Friday, June 17, 2022

17: France, Tulsa



Musk's Twitter meeting bumps shares answer pre-submitted employee questions for about an hour at the virtual meeting — anticipation of which sent Twitter shares up 5%.



Artificial Intelligence is the future & the future is here!



Something Extraordinary Is Happening in France After the first round of the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, the biggest challenge to Mr. Macron’s power comes not from the right but from the left. ............ For the first time since 1997, France’s major left-wing parties put aside their differences and ran a single slate of candidates. The coalition, known as NUPES, for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, soared last week. By securing 26 percent of the vote, earning a virtual tie with Mr. Macron’s coalition, it has an outside chance of winning an outright majority in the National Assembly after the second round of voting this Sunday. Even if that proves out of reach, the left — under a shared banner — will become the major opposition force in Parliament. ............. bringing renewed focus to issues like funding for public services, the fight against climate change and tax justice ........ By striking against France’s highly personalized presidential system and the European Union’s commitment to fiscal rectitude, the coalition could shake up politics in the country and across the continent. It is, quietly, an extraordinary development. ........... Shrewdness and an instinct for self-preservation are two of the biggest factors making unity possible. ........... especially among low-income voters and young people. If these groups do deliver a majority to NUPES, the effects would be truly seismic. .......... The finance minister has likened Mr. Mélenchon to a “Gallic Chavez” who would “collectivize” the economy and bankrupt France, while a leading lawmaker from Mr. Macron’s party has warned of a “return to the Soviet era.” The chief of France’s top business lobby has said Mr. Mélenchon risks pushing the country “to the brink.” ........ The coalition’s two signature economic policy proposals — a hike in the minimum wage to 1,500 euros, or about $1,560, a month and a cap on the prices of essential goods — are modest measures at a time of rapidly rising inflation. .......... Plans to raise taxes on the superrich and boost investment in schools, hospitals and transport networks contrast with Mr. Macron’s embrace of the private sector, it’s true. Yet these are popular, standard-fare progressive policies in Europe. The alliance’s bold climate proposals — a five-year €200 billion, or nearly $209 billion, green investment plan driven by the principle of “ecological planning” — have led the ecology minister to accuse NUPES of “playing on young people’s fears.” But it’s hard to see the plans as anything other than an attempt to tackle the climate crisis head-on. The costs of inaction would be much greater, anyhow. ........... An empowered left in one of the world’s most influential countries would have ripple effects abroad. It would be a source of inspiration for ideologically similar parties in Europe, which have struggled to contest for power since the heydays of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. What’s more, a French government willing to push back forcefully against the European Union’s restrictions on public spending and state intervention in the economy could encourage Brussels to evolve. ......... The coalition is calling for the creation of a Sixth Republic that would rein in presidential power and return France to a more standard parliamentary regime — and the first-round results show a big chunk of the electorate agrees. .......... In a country as complex, large and diverse as theirs, a political system designed to concentrate authority in the hands of a single head of state maybe isn’t the best way of reflecting popular will. And perhaps, after 64 years, it’s time to try something new.



