I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.
I think the Republican Party has taken the myth of rightful Christian dominance over Native Americans and the rights of Christian property owners (slave owning aristocrats of the American South) as far as it can go in a democracy.
The Koch Party better known as the Republican Party wants to bring back the wealthy white people property rights (corporations with human rights) of the antebellum Southern aristocratic slave owners and the myth of the American West.
The “Winged Monkeys” in the “Wizard of Oz” represent Native Americans.
The “Wicked Witch of the West” represents the American West.
The cyclone represents the “political revolution that would transform the drab country into a land of color and unlimited prosperity.”
And the GOP is dissolving into a black puddle.
"Taylor also claimed a sort of iconography for the cyclone: it was used in the 1890s as a metaphor for a political revolution that would transform the drab country into a land of color and unlimited prosperity. It was also used by editorial cartoonists of the 1890s to represent political upheaval.[10]
Dorothy would represent the goodness and innocence of human kind.
Other putative allegorical devices of the book include the Wicked Witch of the West as a figure for the actual American West; if this is true, then the Winged Monkeys could represent another western danger:
Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The King of the Winged Monkeys tells Dorothy, "Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. ... This was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land."[9]"
"HBO will drop all seven episodes of "Mare of Easttown," a limited detective series starring Kate Winslet, on April 18 at 10 p.m.
Winslet reportedly swapped her natural British accent for a Delaware County one, though the show portrays her as a small town detective living in nearby Easttown Township, Chester County."
Former Coatesville City Council member Ingrid Jones grew up as the 1st baby girl in decades among a family of boys in Black entrepreneur Percy Sutton's family from Texas.
As an infant she sat on her uncle Percy Sutton's shoulders and was passed among the boys and men in the Sutton family as Italian women pass baby boys around the dinner table.
Ing sat in front of Bill and Hillary Clinton at Percy Suttons funeral:
"They filed one after another into Riverside Church, mayors and governors and renowned preachers and musicians, all come to pay their respects to that most unusual product of our nation’s history, a man who became father to modern Harlem and godfather to generations of black politicians.
Percy Ellis Sutton, who died last month at age 89, never rose higher than Manhattan borough president, an office he held for 11 years. But in a more racially enlightened age, speaker after speaker noted in eulogies on Wednesday, this stylish and gifted politician well might have been commemorated as a former mayor or governor.
“I’m a proud son of this city, and Percy Sutton was a father to so many,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told an audience that filled every seat in every pew on the grand floor and balconies.
Mr. Holder pointed, jabbed really, at Mr. Sutton’s cherry-oak coffin, which lay garlanded in purple flowers. “Without him, there would be no me.”
For three hours on this cold winter day, Riverside Church, with its soaring gothic reaches, became the Westminster Abbey of black political royalty: Gov. David A. Paterson, Representative Charles B. Rangel, former Mayor David N. Dinkins, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and a host of City Council and Assembly representatives. More than a few white notables mixed among them, from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to Senator Charles E. Schumer and former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. They exchanged confidences and laughs and bowed to a master of their game."
Ingrid is very well connected. She has an extremely low profile in Coatesville.
When Richard Legree was chair of Area 14 of the Chester County Republican Committee and Ingrid ran for District Justice he told people Ingrid was “Not Black enough.” So, in Richie’s mind it looks like being from a pioneering NAACP family that became billionaires in legal businesses makes you not Black.
Ingrid is a former member of the Coatesville NAACP. She discovered the leaders of the Coatesville NAACP were allegedly using NAACP trips to shack up with girlfriends. The Sutton family cut off funds to the Coatesville NAACP.
