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Interview Clips
All About Me: American Racism, American Narcissism, and the Conversation America Can't Have
Boy @ The Window Pictures
Boy @ The Window Theme Music
Notes from a Boy @ The Window
Category Archives: High Rise Buildings
Namby-Pamby Land
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work
Class Privilege, Contradictions, DC, DMV, Gentrification, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Silver Spring Maryland, Struggling Middle Class, Suburban Toxicity, Washington DC, White Privilege
The Sound of Music (1965) poster with Julie Andrews. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy/AP; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)
Last week marked an all-time milestone. Me and my future wife moved to the DMV on Tuesday, August 10, 1999, and moved into our luxury high-rise apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland the next morning. It was a crazy move, done between two jobs and the crossroads of two careers, and with bronchitis on top of that. It was also two days after I proposed to Angelia. Lucky me, she was very, very kind in saying yes, despite my sometimes manly, trash-ass flaws!
Twenty years here in DC, in Suburban Maryland, and (mostly for work) in Confederate Northern Virginia has been both good and terrible at the same time. Living around here has been an exercise in outsized cosmopolitanism. The expensive apartments and homes, the high-salaried jobs that come with stress that will age you right into the grave, side-by-side with examples of poverty that reminded me of my Mount Vernon growing-up years. I've seen it happen, to 23-year-olds and 60-year-olds of every stripe. Not much different from what I've seen of New Yorkers over the years.
United Therapeutics headquarters (a block long, across from high-rise apartments), Silver Spring, MD, August 23, 2018. (https://moretocome.net).
Living in the DC-area has also been an exercise in patience. The area's penchant for urban and suburban elitism is matched by its Southern and East Coast colloquial nature. Gentrification in NE and SE DC would be a case in point, with Trader Joe's and restaurants serving osso bucco within a sniff of an old fried fish or crab shack. Or watching downtown Silver Spring, once dotted with dimly-lit bars and mom-and-pop eateries, turn into a gentrified nightmare, with two-dozen new luxury high-rise apartment buildings and a Star-Trek-like office starship that United Therapeutics had built across the street from our former place. All as Silver Spring has no mayor, save the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce and Montgomery County executives selling off county buildings and parking lots to the lowest bidder. Only to see DC government match the suburbs in driving out its residents living with poverty, to rename neighborhoods in an effort to get White-suburbanite bodies and dollars while giving the trillion-dollar businesses of the world significant tax breaks.
But since I (mostly) left AED and the nonprofit world to go back into academia as a part-time and (since 2012) full-time contingent faculty member at two universities, I really don't spend that much time in DC. Working on nationwide initiatives and programs tends to distort one's view of DC, and it certainly did mine, at least in my time here before about 2006. Really, it shouldn't have. I had lived in Shepherd Park while dissertation-ing for several months in 1995, and regularly visited across various communities between 1992 and 1998. Still, being solidly middle class after years of growing-up, welfare, and self-imposed-via-grad-school poverty does create a bias.
I thought DC was great those first years as a result. This despite the poverty I saw. This no matter the homelessness I breathed in, regardless of the LGBTQ discrimination I witnessed. This in contrast with the education "reforms" occurring in PG County and in DC itself, as politicians like Adrian Fenty and school supers like Michelle Rhee and John Deasy letting the corporate education reform vultures into the school districts. Only to create money-leeching charter schools that would only leave another generation of students with less educational resources and not improve their life chances while also decimating teachers' autonomy and teachers unions.
I thought the same of Silver Spring and Montgomery County, especially after Angelia gave birth to our one and only egg in 2003. After all, we lived in middle class section of an upper-middle-class community in one of the best school districts in the US, and easily the best in the state. What I didn't realize until we moved our son from daycare at a federal agency in DC to one adjacent to his eventual elementary school in Silver Spring was the level of White-bred provinciality our near-immediate neighbors possessed. Yes, even the Black ones. Whether Ivy League-educated, PhD-ed, JD-ed, school teacher, firefighter, nonprofit entrepreneur, lawyer, or government bureaucrat, they all seemed to know very little about the world beyond a two-square mile radius.
Now, some of this was because our kids were four or five years old. I didn't watch anything other than PBS Kids Sprout, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon (with the exceptions of The Wire and Grey's Anatomy) between 2003 and 2010, except for news, of course. But as our kids became preteens and then teenagers, I knew it was more than that. My neighbors, though struggling through the Great Recession and a general downshift of the US middle class throughout the past two decades, still expressed little concern beyond their own day-to-day, as if nothing impacted them as individuals or a family. As our conversations did shift toward politics and -isms, they would cliché their way through them with platitudes like "If we could just get rid of the hate" and "Things have gotten better since the '60s." These conversations were so White that I sometimes clicked my tongue to signal to my prefrontal cortex that it was time to go in Standby mode.
That provincial laziness in thinking and general willful ignorance of the relationship with the world outside the community made me more aware of Namby-Pamby Land as a whole. From my fellow drivers (some I've recognized while driving) driving too slow, taking seconds to react to a green or red light, and blowing through stop signs, to my neighbors walking down sidewalks six abreast and forcing people into streets to go around them. And of course, their general resistance to changing intra-district boundaries because they didn't want to "go over the bridge" across 495 to have little Johnny or Maddie attend school with less-well-off Latinx kids.
That's the price I've paid for living in a suburban community of relative class privilege. The toxicity of it all has left me wanting for the New York of my youth (not Mount Vernon, mind you) as I've gotten older. But I guess it could be worse. It could Potomac or Bethesda, Maryland-worse.
Viewing World AIDS Day From the Cheap Seats
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth
"Shout" (1985), 616, ACT UP, Greyhound, Hard Luck Life, HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Hypermasculinity, Misogyny, NYPD, Port Authority, Prostitution, Sex Work, STDs, Systemic Racism, Tears for Fears, World AIDS Day
World AIDS Day 2018 logo, November 30, 2018. (http://hiv.gov).
Today and this weekend mark 30 years since the first World AIDS Day. Unlike three decades ago, I seldom give HIV/AIDS any thought at all. Where did it go? Has anyone actually died from AIDS recently? Do people still have to worry about HIV/AIDS? I know the answers are, nowhere, yes, most definitely, and hell yes, dumb ass.
But 30 years ago, I worried about HIV/AIDS the same way I worried about the Soviet nuclear threat, my Mom still living with my idiot stepfather, and dying if I wasn't part of some evangelical Christian rapture. I pretty much worried about everything back then. In the context of my heterosexuality and mostly burying it for fear of intimacy, pregnancy, and bodily fluids, though, I worried that with my luck, any sex at all would lead to the STD to beat all STDs.
So when my dad went out of his way to get me a prostitute (we didn't use the term "sex worker" then, I think) for my seventeenth birthday in December 1986, a young woman I knew to have been a fellow Mount Vernon High School student the year before, I didn't hesitate to say no. I preferred Jimme calling me "faggat" to doing the equivalent of Spike Lee's character in School Daze, a form of meat-market sex approaching (but not quite) rape.
I knew, down to my bones, despite the ACT UP crowd of relatively well-off gay White male activists on MTV and elsewhere, despite the dome of Black hypermasculine homophobia found in Mount Vernon and in the city, that HIV/AIDS wasn't a "gay disease." Basic biology would dictate that viruses don't make left turns based on sexual orientation, class, gender, or race. So, hell yes, I was scared, for quite some time, from the prospect of living with a disease that has killed more than 35 million people worldwide since 1979.
The dangers of sex work, of casual unprotected sex, and of HIV/AIDS were made clear to me on my trip to Pittsburgh in August 1990 to secure what would be my studio apartment living for the next eight and a half years. It started at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 41st on Friday night, August 3. It was going to be my second trip ever on Greyhound, catching the 11 pm red-eye, nonstop bus from Manhattan to downtown Pittsburgh. As the 40 of us stood in line to catch the bus, I saw a woman around my age wandering between the men's room and the waiting areas, talking to different guys, with one or two jumping out of line for a few minutes.
Port Authority Bus Terminal entrance, New York, NY, October 22, 2015. (Ilana Gold/CBS2; https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/10/22/port-authority-bus-terminal-plan/).
As she drew closer to my line, I recognized her. She was someone I knew to be the cousin of one of my neighbors on the third floor of 616. By then, I also saw a Black guy in his mid or late-twenties, standing near the men's room, keeping a close eye on her. It was like the cogs of my mind moved in slow motion as it became clear that this person I knew was a sex worker and the guy was her pimp.
A few minutes later, the pimp bellowed, "Five-O! Five-O!." The all-too-familiar woman took off. She booked out the terminal doors and toward the streets around Times Square. The Port Authority police and two NYPD cops had grabbed the pimp, put him on the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away.
I was so surprised and sad after that, at least as we boarded the bus and weaved our way through New Jersey. I hadn't seen this woman since 1986 or 1987, when I was a senior in high school. Over the years, she had come over to her cousin's place to visit, and maybe to stay (at least temporarily). She had mostly teased me about my "White music," except for Tears for Fears in the summer of 1985 (their "Shout" had been turned into some hip-hop urban mix on WBLS).
