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New blogpost: spotlight on Conwy audiovisual archives exploreyourarchive.org/exhibit

"As a county archive, Conwy Archives keeps the history of the area that is now Conwy in North Wales alive. Although it holds a wide variety of records, Conwy Archives is eager to stay ahead of the curve and has a special interest in digital preservation. In recent years, this has meant digitising now obsolete media formats, such as video tapes and floppy discs. The result is a collection of film material that has been made easily available to the public – a collection that dates back more than 125 years"

#Conway #audiovisual #archives #glamm #wales @archivistodon @histodons

Explore Your ArchiveExhibition - Conway Audiovisual Archives — Explore Your ArchiveAs a county archive, Conwy Archives keeps the history of the area that is now Conwy in North Wales alive. Although it […]

#US citizen living abroad?

#GeorgeConway wants you to join the Americans Abroad for #HarrisWalz #Zoom call on SEPT 5, NOON EASTERN!

The former Republican, prominent Trump critic, and #LincolnProject cofounder will be there to support #KamalaHarris. Will you?

Register at democratsabroad.org/americansa

If you haven’t registered to #vote, please go to VoteFromAbroad.org to do so NOW!

Trump adds five new handlers as he tries to find attack lines against Harris

Trump brought Taylor #Budowich, Alex #Pfeiffer and Alex #Bruesewitz from the Trump-aligned "Maga Inc" political action committee,
as well as previous Trump campaign veterans Corey #Lewandowski and Tim #Murtaugh.

The new additions are coming onto the Trump campaign as "senior advisers", meaning they are lateral hires to a campaign still being run by co-campaign chiefs Susie #Wiles and Chris #LaCivita, the people said.

Lewandowski previously ran the 2016 campaign but does not have the same role now.
He has remained an "informal adviser" to Trump since the first presidential campaign, and will continue that function but in a more formal capacity through the final stretch to November, one of the people said.

Murtaugh, who was the communications director for the 2020 campaign, is returning in a broader role, as will Budowich, Pfeiffer and Bruesewitz, one of the people said.

Bruesewitz has a large online following and is expected to help direct social outreach.
The additions came after senior aides on the Trump campaign found themselves open to criticism and challenges to their positions after perhaps the rockiest stretch for the campaign since it launched in 2022, the Guardian has previously reported.

The summer months have historically been the time that Trump makes changes to his campaign chiefs, as he did in 2016 when he installed Kellyanne #Conway, Steve #Bannon, and David #Bossie to take the reins,
as well as in 2020, when he replaced Brad Parscale with Bill #Stepien.

The past month has been bad enough for the Trump campaign that advisers have taken those challenges
– whether from enemies real or perceived
– as serious threats or slights that necessitate devoting time and effort to #slap #down

theguardian.com/us-news/articl

The Guardian · Trump adds five new advisers as he tries to find attack lines against HarrisBy Hugo Lowell

Former Trump administration official #Kellyanne #Conway has registered as a #foreign #agent representing Ukrainian billionaire Victor #Pinchuk's foundation, new foreign lobbying disclosure reports show.

In 2015, the Ukrainian steel magnate donated $150,000 to former President Donald Trump's charitable organization to book the then-presidential candidate to speak at a conference in Kyiv.

The donation was later reportedly investigated by special counsel Robert #Mueller's team in connection with their probe into Trump's and his campaign's alleged role in Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to The New York Times.

Mueller's final report did not specifically address this donation.

Yalta European Strategy's annual gathering, also known as #YES, is the same conference that Trump attended virtually in 2015,
allegedly in exchange for Pinchuk's donation.

Conway's role as an agent for Pinchuk's foundation also includes engaging U.S. political leaders and experts to "explain the importance of Ukraine to the rules-based order and the protection of democratic principles,"
and contributing to "raising awareness among US decision makers of Ukrainians' fight for freedom and the Russian illegal war of aggression," according to the disclosure filing.

