Working on it. Finding a job in the city was first priority because I have really cheap rent where I am now (really cheap). It would have been stupid to pay for a place in Portland then potentially spend months looking for a job.
Hey guys just letting you all know I’m not dead, well… yet. The lack of posting and original content is due to me still not having the intrawebz and being in a transitional phase. I finally found a job in Portland. Though it has zero to do with my degree and it’s not a career move, I am really enjoying it. I am out in the city with clients pretty much all day so I’m learning the area very quickly. It’ll do until I can find something more permanent. The commute into the city is a pain. I want to find something along the Blue or Red Max lines (job pays for a monthly pass).
Anyways, eventually I’ll be using Tumblr again, but for another two or three weeks I’ll be close to a ghost on here.
Much love.
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.
NYPD Data Proves White People Are More Likely To Possess Drugs Or A Weapon Than Racial Minorities When Stopped, Yet 84% of Stop & Frisk Victims Are Black/Latino
During the just-concluded trial on the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, the city argued that officers’ disproportionate targeting of black and Latino New Yorkers was not due to racial profiling but because each stopped individual was doing something suspicious at the time. The data, however, tells a different story: weapons and drugs were more often found on white New Yorkers during stops than on minorities, according to the Public Advocate’s analysis of the NYPD’s 2012 statistics.
White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood of finding one on a white person.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.
It’s unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime. Considering one officer’s testimony that superiors explicitly directed him to target young black men, minorities are judged by a much more flexible definition of “reasonable suspicion.”
In general, stop-and-frisk has proven to be remarkably ineffective; nearly 89 percent of all stops result in no charges. The city has also had to settle a surging number of civil rights lawsuits against police to the tune of $22 million in one year.
Stupid (only acceptable answer).
Black Slam Style
One day we are going to talk about how everyone uses the poetry reciting Slam Style of Black folks for effect and punch. Like that is pretty much the standard now…. I dont know if I have a problem with it persay… But much like everything thing else I feel like that will be forgotten and folks will be talking about its universal and American. I need it to be known that that style comes from Black pain, rage, and triumph….
Politicians have a slightly different information diet. They spend more time gleaning information from lobbyists and rich donors whose concerns and opinions graft themselves onto representatives as easily as the pithiest economists’ opinions attach themselves to me. If politicians naturally gravitate to the issues rich folks want to talk about, it doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them normal people in a broken system that elevates polarization — both between parties and between the priorities of high-income and low-income families — while subtly concealing the issues that most affect Americans who cannot afford a lobbyists’ luncheon or a number on a congresswoman’s speed-dial. The centrality of big money in politics makes it nearly impossible for an issue like long-term unemployment to buy a sliver of mindshare. Our priorities are shaped not only by the stories we choose to believe, but also the stories we happen to hear, from the ideas we give a hearing …
“There is a divide within the [Republican] party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”
A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.
Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to win primary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.
Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.
The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not.
Last week I canvassed with OSPIRG for a day to promote ending subsides for agribusinesses like Monsanto. While doing so I had the chance to meet with what had to have been several die hard Republicans, one of which told me his idea of what best to do with the Eco-movement was to ‘nuke the whales.’ Over the past four decades the reputation of the Green Left has been successfully painted as more ideological than sensible. Those before you and I were radical hippies and treehuggers, all dismissed as conspiracists or lazy anti-business commies. That image lingers on today. In fact it remains a huge obstacle to what has always been sensible logic—you don’t shit where you eat. Polluting the planet is outright suicide, maybe not for our generation but indeed for our children.
Well hindsight is 20/20, or it’s supposed to be. After thousands upon thousands of studies confirming our species’ impact on our planetary ecosystem, it is now the Right that panders to outdated, uncompromising ideology without any regard the sensible. As the article above illustrates, those Republicans willing to recognize the science of climate change are the start of a deepening fissure within their party because climate change flies in the face of how the Christian Right and the irrationally pro-business alike view the planet. For the Christian Right it means deviating from the narrative that Earth and all within it was purposely placed here for the service of our species. For the latter it means relenting on profit, which translates into the loss of growth and income, and therefor power for the few who have it.
A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over pots full of food in a Sudanese restaurant in Tel Aviv Sunday night.
The inspector, from the ministry’s district office for Tel Aviv, was participating in a raid by police and municipal inspectors on illegal businesses owned by African migrants. Altogether, the raid shut down 10 businesses in the city’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, confiscating their equipment and welding the doors shut. The equipment was then loaded onto vans by other African migrants who had been hired as contract workers.
