We offer these flowers to our beloved sister JoanMar.
We ask the community to join in with your thoughts, prayers and financial support
We have very sad news to share with you all today.
Our Sister JoanMar lost her daughter, after a sudden illness.
She who has given her all to us, who has inspired us to care for, and act for those who need defending, needs our help, prayers and support today.
JoanMar is not only a Black Kos Editor, and member of the Black Kos Community. She is our sister and our friend.
She is a member of the following groups here at DKos:
Barriers and Bridges
Bring Home our Girls
Climate Change SOS
Community Fundraisers
Discuss plans
Firearms Law and Policy
House of LIGHTS
Kossacks for the Homeless Person
ObamaNightlyNews
Obamacare Saves Lives
Police Accountability Group
Prison Watch
Repeal or Amend the Second Amendment (RASA)
Shut Down the NRA
SpiritSisters
Support Michelle Obama
Support the Dream Defenders
This is Reggae Music!
Trial Watch
JekyllnHyde will be posting a fundraising diary for her on Wednesday night, August 26, and other groups and individuals will be joining in that effort.
2thanks has posted this information to all her groups:
JoanMar's PayPal address is nevfai@optonline.net.
Go to PayPal.com. Click Send Money to Family and Friends, which allows the recipient to get 100% of the donation. Enter JoanMar's email address nevfai@optonline.net and the amount you are sending. The sender's name is visible to the recipient.
She needs funds for the funeral. She cannot do this alone.
We want her to know, that she is not going to have to do this by herself.
Send her your love, and please send her what you can.
With Love,
Her Black Kos Family.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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As the former U.S. president fights for his life, his work’s focus is on finishing off the guinea worm, an excruciatingly painful condition that affects Africa’s poorest. The Root: Jimmy Carter’s Last Battle—Eradicating an African Disease.
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Former President Jimmy Carter told the world Thursday that he is fighting a spreading cancer. But, really, as he said, the fighting part was going to be left to his doctors. The former Georgia governor and current Sunday school teacher said his role was to be a good, obedient patient.
However, Carter did identify to the reporters assembled in the Carter Center in Atlanta what ranks highest on his work checklist: eliminating from the Earth a painful disease that affects Africans in poor villages without clean drinking water.
“As far as the Carter Center’s concerned, I would like to see guinea worm completely eradicated before ... before I die. I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do,” said the former president in response to a question about what would give him the greatest satisfaction to see happen in his lifetime.
“I think right now, we have 11 cases. We started out with 3.6 million cases. And I think we have two cases in South Sudan and one case in Ethiopia and one case in Mali and seven cases in Chad. That’s all the guinea worms in the world, and we know where all of them are. So obviously that would be my top priority,” he said.
The scientific term for guinea worm is Dracunculus medinensis. It is a parasite that enters the body through unfiltered drinking water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The worm grows inside the human body, causing great pain. It has to be pulled out in a very painful procedure.
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Conservation group plans to move five to 10 rhinos from South Africa, where poaching is on the rise, to Zakouma national park. The Guardian: Black rhino to be reintroduced in Chad.
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The critically endangered black rhino is to return to Chad decades after it was last seen in the country as part of an ambitious relocation from South Africa, where it is under siege from poachers.
African Parks, a conservation organisation that recently reintroduced lions to Rwanda, intends to transport between five and 10 black rhinos to the Zakouma national park in Chad next year.
The black rhino is smaller than the white rhino – adults can reach 1.5 metres in height and weigh 1.4 tonnes – and distinguished by a prehensile upper lip.
Once abundant in southern Chad, the black rhino was hunted for its horn, as elsewhere in Africa. In 1972 it disappeared from Zakouma national park and by 1980 there were only about 25 left in Chad. A decade later it was considered extinct in the west African country. There are now no black rhinos left in Africa north of Kenya, and only 5,055 remain in total.
Peter Fearnhead, chief executive of African Parks, which manages Zakouma and seven other national parks on the continent, said: “Whenever we take on the responsibility for the management of a park, it involves the restoration of the park and its species to the extent that is possible. In the case of Zakouma national park in Chad, black rhinos became locally extinct decades ago, and in fact the sub-species of black rhino indigenous to that part of Africa is extinct.