She had asked me on more than one occasion, "Do you like girls?" I mostly ignored her, saw her as just another person at 616 and in Mount Vernon who saw me as something to kick around. I didn't consider her attractive because of how she talked to me, but looking back, she was. At five-seven or five-nine, she was a yellowish-brown skinned woman, with some freckles, a nice smile, shortish hair, and a nice proportionate shape. She could be witty, in a New Yorker's sarcastic sort of way. But between Wendy, Phyllis, and my march to college, nothing and no one in Mount Vernon could compete for my attention in that way back then.
A week later, I came back from my Pittsburgh trip, on another Greyhound non-stopper, only to realize at 8:30 on Saturday, August 11 that I needed to take a dump. As I've said elsewhere, I tried and failed to take one at Grand Central, as the basement restrooms were full of broken toilets, boarded up stalls, and at least one person with obvious signs of Kaposi's Sarcoma, a sign of full-blown AIDS. I don't know how I managed to hold my shit until I made it back to 616.
I learned from my Mom twelve or thirteen years ago that my former neighbor and teaser had died from AIDS-related complications, leaving two children behind. Even though I didn't know her very well — didn't want to know her, really — I was still heartbroken for her and her kids. All I could think was, what an awful life, what an awful way to die! Who's going to raise her kids?
But really, I couldn't help but go back to that Friday night in August 1990. I observed from up close, what the limited choices in a world of capitalism, patriarchy, misogynoir, and racism left people like this young woman. I observed, from afar, how this world can make something as destructive as HIV/AIDS a movement for gay White males, and a silent way of killing Black women at the same time.
Today Was A Good Day (sometimes)…
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, Sports, Work, Youth
"Dr. K", "It Was A Good Day", 4th of July, 7 Train, AP US History Exam, Ass-Whuppin', Dwight Gooden, Ice Cube, Maturity, Metro-North, Mets, Mrs. Ralph, Shea Stadium
Shea Stadium, second level, behind visitors dugout, Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY, 2008. (http://www.bloggingmets.com/)
Of all my Independence Days growing up, two stand out above the rest. One was Friday, July 4, 1986. It was the grand re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of one-time Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which had raised hundreds of millions to restore both symbols of American inclusion (via European immigrants, at least) to museum-quality glory.
Not so for me. I took my older brother Darren, and my then near-seven year-old brother Maurice and nearly five year-old brother Yiscoc to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play. It was either a 1:05 pm or 1:35 pm start, I don't remember. It was a beautiful eighty-five degree afternoon, beautiful because it wasn't particularly humid, and there were no storm clouds to be found that Friday. Dwight Gooden was on the mound for the Mets, starting against the all-time great Nolan Ryan. It was built up to be a duel, and it was.
Keith Hernandez drove in a run in the first, and that was it until the top of the seventh inning, when Dr. K gave up a home run to Kevin Bass. Other than that, fly balls, walks, double-plays, and strikeouts were the order of the day. Lenny Dykstra drove in the game-winning run with a double to right-center field at the bottom of the seventh inning off of a reliever, as Ryan was out after beginning the bottom of the sixth giving up a walk and a hit. Despite giving up five walks and only striking out four, Gooden got a complete-game, 2-1 win, and 30,000 saw the Mets go to 54-21, well on their way toward their World Series title for 1986.
NYC's MTA 7 train rolling into Queens (Wikipedia), July 4, 2018. (http://amsterdamnews.com).
But that day was so much better with three of my brothers there, away from 616 and Mount Vernon, hanging out, without an adult to supervise, or rather, abuse us in some way. It was one of the first times I actually felt like a fully responsible adult. I took the four of us down to the city on Metro-North at the Pelham stop, rode into grimy Grand Central, took the Shuttle train to Times Square, and then the 7 Subway to Shea. Maurice and Yiscoc were so enamored with the trains and the city that it seemed all they did was stare out at skyscrapers and out of train windows when we weren't at the game. Darren, though mostly quiet, at least wasn't staring off into space plotting some revenge on me for my "5" on the AP US History Exam while doing the Wave.
It was so cheap to do what we did that day. The four upper-deck, slightly left-of-home plate tickets we bought cost $4 each, but each hot dog was $3, and the sodas were $2. apiece Given my $3.40-per-hour job with Technisort, though, the $50 excursion wasn't so cheap that I wasn't thinking about sneaking a Sabrett hot dog from a street vendor in before we got to the stadium. To be sure, the hot dogs at Shea were better than my usual fare on the street or at Gray's Papaya.
It was probably the best day I had during my Boy @ The Window years. There were others to be sure, especially in 1986, including my Mets winning the World Series that October and my AP US History exam results. But on this day, I was with innocent family members, watching my favorite team and one of my favorite players. I was lost in the humongous human mob of New York on a double-whammy of an Independence Day weekend. I slept well that evening, knowing that I'd drawn a 10 am-2 pm shift that Saturday. I planned on buying a new Walkman at the Cross County Mall in Yonkers that afternoon. A normal three-day weekend for many sixteen-year-olds was a small eye-wall in the chaotic hurricane that was my life back then.
Contrast this with Wednesday, July 4th, 1979. My mom's friend Mrs. Ralph was hosting a 4th of July party at her house off Wilson's Woods in Mount Vernon, with kids included. She had hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, tons of ice cream and drinks, and an ice cream cake to top it all off.
I just couldn't help myself. I became a nine-year-old version of Pac-Man. I devoured two hamburgers and two hot dogs, had some red drink, and a slice or two of the vanilla ice cream cake. All within the first half-hour of us getting to Ms. Ralph's house.
I couldn't have been higher if they had injected me with heroin and then had me snort some Oxycodone. I was running around the house and laughing for no reason whatsoever, my older brother Darren staring at me like I was an alien. My mom had grabbed me by my shoulders at one point. "Stop acting up!" she said.
Looney Tunes' Tazmanian Devil in the midst of an eat-a-thon, July 4, 2018. (Catherine Babey
via http://pinterest.com).
But I didn't stop. At least not until I ran into one of Ms. Ralph's dividers in her living room, knocking it down along with some half-empty cups and plates on an adjacent table.
My mom took off one of her square-heeled flats and proceeded to beat my ass with it for the next minute, in front of a crowd of twenty or twenty-five guests. The ass-whuppin' hurt, of course. The fact that it was a public one hurt even more. I was crying well after the party went back to normal. Ms. Ralph, though, came over to me later, reminded me that what I did was wrong, and then gave me a hug and told me that she loved me.
Looking back, I definitely deserved some punishment, maybe even an ass-whuppin'. The public spectacle and the shoe was probably a bit excessive. Was it a good day? No. But it was a day that made the 4th of July 1986 and so many other days easier to appreciate and savor.
What Trump in 2017 and My Dad in 1984 Have In Common
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth
45, American Narcissism, Delusions of Grandeur, Father-Son Relationship, Internalized Racism, Jealousy, Materialism, Resentment, Self-Loathing, White Supremacy
Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).
The first time I ever heard of Donald J. Trump was while working for my father in the fall of 1984. It was in the context of having to work for our money with my dad from August until December that year. Not to mention, Walter Mondale's sad and forlorn presidential run, Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" sound bite, and my Mets making themselves relevant again with Strawberry and Gooden. So many Friday evenings, Saturday and Sunday mornings in that part of the year, me and my brother Darren spent on the 2 Subway going to the Upper West Side to clean co-ops and condos, offices and hallways with so many industrial cleaning and buffing machines. And usually, my father was either drinking, hung over, or jonesin' for a drink during these nearly weekly weekend job duties for nearly four months.
My father would often name drop as part of his constant yammering about "The City," and how he was "a big shot doctor an' lawyer" working carpet cleaning machines on the eighteen floor of a co-op off 68th and Broadway or 77th and Columbus. For two weekends, we worked the Upper East Side off the 86th Street Subway stop. It was during those weekends on the blocks between White Manhattan and Spanish Harlem that I learned who really ran the city.
King of New York (1990) with Christopher Walken screen shot. (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/).
"You know who really run dis city? Milstein," my father said, as if I had asked him about New York's movers and shakers. I remained silent as I worked the buffing machine in an office building lobby.
"But dere 'nother one comin' up. That Donal' Trump a good bid-ness man dere! Yep, yep!," my father continued while waging his right index finger in admiration.
I didn't think much of the comment at that moment, because it was part of my dad's typical "Lo' at dis po' ass muddafucka! I make fitty million dollas a week!" delusional diatribes. But soon after, I remembered seeing something about Trump and his first wife Ivana in the Daily News. It was probably related to one of his business deals, either for the eventual Trump Tower, the hotel deal near Grand Central, or his fight with Koch over being snubbed out of the work for the new Jacob Javitz Convention Center. I thought nothing of the man beyond the truth for people like me, people who tended to be repulsed by narcissistic self-aggrandizers seeking attention and praise.
But in those Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous times, it was obvious Trump believed in host Robin Leach's closing words. "champagne wishes and caviar dreams." The man always talked about making deals, making money, and living as if he were a single man with an insatiable libido and without kids. More than once, in listening to this unseemly rich man, I thought, "Sounds just like Jimme."
To think that an eventual US president would have the same ways of viewing the world as an inebriated man in his mid-forties is beyond troubling. At the very least, it makes me wonder what kind of drugs 45 has snorted over the years. But it also is proof of the pervasiveness of American narcissism. That a Black man with a seventh-grade education — not to mention, an alcoholic with a $30,000-a-year job — could see himself as a "big shot" in the same way as 45 sees himself as a "successful businessman" with at least four bankruptcies, a $200 million trust fund and a $1-million loan courtesy of his dad to his credit. It points to a society that seethes with an egocentric penchant for money, riches, and power to lord over others. It points to a people who self-loathe so much that jealousy can be normalized, that using precious psychological, emotional, spiritual, and even material resources to one-up themselves over unnamed others whom they see as their lessers is an everyday thing.