She is also tasked with assisting with organizing meetings between U.S. political leaders and Ukrainian soldiers and veterans,
and to keep Pinchuk informed of the process and achievements,
per the disclosure filing.

Conway is set to be paid $50,000 a month for her services throughout the contract, which runs from July 25 through Nov. 14, 2024, with an option to extend it, according to their service agreement.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/former

ABC News · Former Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway registers as lobbyist for Ukrainian billionaire with past ties to TrumpBy Soo Rin Kim

Year in and year out, #Christian #nationalists strategize and organize via a seemingly never-ending stream of
conferences, trainings, and other offerings conducted or provided by influential Christian political nonprofits such as:

♦️Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an extremist student group co-founded by Charlie #Kirk and Bill #Montgomery, who died of COVID-19 complications. TPUSA’s specialty is training students to harass “liberal” professors and public school boards. It partners with far right propagandist Jack Posobiec, who is infamous for his viral propaganda campaigns, including the “groomers” campaign launched against Disney after it withdrew support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.  Kirk hopes to open his own network of private Christian academies across the country. 

♦️Wallbuilders, a nonprofit founded by pseudo-historian David #Barton, a leading opponentof the separation between church and state. Barton–who offers “biblical citizenship training” with ♦️Patriot Academy founder Rick #Green–also promotes the militant “black robe regiment” movement and wrote a book about it. 

♦️United in Purpose (UIP), a Christian data targeting firm founded by convicted embezzler Bill #Dallas. UIP’s board has included David Barton and former congressman Bob #McEwen. UIP was involved in a massive voter data breach in 2015, as we previously reported. In or around 2020, UIP formed a group called♦️ Ziklag, which pairs wealthy Christian donors with Christian political projects and organizations. UIP also launched a website called EveryLegalVote.com, which promoted “Stop the Steal” rallies and related “action items,” although UIP’s name was removed from the website soon after it launched. (Image via @visionsurreal.)


♦️Truth and Liberty Coalition, which focuses on taking over public school boards in Colorado and beyond. The nonprofit is led by Andrew #Wommack who owns the Charis Bible College franchise and has said that members of the LGBTQ community should wear warning labels on their foreheads. Truth and Liberty’s board of directors includes Wallbuilders founder David Barton and NAR leader Lance #Wallnau, who has said that we must “destroy the public education system before it destroys America,” as reported in Elle Hardy’s book 🔹Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. 🔹Truth and Liberty’s website includes a list of “influencers” that includes Rep. Lauren #Boebert (R-CO). 
Truth and Liberty has worked with John #Guandolo of Understanding the Threat. Guandolo is a disgraced former FBI agent and anti-Muslim activist.  As first reported by Right Wing Watch, Guandalo “has begun offering training sessions for right-wing citizens on how to take over their towns, arrest their mayors, and destroy the lives of anyone who objects by publicly humiliating them, getting them fired…, and forcing them to move.” 

♦️Patriot Academy founded by Rick #Green. The organization partners with David Barton (of Wallbuilders) in providing “biblical citizenship training.”

♦️The Oak Initiative founded by Rick #Joyner who advocated a military coup against Obama in 2013 or 2014. Rep. Louie #Gohmert (R-TX) attended one of their summits virtually in 2015. NAR leaders Lance Wallnau and Cindy Jacobs are on the board.


♦️The Council for National Policy, a secretive umbrella and strategy group for billionaires and the leaders of most prominent Christian Right organizations. Steve #Bannon, KellyAnne #Conway, Ali #Alexander, Charlie #Kirk, Ginni #Thomas, Cleta #Mitchell, Bill #Dallas, Tony #Perkins, and Ralph #Reed have all been members. Michael #Flynn has been involved with them too.

♦️The Family Research Council founded by Tony #Perkins, which hosts the influential 🔸Pray Vote Stand Summit 🔸(previously the Values Voter Summit) and a pastors roundtable called 🔸“Watchmen on the Wall.”

