Chitown Kev’s Potpourri for The Porch for Tuesday May 2, 2017
(OK, all of the eyes on my brain’s “project stove” are occupied today so...I had to do something...and here it is!)
1)
Keep shaking that head, Ms. Ryan!
And Congratulations!
2)
Caroline Kennedy and John John John (Jack Schlossberg) stylin’ at the Met Gala last night.
3) I readily concede the point that one shouldn’t want any former President to indulge too much in the habit giving paid speeches to corporations and industries that they used to regulate when they were President.
I get that. I even agree with it.
However, the reaction of some on the Left to President Obama’s upcoming speech at Cantor Fitzgerald’s 3rd Annual Healthcare Conference is simply over-histrionic for many reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum.
I do have one other casual observation to add to the discussion.
I’ve held a few jobs working for the government or for a non-profit agency. One of the more frequent topics of discussion among workers is the knowledge that the salary for non-profit/governmental service positions is quite low when compared to the private sector, especially for the work volume required in such positions (the benefit packages are great, though!).
It could easily be argued that both Barack and Michelle Obama have not been adequately compensated for their work experience and “skill sets.”
Indeed, I’ve read and heard frequently that, if anything, President Obama is not being paid enough for this speech.
And I agree.
So assuming that neither President Obama nor FLOTUS will be running for public office ever again, check back with me if and when the former president hits the Wall Street canapé and champagne speaking circuit on a regular basis.
And The Left needs to stop the hatin’ because President Obama has more than earned it.
And then some.
4) A note to Rod McCullom, former blogmaster of the black gay blog Rod 2.0: I see you!
Does Gun Violence Infect Communities Like a Blood-Borne Pathogen?
Building on other research that links everything from behaviors and opinions to obesity, depression, and HIV, to the concept of “social contagion” — defined as the “spread of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors through social interactions” — Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos, along with Harvard Ph.D. candidates Ben Green, an applied mathematician, and Thibaut Horel, a computer scientist, decided to test whether gun violence traced a similar path of transfer through social networks. “The diffusion of gun violence might occur through person-to-person interactions,” the team wrote, “in a process akin to the epidemiological transmission of a blood-borne pathogen.”
If true, the trio posited that the spread of gun violence through direct social ties — as opposed to neighborhood-level exposure to high-crime areas — might be a critical factor in identifying individuals at high risk for being shot. In that sense, the “disease” of gun violence might be considered less like an airborne bug, and more like a virus spread through direct personal contact.
“Our central hypothesis,” the researchers wrote, “was that when someone in your network becomes a subject of gun violence, your risk of becoming a subject of gun violence temporarily increases.”
Anecdotally, I’ve told the story of my grandfather who absolutely did not allow his two grandsons to play with any type of toy guns in the house. To this day, I can hear him saying, “A gun is not a toy.”
I also remember Granddad taking me into his backyard, lifting me in his arms, and guiding his eight ear-old oldest grandson’s hand as he taught me to shoot a gun.
I haven’t shot a gun since.
I can count the number of times that I have even seen a gun on one hand. I have never owned a gun and I never will. I have been a witness to gun violence twice in my lifetime and I hope never to be a witness to it again.
One additional thing: I will readily acknowledge the quid pro quo aspect in my posting of Rod’s story, today, lol.
Some years ago, when he lived in Chicago, Rod treated me to a birthday lunch and some great conversation (with tea, of course!) at a Thai restaurant in Boystown.
Plus...I’ve never been a regular reader of my horoscope, so if I didn’t follow Rod’s Twitter feed, I would never what the day has in store for me!
Today’s horoscope was prescient, I think...
5)
Great podcast featuring Propane Jane. It’s about 25 minutes and more than worth the time.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Governmental neglect left majority-black wards destitute. Seventy-three percent of those displaced by Katrina were black, and more than one-third of them were estimated to have been poor.
Although the hardest hit areas in New Orleans were low income communities and communities of color, white residents were favored over black residents in the rebuilding of New Orleans. The result: New Orleans lost close to 100,000 black residents who were unable to rebuild their homes. This catastrophe and unequal disbursement of resources is the direct impact of climate change.
Katrina is just one example of how structural inequality and institutional racism have everything to do with how communities of color are left to deal with the consequences of climate change.
Moreover, the CEOs making big bucks off coal plants, waste facilities, pipelines and factories emitting even more CO2 into the air, are worsening our climate and heating the planet. Not to mention that this coal plants are more likely to be built in areas inhabited by low-income people of color, indigenous peoples and immigrants.
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The glut of new films, marking the 25th anniversary of the unrest, are imperfect but panoramic portrayals of the events that shook the city and the nation. The Atlantic: Looking Back on the L.A. Riots Through Five Documentaries
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It’s not even properly a documentary at all, but one of the most insightful moments of cultural reflection on the L.A. Riots came just months after the fires in South Central and Koreatown ceased burning. In the September Season 6 premiere of A Different World, protagonists Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy) explore Los Angeles the day a jury handed down not-guilty verdicts for the four officers involved in the infamous Rodney King beating, which helped spark the unrest that became one of the most indelible race riots in American history. The two-part episode is ambitious, a rare on-location retelling that blends ample newsreel footage, radio snippets, and provocative performance art with a sitcom’s serial lesson-telling and a black family show’s moral framework. The episode is all the more remarkable because of the fabled role A Different World’s parent show The Cosby Show, which aired its series finale during the riots, supposedly had in helping to end the city-wide violence.