Many diners saw the inspector pouring bleach on the food, and one, asylum-seeker Aladin Abaker from Sudan’s Darfur region, posted photos of the incident on his Facebook page. He also described his feelings of humiliation.
“Everyone − except the destroyers − was in tears from the humiliation,” he wrote. “The waitress told us, ‘I’ve seen very harsh things in my life, like torture in Sinai, but this humiliated me more than what happened to me in Sinai.”
Abaker accused the inspector of “insensitivity to people and their culture, which sees food as a sacred thing that must be respected,” and said the raid was aimed at “embittering our lives so we’ll return to Africa ‘voluntarily.’”
Altogether, he said, more than 200 kilograms of meat, chicken and fish and over 500 prepared meals were destroyed.
The inspectors said they didn’t know where the meat came from and therefore feared for the diners’ health, Abaker wrote. “We told them: But this is the only place we’ve eaten all our meals for four years now, and none of us ever had stomach problems. Even whites eat here.”
The Health Ministry responded that inspectors had discovered “deplorable sanitary conditions, food stored under unsuitable conditions and temperatures, and food from unknown sources. In order to preserve the public’s health and that of the diners themselves, it was decided to destroy the food immediately. As part of the process of destroying the food, chemicals suitable to this purpose are used. It should be noted that this was a routine process of food destruction that is no different from other destructions of food/meat.”
Tel Aviv’s deputy city manager, Ruby Zelof, said the raids were carried out “to eradicate the undesirable phenomenon of businesses operating illegally, with sanitation and safety problems and illegal connections to electricity and water, and sales of alcoholic beverages without permits.”
Haaretz | Photo credit: Aladin Abaker
Israel is deporting Africans and also planning to put tens of thousands into detention camps.
Knesset Member Miri Regev — a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party — called the refugees “a cancer in our body” and Danny Danon — also a Likud Knesset Member — wrote on his Facebook page referring to the Africans as “infiltrators”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the African asylum seekers threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”
See also:
- Why is the birth rate in Israel’s Ethiopian community declining? Ethiopian women who immigrated to Israel were coaxed into agreeing to injections of long-acting birth control drugs, or told they would not be allowed into the country
- Israeli woman has her photo taken with Africans, titles the Facebook album: “Late night tour of the Tel Aviv Safari”, captions the photo: “There are no signs forbidding taking pictures with the animals. There were no signs that forbid feeding, but we passed on that.”
The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people—“none of those groups were big spenders on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times—and wasn’t aggressive enough. The outrage that Washington should be talking about—what my colleague Chris Hayes calls “the scandal behind the scandal”—is how the Citizens United decision has unleashed a flood of secret spending in US elections that the IRS and other regulatory agencies in Washington, like the Federal Election Commission, have been unwilling or unable to stem.
501c4 “social welfare” groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform—which don’t have to disclose their donors—spent more than $250 million during the last election. “Of outside spending reported to the FEC, 31 percent was ‘secret spending,’ coming from organizations that are not required to disclose the original sources of their funds,” writes Demos. “Further analysis shows that dark money groups accounted for 58 percent of funds spent by outside groups on presidential television ads [$328 million in total].”IRS guidelines for 501c4 groups state that “the promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office…a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.” It’s ludicrous for groups like Crossroads GPS—which spent at least $70 million during the last election—to claim that its primary purpose is not political activity. Only the likes of Karl Rove would believe that running attack ads against President Obama qualifies as social welfare.
Bill Maher is taken apart by Glenn Greenwald for trying to absolve the US from any responsibility for the mass slaughter and destruction in Muslim countries, blaming it on Islamic fundamentalism, as if the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never happened, as if the US wasn’t pushing for more war in Iran, as if it isn’t intervening in Somalia and Yemen.Wow, what a great week. Bill Maher is being humiliated left and right. Maybe there is some justice in the world…
If we don’t create a solution to the enormous potential gap between our inherent demand for energy and the availability of energy we will have the nastiest and last war we’ll ever fight.
Humans, the dumbest smart species on Earth.
There were 74 schools that showed a return of $1 million or more on the investment in an education, while 30 schools had a negative return on investment—meaning the cost of attending was more than what the students would make up with increased wages, even over a 30-year period.
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