“I evaluate leaders by saying how many people voted for you. Another way that you can vote for a person is to join with that person in protest…Change does not come except for aggressive approaches. The way you get followers is to run for public office and win or to put your purposes before the public and have the public come to you and support you in those purposes” Percy Sutton:
Whereas Percy Sutton served his country in World War II as an intelligence
officer with the Tuskegee Airmen, who overcame prejudice and doubts
about their skills and bravery to perform heroically as the first
Our Pennsylvania zoning laws are car based. They are designed for suburban living connected by interstate roads (that often cut cities in half), to shopping centers, commercial business parks & industrial centers, BUT:
"Last summer, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, co-bylined an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promising to “protect America’s suburbs," describing how they reversed policies that would allow for the creation of denser living structures in areas zoned only for single-family homes.
"America’s suburbs are a shining example of the American Dream, where people can live in their own homes, in safe, pleasant neighborhoods," they wrote.
But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties...
You argue that many of these suburban forms are obsolete today because they don't fit the needs of the people who live there now. Can you walk me through some of the major demographic changes that have led to these suburban forms becoming obsolete?
EDJ: One of the biggest shifts is that the U.S. now is a majority of one to two person households. And yet, the majority of land within regional urban boundaries is zoned for single-family houses. That already is something of a mismatch.
The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units.
Plus you have the aging of the society, that's the other really big piece. Especially in the suburbs, a lot of elderly people loved their single-family house while they were raising the kids. But now that they're empty nesters and retiring, it's kind of lonely. They want to stay in their community with doctors and friends nearby. But a lot of them are looking for, frankly, a more urban lifestyle.
It's pretty interesting how the desires of both the younger millennials, Gen Z, and a lot of those aging boomers are converging on an interest in more walkable, mixed-use, compact urban places out in the burbs.
JW: Commuting has also been transformed dramatically over the past decade or so, too. The notion that people live in the suburbs and work in the cities just isn't true anymore…."
“I was really struck by the statistics in the book about how many parking spaces there are per household in certain cities. Like how there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. These all seem like really obvious places to re-think about how we're using land.
JW: These choices around parking we've made have been codified through regulations and naturalized as normal.
EDJ: We really have made it almost a right to park as opposed to a right to housing. Cars have much more protection than people do.
There are these aging properties for the most part; a lot of them have become obsolete and those are places to retrofit. But sometimes [properties] are thriving. They're doing well. Yet they still look at their parking lot as this underperforming asphalt. It's not doing enough of the job. Sometimes there's a mall that is doing well, and it makes more sense now to build a parking deck and build housing and bring in offices and make more mixed use."
Several years ago at a municipal training meeting I spoke to a West Whiteland Township Supervisor about Main Street at Exton. I said something like, “You’ve got Main Street, you need a town to go around it. She said, “We’re working on it.
SEE "Exton the Crossroads of Chester County" below to see what they did.
"All of these: the parking lots, the dead space, the vacant spaces. Those are the opportunities for the suburbs to finally address really urgent challenges of equity, climate change, and health.
You’ve been documenting retrofitting since 2011, when your first book came out, and now this second book includes even more case studies. Is the retrofitting phenomenon increasing, or does it need a push?
EDJ: If you go into any architecture school or city planning school's library, there are tons of books on downtowns. There's remarkably little written about the suburbs or suburbia. Most of what is there are sort of condemning them as wasteful and ecological boring places.
We're academics, we're documenting this stuff, but we're not exactly neutral. We are advocates. We're advocates within our disciplines to to sort of say, hey, we really need to bring design to the suburbs
There's so much opportunity. It is where most Americans live. We saw a lot of these projects happening and noticed that none of the architecture magazines would cover them because they weren't cool looking enough."
We considered moving to a garden style apartment complex a few decades ago. It was located near interstate roads connecting to municipal centers & job possibilities. Shopping was a 10 minute drive. We looked but it was miles from transit & train lines. You needed to get in a car for everything.
I drove by it recently. It was in disrepair and possibly bankrupt.
"Poverty remains most highly concentrated in our cities. But there's actually more Americans living in poverty out in the suburbs.
We draw attention to some of the efforts that have been made. Sadly, we don't yet see nearly enough examples of retrofitting that are really addressing the problem.