Much has changed in the decades since the riots, which started 25 years ago on April 29, 1992. Today’s fires have come in the forms of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charlotte, and with the recognition that history can inform America’s stubborn race problems often comes a call for probing the past for answers. And although the actual events of the L.A. Riots remain the same, they carry new ways of understanding the country today.
Perhaps that’s why there are so many documentaries out now on the riots to commemorate their 25th anniversary.
At least five documentaries released this week seek to accomplish their own versions of what that A Different World episode attempted two-and-half decades ago: to outline a theory of causality for and final implications of the L.A. Riots. National Geographic’s full-length documentary LA 92, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, premiered on April 21 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Smithsonian Channel’s Lost Tapes episode on the L.A. Riots is currently streaming online and airing regularly on the channel. Fresh off controversy over the perceived erasure of black women activists in his Guerrilla miniseries, the director John Ridley’s Let it Fall, produced in conjunction with ABC, is out both in a theatrical run and on the network. A&E’s L.A. Burning, directed by Erik Parker and One9 and executive-produced by John Singleton, and Showtime’s Burn, Motherf*cker, Burn!, directed by Sacha Jenkins, both round out the list and are available via streaming and on television.
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Domingos Luis, a 20-year-old farmer, has lived his entire life in a hamlet surrounded by land mines, their lurking threat a constant presence. He remembers the old man who was killed after stepping on an explosive while tending his crops. Wild pigs and deer still set off mines in the nearby bush.
“I grew up with the fear that behind every bush there might be a mine,” he said.
When he was a boy, the village elders told him “where to go, where to move, how to move.” But sticking to the strict confines went against a child’s irrepressible desire to wander and explore.
His grandmother Diana Tchitumbo said she explained the dangers bluntly. “‘If you go there, you’ll be killed and never come back. Don’t go there again,’” she told him. “And if he did, I beat him.”
Fifteen years after the end of one of Africa’s longest wars, Angola remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries. Swaths of Angola are still littered with land mines, some produced decades ago in countries that no longer exist.
Nowhere are there more mines than here in Cuito Cuanavale, a city in southeastern Angola that was one of the last great battlefields of the Cold War. As the United States and the Soviet Union faced off globally, their proxies laid tens of thousands of mines in Cuito Cuanavale, in an area of Angola then considered so remote and impoverished that it was known as the Land at the End of the World.
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Just months into office, the Trump administration has rattled allies and partners in North America, Europe, and Asia. Now you can add Africa to that list.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson invited the chairperson of the African Union to Washington for a meeting, then backed out on him at the last minute, infuriating African diplomats, several sources tell Foreign Policy.
Tillerson invited African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki to Washington the week of April 17, after Faki ended meetings at the United Nations in New York. Several sources close to the matter say Faki scheduled his trip to Washington on April 19 and 20 while waiting for the details to be sorted out. But then Tillerson’s office went radio silent for several days, and left the head of the 55-nation bloc in the lurch and fuming, the sources said.
Tillerson’s team eventually got back to Faki’s entourage as he was about to depart New York and offered a meeting with lower-level State Department officials, but Faki cancelled his Washington visit entirely.
Diplomatic and protocol missteps — particularly in dealings with Africa — can have lasting consequences and potentially burn bridges that took decades to build, experts warn. That’s especially important as other geopolitical rivals continue to ratchet up their own global influence. Faki chairs the only continent-wide organization that speaks for Africa as a whole, and has been supportive of U.S. efforts to take a tougher line against terrorism.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A late spring that smells of summer on the west coast, the occasional rain squall that cleans the air. A temperate mid-70's as the sun casts moving shadows of moving clouds pushed by a confluence of sea and desert winds. Ntozake Shange evokes this landscape of concrete, glass and chaparral, of date palms and ice plants, of the freeway and the back yard; as she pays homage to the...
People of Watts
where we come from, sometimes, beauty
floats around us like clouds
the way leaves rustle in the breeze
and cornbread and barbecue swing out the backdoor
and tease all our senses as the sun goes down.
dreams and memories rest by fences
Texas accents rev up like our engines
customized sparkling powerful as the arms
that hold us tightly black n fragrant
reminding us that once we slept and loved
to the scents of magnolia and frangipani
once when we looked toward the skies
we could see something as lovely as our children's
smiles white n glistenin' clear of fear or shame
young girls in braids as precious as gold
find out that sex is not just bein' touched
but in the swing of their hips the light fallin cross
a softbrown cheek or the movement of a mere finger
to a lip many lips inviting kisses southern
and hip as any one lanky brother in the heat
of a laid back sunday rich as a big mama still
in love with the idea of love how we play at lovin'
even riskin' all common sense cause we are as fantastical
as any chimera or magical flowers where breasts entice
and disguise the racing pounding of our hearts
as the music that we are
hard core blues low bass voices crooning
straight outta Compton melodies so pretty
they nasty cruising the Harbor Freeway
blowin' kisses to strangers who won't be for long
singing ourselves to ourselves Mamie Khalid Sharita
Bessie Jock Tookie MaiMai Cosmic Man Mr. Man
Keemah and all the rest seriously courtin'
rappin' a English we make up as we go along
turnin' nouns into verbs braids into crowns
and always fetchin' dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn't make it whose smiles and deep
dark eyes help us to continue to see
there's so much life here.
-- Ntozake Shange
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH