianity as they are realigning with [alternative] groups that live Christian values in the world -- instead of just gathering again to hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday."

Such alternative groups include support groups, prayer groups, study groups, house-building projects and the like, he says.

Now this is a radical concept, isn't it?

What if we who hold what we believe to be Christian views quit trying to push our agenda on others -- and instead concentrated on trying to live our own lives like Jesus lived his life, full of acceptance, mercy and faith? What if we sought to broaden our own relationship with the Lord more than we sought to judge everybody else's relationships? What if we felt more allegiance to the kingdom of God than to some earthly political agenda?

Why, I imagine we'd not only become better disciples, but we'd be more effective at spreading the faith. We'd say less, but accomplish way more.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at

pratpd@yahoo.com

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Live what you preach so you don't have to preach - Arkansas Online

If Netflix is no longer the ne plus ultra in streaming services, as subscriber losses in Q1 and 2 have suggested, then which platform is poised to take its place? One of the strongest contenders is HBO Max. Not only did the Warner hub and its sister brand HBO rack up a combined total of 140 Emmy nominations a few weeks back, besting every competitor including Netflix, but it also topped Vultures annual streaming-service power rankings. So it doesnt come as too much of a surprise that my roundup of Julys best new shows is also dominated by HBO and HBO Max. From Nathan Fielders latest off-the-wall social experiment to Issa Raes latest comedy about young women struggling to realize their dreams to Ethan Hawkes guided tour of an iconic Hollywood marriage, the streamer covered lots of tantalizing ground this month. Also on the list: two of the years best sci-fi offerings to date. And if youre looking for even more recommendations, here are my top 10 shows from the first half of 2022.

Hollywood has a biopic problem. Theres no shortage of movies or TV shows that chronicle the real lives of notable peoplethats for sure. But whether they take the form of documentaries or dramatizations, features or series, too many of these biographies ring hollow. Maybe they dutifully touch on each highlight of their subjects lives, but rarely do they move past shallow reminiscences to create a compelling, specific portrait of the icon in question. Who were they? What did they live for? How did they change over the course of decades? What did they mean to the people who loved them, and vice versa?

Its easy to forget that such depth and clarity is possible in an onscreen biography until you encounter an exceptional one like The Last Movie Stars. Recruited by the children of Hollywood legends Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward to tell the story of their parents 50-year marriage, director Ethan Hawke also had access to a trove of interview transcripts from a memoir Newman had planned to write. (He burned the audio tapes in 1998 and died a decade later.) So, in the midst of the pandemic, he tapped a slew of actor pals to bring the interviewees words to life, casting George Clooney as Newman and Laura Linney as Woodward. We find out just how amorous their romance could beand how capable they were of hurting each other. These revealing monologues by the couple, their friends, fellow actors, directors, and other contemporaries form the spine of the 6-part series; an episode 2 conversation with Woodwards high school sweetheart, voiced by Steve Zahn, is a showstopper. But for all the awe he expresses over each performers body of work, Hawke has no interest in sugarcoating their story. Particularly through his heart-to-heart chats with their kids, Movie Stars confronts the selfishness, competition, bad parenting, and miscellaneous pain that lay beneath their perfect image. The effect isnt to tear these idols down but to reveal their essential humanity.

[Read Stephanie Zachareks review.]

Why would a person ever willingly leave utopia? For the citizens of Moonhaven, a verdant, peaceful community nestled in 500 square miles of the moon, the answer is: in order to save the world. The year is 2201. Earth has been ravaged by climate change, war, and a cascade of related plagues. Now, the only hope for humanity lies with the so-called Mooners, whove spent more than a century building a kinder, more sustainable society. Sci-fi thriller Moonhaven opens just two weeks before a crucial event known as the Bridge, in which the first wave of Mooners will relocate to Earth to help their terrestrial brethren heal the planet.