Luckily, my father sobered up about whom he had been, his narcissism, the many slights he absorbed as a late-era Black migrant in New York, the many jealousies he harbored, and his own self-hatred. And that was all before he stopped drinking at the end of 1997. That doesn't mean that my father now qualifies for sainthood. But he is at least in touch with who he is, and the need to be a better person every day.
Losing brain cells, September 27, 2013. (http://www.dailyhealthpost.com).
45, though, hasn't grown a single self-reflective neuron in the past thirty-three years. Matter of fact, as evidenced with so many verbal explosions over Charlottesville and "Rus-shur," 45 may have destroyed at least five billion neurons since Ivanka was a toddler. America, to its collective detriment, has a 71-year-old less psychologically able to be president than my father would've been during the worst of his alcoholic times. What makes this unsurprising, sad, and anger-inducing, is that the US has had at least a half-dozen other presidents who also shouldn't have been trusted to sit next to my dad and remain civil at the same "Shamrock Bar" on East 241st Street, where he frequently gave away his paychecks.
So America, 45 is "a shame and a pitiful," as my father would say. A shame to the US and the world stage, and a pitiful mess for anyone to watch in action.
Covfefe Plaza
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture
Cole Spring Plaza, Corporate Influence, Corruption, Gentrification, Greater Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce, Growing Older, Housing, Isiah Leggett, Lobbying, Montgomery County, Moving, Noise Factor, Public Parking, Ross Management, Silver Spring Maryland, Space, United Therapeutics, Unither, Urban Sprawl
Cole Spring Plaza (w/atrium in permanent renovation) with Photoshopped spray paint, July 9, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).
Well, actually, this post is about Cole Spring Plaza, the luxury apartment high-rise that me and my pregnant wife moved into in 2003, and recently moved out of with our nearly 14-year-old son at the end of June 2017. In all, we lived in the building in downtown Silver Spring for fourteen years and a month, or 5,144 days. For half of those days, it was a pretty good to solid place to live. Although there were a decreasing number of luxuries in our two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat on the eleventh floor, the apartment was a roomy one and our neighbors were friendly. And I could get a good night's sleep many nights (when I wasn't sleep-deprived from the first 1,859 days of Noah's life, 2003-2008). Or, short of that, I could count on getting an afternoon nap, a short after-work nap, or weekend naps to recover.
By the winter of 2011-12, I couldn't count on that anymore. Not with United Therapeutics and their endless construction projects, underway off and on since 2005. They had torn down their old headquarters adjacent to the Montgomery County Public Parking garage on 1200 Spring Street to build a state-of-the-art solar and geothermal powered monstrosity, including an underground garage. For seven weeks between December 2011 and February 2012, the construction workers pounded away with jackhammers on granite boulders as I attempted to work and teach online at home. I nearly lost my sanity.
Cole Spring Plaza, circa spring 2012 (before new double-paned windows; with trees & bushes in atrium), Silver Spring, MD. (http://www.australiansquashtour.org/).
This, of course, was not Ross Management's fault, the property managers for Cole Spring Plaza. Nor was the onsite property manager to blame, seeing that they had nothing to do with the jackhammers. What was their fault was that no one in the building had double-paned windows, ones that could seal the noise of downtown Silver Spring and of major construction sites out of our flats. Ross finally replaced our windows in July 2012, but only after it became obvious that more tenants than usual had started moving out.
The granite boulders ordeal was but a symbol of the accumulation of the problems with our living arrangement at Cole Spring Plaza. None of these problems would've been a deal breaker for us when we first moved in back in May 2003. After four years in our previous luxury apartment, a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom place, the 1,350-square-footer that was our flat in Cole Spring Plaza seemed spacious. Sure, we knew that it didn't have a washer and dryer in the unit, or valet parking, or a dry cleaning service on the premises, or a community gym or business office. But it did have the space we needed.
It only became obvious after a few years why the "luxury" part of the sell to us regarding Cole Spring Plaza was a lie. The developers had built the high-rise in 1967, apparently with the idea that it would be a hotel at first. But with Silver Spring not exactly a business or tourist attraction a half-century ago, they settled on the luxury high-rise idea. In the thirty-six years before we moved in, little to no work had been done to replace old plumbing, to repair the central ventilation system, to make washers and dryers available in each flat, or to give each apartment its own central air and heating. This Oscar Madison-Felix Unger setup may have been the definition of a luxury high-rise back in 1973. But in 2017, was a higher end version of my time at 616 (a bit of an exaggeration — the rent was/is way too damn high!). The result of what we did know, combined with the numerous little things we didn't know, meant a gradual decrease in the quality of living in our place over fourteen years.
The plumbing issues meant for hard water stains that messed up our clothes when we washed them in the building, so by 2011, we were washing them off site. The lack of central ventilation exacerbated my sleep apnea and asthma symptoms, meaning less sleep over time. By 2012, there were two full months out of the year that we didn't use our HVAC, one month because it was too warm for heat, the other because it was too cool outdoors for air conditioning. It was clear to me by the time our son had finished elementary school that it was time to move.
Spring Colesville public parking (the garage we used off-on for 12 years), Silver Spring, MD, January 23, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).
But, move where, exactly? Did we want to stay in the area, or, especially with most of my job interviews taking me to Boston, California, Philly, and Baltimore, did we want to move out-of-town? Would we end up moving, but would I be stuck in long-distance marriage and fatherhood? That was always the main issue for me.
Aside from that, so much had changed since the spring of 2003. A large reason for the choice that we made in Cole Spring Plaza was because we didn't own a car in 2003. We had looked at the Nissan Xterra and Volvo XC90, but because we lived so close to a Metro stop, we hadn't seriously considered buying one. That is, until our son came along. We hadn't looked at other options because for us, there didn't seem to be that many.
United Therapeutics project after removal of last of garage, Silver Spring, MD, October 27, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).
Finally, after Cole Spring Plaza decided that the best way to attract new tenants was to tear down fifty-year-old trees and decades' old bushes and build a new atrium in June 2015 (which still isn't complete), me and my wife both knew it was time. That, and United Therapeutics getting another sweet deal from Montgomery County Council Executive Ike Leggett and the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce. After six years of negotiation, the county sold them the parking garage conveniently located across the street from Cole Spring Plaza for $10.2 million. In the twelve months since, Whiting-Turner tore down this garage and has mostly laid the foundation for a six-story, 120,000-square-foot building. That, and the electrical and water and sewage work around the building, left us — and especially mostly working-from-home me — feeling under siege.
United Therapeutics project, Silver Spring, MD, June 19., 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).
So we looked, at places in Baltimore, but mostly, between Rockville, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and even in Bethesda (whose lily-Whiteness I can't stand), and settled for a town home a couple of miles from our old place. Here, the loudest thing I've heard so far is a garbage truck and birds fighting over food.
I wouldn't recommend Cole Spring Plaza to anyone except to college students, especially if five of them want to room in a two-bed, two-bath flat (I met at least two groups of students doing exactly that). The building, like the rest of downtown Silver Spring, has changed, and not for the better. The building is in disrepair, and will likely get bought out by United Therapeutics in the coming decade.
This isn't a story of gentrification, for Silver Spring has been a mix of upwardly mobile ethnicities for decades, especially in downtown. No, this is another story of cash-strapped municipalities, the lobbying of Chambers of Commerce, sweet deals for politicians lining their pockets, and corporations encroaching on residential areas. And the story of a family who should've moved into a town home three years sooner.
On the Levi Brothers and Trump-esque People
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper West Side, Work, Youth
45, Christopher Walken, Crash-and-Burn, Crassness, Criminal Activity, Exploitation, John Gotti, King of New York (1990), Levi Brothers, Narcissism, Ostentatious, President Donald J. Trump, Racism, Stupidity
Darth Sidious, Star Wars VI (The Return of the Jedi) screen shot, 1983/1997. (LusoEditor via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to lower resolution and subject matter.
There are a plethora of people to pick from in making comparisons between President 45 and examples of narcissistic evil operating in positions of leadership. Andrew Jackson, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, 45's hero Vladimir Putin, Jacob Zuma, and Recep Erdoğan all have served as examples in op-eds and other articles over the past couple of years. And these are all potentially good picks. Mercurial, vengeful, and even erratic actions, combined with dehumanizing speeches and screeds, all characterize this cabal of soft despots and fascist dictators, and match 45 well.
But the level of ostentatious stupidity that 45 has exhibited as President and a presidential candidate has made think of people closer to home. After all, 45 has always been a New Yorker, a crass rich White guy who has spent his entire adult life attempting to make himself look even more wealthy and powerful than his relative position in elite circles would've otherwise justified. He's also always seen himself as the most important person in the room, maybe in the world. So much so that he has also seen himself as the smartest person in any context, even as everything 45 has touched has been tarnished or turned to shit by his callous, narcissistic stupidity.