There have been some cases of aging garden apartments that are the housing of last resort for a lot of very, very poor people.
Those are just kind of aging out. In some cases, they're being redeveloped into more expensive fancy apartments. We need a lot more attention to preserving and restoring a lot of those. It's not solving a lot of ecological problems. These places are very auto dependent. But there's such desperate need for more affordable housing out in the burbs.
In Chester County PA you could consider that West Whiteland Township and Downingtown are in competition with the City of Coatesville in reuse of land.
It’s not a zero sum game. The more affordable lower middle class housing there is, the more industries that employ lower middle class people that work in those industries will come to Chester County.
Understand that the middle class of 1950s & 1960s in Coatesville that I grew up in is almost gone.
Most of the United States is a tiny percentage of wealthy, a small middle class and a very large lower middle class to poor population.
Chester County PA is among the wealthier counties in the United States.
"Matze, who said he was fired as Parler CEO last week by Mercer, told the Journal that before he was fired he had tried to implement more content moderation so that Apple and Google would allow the app back into their app stores. He said his suggestion to ban groups based on affiliations with designated domestic terrorism organizations was ultimately resisted by the board." My underlining
Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered Trump 40% of the company if he posted exclusively to the platform. The deal was never finalized.
“To enter your housing area, you need to have your face scanned and match your ID. It’s sort of like a keyless entry, but in this case the keyless entry is controlled by the police. They’re also at many of the checkpoints checking people’s phones, so you have to carry your smartphone with you and that’s an additional way that they’re tracking your movement."
Understand that “Libertarian” means liberty for corporations.
“There can be no tolerance,” he writes, “toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”
And thrown from helicopters into the sea.
"Among the panoply of bizarre memes that far-right extremists flash at Trump rallies and share obsessively online, one of the more disturbing for its frightening historical reference is that of the “Hoppean Snake.” The image typically consists of a coiled serpent sporting the officer’s cap of notorious Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet. In the background fly childlike depictions of helicopters from which stick figures are jettisoned to their death, crying “Aaaahhh” in a barely legible scrawl. In one of its many variants, the snake-as-Pinochet proclaims with a sardonic smirk, “I’m evil for throwing people out of helicopters? False. Commies aren’t people.” It’s unclear why Pinochet is depicted as a snake, though it may be inspired by the recalcitrant snake on the Gadsden flag that warns “Don’t Tread on Me.”
Far from being a joking homage to Pinochet — putschist, tyrant, torturer, mass murderer, puppet of the CIA, and hater of all things socialist, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 — the fetishized totem of the Hoppean Snake has dire significance for U.S. paramilitaries. When Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer “free helicopter rides,” they are referencing a program of extermination.
Following Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état, which ended the short-lived and turbulent administration of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende, an avowed Marxist, thousands of Allende’s supporters were killed, tens of thousands of perceived enemies of the putschist regime were tortured, and thousands of others were disappeared, often after being flown in a military helicopter and toppled from the sky. Sometimes this free helicopter ride included splitting open the guts of kidnapped victims while they were still alive so that their bodies wouldn’t float when dumped in the sea."
When Trumpists use images of the “Hoppean Snake,” offering “free helicopter rides,” they’re advocating a program of extermination.
Christopher Ketcham
February 4 2021, 8:00 a.m.
If we do not take our democracy back from libertarian corporate control this could happen here:
“To enter your housing area, you need to have your face scanned and match your ID. It’s sort of like a keyless entry, but in this case the keyless entry is controlled by the police. They’re also at many of the checkpoints checking people’s phones, so you have to carry your smartphone with you and that’s an additional way that they’re tracking your movement.
The “counterterrorism sword” or “anti-terrorism sword” is a device that’s something you can plug into your phone and then it will scan through the files that are on your phone or computer. It will look for things that you’ve deleted in the past or thought you deleted. In some cases it will access your social media as well, looking for around 50,000 different markers of Islamic activity or political activity. So it’s a way of scanning someone’s digital history really quickly. And there’s always a traumatic experience because you never know what this device is going to find.”