♦️The Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC) founded by Ralph #Reed. FFC’s website says that FFC knocked on more than 8 million doors before the midterm election and held its annual 🔸Road to Majority Policy🔸 conference in June this year. Its website says the conference “equips attendees with the knowledge and connections they need to drive engagement and voter turnout. The June 2022 gathering accelerated conservatives further down the road to majority ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.”

♦️The Family Leader, which held a Family Leadership summit in July this year. Its president and CEO is Bob Vander #Plaats. Its website called its annual summit the “Midwest’s biggest gathering of Christians seeking cultural transformation in the family, church, government and more.” 

♦️Focus on the Family, the
♦️Family Institute, and the
♦️Dobson Policy Center founded by James #Dobson. Focus on the Family has offices and partnerships around the world. Focus on the Family and Family Research Center helped craft and promote the bill that recently made Arkansas the first state to ban gender-affirming care for minors,

buckscountybeacon.com/2022/11/

Bucks County Beacon · Q&A with Jennifer Cohn: A Christian Nationalism Post-Election DebriefingEditor Cyril Mychalejko asked Cohn five questions to make sense of the election, assess this extremist threat moving forward, and to figure out what can be done to reinforce the crumbling wall separating church and state in the country.
Continued thread

On a personal level, Conway gives a hefty share of the credit for her accomplishments to gender transition itself.

"I can’t explain any other way how I could have done what I did," she says.

"I actually became a really different person.”

“Being able to see a moment and be decisive and seize it, and make it happen,” she continues.

“Getting other people all fired up, and working together towards [a] shared mission… new capabilities I didn’t have before,
that completely enhanced my feeling of being alive."

That is why she believes that trans people are unusually likely to have ideas ahead of their time,
or to be at the forefront of new artistic or technological movements.

"We are highly empowered
– in ways that people may not understand
– because of the joyfulness we feel in having been able to do what we do in spite of the difficulties," she says.

Despite this, Conway is keen to be seen first and foremost as a talented engineer.

She urges me to read a recent interview with the pop star Kim Petras, who said:
"I just so happen to be transgender, but that’s not all I am... reaching equality is being able to be known as a great artist.”

Perhaps there is no contradiction. Conway appears to see transition as just one of many "profound" experiences that can give someone a risk-taking edge
or an unusual perspective,
likening it to a particularly immersive adventure sport.

Gender, race, disability, innovation and oppression: as ever for Conway, it’s all connected.

Today she is still drawing connections.

She regularly chats with academics and engineers across the world, sending LinkedIn messages to strangers she finds interesting.

She is well abreast of the microchip war between China and the West,
and sees in artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT the potential for another "unfolding" that multiplies ordinary people’s abilities.

"Things are changing so fast that every few years is sort of like decades," she says.

"Forces are clashing, and it’s either headed into something joyous or it’s going to go ‘boom’."

Humanity, she argues, is caught in a race between the escalating speed of change and our limited ability to predict and adapt to it.

The current backlash against trans rights is one manifestation of this dynamic;
the next may be over cybernetic "amplification" of our bodies and minds.

Nevertheless, Conway is hopeful for the future,
and for trans people’s role in it
– not least because transitioning is "just too much fun" to stop people from doing it.

"We’re going to watch the trans community become a powerful force
for novel and exciting views about life that have not surfaced before," she says.

"And people are going to want to listen to what we have to say
– not because we’re trans, but because we’re delivering goods.

"And [eventually] they forget you’re trans, and wonder ‘how did you get that way?’

And then you can tell them:
‘Well, I lived a pretty adventurous life.’"

Continued thread

It was only after her retirement, when research into IBM’s nearly-forgotten Project Y threatened to uncover her past,
that she began coming out to people beyond her inner circle.

She remains sensitive about how her story is described, wary of misrepresentation.

In 2000 she started writing about her experiences and compiling evidence of her work on her personal website,
making it a resource for people considering or beginning transition.

She engaged in activism, pressing the IEEE to include trans people in its code of ethics
and marshalling opposition to the theories of controversial sexologist Kenneth Zucker.

In the end, Conway believes, the danger made her stronger, and was eclipsed by the "dramatic, profound joy" of having transitioned.

To finally be comfortable in herself after so long in chains was like suddenly being able to fly
– and gave her a deep appreciation for what she had.

‘Things are changing so fast. Every few years is like decades’

Conway has thought deeply about what drives innovation.

She is scathing about the so-called "great man theory" of history, which credits paradigm shifts to the individual genius of powerful people.

"When you’ve been on the inside of all these tents and stuck your nose through all the peepholes... you start noticing that it’s madness all the way up," she says.

"The further up you go, the weirder it gets.

Instead, she argues, paradigm shifts come about through a complex "unfolding" process
in which many individuals exploit the possibilities unlocked by new technologies and ideas,
communicating with and learning from each other as they go.

One of her favourite examples
– and a major inspiration for her approach to VLSI
– was the intertwined march of railroads and telegraph wires across the US.

Rather than some grand plan, she describes it as an "exploratory process"
where groups who founded new settlements could quickly establish links back to the lands they’d left behind
and use them as a scaffold for further exploration.

Continued thread

Yet by the early Sixties, a change was rippling through the underbelly of American society.

As Conway tells it, the media sensation over Christine Jorgensen
– a trans former Army draftee who was outed by The New York Post in 1952
– had alerted a growing minority to the truth that it was, actually,
entirely possible to change one’s secondary sex characteristics through hormone therapy and surgery.

Not unlike VLSI, the knowledge spread by example, driven by people’s desire to make use of it rather than by top-down mandate.

To Conway, all this felt like a natural fit with the can-do spirit of the early tech industry.

"There was a feeling in the air that we were all being empowered to take all this burgeoning new knowledge and just go do stuff," she says.

" If you wanted to [modify your body] why not try it?"

Possible is not the same as easy.

Conway’s transition, beginning in 1967, ultimately sundered her first marriage and cut her off from her family for years.

There were times when she escaped violence only narrowly,
and she could not rely on the law for protection.

Other girls she knew were sex workers who were routinely victimised by the police
– events she still shudders to remember.

Conway played the spy game, and in time her pre-transition self came to seem like a different person
("I call him my evil twin brother," she says).

Often she would meet former colleagues who didn’t realise they’d already met her.

Continued thread

A ‘haunted’ world where transphobic violence was the norm

At the tail end of the 1950s, one of Conway’s friends introduced her to the dean of a prestigious medical school.

She’d heard stories about people changing their sex, and she wanted to know: was it really possible?

Absolutely not, the dean told her.

Such procedures could only make her a "freak", and pursuing them would likely end up with her in a mental institution.

"That set me back," she recalls. "That was horrible."

This was the environment in which Conway came of age.

She remembers family holidays in Texas where she witnessed how Black people were treated by local whites
– a glimpse of the violence lurking underneath the "appearance of normalcy" that adults seemed to cling to.

"It was like the world was haunted," she says.

"You go to church on Sunday and everyone’s pretending this is all wonderful.
But it’s not all wonderful, and if you get any hint that you might fall into one of these categories,
it’s like suddenly you’re in the middle ages,
and there’s spirits and terrors and devils that are gonna get you."
#Carver #Mead #transitioning #Lynn #Conway #VLSI

Continued thread

As she rode the wave, Conway remembers feeling a "complete resonance with the universe".

She says: "I was so completely, manically joyful that I was, like, whacko!

That’s the way it is when crazy things are happening, like in a cool start-up... you’re just having so much fun."

Soon the Feds came knocking, and in 1983 Conway was recruited by the US military research agency DARPA.

The background checks went so smoothly that she is sure she wasn’t the Pentagon’s first trans employee, although she never ran into any others.

