-
Recent Posts
Top Posts & Pages
Categories
That’s Why the Lady Was on Stamps
(Photo credit: Diane Duane)
By Litsa Dremousis
“YOU SAW THE job applications, right?” the social worker asks me and nods in the direction of a bulletin board festooned with red construction paper stars. I imagine the staff meeting where someone asked, “You know what would totally liven this place up and make people forget they’re applying for food stamps and other means of government assistance? STARS! Fuck yes, I’ll get my tracing paper.”
I’m sitting on a gray plastic chair and my crutches are perched against the social worker’s battered wooden desk. I reply, “Yes, I saw them,” and my voice sounds uncharacteristically timid. She is a woman in her fifties with short brown hair and seems neither kind nor cruel. She briefly makes eye contact before checking a box on the first page of a tall stack of forms. I’m certain she’ll forget me by the time I hobble out the sliding glass doors and into the parking lot littered with candy bar wrappers and broken glass and other detritus that somehow didn’t make it to the state-issued garbage can perched right there. I need her to remember my case, though, and feel humiliated and desperate.
It’s Seattle, January 2002 and this isn’t how I’d planned on starting the new year. But four months prior, I’d experienced a severe relapse of CFIDS, an illness that presents in many ways like M.S., and I’d found myself in a wheelchair for the second time in a decade. By now, I’ve progressed to crutches again but am still far too ill to resume work. My money is gone and my parents have been incredibly supportive emotionally and financially for the past ten years, but my depleted health has likewise depleted their savings.
Read More That’s Why the Lady Was on Stamps | The Weeklings.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged CFIDS, Chronic fatigue syndrome, Snap, social assistance, Social work
Leave a comment
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, presents his pre-show keynote at the 2010 International CES in Las Vegas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Lance Whitney
Steve Ballmer will retire from his role as Microsoft CEO within the next 12 months, Microsoft announced Friday.
Ballmer will remain as chief executive until the board of directors chooses someone to succeed him.
“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Ballmer said in a statement. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”
Ballmer had more to say in an internal e-mail sent to Microsoft employees.
Microsoft’s board has set up a committee to pick the company’s next CEO. Comprised of board chairman and former CEO Bill Gates and other members of the board, the committee is working with an executive recruiting firm and said it will look at both internal and external candidates to fill the role.
“The board is committed to the effective transformation of Microsoft to a successful devices and services company,” committee chairman John Thompson said in a statement. “As this work continues, we are focused on selecting a new CEO to work with the company’s senior leadership team to chart the co
via Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months | Microsoft – CNET News.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Bill Gates, Busines, Microsoft, Retirement, Steve Ballmer, technology, Windows Phone
Leave a comment
Why Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’ Speech Is So Hard to Find Online
Dr. Martin Luther King giving his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Dustin Volz
As Washington gears up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech later this month, one thing might be missing from the celebrations: the speech itself.
A full, unedited video clip of the speech is tougher to find than you might think, because of copyright disputes that date back almost as far as the speech itself.
“We were shocked to find that it was very difficult to find a full copy of Dr. King’s speech on YouTube,” said Evan Greer, a campaign manager at Fight for the Future, an Internet free-speech advocacy group. In January, the group posted the full-length speech on Vimeo in an act of “civil disobedience” coinciding with Martin Luther King Day. The video was promptly removed for violating Vimeo’s terms of service, Greer said, but a version on YouTube has managed to avoid detection and remains up on the site, having accumulated more than 80,000 views.
“When I sat down to make this video, I’m not sure I had ever seen the whole speech,” Greer said. “We thought it was incredibly important that any young person be able to hop online and watch this speech … that is as relevant today as it was when it was written.”
Months after the August 1963 March on Washington, King himself sued to prevent the unauthorized sale of his speech, purportedly in an effort to control proceeds and use them to support the civil-rights movement. In 1999, the King family sued CBS after the network produced a video documentary that “used, without authorization, portions of … King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” A divided Appellate Court, in reversing a lower court ruling, held that the speech was not a “general publication,” despite its huge audience and subsequent historic importance. The speech instead qualified as a “limited publication,” the court said, because “distribution to the news media, as opposed to the general public, for the purpose of enabling the reporting of a contemporary newsworthy event, is only a limited publication.”
Read More Why Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’ Speech Is So Hard to Find Online – Dustin Volz – The Atlantic.