In totality, this could describe any upper-crust New Yorker I encountered growing up looking to own more, buy more, be more than they already were. But in light of all things 45, I am thinking of two folks from my teenage years, the Levi brothers. They owned cleaners in Midtown Manhattan and ran a building-cleaning company, and my father worked for them all through the 1980s. The Levi brothers were two of a kind, some of the most flashy people with wealth that I would ever meet.
As I described them in Boy @ The Window
I can confirm with absolute certainty that the Levi brothers wore not-so-thin gold chains. I can also remember how uneasy my encounters with them made me feel. It wasn't just the fact that they often questioned my intelligence. For nearly all of the years my father worked for the Levi brothers, they paid him under the table. They enabled his alcoholism, in exchange for $500 a week, for eighteen years. No retirement plan, no raises, no sick or annual leave, no unemployment insurance, in exchange for no child support payments and no tax payments. A Faustian deal if there ever was one.
That my father knew who Paul Milstein was — the late real estate mogul for whom a program within the Columbia Business School is named — is amazing to consider in hindsight. It meant that he was privy to many conversations between the Levi brothers about their master plan for generational wealth. It meant that the Levi brothers believed themselves to be kings, or at least princes, of New York. But only because they cut corners in their shops and business, and looked for ways to literally get rid of their competition. Things that would later lead to alleged criminal activities and the loss of their businesses.
If I could interview them in their mid-1980s milieu now, I would've ask them, "Who were you trying to emulate, John Gotti?" But given those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous times, I suspect the person the Levi brothers were most trying to ape was Donald Trump. Only, 45 came from more money, and wanted to do more than corner the market on cleaners and cleaning contracts for Manhattan high-rises. Beyond the differences in a couple of zeros, the braggadocio, the seeing of people not like them as "others" or "not human," the need to show the world their wealth, their stunning stupidity in their attempts to monopolize their market. It's as typical a New York story as I ever got the chance to see. And with 45, I get to see it again, this time on a massive scale, a crash-and-burn that the universe of intelligent beings won't be able to ignore.
The Cruel Lure of Academia
Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth
Academia, Academic Culture, Academic Jobs, Barbara Lazarus, Bruce Anthony Jones, Burnout, CMU, Contingent Faculty, Faculty, False Gods, Family Issues, job search, Joe William Trotter Jr., Meritocracy, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Publish-or-Perish, Teachers College, Tenure-Stream Positions
Rihanna as Medusa, GQ Magazine cover, December 2013. (http://pinterest.com).
Twenty years ago on this date, I took the call that would help define my last two decades professionally. It was a call from Teachers College, Columbia University. I had made a final cut of interviewees "out of more than 300 applicants," for a tenure-track assistant professorship in the history of education, the administrative assistant to the ed foundations department chair's office had told me. It was my first post-PhD job call, one at the time that I hoped would be the only one I'd need.
It wasn't my first interview for an academic position, though. That distinction went to Illinois State University, in April '94. Two of their history professors were at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New Orleans, screening applicants for a lecturer and a non-tenured assistant professor position. I dared not tell my advisor Joe Trotter or anyone else about the screening invite. I went, I met the two youngish professors, both of whom told me to finish my PhD before applying for another job, because they thought my work "too promising" for non-tenure-stream positions. I had also interviewed for two education nonprofit positions, both in Pittsburgh, and both only offering me only a few thousand more than the US Postal Service offered me in '92, when my name for a job finally came up.
Burned out 40w light bulb, April 27, 2010. (http://www.iamtonyang.com).
Now I had gotten a call from one of the most prestigious education schools in the world. A school within the same university that wanted to hire a private investigator ten years earlier because they didn't want to give a poor Black kid a four-year free-ride. Despite the irony, I was happy, nervous, and apprehensive. I was happy for the opportunity, nervous about my prospects, and apprehensive about the possibility of moving back to New York. But, most important, I was also burned out emotionally and psychologically from the dissertation process, though not as burned out as I would become in the six weeks that followed.
The interview itself three weeks later was one of the best I've ever done for anything. I gave my job talk on multiculturalism and Black education, and for once, professors and graduate students in the audience didn't look at me like I was speaking Vulcan. I actually had fun on that eight-hour interview day. As much fun as eight hours of scrutiny and answering the same questions over and over again could bring.
But, I remained apprehensive. Because I knew that I had a lot of big decisions ahead if I didn't get this position, and just as many or more if I did.
Could I pay rent or eat through the summer if I didn't get the job? Should I go groveling back to Carnegie Mellon, so that I could teach the required World History course for the 1997-98 school year? Could I pick up an adjunct gig at Pitt, Duquesne, or one of the other universities for next year, or what if it's already too late to reach out? Could I get help from Bruce Anthony Jones, or beyond my dissertation committee, people like Barbara Lazarus, in securing my future? These were the normal questions that an army of PhDs in fields like history faced every single year.
For me, though, the idea of being an assistant professor twelve miles from where I grew up and thirty blocks from one of the buildings I helped my alcoholic father clean made my brain twist in knots. Heck, Teachers College had put me up at the Hotel Beacon on Broadway, between 74th and 75th Street, just three blocks from a high-rise me, my older brother Darren, and my father had cleaned the carpets and floors of regularly between 1984 and 1986. Did I really want to go back to a place with so many bad and embarrassing memories?
Plus, it wasn't just my past I worried about. Living in subsidized faculty housing wasn't ideal for me and my soon-to-be-wife. My younger siblings could reach me by catching the 1 or 2 train, and with the recent fire at 616 and the trauma that had caused, their visits were likely to be a regular part of my routine. I had given Mom something like $5,000 in the three years before the possibility of this job, as a graduate student. As a professor, she would likely expect me to do so much more.
Charging Bull of Wall Street (or a false god), cropped, January 19, 2016. (Sam Valadi/Flickr, via http://www.atlasobscura.com/)
Looking back, if Teachers College had offered me the job and I'd of course taken it, I likely wouldn't have earned tenure. Oh, I would've been a fine classroom professor, and most of my students would've liked, loved, or learned from me. But between me having not dealt with my Mount Vernon/NY past, my Mom and siblings and family issues, and trying to turn my dissertation into a book and churn out academic pieces, I would've needed psychotherapy after three or six years. But Teachers College rejected me two months later. It supposedly came down to me and one other person.
This is what academia does to its own. With too few tenure-stream jobs and way too many qualified candidates, each job interview or job earned becomes magnified, to the point where taking a position can close as many doors as receiving a rejection for a job. Combine that with the false gods of meritocracy and academic freedom, and you have a recipe for a world of competitive disappointment. Academia is a world full highly educated people working for working-class wages but with elitist expectations of themselves and of those lucky few with tenure-stream positions. Add race, class, gender, family, and intersectionality to this brew, and it's a wonder more of us don't experience depression or some other mental illness.
I wouldn't have been able to write this twenty years ago, even if I subconsciously suspected or consciously knew this to be true. I was tempted by the brass ring, only to find it was really a rusty old nail bent to look like something valuable.
Boy @ The Window: A Memoir
Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window
There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/
There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:
Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/
Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1
Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567
You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:
RT @aurabogado: "she turns migrants magnificently back into people" What the fuck kind of racist shit is this 6 hours ago
@copeytwo @SenateGOP @senatemajldr It's hard to go lower than the Marianas Trench out in the middle of the Pacific,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 7 hours ago
@FeministaJones Well, I just made banana bread with walnuts today, blondies on Sunday, and fried chicken yesterday.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 7 hours ago
@michellebhasin There's plenty wrong with men to be sure. This is a whole 'nother level of wrong, tho! 10 hours ago
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Heldt Produce is a family operated business located in rural Ashland, Nebraska. Our location is in between Omaha and Lincoln, which helps to support timely and efficient distribution. Our products are all grown close to our facility to assure we have complete control over every aspect of the process- from field to distribution. This is how we make sure you get only the freshest produce possible.
So what makes Heldt Produce different? We don't sell anything we wouldn't be proud to put our name on. Our business was founded on quality products, honest people, and hard work. That's why it's still in the family today and will continue to be for generations to come.
In today's day and age, it's easy to lose sight of the important things in life and overlook the small details. At Heldt Produce, we pride ourselves on doing things right, even if it means putting in a little extra effort. The best quality produce comes from having employees that are dedicated, knowledgeable, and experienced. We care about our product and the value it will bring to our customers.


