OK, but…
Commentary by Chitown Kev
How is everyone doing?
Physically, I’m going through a few changes; changes in diet, sleep patterns all f’d up (I’ve become a vampire, now)...a lot of stuff that mostly has to do with me getting older, I guess.
Mentally: it seems that too much is happening too fast and, try as I might, the discipline is not there to get anything under control. I feel as if I’m going through a short circuit,
Not for the first time.
Probably not for the last time.
There are outward signs of that as well, which I won’t mention...(Well, I will mention that I damn near have an Afro now, it seems...and I will mention that working fewer hours is really having an effect on me).
The fact that I don’t make enough in salary to regularly donate means that I feel as if I don’t contribute enough.
Phone or text banking is what people usually advise in these situations but...I’m not good at all at that type of stuff; I lose my cool and start cussin’ folks out too quickly with that.
So with one week to go until the end of the 2020 presidential election, I’m filled with anxiety but...I have to do what I can to contribute, as well, because this is an election that Democrats can not afford to lose at any level.
At least I’m being a little outspoken about how I’m really doing...and that always helps me feel a little better.
Now to get the work done because...it’s simply my duty to do so with the stakes as they are.
That’s it, that’s all for today.
Related link: WaPo: Pandemic depression is about to collide with seasonal depression. Make a plan, experts say. By Chelsea Cirruzzo
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Another reminder why local election matter. Evictions in Arkansas can snowball from criminal charges to arrests to jail time because of a 119-year-old law that mostly impacts female, Black and low-income renters. ProPublica: When Falling Behind on Rent Leads to Jail Time
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One early evening in October 1999, Wilma Young was preparing dinner for her daughters when there was a knock on her front door. She had a quiet pride in her three-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in Sherwood, a middle class and rapidly developing suburb outside Little Rock. The Park Crest complex had a dirt road leading into it, but she could walk to grocery stores and her favorite spot, Shotgun Dan’s Pizza.
Young, then 42, opened the door that evening to find a police officer on her doorstep. He asked for Young by name, then told her he had a warrant for her arrest for failing to pay rent and then not vacating. “There must be a mistake,” she remembers repeating over and over. Young had made a point of paying her rent on time and had copies of her monthly checks. With the officer on her doorstep, she retrieved them to let them speak for themselves.
They did not. Young remembers the officer saying he had to carry out the warrant as issued. In front of her children, the officer handcuffed and arrested her. Young shuddered as her youngest, just 5, started crying.
Outraged, Young spent the night in the county detention center. In the morning, her dad came to bail her out. Aside from a parking violation, she had never been accused of breaking the law or been arrested before. “You do all the right things and still get hung up in a system that’s never built for you,” she said.
Young, who knew her neighbors from swapping child care, began knocking on their doors to find out whether anyone else in the development had had similar visits from the police. Sure enough, the stories rolled in. One neighbor told Young she had been driving out of town to visit family in Memphis, Tennessee, when police pulled her over for a broken taillight. The officer ran her driver’s license, found an active warrant for failing to pay her Park Crest rent and arrested her. She spent a few days in jail before her family could post bail, Young recalled.
After surveying the entire apartment complex, she came to believe that only Black tenants, mostly women, were getting charged and arrested for not paying rent. In legal filings, Park Crest denied the allegation that they were only using the statute against Black tenants. Park Crest’s former owners and property managers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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The "CAREN Act" (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) was introduced in July at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting by Supervisor Shamann Walton.
The ordinance is one step closer to becoming a law. On Tuesday, the board unanimously passed the act on first read. Next week, the bill has to be voted on again by the board, and then it will be sent to Mayor London Breed to sign.
The ordinance's name is a twist on "Karen," the name social media gives people making racially biased 911 calls.
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Pope Francis said Sunday he would elevate Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington to cardinal next month, making him the first African American to hold the title.
Gregory, 72, is one of 13 cardinals in the new class announced by Francis on Sunday, a promotion that comes as he is trying to rebuild trust in an archdiocese rocked by sexual abuse cases.
The move was widely anticipated; Washington archbishops are typically elevated to cardinal after their appointments. But it's nonetheless symbolically significant in the U.S. Catholic Church, where Blacks have been underrepresented among the leadership.
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A Royal African Company ship that carried more African slaves to the Americas than any other institution in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, was discovered buried underneath the sea by a Black scuba driver.
In a new documentary called Enslaved, Kramer Wimberley, a member of the board of directors of Diving with a Purpose (DWP), a diving organization that preserves African architects lost in the sea, unearth fragments of a slave trade ship.
The significance of Royal African Company is that they traded more than 12 million Africans to the Atlantic in 45,000 voyages, more than 400 years ago, the Guardian reported.
Not many slaves survived those voyages. Of the 65,411 Africans trafficked to the Caribbean, 14,668 died at sea, having been chained in cramped hulls.
