“There are Times.” Thoughts from Puerto Rico — around midnight.
by Bobby Neary
Many regular readers of Daily Kos know Chef Bobby Neary — screen name newpioneer, and @nuevopionero on twitter. He lost everything during Hurricane Maria, and is still working daily on the island to help others. Around midnight, June 10, he posted these thoughts on twitter. He gave his permission to re-post them here.
There are times
when despair grips you so tight
it’s almost too painful to bear.
Then across the miles
appear hands to hold you,
bringing a relief so desperately needed
that it almost seems impossible.
Many are traveling this exhausting road,
in solitude, illness,
bullied, shamed,
abandoned, hopeless.
We can find one another
if we only look and listen,
if we refuse to turn away.
There are times
when distant hands
can reach into your heart,
your suffering becomes their suffering,
they selflessly share the grief
pouring from your eyes,
streaming down your face.
You're not alone,
you'll never be alone again.
There are so many who care.
There are times
when these friends
know that clichéd affirmations,
forced smiles,
pretending you're o.k.
are not solutions for your crushed spirit.
They don’t insult you with superficial self-help platitudes
that can lead one in the claws of depression
to an even darker place,
a place consumed with spiraling self-doubt
and desperate cries of “what’s wrong with me?”
when quotes-of-the-day fail to ease the pain.
Or worse, “what did I do to deserve this?”
when faced with devastation
that has left your life,
your environment,
unrecognizable.
There are times
when obstacles appear
that walks in nature cannot cure,
supernatural chants cannot resolve,
no matter how sincerely believed.
Time doesn’t always heal wounds,
saying your deity will not burden you
with more than you can carry
doesn't make it true.
We’re breakable.
There are times
when life hangs in the balance
and a single word
can tip the scales.
The human mind can be so fragile,
please listen carefully
and speak with your heart.
There’s no need for other rules,
no suffocating dogma,
only love,
caring,
and respecting another life.
There are times
when the hands of a friend
have this power,
friends who will walk beside you
on the darkest nights
and hold you close
through the fiercest storms.
No judging,
no shaming disguised as piousness,
only hands to hold you,
there to catch you when you stumble.
There are times
when hope appears as gentle words on your screen
or a soothing voice on the line
just when you need it the most.
No matter the distance,
you can feel them,
you can hold them,
you can hear them,
you can see them
even if you’ve never looked
one another in the eyes.
There are times
when you can’t deny the healing power
you hold in your own hands,
at the tips of your fingers.
Use your power
with love and understanding
because during these dark and confusing times,
you may be saving a life.
There are times
like yesterday,
like today,
like tomorrow,
when another life will be gone here in Puerto Rico,
crying out in the pitch of night,
abandoned,
forgotten,
betrayed,
all hope lost in their darkness.
There are times
like yesterday,
like today,
like tomorrow,
when 22 more veterans will take their own lives,
tormented,
discarded,
betrayed,
all hope lost in their darkness.
There are times
like yesterday,
like today,
like tomorrow,
when another youth will be pushed
beyond hope,
bullied,
shamed,
betrayed,
all hope lost in their darkness.
Suicide,
depression,
mental illness,
there is no discrimination.
Whether you have traveled the world
or never left your hometown,
whether you live in a mansion
or live on the streets,
neither the rich nor the poor
are exempt.
So be kind,
be gentle,
do no harm, please.
There are times
like now,
when each of us can make a difference.
Light a candle,
say a prayer if you must,
but we need action.
Please don't be the person
who only prays for those suffering.
If someone is hungry,
first give them something to eat,
then you can pray together.
Those lost and in the dark
don’t need your prayers,
they need your heart.
Please open your heart.
They need your hands.
Please reach out your hands.
They need your light.
Please be their light.
That time is now.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The Supreme Court’s decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute is the culmination of a decadeslong effort to disenfranchise minority and low-income voters. Slate: Fraud Fiction Becomes Purge Reality
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In 2008, Justice John Paul Stevens joined the majority in a 6–3 ruling in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, holding that Indiana’s requirement that all voters must present a photo ID was constitutional. Bolstered by the decision in Crawford, voter-ID laws have proliferated in the states, as have other efforts to correct for the fake scourge of fraudulent voting. Indiana justified this additional burden on voting by claiming that even though it could produce no evidence that vote fraud had occurred in the state, the need for “integrity” and public confidence in the voting process warranted these safeguards.
Two years ago, reflecting back on his vote in Crawford, Justice Stevens said that while he had painstakingly confined his opinion to the record in the case, he had also “learned a lot of things outside the record that made me very concerned about that statute.” Nevertheless, he added, “I thought in that case I had a duty to confine myself to what the record did prove, and I thought it did not prove the plaintiffs’ case. And as a result, we ended up with a fairly unfortunate decision.” Stevens was sufficiently worried about the record in Crawford that he actually dropped in a footnote saying, “Supposition based on extensive Internet research is not an adequate substitute for admissible evidence subject to cross-examination in constitutional adjudication.”
In the years after Crawford, one of the three federal judges on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel who had also ruled against Indiana’s voter-ID challengers, Judge Richard Posner, also said that he had gotten it wrong and that the photo-ID requirement is now widely regarded as “a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” Posner also wrote that he had come to the view that “there is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.”
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, decided Monday by the Supreme Court, is not a voter-ID case. It relates to a massive Ohio voter purge, ostensibly carried out to protect the integrity of the voting process, by using a voter’s failure to vote in elections as evidence that the voter has moved. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the five-justice majority, thus finds that Ohio’s decision to purge thousands of voters from the rolls does not violate the directive of the National Voter Registration Act, which bars any state from removing a registrant “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” Ohio is A-OK, Alito says, because the failure to vote doesn’t trigger the purge—it’s merely used as evidence that the person has moved.