About New Kent Coatings, Inc.
New Kent Coatings is an industrial coatings/painting contractor that specializes in high performance coatings application in Power Generation Facilities, Paper Mills, Chemical Facilities, In-Ground and Elevated Potable Water Storage Tanks, Food Processing Facilities, Petroleum Storage Facilities and Waste Water Treatment Facilities. Our services include industrial cleaning, sandblasting, UHP Water Blasting, Dry-Ice Blasting, Lead Abatement, Floor coatings, Pool and containment coatings, concrete restoration, tank coatings and linings and structural steel coatings.
I started my business in February 2010, in the height of the recession. I took the Virginia Class A Contractor's exam, found a leased space, developed my logo and began marketing my business.
Over the previous 15 years of being in the painting industry, I saw a gap in the market where there was a tremendous need for a contractor that specialized and focused on industrial coatings. There were other companies that worked in this space, but most of them had a commercial or residential background and were not well versed in the intricacies of high-performance coatings that require an advanced understanding of rigorous engineering standards and safety protocols.
Many of my customers do not care about diversity, but some do. WBENC Certification has helped me gain access to large corporations and meet some incredible WBEs in our network. My clients' decision makers are typically maintenance engineers that are very difficult to access without a formal introduction. WBENC and WPEO have been the key to making these introductions through our corporate partners' supplier diversity programs.
Personal integrity and treating people fairly and with respect. I have not lost sight of the fact that my employees in the field are the backbone of my organization. I believe that is the key to any successful business.
Finding qualified employees and controlling growth. When well-rounded employees are not available, we cross-train those that have some of the skills we require. We have developed training programs that work to that end goal. On controlling growth, I never take on projects that we are not 100% ready to complete successfully. On numerous occasions I have turned down projects when manpower and/or deadlines were an issue. I would much rather not take on the project than fail, jeopardizing a relationship with a customer or potential future customer.
Another challenge has been starting a business as a woman in a non-traditional industry for women. When a person asks, "What does your business do?", I respond. The following questions are a very confused series of questions such as, "How did you get into that business?" and "What does your husband do in the business?" It is automatically assumed that my husband is involved. My husband is not involved in any way in my business. I believe that women go about business differently than men. We are organized, detail oriented, masters of multi-tasking and care deeply about our employees and their futures. Ultimately, once an opportunity is given and we deliver, the "woman-owned" stigma goes away. It is very gratifying to prove that women can succeed in a man's world.
Purchasing and renovating my business location in 2014 after the frustration of leasing inadequate space. By doing so, we also solidified New Kent Coatings' deep roots in our community and great growth potential.
Hire professionals: Make sure you have a good corporate attorney, a CPA, a strong banking relationship and set a solid business plan into action. Strategize continuously and know where you are going in an ever-changing business climate.
During my first year in business I wanted to do business in a local food processing facility. I did not have a contact at that company. I went on their website to do some research and saw a tab for "supplier diversity." I clicked on the tab and began filling out the profile. When I got to the diversity field, I indicated that I was a woman-owned business. The next field was asking me to upload my WBENC certificate. I had no idea what that was so I had to leave the registration page. I immediately researched WBENC Certification and applied.
SHOW UP, be yourself, and if it is your passion to help other WBEs, participate and help wherever you can. Let service above self be your priority and real opportunities for strong relationships will follow naturally.
Always be fair and honest with employees, vendors and clients. Don't assume you are right and others are wrong until you have all the facts. Handle business decisions unemotionally in most cases.
Research which corporate partners will be there and what services they are currently looking for. Once you identify the ones you have potential offerings for, research their business and their industry so that you can be fully prepared for an informed conversation when the opportunity presents itself.
SHOW UP, be yourself and be prepared for any conversational opportunity that presents itself with corporations and other WBEs. Network when appropriate; you never know where you will find your next opportunity.
Don't be overwhelmed by the number of people that are there. Have fun, be yourself and be prepared to represent your business with the passion and energy you have for it.


text:
<?php

namespace Omelet\Annotation;

use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader;
use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\PhpParser;

class AnnotationConverterAdapter
{
    /**
     * @var ReflectionClass
     */
    private $intf;

    /**
     * @var AnnotationReader
     */
    private $reader;
    /**
     * @var AnnotationConverter
     */
    private $converter;

    public function __construct(\ReflectionClass $intf)
    {
        $this->intf = $intf;

        $classParser = new PhpParser();
        $uses = array_merge($classParser->parseClass($this->intf), [$this->intf->getNamespaceName()]);

        $this->reader = new AnnotationReader($this->intf);
        $this->converter = new AnnotationConverter($uses);
    }

    /**
     * Collect method annotations.
     *
     * @param ReflectionMethod methodName
     *
     * @return DaoAnnotation[]
     */
    public function getMethodAnnotations(\ReflectionMethod $method)
    {
        return array_merge(
            $this->reader->getMethodAnnotations($method),
            $this->converter->getMethodAnnotations($method)
        );
    }

    /**
     * Collect property annotations.
     *
     * @param ReflectionProperty methodName
     *
     * @return EntityFieldAnnotation[]
     */
    public function getPropertyAnnotations(\ReflectionProperty $prop)
    {
        return array_merge(
            $this->reader->getPropertyAnnotations($prop),
            $this->converter->getPropertyAnnotations($prop)
        );
    }

    public function getClassAnnotations()
    {
        return $this->reader->getClassAnnotations($this->intf);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Nicole Asta
Nicole Asta has been living with epilepsy since before she applied for her first job. Diagnosed at age 12, she has yet to find a treatment that effectively controls her seizures; she currently takes seven medications to provide any control.
Epilepsy isn't something Nicole is afraid to talk about. She has been connected with Epilepsy Toronto for years, taking part in the Be Heard public education program when she was younger and helping to facilitate a panel discussion for parents of newly diagnosed children.
Despite being an intelligent, well-educated person, she has struggled to find work in her field, Human Resources, a struggle that epilepsy has only complicated. She finally connected with Epilepsy Toronto's employment team and began the process of doing an employment assessment and developing her job search skills.
"I wanted anything related to recruitment. I wanted to get into the recruitment field," she says. Nicole needed help developing the skills and contacts to land the job. Even simple things like Epilepsy Toronto's Job Developer reworking her resume made a big difference.
"It was magic," says Nicole. "He has the knowledge of how to do interviews properly, how to get someone on your side." She says the networking connections he offered made a big difference. After sending her frequent job postings and suggestions about potential employers, he connected Nicole with a contact at Scotiabank, just in time to apply for an available contract position.
"I was the last resume in and I got the position!" she says. The job has her developing a variety of tasks you would see in a recruitment department, and a chance to develop skills and job shadow for future opportunities. It has turned out to be a work environment that is highly supportive of the challenges of living with seizures.
Nicole has asked for, and received, a few straight-forward accommodations: shifting her work hours back to prevent sleep deprivation, using visual notes for instructions, and choosing a particular seat during meetings.
"I have seizures in rooms with lots of people, and it's hot and claustrophobic, so I go and check out the room ahead. If it's small I sit by the door in case I need to stay cool," she says.
She has a simple message for employers looking to hire someone with epilepsy.
"Don't be afraid of the possible challenges you may think that person has, because those challenges may not be as large as you think. Give them a chance".
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Had my 30-day injection of Lupron and within 24 hours experienced a total seizure with instant loss of consciousnesses, collapsed to the floor out cold. 9-1-1 call and ride to hospital.
Is this common, possible, unheard of?
I'm scheduled for another injection followed by daily radiation, but am freaked out I could have another seizure, a fatal one.
Am I an outliers or is this not uncommon for some?
The "specialists" treating me are puzzled at best and just tell me to make whatever decision I feel is appropriate.
And I'm in an HMO stuck with these docs.
Would Valium before and right after the injection prevent another seizure from Lupron?
Hi! I'm with a big HMO and it's difficult to get anyone to dig. But it's important to know as it can happen at any time without warning and the docs offer "that's rare" or "that's unusual" … but little else in the way of useful information.


The correct positioning of teeth has not only aesthetic relevance, but also influences the chewing, the mechanic protection of teeth and allows a better resistance to plaque.
The most common concern for patients regarding orthodontics is the uncomfortable feeling of having visible braces on teeth. However, in some cases, there are alternative solutions that can be useful for the patient, such as lingual orthodontics, in which the brackets are laid out behind teeth, or Invisalign, a transparent apparatus customizable to the patient used to correct slightly inaccurate disposition of dentures.
Dr. Samuel Pelcman is a well-known Buenos Aires cosmetic dentist who provides a number of leading-edge oral health treatments to patients throughout Argentina and the United States. Throughout his 35 years in dentistry, Dr. Pelcman has becoming known as a top Buenos Aires dental implants provider. In addition, he offers treatments such as teeth whitening, dentures, periodontal care and porcelain veneers in Argentina.


text:
INSTITUTION BUILDING
(-) Remove INSTITUTION BUILDING filter INSTITUTION BUILDING
Think Tank-University Relations in Africa
Think tanks and universities are important institutions with a key role to play in improving the lives of Africans by producing high-quality research that addresses Africa's policy challenges.
Global Think Tank Initiative Policy Engagement and Communications Program
Think tanks in developing countries aim to produce quality, evidence-based research to address the policy challenges faced by the countries or regions within which they operate.
Institutional Support : Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA)
REPOA is a well-established and well-managed independent policy research organization with a record of producing high-quality, policy-relevant research results. REPOA is experiencing rapid growth in the demand for its services.
Institutional Support : Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER)
The Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) is an established, semi-autonomous national policy research entity created in 1960.
Institutional Support : Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER)
The Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) established in 1969 is a semi-autonomous university-based research centre located at the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra.
Institutional Support : Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA-Kenya)
The Institute for Economic Affairs - Kenya (IEA-Kenya) was established in 1994 when the country was moving from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy.
Institutional Support : Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR)
The Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR), Kenya, is a 15-year-old research organization known as a reputable producer of high-quality, policy-relevant research that it disseminates in various forms.
Institutional Support : African Technology Policy Studies - Tanzania (ATPS-Tanzania)
African Technology Policy Studies - Tanzania (ATPS-Tanzania) was registered as a national nongovernmental organization in 2001. Previous to that (from 1984), it operated as the Tanzanian Chapter of the Africa-wide ATPS.
Institutional Support : Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)
In 2006 the Government of Kenya passed an Act of Parliament making the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) the government's lead socioeconomic research institute.


We work with entrepreneurs and forward-looking companies to transform ideas into products that HELP, CHALLENGE, and INSPIRE.
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This process is further fuelled by our integrated approach to strategy, design and development, which allows us to help deliver ideas from concept to launch, and beyond.
Not in a rush? Here's a bit more about who we are.
We pull it apart in search of all opportunities. We love good ol' blue sky thinking.
Somewhat curious? Here's a bit more about the uncommon way we work and what we do.
And here's some stuff that's worked.
Check out what we do, drop your brief below or get an instant quote.
Here are some of the folks we work with.


text:
China's Steel Makers Undercut Rivals as Trade Debate Intensifies
CARDIFF, Wales — With thunderous roars and flashes of blue light, an electric arc furnace at a steel mill in this industrial city melts 170 tons of scrap metal at a time, which is made into reinforcing bars for construction projects across Britain.
[Stanley Reed & Keith Bradsher| May 3, 2016 |The New York Times]
The furnace, decked out with all the latest gear, helps keep costs down by relying on local scrap instead of imported materials. It was part of a broad $500 million investment plan to make the steel mill competitive and profitable.
But China has stymied the strategy.
The steel mill, owned by the privately held Celsa Group of Spain, just cannot compete with Chinese rivals, which offered products at 20 percent below prevailing rates in Britain. Celsa estimates that Chinese companies at one point accounted for about half of the region's sales in a certain type of reinforcing bar, up from essentially nothing just four years ago.
"It's nice to have free trade, but it has to be fair," said Luis Sanz, the managing director for British operations at Celsa.
The steel industry sits at the crux of a major debate playing out across the world economy, one that could soon be intensified by a looming change in the global trade rules.
As China's economy has slowed, the country's manufacturers, in varied areas like solar panels, tires, aluminum and shoes, have been in a desperate hunt to maintain sales and avoid layoffs. Looking beyond their borders, many are offering rock-bottom prices to win orders.
The heavy discounting has fed a backlash. Politicians like the American presidential candidates Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders are railing against free trade, saying the rules hurt domestic workers. Countries are crying foul, claiming that Chinese exporters are dumping goods.
And the dynamics are getting more complicated, as a crucial provision of global trade rules expires in December.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the country was labeled a nonmarket economy, at the insistence of the United States and Europe. The technical designation makes it easier to prove that China is dumping goods in foreign markets, allowing countries to slap tariffs on those products. In March, the United States imposed a prohibitive 266 percent tariff on certain Chinese steel makers for selling below cost.
Calculating production costs in China is tricky. The true costs are often obscured by politically guided policies that benefit companies, including state-backed loans at below-market interest rates and free land for job-creating factories.
Given China's designation in the W.T.O., the United States, Europe and others can use a proxy country, a locale with a similar level of income and better data like Poland, Thailand or South Africa, to help determine production costs. The proxy countries often have higher costs than China, which has greater economies of scale.
China is beginning a global lobbying push to bar the use of proxy countries. Chinese ministers have been meeting with overseas leaders and with executives of businesses that sell to China. The country is calling for W.T.O. members to "acknowledge China's market economy status" and "to adopt the necessary measures as soon as possible," the commerce ministry said in a faxed response to questions.
But the rules are somewhat ambiguous, complicating China's efforts. The 2001 W.T.O. agreement explicitly authorizes the use of proxy countries through December in cases against China, but it is silent about what happens after that.
The Europeans and Americans are skeptical about whether China actually qualifies as a so-called market economy. In a market economy, supply and demand are the guiding forces. In China, the government also plays a major role, dictating investments, strategy, even when a plant can close.
China's policies have helped create extensive overcapacity. China makes 50 percent of the world's steel, 55 percent of its aluminum and 60 percent of its cement, even as its domestic demand has weakened.
"They're nowhere near a market economy, and it's delusional to think that they are," said Leo W. Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers Union.
The tensions have been palpable in steel.
Celsa and other Western steel manufacturers got clobbered by the global financial crisis that started in 2008, as demand sank and prices dropped. When the industry started to recover, they faced a growing competitive threat from China.
In the last three years, Chinese steel exports more than doubled to 107 million metric tons, higher than the annual raw steel production of the United States. Prices fell steeply, although they have perked up lately on speculation of renewed demand in China.
The result has been a shakeout in steel.
Celsa has not turned a profit in seven years. ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel maker, announced an annual loss of nearly $8 billion in February, blaming Chinese competition. Since the beginning of last year, United States Steel has cut 5,000 jobs and warned that thousands of others are at risk.
"Unfairly traded steel imports have reached historic levels in 2015 and 2016, taking almost 30 percent share of the domestic steel market," Doug Matthews, a U.S. Steel executive, testified in a government hearing last month.
China faces its own share of pain.
Hundreds of steel makers are limping along, overloaded with debt and battered by weak prices. The chairman of Dongbei Special Steel, a large Chinese company, hanged himself in March, days before the company began defaulting on loans.
The global downturn has created a political firestorm. In February, thousands of steelworkers marched in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, demanding protection from Chinese products.
The issue flared up again when Tata Steel announced plans to sell or close its money-losing business in Britain, prompting calls for an emergency session of Parliament. Tata has managed to find takers for some of its plants, but about 11,000 jobs in Britain remain at risk.