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Ethiopia's prime minister has said his country "will not cave in to aggressions of any kind" after President Donald Trump suggested Egypt could destroy a controversial Nile dam.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is at the centre of a long-running dispute involving Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan.
Mr Trump said Egypt would not be able to live with the dam and might "blow up" the construction.
Ethiopia sees the US as siding with Egypt in the dispute.
The US announced in September that it would cut some aid to Ethiopia after it began filling the reservoir behind the dam in July.
On Saturday, Ethiopia's foreign minister summoned the US ambassador to clarify President Trump's comments.
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The two presidents drove out 10,000 Cuban doctors and nurses. They defunded the region’s leading health agency. They wrongly pushed hydroxychloroquine as a cure. New York Times: How Trump and Bolsonaro broke latin America's Covid-19 defense
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The coronavirus was gathering lethal speed when President Trump met his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, on March 7 for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Bolsonaro had canceled trips that week to Italy, Poland and Hungary, and Brazil’s health minister had urged him to stay away from Florida, too.
But Mr. Bolsonaro insisted, eager to burnish his image as the “Trump of the Tropics.” His grinning aides posed at the president’s resort in green “Make Brazil Great Again” hats. Mr. Trump declared he was “not concerned at all” before walking Mr. Bolsonaro around the club shaking hands.
Twenty-two people in Mr. Bolsonaro’s delegation tested positive for the virus after returning to Brazil, yet he was not alarmed. Mr. Trump had shared a cure, Mr. Bolsonaro told advisers: a box of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, the unproven treatment that Mr. Trump was then promoting as a remedy for Covid-19.
“He said the trip was wonderful, that they had a great time, that life was normal at Mar-a-Lago, everything was cured, and that hydroxychloroquine was the medicine that was supposed to be used,” recalled the health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who was fired by Mr. Bolsonaro the next month for opposing reliance on the drug.
“From that time on, it was very hard to get him to take the science seriously.”
The Mar-a-Lago dinner, which would become infamous for spreading infection, cemented a partnership between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro rooted in a shared disregard for the virus. But even before the dinner, the two presidents had waged an ideological campaign that would undermine Latin America’s ability to respond to Covid-19.
Together, the two men, fierce opponents of Latin America’s leftists, took aim at Cuba’s great pride: the doctors it sends around the world. Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro drove 10,000 Cuban doctors and nurses out of impoverished areas of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador. Many left without being replaced only months before the pandemic arrived.
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As a kid, Leandra King loved visiting the cider mill every autumn, but visits were limited as the trip required traveling outside county borders.
Now, the Detroit native has recreated the classic fall tradition in her hometown after launching the first cider mill in the Motor City, WXYZ reports.
“It was one of my fondest memories, going to Parmenter’s,” King told the local ABC affiliate. “I’ve been to Blake’s. I just remember going to Yates as a kid, and I just wanted to recreate that for the city of Detroit.”
According to research by American Express, Black women are starting businesses at the fastest rate of any racial group. Since 2007, the number of firms owned by African-American women has grown by 164%.
The family-owned enterprise is called Detroit Farm and Cider, and it’s a first-of-its-kind for the majority-Black city. It’s located in a mostly residential area on the city’s west side. The roughly four-acres cider mill also resides in a neighborhood with a rich history, the outlet said.
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Katrina Brooks has a challenge most small business owners would envy: She’s working overtime to fulfill orders at Black Pearl Books in Austin. A year ago, when she started her company, which depends mostly on online sales, she expected she’d have time to build a customer base. She still thought so when pandemic lockdowns occurred in March, and local arts, school, and other events where Black Pearl operates pop-up stores were canceled.
Then came the Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of George Floyd in late May. Suddenly, Black Pearl was deluged with orders for books by and about Blacks and other minorities—so many that Brooks closed her online store in July so she could tackle her backlog. She reopened in August and has relied on volunteers, friends, and family, including her mother, to help pack and ship books to customers while she strategizes for the future.
“Overnight we went from getting dozens to thousands of orders, and it felt overwhelming,” Brooks says. “I had to switch my thinking about the scale of my business. I’m still working until 3 a.m. many days—but it’s been a blessing.”
In recent months, Black booksellers have had more success than many Black-owned businesses. After confronting the same disruptions at the outset of the pandemic, including having to close brick-and-mortar stores, they were swamped with orders from a more diverse and larger group of customers than they’d previously served. Now they face the challenge of sustaining increased demand, or at least transforming their short-term sales boost into a longer-term benefit. This includes curating an inventory of books that appeal to new customers, increasing social media and other marketing efforts, and forming partnerships with local community groups, schools, and businesses.
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President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said Black people must “want to be successful” in order for his father-in-law’s policies to help them.
“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Kushner said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
Kushner was dismissive of the Black Lives Matter movement in his Monday interview.
“You saw a lot of people who were just virtue signaling,” he said. “They go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court and quite frankly that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”
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