Tom Hanks Explains It All Hanks has gradually become an avatar of American goodness. Over the course of his long career, he has found clever ways to convey a fundamental and aspirational decency. He has played honorable men on society’s then-margins (the discriminated-against gay lawyer of “Philadelphia”) and at the center of our history (“Forrest Gump”; “Apollo 13”). At other times, he has found ways to imbue with can-do optimism characters who are caught in the middle of seemingly unbearable situations, whether they’re alone (“Cast Away”) or surrounded by enemies (“Saving Private Ryan”). Such is the malleability of his gift that he has created trustworthy portraits of real-life characters (the heroic airline and cargo-ship captains of, respectively, “Sully” and “Captain Phillips”), cartoons (Woody the cowboy from the “Toy Story” films) and real-life characters who easily could have come off like cartoons (as Fred Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”). .......... Tom Parker was a Dutch guy who passed himself off as a Southern colonel. Despite his claims to the contrary, Parker was no colonel, nor was he even an American. Parker was Dutch native whose birth name was Andreas van Kuijk. Elvis was a poor kid from Tupelo who turned himself into a superhero. Both were careful to present very specific versions of themselves to the public. ........... Elvis dressed the way he dressed because he had to. He felt he looked good. Onstage, he wasn’t wiggling to say, “Hey, time to turn on the sex appeal.” It was instinct. ........ his hair and clothes and the music he loved was the secret sauce for Elvis. ......... I was not an overnight sensation. I had been in movies for a long time until I had enough opportunities and experience to realize that I don’t have to say yes to everything just because they’re offering me the gig. ............ So then you hold out for something that represents more of the artist you want to be. ......... The other thing that happened in the ’90s was when Richard Lovett Hanks’s longtime agent and now a co-chairman of the C.A.A. talent agency. at C.A.A. said, “What do you want to do?” No one had asked me that question, either. People always said: “What do you want to do with this opportunity?” But what do you want to do? I said I’d like to make a movie about Apollo 13. ......... There’s movies that simply don’t work, and if something not working is debilitating to you, you’re toast. ............ You can say, “Where was the Colonel when Elvis was having drug problems?” The Colonel would argue that what I was doing was protecting my boy’s reputation as the world’s greatest performer. You will give him what he needs, and he will get up and sing enough so the audience will have what they want and Elvis will not be put in a position where he’s some rock ’n’ roll junkie — because he’s Elvis [expletive] Presley. ............. At the end of the day, the only people who care about your image in a movie is the marketing department. ........... [Laughs.] OK, what else can I explain for you? .......... I have a particular cinematic countenance that I carry into any movie, the same way that De Niro carries a malevolence into every role that he plays. There can be new ways to explore what that means. For example, when Clint Eastwood said, “You want to be Sully?” I said to him, “I’ve sort of played that role before,” and he said, “Yeah, you have.” I took that as a challenge. It’s like he was saying there’s still an unplumbed thing. ................. Mr. Bruce Springsteen said his rock-and-roll show is like going to church. Provided that what he does in the big shows is give you six songs in a row that are Bruce Springsteen at his absolute E-Street Bandiest. After that he takes you anywhere he wants. It’s not exactly the same with movies, but the audience expects a thing from my name up there. I’m not saying they come in expecting something specific, but they’re going to trust me in making my choice to do the movie in the first place. ........ What is worse than going to a movie and coming out and saying, “Coulda seen that on a plane”? ............ “Back in my day.” Those days were [expletive] up! “Oh, the ’50s were this carefree time.” Excuse me, no, they were not. How come things aren’t the way they were? You mean when you were comfortable? Institutions were gaming the system in order to maintain the status quo! That has always been the case except for when some redefinition of our institutions comes along out of a public outcry because the status quo isn’t fair. .............. World War II: The Nazis were defeated, as was a Japanese empire, because enough good people said no. Civil rights came about because of, I think, an American belief that our responsibility as citizens is to work toward making a more perfect union. I don’t know if I’m answering your question but “There’s Hanks, he’s got a nostalgia for the way America used to be”: No. I have a fascination with the progress that America has made in all these incremental moments. That is an American sense of what is right and what is wrong. What I don’t do, if I can continue on, I’m not cynical. Cynicism is a default position in an awful lot of entertainment. How many knockoff versions of “Chinatown” have you seen? Eight million. The conflict of cynicism is glamorous, gorgeous. Violence is glamorous and gorgeous. But it’s cynical, and I’m not a cynic. ............. “The Da Vinci Code” was hooey. I mean, Dan Brown, God bless him, says, Here is a sculpture in a place in Paris! No, it’s way over there. See how a cross is formed on a map? Well, it’s sort of a cross. Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage. But they’re as cynical as a crossword puzzle. All we were doing is promising a diversion. .............. Let me tell you something else about “The Da Vinci Code.” It was my 40th-something birthday. We were shooting in the Louvre at night. I changed my pants in front of the Mona Lisa! They brought me a birthday cake in the Grand Salon! Who gets to have that experience? ........ But at the end, they’re old, they’re infirm, and they just sat and held hands at some restaurant, weeping. Forgive me if I’m telling you too much about the movie we never made. ......... I consider myself a student, I read history for pleasure,

and when I found out about Tulsa, the question I had was, Why had I not heard about Tulsa?

Quite frankly, that led into a personal enlightenment. ............. your American-history projects almost always offer some redeeming idea about the country’s values and its people’s character. ........... So you’re going to see Black people. You’re going to see these young kids who are just like their white counterparts, the same exact kind of prisoners of war, knowing that when they get home, the land they come from is institutionally racist. ........ we had an opportunity in “Masters of the Air” to show segregated pilots, in the same prisoner-of-war camp as everybody else, and it’s the truth. If you don’t see that, if you don’t learn about Tulsa, that is saying you’re going to keep this rosy-eyed idea of the past. .......... a certain administration came down the pike, and the people who were screaming seemed to rule the day. Why? Because the people who cared about what’s right didn’t show up. ....... technology has shifted so that truth has no currency. That is only going to be altered when enough people say, “[Expletive] that, I’m not going to pay any attention to social media ever again.” ......... I stopped posting because, number one, I thought it was an empty exercise. I have enough attention on me. But also I’d post something goofy like, “Here’s a pair of shoes I saw in the middle of the street,” and the third comment would be, “[Expletive] you, Hanks.” I don’t know if I want to give that guy the forum. If the third comment is “[Expletive] you, you Obama-loving communist,” it’s like, I don’t need to do that. ...........