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1st April 2021, 12:22 PM #241
Originally Posted by Bob001
There were multiple crimes with multiple victims committed as part of a conspiracy over a period of years. And who are you to say that teenage girls weren't traumatized?
I feel sure many were seriously traumatised. By the same token, some are capable of sleeping with men for money and think nothing of it, especially of they are mixing with the wealthy and influential.
You think the death penalty is proportionate?
Why don't you answer the question you're asked, rather than responding with an unrelated one?
To remind you, you said:
How is 35 years on a par with the death sentence? To remind you, again, 35 years is the maximum, as is the death sentence. Please don't equivocate the maximum for one crime with the usual sentence for another, nor the maximum sentence for one crime in one country with that for a different crime in a different country.
Originally Posted by zooterkin
Whatevs.
theprestige
Location: The Antimemetics Division
I feel sure many were seriously traumatised.
Pretty much everyone feels sure about this. Hence the widespread approval of her life sentence. What's weird is you feeling sure that Gislaine Maxwell seriously traumatized many children, but don't like the sentence she's received.
What's doubly weird is that you think her sentence should be more lenient because maybe some of her victims escaped relatively unscathed. Like, she should get some kind of reward for failing to seriously traumatize all of her victims. Your position is morally perverse.
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Originally Posted by theprestige
I did not say the sentence should be lenient. Here in Europe it is considered twelve years is enough for murder, with parole after 2/3rds.
Just trying to get it into perspective. The way they hurt a criminal here is by awarding their victim compensation from them.
JoeMorgue
Maxwell ran a rape ring.
What ******* "perspective" do you think we need to keep?
"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong.
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RecoveringYuppy
Here are some numbers.
https://bflawmd.com/average-maximum-...common-crimes/
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-a...ntencing-rates
To me it seems accurate to claim that 35 years is on par with a murder sentence. No, it's not identical but I don't think the phrase "on par" requires exactly identical. And 35 years for a murder doesn't appear to be "the usual sentence". In fact for the state I happened to find data for at the link above it's greater than the maximum for 2nd degree murder.
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue
Europe is better. Europe produced her; Europe knows best how to deal with her. The American Child Rape Impresario, Jeffrey Epstein, should get a quintessentially American outcome: death in solitary confinement under suspicious circumstances. But the European Child Rape Impresario should get a European outcome: 12 years in a country club for wayward socialites, parole after 8, and maybe pay some reparations.
Hold on.
How did we get widespread approval of a life sentence "she's received" before she was even tried?
I, uh, was speaking hypothetically. Yeah. That's the ticket.
Actually I botched my timeline in a fit of inexcusable carelessness. Sorry 'bout that!
Let's just note that she hasn't received any sentence. She hasn't been convicted of anything. But the charges keep piling up.
Ninja'd.
Because theprestige is a time traveller from the future, he's secretly John Titor!
Hey, Mr Prestige, have you found that IBM 5100 you're looking for yet?
Last edited by smartcooky; 1st April 2021 at 02:10 PM.
I wioll haven finded it yestermorrow.
Actually this explains Epstein's death. He was actually murdered somewhere else, in the future, and then they backtimed his body. Their goal was to avoid exposure as his co-conspirators, by erasing the whole timeline where he lived to go to trial, and ratted them out in a plea bargain.
2nd April 2021, 12:32 AM #256
It is probably true that someone used to a sheltered life would find prison far tougher than someone used to the rough and ready. Just being locked up for one day would be torture alone. In the UK so called 'white-collar' criminals are more likely to be sent to a soft open prison. They are also a target for other prisoners. Especially if they were once a policeman or something hated by the criminal classes. Maxwell would be seen as a 'nonce' and would need heavy protection.
LondonJohn
And as I've already explained, you don't actually understand the sentencing structures/guidelines "here in Europe" properly in any case... quite apart from it being irrelevant to compare apples from one country with oranges from another.
(As just one hint: a murder sentence of "life, with a minimum of 12 years" - which you've misunderstood to be "a 12-year sentence" - does not mean that the person is out on parole after 2/3 of those 12 years. It doesn't even mean that the person is first considered for parole after 2/3 of those 12 years. It means that the person is first considered for parole after 12 years. And even when the person does get parole - which might be after 12 years of imprisonment, or might be after 16 years, or might be after 40 years - their life sentence means that they are closely monitored and evaluated for the remainder of their life on Earth; if the monitoring authorities determine that the person has gone back to posing a risk to the public, the person can be returned to prison, irrespective of whether they actually commit any further offences.)
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Originally Posted by LondonJohn
We have similar sentencing here, for example, Scott Watson, who was found guilty of double murder in 1999 (he didn't do it, but that is another story - link to thread if anyone is interested) and was sentenced to life with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years. That takes it to 2016, but five years later, he's still in jail, having been refused parole three times because he maintains his innocence.
Last edited by smartcooky; 2nd April 2021 at 03:47 AM.
Someone make this nonsense stop. Please.
The term "white-collar criminals" refers solely and exclusively to the type of crime for which the person has been convicted and sentenced. It does not refer to the demographic status of the person who committed the crime. A person attracts the label "white-collar criminal" only on account of that person having committed a "white-collar crime". Not the other way round.
So-called "white-collar crimes" are loosely defined as crimes which involve no physical violence, no threatening or sexual behaviour, no intimidation etc. So, for example, credit card fraud is a white-collar crime; while bank robbery is not.
And it almost goes without saying that those who are convicted of white-collar crimes are typically housed in less restrictive, less secure conditions than those who've been convicted of those crimes which are not white-collar in their nature. I would hope that it wouldn't be difficult to understand why that should be the case.
We have similar sentencing here, for example, Scott Watson, who was found guilty of double murder in 1999 (he didn't do it, but that is another story) and was sentenced to life with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years. That takes it to 2016, but five years later, he's still in jail, having been refused parole three times because he maintains his innocence.
Yes. And indeed, this is one of those more-than-unfortunate Catch-22 problems: those criminals who believe they've been wrongfully convicted will (almost by definition) a) protest their innocence, and b) find it effectively impossible to accept that they did wrong. And that, in turn, means that it will be much more difficult - in some instances impossible - for them to get released from prison, even after the minimum determinate sentence of imprisonment has been reached.
There are a few sad examples of people who have refused to "come to terms" with their crimes, which has directly resulted in them being repeatedly denied parole long after their minimum prison sentence has been exceeded - but then ultimately they've been exonerated on appeal.
I was referring to mainland EUROPE (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany), NOT the UK which has a different system of law anyway.
In Finland - which is the same inquisitorial/tribunal-style criminal justice system as Germany - it is an enshrined right for a criminal to be released after two thirds. You saw with Christian Brückner's case (McCann prosecutors), the state had to go to court to stop his release 2/3 of the way through. Likewise, Norway had to do this with Brevik after his time was up (just 12 years, but they have managed to keep him banged up).
They idea of 'showing remorse' is pretty much old hat even in the UK. Good behaviour is enough and you are out on parole.
Firstly, you simply referred to "here in Europe" - as opposed to the USA. If you'd meant "mainland Europe" (or, even more specifically, your own special definition of mainland Europe, headed by Finland Sweden and Norway... ), you should have made that clear up-front.