Its at this moment that the lunar utopia starts to look less perfect. First, a young woman, Chill (Nina Barker-Francis), is murdered. Then, two hilariously ill-prepared Moonhaven detectives, Paul (Dominic Monaghan, a.k.a. Charlie from Lost) and Arlo (Kadeem Hardison, a.k.a. A Different Worlds unforgettable Dwayne Wayne), discover a strange connection between Chill and a pilot, Bella Sway (a taciturn Emma McDonald), who has just arrived from Earth with the powerful envoy Indira (Amara Karan from The Night Of) and Indiras bodyguard Tomm (True Bloods Joe Manganiello, playing a sentient snarl) to aid in final preparations for the Bridge. As an Earther with a violent past and a sideline in smuggling, Bella arouses the suspicion of the colonys leadersincluding Maite (Ayelet Zurer of Losing Alice), a council chair with big mother-goddess energy who is beloved by her people. Yet in Moonhaven, a philosophical near-future epic whose ambitious ideas compensate for sometimes-flimsy execution, characters tend to be more complicated than they seem. [Read the full review.]

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1988, four suburban middle-school girls venture out to deliver newspapers and dodge threats from teen bullies slinking home after a long night of Halloween mischief. In search of the boys who stole their walkie talkie, they bust into an under-construction house, come face-to-face with a pair of apparent mutants, and flee into deserted streets under an angry, unnaturally fuchsia sky. Instead of fighting bullies, theyre caught in some cosmic war.

Paper Girls sounds a lot like Stranger Thingsbut for girls! And if thats what gets you to watch, so much the better. But this coming-of-age sci-fi series, based on a comic written by Brian K. Vaughan (best known for Y: The Last Man and Saga) and illustrated by veteran artist Cliff Chiang, tells a more focused, character-driven story that is particularly refreshing on the heels of the Netflix epics bloated fourth season. [Read the full review.]

Issa Rae created one of TVs realest bonds in the rocky relationship between Insecures flailing heroine Issa Dee (Rae) and her high-achieving, unlucky-in-love best friend Molly Carter (Yvonne Orji). Now, just months after that show culminated in an emotional tribute to the two characters friendship, Rae is back with another comedy about young women chasing dreams together. Shawna (Aida Osman) is a conscious rapper who dropped out of college to pursue a big break that never came and is now working the concierge desk at a hotel in her hometown of Miami. Her high school buddy Mia (KaMillion) supports a young daughter by cobbling together makeup-artist gigs and OnlyFans proceeds. When the stars align for the formerly estranged friends to form a fast-rising rap duo, they turn out to be the perfect combination of lyrical insight and bad-bitch energy.

From the lived-in dialogue to the female-gaze sex scenes, Raes voicereinforced by a writing staff that includes several Insecure alumsis unmistakable in Rap Sh!t. With JT and Yung Miami of the real South Florida hip-hop duo City Girls onboard as executive producers and The Read podcaster Kid Fury in the writers room, it also captures the pleasures and pain points of being a female MC in an era when more women than ever are climbing the rap charts. More surprising is the shows insightful use of social media. By weaving self-shot videos and livestreams into the fabric of each episode, Rae evokes an existencenot just in the entertainment industry, but also as a regular 20-somethingwhere people are always performing their allegedly real lives for an audience and surveilling lovers, friends, and rivals.

[Read an essay on Rap Sh!t and TVs newfound love of girl bands.]

This brilliant, brain-breaking series once again puts Nathan for You mastermind Nathan Fielder at the service of people with problems they feel incapable of solving on their own. But this time around the predicaments are more personal than entrepreneurial, and the Fielder who hosts, narrates, directs, and writes or co-writes each episode comes off as a more authentic representation of the real Fielderor, at least, a more authentic facsimile of a real human beingthan that inscrutable Nathan for You guy. In fact, the shows conceit is that it pulls back the curtain on its predecessor, using Fielders over-the-top social-engineering methods to help people overcome the stumbling blocks in their lives. [Read the full review.]

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Best TV Shows July 2022: What Our Critic Loved - TIME

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

WEST HAVEN UTOPIA Fiber, operator of open-access fiber-optic networks in numerous cities across Utah, is most likely on its way to West Haven, expanding the broadband options for city residents.

The West Haven City Council last Wednesday unanimously approved an accord with the Utah Infrastructure Agency, or UIA, to build the $17.6 million network, which would be accessible by all homes and businesses in the city when complete. The UIA is a sister agency to UTOPIA, and UTOPIA officials, who crafted the agreement with West Haven officials, are to formally consider the accord at a meeting on Aug. 8.

Its hugely important because we want to be fair to every part of the city, West Haven Mayor Rob Vanderwood said Tuesday. That is, city leaders want to make sure high-speed internet, currently lacking in some areas, is available in all corners of the city.

Presuming UTOPIA officials OK the agreement, as expected, West Haven would become the first Weber County city to be fully built out with a UTOPIA system. Around 20 Utah cities in all have or are getting UTOPIA networks, including West Point, Clearfield and Syracuse, among others, in Davis County. Officials in other Weber County cities, including North Ogden and South Ogden, have also talked with UTOPIA reps, though they havent reached accord for action.

Construction in West Haven would start by the end of 2022 or early 2023, according to Kim McKinley, UTOPIAs chief marketing officer, and take no more than two years, probably less.

Accessibility to high-speed internet has become an increasing topic of debate in Weber County and beyond as demand grows and critics charge that networks of incumbent operators like Xfinity arent extensive enough. West Haven officials had been debating the issue for about a year and a half before taking action last week.

The pandemic changed how we do business and how we teach our kids, making accessibility to high-speed internet even more important, Nina Morse, a member of the West Haven City Council, said in a message to the Standard-Examiner. We have areas of the city where folks cant access internet at all. This changes that. Now every resident will be able to connect to not just internet, but high speed internet. Definitely a game changer here.

UTOPIA, owned by the communities with networks, operates open-access systems, which means private telecom firms that actually provide internet tap into its fiber to provide the service to the public.The standard operating procedure calls for bonding to cover network construction costs by UIA, backed by the particular city where the system is going in. Subscriber revenue is tapped to cover bond costs, thus requiring no out-of-pocket costs by cities.

In the case of West Haven, 3,612 subscribers would be needed to create the needed revenue stream to cover bonding costs for the $17.6 million network. Officials think theyll be able to hit the mark. I think well be able to hit it early, Vanderwood said.

West Haven City Manager Matt Jensen echoed that, noting that the network would be available to the commercial sector. He also noted the many apartments and townhomes taking shape in the city additional potential customers as well as the rapid growth of late in West Haven, one of Utahs fastest-growing locales.

West Haven officials polled city residents as part of the process in determining whether to seek a new internet option, with more than 93% of respondents saying they backed the notion of adding broadband. It was a resounding We need the service,' Jensen said.

Strata Networks also put forward a proposal for development of a fiber-optic network in West Haven. Under the Strata scheme, West Haven would have owned the network, though the firm would have helped manage it.

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West Haven OKs accord to build UTOPIA fiber-optic network in city - Standard-Examiner

Travis Scott has shared his first song as a primary artist since last November, teaming up with NAV to deliver the Lil Baby-assisted Never Sleep.

The song produced by Tay Keith and Grayson, with co-production from Mike Dean serves as the lead single from NAVs upcoming fourth album, Demons Protected By Angels, which according to a press release, will be coming soon.

He and Scott share the songs chorus, rapping: Geeked, never sleep / Stretch a hundred to millions in weeks / Got her runnin and ridin for me / Where its sunny we gotta retreat / Straight from London, she out in the East / Let her shop and she keep the receipts / Dont you tell him you got it from me / After this, Ima need therapy.

I been buildin up my legacy / Hundreds on hundreds, on fold / I been up so far, somewhere / Stuck at the top and its nowhere to go.

Take a look at the lyric video for Never Sleep below:

Aside from an uncredited guest feature on Kanye Wests Donda 2 cut Pablo, Scott has had a relatively quiet year on the release front. Back in April, though, he appeared on the single Hold That Heat alongside Future and 808 Mafia producer Southside. His last headlined release was the double A-side of Mafia and Escape Plan, which landed last November as the first previews of his upcoming Utopia album.