The problem with “Forrest Gump” is it made a billion dollars.

......... there’s books of the greatest movies of all time, and “Forrest Gump” doesn’t appear because, oh, it’s this sappy nostalgia fest. Every year there’s an article that goes, “The Movie That Should Have Won Best Picture” and it’s always “Pulp Fiction.” ........... understand all they had been through and feel gratitude for every ounce of pain and tragedy that they survived....... I wanted to do extraordinary work, but I also wanted to not be carrying the economic burden of another bigass movie. Because as soon as you carry one of those and it tanks, you’re in the doghouse for a while. It’s that old story: “Get me Tom Hanks. Get me the next Tom Hanks. Get me the young Tom Hanks. Who’s Tom Hanks?” But that’s the business. You can’t change that. ............ I’ll be 66 in July, and I’ve been acting for a paycheck since I was 20. Forty-six years and I now know what was evident when I was 20 years old is what Spencer Tracy said ...... Tracy is one of many performers who have been credited with offering versions of this advice to aspiring actors: “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” .......

“Learn the lines. Hit the marks. Tell the truth.”

That’s all you can do.

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Tom Hanks: You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre “Do you know that the Erie Canal is the reason Manhattan became the economic center of America?” ........... Did you know our second president once defended in court British soldiers who fired on and killed colonial Bostonians — and got most of them off? ......... By my recollection, four years of my education included studying American history. Fifth and eighth grades, two semesters in high school, three quarters at a community college. Since then, I’ve read history for pleasure and watched documentary films as a first option. ........... Many of those works and those textbooks were about white people and white history. The few Black figures — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were those who accomplished much in spite of slavery, segregation and institutional injustices in American society. ............. in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla. ........... I knew about the attack on Fort Sumter, Custer’s last stand and Pearl Harbor but did not know of the Tulsa massacre until last year .............. anti-Black violence on large and small scales, especially between the end of Reconstruction and the victories of the civil rights movement; there was nothing on the Slocum massacre of Black residents in Texas by an all-white mob in 1910 or the Red Summer of white supremacist terrorism in 1919. Many students like me were told that the lynching of Black Americans was tragic but not that these public murders were commonplace and often lauded by local papers and law enforcement. ........... For a white kid living in the white neighborhoods of Oakland, Calif., my city in the 1960s and ’70s looked integrated and diverse but often felt tense and polarized, as was evident on many an AC Transit bus. The division between white America and Black America seemed to be as solid as any international boundary even in one of the most integrated cities in the nation. Bret Harte Junior High and Skyline High School had Asian, Latino and Black students, but those schools were mostly white. This did not seem to be the case in the other public high schools in town. ........... The issues were myriad, the solutions theoretical, the lessons few, the headlines continuous. ......... placing white feelings over Black experience — literally Black lives in this case. ........... When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring. And teach the truth to the white descendants of those in the mob that destroyed Black Wall Street. .............. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people. 1921 is the truth, a portal to our shared, paradoxical history. An American Black Wall Street was not allowed to exist, was burned to ashes; more than 20 years later, World War II was won despite institutionalized racial segregation; more than 20 years after that, the Apollo missions put 12 men on the moon while others were struggling to vote, and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers showed the extent of our elected officials’ willingness to systemically lie to us. Each of these lessons chronicles our quest to live up to the promise of our land, to tell truths that, in America, are meant to be held as self-evident.



The Gerontocracy of the Democratic Party Doesn’t Understand That We’re at the Brink What’s missing from party leaders, an absence that is endlessly frustrating to younger liberals, is any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink. Despite mounting threats to the right to vote, the right to an abortion and the ability of the federal government to act proactively in the public interest, senior Democrats continue to act as if American politics is back to business as usual. .......... “Thank you for being my friend,” Biden said to a man who is almost singularly responsible for the destruction of the Senate as a functional lawmaking body and whose chief accomplishment in public life is the creation of a far-right Supreme Court majority that is now poised to roll American jurisprudence back to the 19th century. ........... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is similarly enamored of this rhetoric of bipartisan comity in the face of a Republican Party whose members are caught in the grip of a cult of personality marked by conspiratorial thinking and an open contempt for electoral democracy. ........ American politics since then has reverted to an earlier state of heightened division, partisanship and fierce electoral competition. Even the authoritarianism on display in the Republican Party has antecedents in the behavior of Southern political elites at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

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