And secondly, Wikipedia seems to be under the impression that in Germany, for example, the mandatory sentence for murder is life imprisonment, with a minimum incarceration period of 15 years before any parole application can be made. It further notes that the "usual" minimum incarceration period is 18 years, with the more serious cases requiring 23 years inside before parole can be applied for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder...0(%C2%A7%20211).
So, y'know.....
No, many of these 'white-collar' criminals (Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken, etc) have committed serious crimes. You can't just brush it off as 'credit card fraud'. This was serious corruption. Compare and contrast to some burglar making off with a flat screen tv.
And it is true, 'white collar' criminals are often middle-class or even upper class.
Ghislaine Maxwell procured teenage girls for Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them returned time and again for the money, when they could easily have desisted or gone to the police. They even recruited their friends to join in. However, of course, these girls are rightly protected by law. There was a time when being 'talent spotted' was considered flattering. Naomi Campbell was approached by a model talent spotter in the street. So, when Maxwell approached young women in public places inviting them to join the Les Wexnar (_sp?) and Epstein's various 'model agencies', many of them would have jumped at the chance, likewise going to celebrity packed parties int he hope of bagging a rich guy. Let's face it, Trump met Melania through his model/escort agency. Whilst it is damaging for young teenage girls to be procured as prostitutes, for many it was a quite voluntarily particapation. Becuase they were underage, this is the only reason it is illegal, not that they were necessarily harmed. There is quite fine line here between prostitution and trophy 'footballers wives and girlfriends' (WAG's): for him, a rich handsome athlete on £30,000 per week and her a plastic bimbo with the whole works - boob jobs, botox, hair extensions - whose only ambition is to marry a rich guy who can provide her with a luxurious home, exotic holidays, jewels, clothes, no need to work, cleaning ladies, nannies, etc. This is what many of the girls procured by Maxwell (and Guiffre, let it be said) were attracted by: they had overseas university courses paid for by Epstein in return for 'massage' sessions, holidays on his Caribbean island, Texas ranch and wild parties with famous politicians, rock stars, films stars and top scientists. So to equate it with the crimes of the lower classes or murder is ridiculous. Sure, it is rightly illegal to run prostitution rings, but let's keep perspective.
Did you miss this excerpt out?
The penalty for Totschlag (intentional homicide, otherwise) is five to fifteen years in prison and in especially grave cases life imprisonment (minimum sentence 15 years). Life sentences for Totschlag are rare as such an offence would typically qualify as Mord (§ 211).
IOW 'especially grave' is vanishingly rare.
I'll try again:
If a society aristocrat is convicted of (say) murdering his wife, I can give you a 100% assurance that
a) this does not count as an instance of a "white-collar crime" (and nor is the perpetrator a "white-collar criminal"), and
2) the perpetrator will be being sent to exactly the same type of medium-high-security prison as (and might end up sharing his cell with) an illiterate sheet-metal worker who was convicted of murdering his own wife.
What has white collar crimes got to do with this case? Her crimes were not "white collar' crimes.
Arcade22
Originally Posted by RecoveringYuppy
It's accurate to say that, internationally speaking, an effective prison sentence of 15-20 years or longer is the equivalent of life imprisonment or the death penalty.
Note that this is the effective prison sentence, not the notional one where people are sentenced to X years in prison yet are released after having served only half of that.
We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr
And no, Cuba is not a brutal and corrupt dictatorship, and it's definitely less so than Sweden. - dann
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What is being argued? Yes courts aren't psychic so don't know how long anyone is going to live. We get it.
You've not read - and/or understood - it properly.
"Totschlag" is the equivalent to "manslaughter".
And, as the article points out (but which you further misunderstand). the reason why it's rare for a conviction for "totschlag" (manslaughter) to carry a life sentence is because if the crime was that grave, it would usually qualify as murder ("mord").
I suggest you read it through again, perhaps.
Originally Posted by Arcade22
That needs some explanation before I would agree it's accurate. It would appear to be the exact opposite of accurate.
Are you trying to say that those sentences would be the "analog" rather than the "equivalent"? Is this a correct paraphrase of what you are trying to say: In Europe a person would face 15-20 years for a crime that would get life or death in the US?
2nd April 2021, 12:32 PM #272
Erratum: I was wrong about Breivik: he received a 21-year sentence. However, this is not standard (bear in mind he killed 77 people, most of them young people and injured a further 300).
(Puts Maxwell's possible 35-year sentence into perspective, eh?)
The maximum determinate penalty (civilian penal code) is 21 years' imprisonment, but only a small percentage of prisoners serve more than 14 years. Prisoners will typically get unsupervised parole for weekends after serving a third of their sentence (a maximum of 7 years) and can receive early release after serving two thirds of their sentence (a maximum of 14 years). In 2008, to fulfill its requirements under the Rome Statute, Norway created a new maximal penalty of 30 years for crimes against humanity.[1]
What I was thinking of is that Norway has to apply for a renewal of Breivik;s sentencing every so often, or he'd be out on parole at the 14-year 'maximum' mark.
The indeterminate penalty (civilian penal code), called "preventive detention" (Norwegian: forvaring), is set at up to 21 years' imprisonment, with no eligibility for parole for a time period not exceeding 14 years. If the prisoner is still considered dangerous after serving the original sentence, the detention can be extended by five years at a time. Renewal of the detention every five years can in theory result in actual life imprisonment. Preventive detention is used when the prisoner is deemed a danger to society and there is a great chance of them committing violent crimes in the future.[2] However, after the minimum time period has elapsed, the offender can petition for parole once every year, and this may be granted if it is determined that they are no longer a danger to society.
She is not that different from Cynthia Payne, who was considered middle-class and was out of prison in four months.
Payne first came to national attention in 1978 when police raided her home while a sex party was in progress. Men paid with luncheon vouchers to dress up in lingerie and be spanked by young women.[4] Police found 53 men at her residence, in varying levels of undress, which included "a peer of the realm, an MP, a number of solicitors and company directors and several vicars". A cartoon in the press at the time, according to Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times, "showed a vicar in bed with a prostitute, confronted by a policeman. 'I demand to see my solicitor,' said the vicar, 'who is in the next bedroom.'"[5]
When the case came to trial in 1980, Payne was sentenced to 18 months in prison, reduced to a fine and six months on appeal.[6] She served four months in Holloway prison.[4]
Why aren't Maxwell's johns being prosecuted? They were the ones demanding teenage girls at the parties and presumably demanding and paying for them?
She was out of prison in four months not because of her class, but she was facilitating prostitution between consenting adults. That's a fairly minor crime, compared to sex trafficking children.
Your sense of proportion is wildly inhuman.
Why aren't Maxwell's johns being prosecuted?
Probably because she hasn't implicated any johns yet.
They were the ones demanding teenage girls at the parties and presumably demanding and paying for them?
And they should be prosecuted, too. But that has nothing to do with prosecuting Maxwell for her own involvement in child sex trafficking.
Why are you so opposed to prosecuting Maxwell for child sex trafficking?
No one is opposing prosecuting Maxwell.
Thank you, Samson.
'Child Sex Trafficking' sounds very grand and very serious.
Yet, the underage girls were between 14 - 17, so hardly 'children' except per age of consent law.
Yes, prosecute her for her crimes but let's not carried away!
There is a propensity on this sub forum for piling on to anyone who sees a nuance in alleged offending and thus be subtly accused of complicity.
Yep, it sure does, but not in the way you are thinking
It shows that Norway's criminal sentencing is wholly inadequate to deal with a crime of that magnitude. Breivik should have got life with no possibility of parole.... ever!
I generally oppose the death sentence, but I would have no problem with its use for such an individual.
Reprehensible - you're stating a position that amounts to apologism for statutory rape... even if that is not what you meant
Prosecute her, and if found guilty, sentence her to very, very long time in jail.
3rd April 2021, 01:03 AM #280
What has this got to do with the non-white collar crimes that Maxwell is on trial for?


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