The rapper is still making a gradual comeback to the spotlight following last years Astroworld tragedy, where 10 people were killed in a crowd surge during his headline set. Hes performed a handful of times since then, appearing at a pre-Oscars party in March and a Coachella afterpartyin April, before delivering a public show at a Miami nightclub in May. Later that month, he performed at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards.

Last week, Scott made a surprise appearance with Future at this years Rolling Loud Miami festival. The two performed Hold That Heat together, before Scott did a medley of his own tracks including Antidote, No Bystanders and Goosebumps. At the end of the set, they teamed up once more to perform March Madness.

Earlier this month, Scott opened for Meek Mill in Brooklyn, and momentarily stopped his set to address safety concerns. At one point in the show, some fans climbed up a lighting truss this prompted Scott to stop the show and tell them to get down. In a statement shared after the performance, a representative for Scott said the rapper was committed to doing his part to ensure events are as safe as possible.

Next month, Scott will perform two headline shows at the O2 in London, which will mark his first headline shows since the Astroworld tragedy. Then, in November, he will headline Primavera Sounds inaugural Brazil, Chile and Argentina editions.

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Travis Scott and NAV join forces with Lil Baby for new single 'Never Sleep' - NME

Most "buildings" in The Line are in the 500m-high walls, with public space and facilities like this sports stadium between them. Note the mirror glass on the outside of the wall.

Finally, someone has invented the future. And it's none other than Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia! In his new city, everyone will live very closely together, with all their daily needs work, school, community activities, recreation within a five-minute walk.

Every home will have great views. Energy and water will be 100 per cent renewable, temperatures will be fully controlled and autonomous machines will do everything from shopping to cleaning the apartments. There could be an artificial moon.

It's called The Line: a "revolution in civilisation" designed to "protect and enhance nature" and by 2030 this extraordinary city could largely be built. The design is by Morphosis Architects, a US-based firm founded by Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. The budget is close to a trillion New Zealand dollars.

The Line will consist of two parallel walls, 500m high (that's taller than the Empire State Building), with homes, commercial buildings, vertical farms, schools and other services fitted into them. The exteriors will be mirror glass, with the stark beauty of the desert beyond. The public spaces between the walls will be parklands and waterways, designed for "an optimal balance of sunlight, shade and natural ventilation". The city will stretch for 170km, with a high-speed railway making the journey from one end to the other in 20 minutes.

Those walls will become the world's largest structures, and yet the whole thing will be just 200m wide: the width of two rugby fields. Nine million people will live there.

And none of them will own a car. There won't even be any roads.

That's right: Saudi Arabia, the world's second-largest oil producer, is building an enormous car-free city, protected from all the adverse effects of climate change, using the billions it makes from reinforcing car dependency in the rest of the world.

"You see desert," they say, "we see opportunity." The place will be "a living laboratory, home to the brightest minds, dedicated to the sanctity of all life on Earth".

"All life", presumably, doesn't include the people Saudi Arabia routinely imprisons, tortures and often executes for such "crimes" as being raped, "behaving" in some LGBTQI+ way, criticising Mohammed or being a woman who leaves the house without permission. Or the untold number of workers, most of them migrants and treated little better than slaves, who will build The Line.

The value to MBS is clear enough: he wants to be known as a visionary world leader and not the guy who ordered the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

For the rest of us, extraordinary architecture is probably not the future but does pose a challenge. The Line asks us what we value in cities and how we might reconceive them in a zero-emissions, equitable way. We're not going to build our own Line in the sand, so what will we do instead?

It's also a warning. The Line affirms that the mega-rich will be just fine, whatever global warming does to the planet. They will build themselves fabulous pleasure cities, insulated from the world as it turns to desert.

And they will carry on mega-polluting, while their lackeys in politics and the fossil-fuel industries keep assuring the rest of us we really don't need to worry. We're going to see more projects like this.

You can check out The Line here.

Design for Living is a regular Canvas magazine series about bright ideas designed to make cities better.

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Simon Wilson: Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince invents 'utopia' - New Zealand Herald