In 1985 she switched to academia at the University of Michigan, where she remains a professor emerita today.

At first, Conway was generally recognised alongside Mead as the progenitor of VLSI.

Throughout the 1980s they received multiple joint awards. But in the 2000s and 2010s Conway’s honours began to dry up, while Mead’s accelerated.

Conway traces that change in part to the influence of George Gilder,
a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and anti-feminist author turned internet evangelist,
who lionised Mead in his best-selling 1989 book Microcosm.

"Mead probably thinks it was 80/20 him; most people, I think, in the long term, will find it was really 80/20 me," she says, matter-of-factly.

For his part, Mead tells The Independent that he never sought out those awards and wasn't party to their decision process,
but strongly supported Conway's nomination to the National Inventors' Hall of Fame.

"I certainly empathise with Lynn's feelings on these matters… without her leadership I think the VLSI revolution would have taken much longer," he says.

As to the share of credit for VLSI, he says:
"From 1971 to 1972, it was 100 per cent me.

That decreased with time. After [late 1979] I was really burned out, and Lynn was leading the charge.

For that period, I'll go with her number."

Continued thread

Wackiness was hardly unusual in early Silicon Valley.

After graduating from Columbia University in the early Sixties, Conway had moved to Menlo Park, California
– now the home of Facebook’s parent company Meta
– to work on a secretive IBM supercomputer known as Project Y.

Her team was considered so nerdy and eccentric that the project leader was nicknamed "the Zookeeper".

In 1973, under a new name, she joined Xerox’s famous PARC lab in nearby Palo Alto, which pioneered now-ubiquitous concepts such as the personal computer, the mouse, and the digital desktop interface.

It was there that she noticed "whole industries had no clue what they were doing".

The problem was the ballooning complexity of designing new microchips.

The number of transistors that could be packed into one chip was growing exponentially
– a phenomenon dubbed "Moore’s Law" by the engineering professor Carver Mead.

Yet actually taking advantage of such power was difficult because chip design was still a bespoke, effectively manual process.

Mead had long been studying this problem, and in 1976 he and Conway began working together on a solution.

Their innovation was to develop simple rules for grouping transistors together into standardised clusters, like blocks of buildings in a city, which could be arranged on a grid in standardised patterns.

It was, Conway explains, comparable to the impact of the moveable type printing press on European literature
– allowing each new page to be quickly assembled out of alphabetic components rather than laboriously carved into one block of wood.

Instead of trying to go through traditional chipmakers, Conway wanted to spread this method across the world as fast as possible, hoping to give other people the tools to create change.

Throughout 1977 and 1978, she used the new-fangled equipment at PARC
– including home printers and the early internet
– to rapidly assemble and edit these ideas into a bombshell textbook on VLSI design, co-authored with Mead.

She soon became VLSI’s chief evangelist,
first teaching an MIT course where students could get their own microchip designs printed within a few weeks,
then building an online system that extended this capability to a nationwide network of similar courses.

Continued thread

"Those were the moments that mattered to me, and I want to talk about them so that people can learn to notice:

how do you do stuff like that?
Where do you get the nerve to take that risk?"

‘I just noticed whole industries had no clue what they were doing’

Conway was born in 1938 in White Plains, just outside New York City, four years before the completion of the world’s first electronic digital computer.

As a child she remembers standing in her family’s garden shortly after Pearl Harbour, watching her father demonstrate a fire extinguisher designed to protect their roof from incendiary bombs.

Today she lives on a 23-acre plot outside Ann Arbor with her husband Charlie ("a teddy bear," she says), whom she married in 2002.

She has two children, four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren stemming from a previous marriage, plus a rotating cast of cats.

These days she has largely retired from sports such as rock climbing and motocross
("getting old is a real serious adventure sport").

But her conversations have a playful agility, leaping unpredictably from topic to topic, sometimes in mid-sentence,
peppering her speech with "you see?" while she traces surprising lateral connections between the rise of Christian nationalism, the Wizard of Oz books, and the 2022 film Monica.

