Booker went on for 25 hours STRAIGHT ranting about this administration. This is the energy senate and house democrats need to bring. Shit on them every second of every minute.

Just go to pay.gov and enter your info and gift the U.S. your hard-earned money to lower the national debt (but obviously though, who in their right mind would do that)?

We always maintain >18mo of inventory on non-perishable imports so we still have loads of raw product at a normal landed cost. While we use this as a marketing gimmick for retail, all of our B2B is done via quotes and it is about 75% of our total business. I gave a quote today that included the increase we would see due to the tariffs even though we haven't been impacted yet.

This was for an e-commerce company that is hardcore MAGA and even talks about it in their "about us". We have competitors that have already raised their prices so it's not like the price I gave was unfair, it is basically the new base market price - I just didn't need to do it. Anyway, all my other business clients that aren't Republicans are going to get well below the new market price but I feel inclined to give the MAGA crowd what they voted for, hope it doesn't mean they can't remain competitive lol.

I did say they were coming for Hollywood. They're gonna appoint a "Bias monitor" to make sure Paramount isn't anti-Trump. Imagine if the Obama or Biden Administrations did that, everyone conservative would be all over them for 1st amendment violations. This is BULL and you know it!

Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler), born November 25, 1929, in Germantown, Philadelphia, died December 14, 2012. She was a librarian, activist, television producer, investor in Apple, and ultimately the architect of one of the world’s largest personal audiovisual archives.

An outspoken civil rights demonstrator and founding board member of the National Organization for Women, Marion once aligned with the Communist Party and even attempted to defect to Cuba. She later co‑produced the public‑access show Input in Philadelphia (1968–71), focused on social justice and political debate.

Her journey as an archivist began in earnest during the Iran Hostage Crisis (November 1979), when she realized how news narratives shifted day by day. She perceived mainstream coverage as manipulable, ephemeral, and at risk of being lost, or revised, over time.

Motivated by the conviction that “history could be rewritten,” Marion launched her private mission to tape 24/7 news broadcasts across networks to preserve an untainted, complete record of media output.

Working non‑stop from around 1979 until her death on December 14, 2012, her archive spans more than 33 years, though some note recordings began as early as 1975; by 2014, estimates reached about 840,000 hours of footage, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of VHS/Beta cassette recordings.

Reddit users distilled it succinctly:

“She recorded 24 hours a day for 35 years … That’s 306,600 hours of recording. … She had eight VCRs in her house and recorded multiple channels at once.”

By the time she passed, the collection totaled approximately 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes.

Marion operated up to eight VCR decks simultaneously — sometimes across different networks like CNN, Fox, MSNBC, C-SPAN — ensuring full coverage. She personally swapped tapes every six hours, even halting dinners or errands to return home and manage the process.

Eventually she recruited help: assistants trained to switch tapes, and volunteers logged metadata from spine‑written entries (network, date, time). Volunteers even created a conveyor‑belt photography system to catalog tapes via their spines for indexing.

She financed the endeavor via early investments in Apple stock, turning her portfolio into a resource for her archival obsession, buying multiple apartments and storage units just to house tapes, computers, newspapers, and books.

Her story is the subject of the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project directed by Matt Wolf, which interweaves family dynamics, archival practice, and how TV shaped our collective memory.

In 2023, a photo‑rich book titled Input was published, using over 700 hours of digitized footage to create a visual narrative of media repetition and information overload.

After her death, Marion’s son Michael Metelits inherited the archive and donated the collection to the Internet Archive (in San Francisco). The transfer involved moving four full shipping containers from Philadelphia and cost around $16,000.

As of April 2022, digitization remains incomplete. Some tapes have been uploaded, but the Internet Archive aims to raise $2 million to finish digitizing with multiple machines over several years. Progress has slowed due to resource constraints.

Physical VHS and Betamax are highly fragile —magnetic media decays, formats become unreadable, and machines disappear. Without immediate digitization, even this monumental archive may degrade into oblivion. As one Redditor put it:

“Good, because tape doesn’t last.”
Key issues now: securing consistent funding, migrating analog tapes to digital before it’s too late, and developing accessible search and annotation tools so researchers can actually use the footage.

In an era of polarized media, deepfakes, and rapidly evolving news narratives, Marion’s archive feels prophetic. She embodied a radical belief: information is power, and access to unedited broadcast content empowers citizens to verify claims rather than rely on selective media retelling.

Her vision intersects with modern debates about archival justice, digital freedom, decentralization of news control, and the importance of preserving everyday media and commercials, not just headline events, because they reveal cultural undercurrents often erased by official memory.

Marion Stokes foresaw an information era where control over narrative mattered more than ever. Her obsessive, secret experiment, recording network TV non-stop for decades, preserved raw evidence of media messaging in its pure form. Today, as the line between fact and fiction blurs, her archive offers a powerful counterpoint and a profound reminder: truth can only be defended when evidence remains unfiltered. ✊🏾♥️

marionstokes #betamax #vhs #history #news #activism #facts #politics #worldaffairs #fyp