Here a newborn black rhino stays in touch with her exhausted mom.
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Hurricane Katrina exposed our nation’s amazing tolerance for black pain. Slate: Where Black Lives Matter Began.
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With the 10-year anniversary this week—Katrina’s storm surge breached the levees a decade ago on Saturday—we’ll soon see similar rhetoric from politicians and those seeking to pay respect to the storm’s victims. Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters in American history: It killed more than 1,800 Americans, displaced tens of thousands more, and destroyed huge swaths of New Orleans. While the government couldn’t stop the storm, it could have prepared for the damage. But it didn’t. The days and weeks after Katrina were marked with scandalous mismanagement, as the federal government made history with its incompetence and failure. Thousands of New Orleans residents who weren’t evacuated and couldn’t escape the city were left with inadequate aid and shelter, all but abandoned by officials who couldn’t, or in some cases wouldn’t, help them.
In our current remembrance, Katrina is a synonym for dysfunction and disaster.”
In our current remembrance, Katrina is a synonym for dysfunction and disaster, a prime example of when government fails in the worst way possible. It’s also a symbol of political collapse. George Bush never recovered from its failure, and “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” stands with “Mission Accomplished” as one of the defining lines of the administration and the era.
But there’s a problem with this capsule summary of Katrina and its place in national memory. It assumes a singular public of “Americans” who understand events in broadly similar ways. This public doesn’t exist. Instead, in the United States, we have multiple publics defined by a constellation of different boundaries: Geographic, religious, economic, ethnic, and racial. With regards to race, we have two dominant publics: A white one and a black one. Each of them saw Katrina in competing, mutually exclusive ways. And the disaster still haunts black political consciousness in ways that most white Americans have never been able to acknowledge.
White Americans saw the storm and its aftermath as a case of bad luck and unprecedented incompetence that spread its pain across the Gulf Coast regardless of race. This is the narrative you see in Landrieu’s words and, to some extent, Obama’s as well. To black Americans, however, this wasn’t an equal opportunity disaster. To them, it was confirmation of America’s indifference to black life. “We have an amazing tolerance for black pain,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson in an interview after the storm. Rev. Al Sharpton, also echoed the mood among many black Americans: “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.” Even more blunt was rapper Kanye West, who famously told a live national television audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Song which is America is harmonized by many diverse voices. Some of those voices sing America from an unbridled joy deep within them. while others sing America from the constant anguish brought by generation after generation suffering under the manacle and the lash. It is a sad refrain sung from that inner pain brought from the loss of ancestry and Home.
The melodies of both interweave and play a coda on the landscape and the Soul of America.
It is on that landscape that the first faint strains of the Song that is America became the forceful tacet on an American Exceptionalism. A certainty of purpose and an almost religious devotion to save those not touched by our benevolence. It is a Martial song of an agreed upon regiment, marching to the beat of ancient drums and flutes made of bone.
It is a Song of Symbols, it is a representation of History and it is the answer to every question.
For Which it Stands
For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow,
fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there
of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled
drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?
This is rhetorical. Like, "What to the Negro
is the fourth of July?" A flag should be stitched with a fuse.
Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe
he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag
of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland.
I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not
what you might guess), little sails and banners
down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were
rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because
I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast.
My wife's people are from San Salvador. They sent us
with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among
anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked
concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred
as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon
where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment.
Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly
Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke.
Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power-
washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing
the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed's trunks, the apocalyptic
Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz
Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew
youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels
and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day
it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates's Flag
from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no,
like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some
cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine
blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny,
texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost.
Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers
of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend
tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts
or strips of jerky.
How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean,
what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm
of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite?
Gates's salute is a torch song, a rhythm
of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme.
I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation
of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire
shut up in our bones.
-- Gregory Pardlo
"For Which it Stands"
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch!
Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.
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Please Help JoanMar Pay for Her Daughter's Funeral
- Go to PayPal.com. Click Send Money to Family and Friends, which allows the recipient to get 100% of the donation. Enter JoanMar's email address nevfai@optonline.net and amount you are sending. The sender's name is visible to the recipient. Remember, every little bit helps and adds up in a hurry.
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