I feel that Uyghur is me. Uyghur language is me. It means that I’m in danger. So it gives me strong feeling that, “What am I doing here? What should I do?” And then I decided to do something to protect language, to protect Uyghur alive. So I thought that I should have a Uyghur kindergarten, mother language kindergarten in Ürümqi. Someone should do it, even if it’s dangerous!
The first we recruited 15 students, 15 kids. The next semester it increased to 57. The local authority began to bother me. Like three guys came and two asked questions and the one record, “What are you doing? And why are you doing? Like who are you talking with? We are watching you and you should be careful.”
But at the time they didn’t say to stop. I was very happy.
2013 August 19th, at that day I was at my kindergarten. The police came about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. So I go directly and told them, “So let’s talk in your car.” Get in the car and then two police put black hood on my face and they paste my mouth with the bandage, put the handcuff on my hand and they drove me to a detention center. They put me in the office. Inside the office there’s a cage and inside the cage there’s a chair. In Chinese it’s a laohu, like a tiger chair. In Chinese, if you call something “tiger” it’s horrible. Like “tiger chair” it means horrible chair. They bind my feet, arms and the neck with special equipment. You cannot even move. I felt nervous and afraid.
They started interrogation. They accused me of separatism. I have nothing to do with separatism. I was abused — sexually, physically — and tortured and got electric stick. But I told them that, “You can kill me. It’s ok, but I will never tell something I have never done.” They released me because during this 15 months I have never compromised, I have never admitted anything I have never done. And then I feel there is no way to protect my language and there’s no way to protect even myself. So I have to leave. And then I left in 2015.
I feel that somebody’s watching, something will happen in next hour and my every action and my every word recorded, the camera all the time looking at me and every moment the camera just take picture of me. And that feeling is horrible. And because of that people cannot even speak what they want to speak. They cannot be as a normal human being.
My niece, her father arrested in 2017 and she went back to China because she wants to see her father. Last year, 2020 December 20th, I received a message that she died. I know she got arrested after she went and I know she was in the camp. She died. I don’t know what happened to her and I cannot even call her. And I don’t know the reason. And I know she was living in Japan and she said she missed her father very much and she wants to see. I said that, “You cannot see your father. Believe me, it’s impossible to see your father. You father is in concentration camp. It’s not possible.” And she went back and she died. She even didn’t get married, she’s just 30 years old, just 30. Yeah. I, like, I wrote poetry for her. Let me read it in Uyghur first and then translate into English.
I wish I would be your country.
I wish I would be your safe place.
[reading Uyghur]
I know you would not be disappeared if I was …
You can smell, you can smell inside me.
And if I, if I’m your father, you’ll not go back. You will not leave me. You would stay with me.
If I’m your country, if I’m your free land, if I’m your promised dream, you will never leave.
You will never disappear — as a star, as a drop of rain, as a kite without thread.
If I’m a wind in your hot, stifled summer.
If I’m a water in your endless desert, you will not wither. You will not die as a flower.
If I was a garden for you.
If I was her father.
Thank you. We have an endless desert without a drop of rain, without water, it’s just a flower there. She disappeared because there is no water. There is no rain. It’s too sad. She is the most successful one in our family. She got the scholarship from the Tokyo University and she left message to her friend that she’s going to have a school in Kashgar and she’s going to teach science. She’s going to teach love. She’s going to teach about the world to the kids. Like, somehow I think that she was following my dream to have a school, to have kids, to hold their future. Like, I sacrificed 15 months. It’s enough for me. But my niece sacrificed her life for my dream. So I feel very mad, very sad about that.
What’s happening is horrible to Uyghur and horrible to me and to my family, but it’s the future of other people. And if we allow this atrocity continuously happening, it will happen to millions of people. So we should stand up and we should say “no” and we should stop this. Even one interview — we should keep doing this until we stop this genocide and we stop this atrocity. Thank you for giving me this chance.
