Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica earlier today.
A rant about Hurricane Melissa and Jamaica
by Chitown Kev
As I write this, Jamaica is in the process of being devastated by the largest storm that the island nation has ever experienced.
There will be loss of life, widespread infrastructure damage, blackouts, starvation...anyone can increase the list.
Jamaica will need a lot of assistance in recovering from this natural disaster.
And I would rather that Jamaica not ask the United States government (as it is currently constituted) for a goddam*ed thing.
Really.
The United States is, of course, the wealthiest country that this planet has ever seen and has the resources, of course to be of great help to Jamaica...but at what price?
(Hell, this wealthiest country in human history is even willing not to feed millions of its own people...or at least take that gambit to the brink.)
To only have that clown of a tacky shoe salesman throw paper towels at its’ people?
To have Trump call for some sort of meeting in the gold-plated whatever-the-fu*k-that-is Oval Office only to further humiliate Jamaica’s leaders and call them a sh*thole country?
I get it...Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness needs assistance from anywhere and everywhere that he can get now and the United States is well...right there, so I won’t fault him if he does ask for American resources and assistance to help his people.
If the United States provides the assistance that Jamaica needs than accept it gracefully and gratefully.
But as far as asking...I’d rather Jamaica get the help that it needs from China or...hell, ask King Charles III...anyone but The American Clown.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Another pastor is turning away financial church offerings for a very different reason than what we’ve seen this month on social media. Yesterday, Pastor Jamal Bryant, who leads New Birth Church in Georgia, revealed how his church will support communities impacted by the government shutdown, SNAP benefit freeze, and climbing unemployment rates.
Instead of monetary offerings, Pastor Bryant asks the congregation to bring in canned food donations every Sunday in November to supply its King’s Table drive-thru food distribution initiative, which offers free groceries to those in need.
“We have a responsibility,” he said in his sermon on Sunday. “Our history is going to record that this president is the very first president in American history to starve his own citizens. On November 1st, SNAP benefits are cut in this country, impacting 42 million Americans. That is, ladies and gentlemen, one out of every seven people. One out of every seven people in this room is on food assistance. One out of seven who are watching online are on food assistance.”
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The bookies had them down as the favorite. In the end, Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (errs) missed out on the Nobel peace prize, which instead went to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition politician. Yet the network of mutual-aid groups delivering life-saving help amid civil war would have deserved the prize, too.
The errs have been laboring on the front lines of Sudan’s humanitarian crisis ever since the civil war began in 2023. They are made up of more than 700 small, decentralized groups of local volunteers. Most are young women. They feed the hungry, restore electricity, fix water wells, evacuate civilians and do “everything else in between”, says Haitham Elnour, a spokesman. As Western aid budgets are being slashed, and belligerents on both sides of the war block aid and terrorize civilians, the errs have managed to help more than 3m people. “In many ways, they are the state now,” says Kholood Khair of Confluence Advisory, a Sudanese think-tank.
They also suggest how aid might work in a more skeptical age. Forged from Sudan’s “resistance committees”, autonomous networks of protesters who in 2019 helped topple Omar al-Bashir, the country’s former dictator, errs are unlike traditional aid groups. Instead of formal leaders they have a council whose elected representatives serve eight months at most to prevent vested interests from emerging.
They are cost-efficient, with 95% of donations going directly to volunteers on the ground. Yet until now they have received less than 1% of all international aid for Sudan. After American aid was frozen in February that paltry amount shrank by even more; hundreds of their soup kitchens were forced to close.
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Look, maybe it’s time the tech world rethinks having AI technology do the job of law enforcement, particularly in the Black community. Not that human cops don’t do a fine job of making Black people feel terrorized rather than protected all on their own, but when AI surveillance systems are out here mistaking Dorito bags for deadly weapons—resulting in Black teenagers being handcuffed at school—it might be safe to say the artificial “intelligence” is running the risk of making things worse.
According to WBAL-TV, Taki Allen, a student at Kenwood High School in Baltimore County, was sitting with friends outside of the school Monday night when armed officers approached him and searched him for what was reported as a weapon.
It was a bag of chips.
“It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us. At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?'” 16-year-old Taki told WBAL-TV
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U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, hit back at President Donald Trump on Monday after he, yet again, attacked her as “low IQ.”
“I’m waiting on a reporter…[to] finally asked him what is his IQ, because he is constantly talking about…he doesn’t even know what a low IQ is,” Crockett fired back at Trump during an interview on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins.”
“He doesn’t even know which scores are low. And I can guarantee you that whatever score he’s taken anytime recently, I’m sure that his qualifies as [low IQ] well,” she continued.
The Texas congresswoman and attorney said Trump, 79, has “never been known to be an Einstein.”
“This is not a guy who got in on merit when it came to going to college. This is someone who, but for him being born with a silver spoon, probably wouldn’t have got into anybody’s institution, unlike me,” Crockett said of the president, who reportedly gained admission into the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business as a result of his wealthy father’s connections.
Congresswoman Crockett said that, more than Trump’s IQ, she is particularly disturbed by his pattern of attacking Black and brown women in politics.
“I wish people would look at the fact that you have a president of the United States who consistently is obsessing over two women of color that are members of the House,” she said, referring to Trump also calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “low IQ” during a Monday gaggle with the press on Air Force One.
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