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A California man discovered that his face had been plastered all over newspapers, local television stations and the internet after a woman saw him walking his dogs through her neighborhood, snapped a picture of him and gave it to police trying to stop a burglary ring.
According to the Los Angeles Times, on May 16, 55-year-old Ike Iloputaife walked his two dogs, as he does every morning. Unbeknownst to him, seven hours later, a home in his San Diego neighborhood was burglarized and several rifles and handguns were stolen. A week later, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department released general descriptions of the men who were responsible, along with photos of the suspects. All of the photos were from surveillance cameras from burglarized homes, except one.
That photo was of Iloputaife.
The press release said that the photo was of “suspect 2” in the burglary. According to the police, the alleged burglar was 20 to 35 years old, between 6 feet and 6 feet 5 inches tall, and weighed about 260 pounds. Given that Iloputaife is only 5 feet 9 inches and weighs 195 pounds, it is understandable how the police and the media got the two men confused because the two men share one similar characteristic:
Black skin.
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As America waits to see if Georgia will make history by electing the first African American woman governor in the country this November, African American women in one of Georgia’s newest cities are already making U.S. history.
Only a year after the creation of the city of South Fulton, Georgia’s fifth largest city is breaking American barriers.
In January 2018, the city’s Municipal Court began operating and in March 2018 the city’s police services officially began. The city is the first city in American history where every criminal justice department head is an African American woman.
Chief of Police Sheila Rogers is a career law enforcement professional with more than twenty-six years experience. Rogers is the city’s first police chief and one of a few women police chief around the country.
Chief Judge Tiffany Carter Sellers is a University of Georgia law school graduate and the city’s first chief judge. Sellers was selected through a panel of experienced judges from the surrounding community.
Judge Sellers hired and appointed the court administrator, Lakesiya Cofield, and the city’s first chief court clerk, Ramona Howard.
Also appointed to represent the two equally important components of any criminal justice system were two attorneys, City Solicitor LaDawn “LBJ” Jones, who prosecutes the cases and City Public Defender Viveca Famber Powell, who defends those accused of crimes.
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The cop who tackled former pro tennis star James Blake got a penalty of five lost vacation days — half of that recommended by an independent oversight board, the Daily News has learned.
Officer James Frascatore was slapped with the five-day rip by Police Commissioner James O’Neill in February, sources told The News. The decision came five months after Frascatore was found guilty of excessive force following a departmental trial and two years, nine months after the incident.
Lawyers for the CCRB had recommended he lose 10 vacation days for the Sept. 9, 2015 encounter outside a hotel on E. 42nd St. near Lexington Ave. Frascatore was on a stakeout and mistook Blake for a credit card scammer.
Blake himself found even that penalty inadequate, saying he wanted the cop fired.
“Losing five vacation days for excessive force is a woefully inadequate penalty," Blake’s lawyer Kevin Marino told The News.
“Far from serving as a deterrent, a trivial penalty of that type would seem to be encouraging those inclined toward excessive force to go right on doing it.”
“He used violence first,” CCRB lawyer Jonathan Fogel said at the trial In September. “He used no words or warning, slamming him to the ground like a linebacker in NFL football."
Frascatore’s lawyer Stephen Worth called his client’s actions “appropriate.” “He did what he was told to do, what he was sworn to do,” he said at the trial.
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MARIS GIDWELL unwinds the bandage from her forearm and removes a wooden splint. Two fingers are missing. Her arm shakes as she tells how, as dawn broke, she heard shouts warning the residents of Lawaru, in Adamawa state in north-east Nigeria, to flee. She ran towards a neighbouring village with her 25-year-old son. Tragically, men wielding machetes caught them. They robbed and wounded Ms Gidwell, and murdered her son.
The attack on Lawaru and its surrounding villages was probably carried out by nomadic Fulani herdsmen, a group that is scattered across much of west Africa’s semi-arid Sahel, from Mali to the Central African Republic. Many of those killed were sedentary farmers, mostly from the Bachama tribe. The incident is part of a growing wave of violence between nomads and farmers that has ebbed and flowed across Nigeria’s central “Middle Belt” since at least 2011.
Although strife between herdsmen and farmers dates back centuries, it has escalated sharply as climate change pushes herders south. Clashes are deadlier, too, thanks to guns looted from the arsenals of Libya’s former dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, and smuggled around the region.
The fighting is stretching a government that is also trying to contain a jihadist insurgency in the north-east and banditry in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Violence in the Middle Belt, which is about a third of Nigeria’s land mass, is every bit as brutal.
In the past year armed Fulani groups have surpassed Boko Haram, a jihadist group, as the deadliest threat to civilians. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a non-profit organisation, estimates that armed Fulani men have killed almost 1,000 civilians this year; Boko Haram have slaughtered 200 or so.
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Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers.
The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated.
“We report that nine of the 13 oldest … individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years,” they wrote in the scientific journal Nature Plants, describing “an event of an unprecedented magnitude”.
“It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages,” said the study’s co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania.
Among the nine were four of the largest African baobabs. While the cause of the die-off remains unclear, the researchers “suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect southern Africa in particular”.
Further research is needed, said the team from Romania, South Africa and the United States, “to support or refute this supposition”.
Between 2005 and 2017, the researchers probed and dated “practically all known very large and potentially old” African baobabs – more than 60 individuals in all. Collating data on girth, height, wood volume and age, they noted the “unexpected and intriguing fact” that most of the very oldest and biggest trees died during the study period. All were in southern Africa – Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia
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