"I’m actually kind of wacky, see?" she laughs. "And I admit that."

Continued thread

But for years, Conway’s role was overshadowed by that of her male collaborator
#Carver #Mead and other "founding fathers" of Silicon Valley.

That, she argues, was partly because she is a woman and partly because she had been forced to live much of her life in "stealth",
leery of attracting attention lest she be outed to a hostile world.

She had already been forced to restart her career from scratch with a new identity in 1969,
after being fired by IBM for telling her bosses she was #transitioning.

The rupture meant she could not claim credit for techniques she had invented there, even as they became standard practice across the industry.

And so, over the past two decades, Conway has been investigating
– and attempting to reverse
– what she describes as her "disappearance" from history,
chronicling her experiences both as a computing and a gender trailblazer.

Slowly, that recognition is coming to pass.

In 2009, she received an award from the engineering trade group, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE).

In 2020, IBM finally apologised for firing her 42 years earlier.

And this October she was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame
as the co-creator of VLSI
– 14 years after Mead received the same honour.

Now, speaking to The Independent, Conway wants the world to understand what made that revolution possible and why she feels so strongly about telling her side of the story.

"What I’m interested in... isn’t so much who I am, but what I actually did," she says.

"The joy I felt – the joy of discovery. The daring to push send on something that I knew was going to change the world.

"Basically you were an outlaw," says #Lynn #Conway from her home in rural Michigan,
as she recalls her years working at the heart of the American computer industry while hiding a secret that could have wrecked her career.

"You have to operate at a high level pretty quickly, or else you’ll get exposed," the 85-year-old continues.
"But at the same time you have to be kind of affable, and not attract attention… Can’t ever get angry, or show fear."

Altogether, Conway reflects, it is "eerie" just how much her life as a transgender woman at the dawn of Silicon Valley resembled that of a deep-cover Soviet spy
– whose methods she would later learn about while working for the US Department of Defence.

"I think a lot of us are living more interesting, more fun lives than most people. It’s our secret," she tells The Independent.
"The added pressure [on trans people] to learn, to adapt, to figure things out, and to find ways to manoeuvre... actually provides lessons beyond what most people face."

Even if you’ve never heard of Conway, you’ve felt her influence.
Today’s superabundance of digital devices, from iPhones to computerised coffee machines, was made possible in part by her ideas.
As a pioneering computer architect in the 1970s, Conway co-developed a revolutionary new method of microchip design that allowed billions of individual components to be integrated into one chip with relative simplicity.

That method, known as Very Large Scale Integration ( #VLSI ), blew open the tech industry to individuals and small companies across the world
while allowing processor speeds to ascend into the stratosphere.
As the University of Michigan put it in 2014:
"Thank Lynn Conway for your cell phone
independent.co.uk/news/world/a

The Independent · ‘I was completely, manically joyful’: How a trans woman changed computing in the modern worldBy Io Dodds

Donald Trump, facing a cash crunch that puts him at a severe disadvantage to President Biden, dined on Thursday night with a small group of donors including the hedge fund billionaire #Robert #Mercer and his daughter #Rebekah, according to two people with knowledge of the event.
Mr. Trump’s dinner companions also included the entrepreneur #Omeed #Malik, the cosmetics firm founder #Trish #McEvoy and the real estate management billionaire #Richard #Kurtz, one of the people said.
The Mercers, Ms. McEvoy and Mr. Kurtz did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Malik declined to comment, and a Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The Mercers were a critical source of support behind Mr. Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election.
In addition to giving donations, they pushed him to make changes to his political team, including making #Kellyanne #Conway his campaign manager and #Stephen #Bannon his chief executive.

The Mercer family was conspicuously quiet during Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election effort

nytimes.com/2024/03/30/us/poli

The New York Times · Trump Rekindles Relationships With Key 2016 DonorsBy Maggie Haberman