The Hunt for the White Trayvon Martin
By Elspeth Reeve
The hunt for the white Trayvon Martin has evolved since the case became national news, with a changing cast of victims and perpetrators, but the problem has remained the same: instead of countering the racial narrative of the Martin case, it has only reinforced it.
For years, guys like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have condemned people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “race hustlers,” arguing they’re making a living exploiting phantom racism. But the point of finding a white Trayvon is not to prove that racism isn’t real, but that racism is justified. To refresh your memory: the outrage over the shooting of Trayvon Martin was not just that George Zimmerman assumed the unarmed teenager was a criminal, but that the police let Zimmerman go without a charge because they thought it was credible when Zimmerman said he had to use lethal force against a kid carrying with Skittles. You probably remember the rest.
But what you may have forgotten is how much fixation there was on the idea that if the races of Martin and Zimmerman had been reversed, the outcome would have been different. On the left, this gave birth to a meme (shown above) that went viral after The Grio posted it in May 2012. It’s intended to create sympathy for Martin — that fewer people would have assumed Martin deserved to be shot if he were white. But on the right, to try to shut down the outrage and counter the attention that the Martin case was receiving — or at least to rebut the claims that the shooting was a clear-cut example of the deadly results of racism — there was an effort to find real-life incidents of reversed races that weren’t leading every cable news channel. Here are a few of them.
The Black George Zimmerman
In Greece, New York, in 2009, Roderick Scott, who is black, was acquitted of manslaughter when he fatally shot a white teenager he had spotted breaking into cars outside his home. According to Scott’s testimony, at about 3:30a.m., he heard people outside, grabbed his handgun, went out, and saw three teens breaking into a neighbor’s truck. When he confronted them, one started running at Scott. Unsure whether the rushing kid was armed, Scott shot him twice. Scott killed Christopher Cervini, who was 17.
Read More The Hunt for the White Trayvon Martin – Elspeth Reeve – The Atlantic Wire.
New York City Council overrides Mayor Bloomberg’s vetoes, passes bills to rein in aggressive policing
(Photo credit: Dan Nguyen @ New York City)
By Erin Durkin
The City Council’s election-year confrontation with Mayor Bloomberg over the NYPD reached a climax Thursday with two votes to rein in overly aggressive policing.
The Council voted 34-15 for a bill that would give people more options to sue the NYPD if they think they’ve been the victims of racial profiling.
The override got exactly the number of votes needed to override a veto and the same number of votes the initial bill received in June despite a strong effort from Mayor Bloomberg and police unions to convince Council members to change their votes.
The Council voted 39-10 to override Bloomberg’s veto of a bill to create an NYPD inspector general who will oversee all police practices and policies including the controversial stop and frisk tactic.
Bloomberg, who called the bills dangerous, had hoped to flip at least one vote to kill the profiling bill, but did not succeed.
“We are tired of the lies. We are tired of the fear mongering. We want good policing, and we want safer streets,” said Councilman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn), a sponsor of the bills, who said Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly “will go down in history as the people who tried to prevent progress.”
What I learned from getting shot
By Brian Beutler
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I haven’t said or written much publicly about the shooting that nearly killed me in 2008. But a recent confluence of events — Trayvon Martin’s death, the Zimmerman trial and the public pronouncements of mostly privileged, mostly white people in the aftermath of the verdict — has left me feeling like I have something to share.
Most recently, actor-activist Kal Penn, once an avowed opponent of racial stereotyping in law enforcement (based in part on his own experience getting patted down at airports), changed his views after he was held up at gunpoint in Washington, D.C. (Penn published a brief explanation late last week, and apparently reconsidered his view over the weekend.)
Racial profiling for thee but not for me. That’s how it looks, at least. It’s probably more complicated than that. I don’t know. I asked Penn on Twitter to discuss the evolution of his views with me, but didn’t get a reply. Maybe he didn’t see the request. Either way, the offer still stands.
What I can say with some authority — whether this is what happened to Penn or not — is that being a victim of gun violence doesn’t have to turn you into a supporter of racial profiling.
My story is more than five years old now. It took place in Washington, D.C., on a typically warm July night. I was out late on a Tuesday with a friend whom I’ll call Matt, since that’s his name. We’d been drinking — probably too much for a weeknight, but not too much for a 25-year-old journalist.
A half-hour after last call, on our walk home up 16th Street northbound toward Mount Pleasant where we lived at the time, we impulsively decided to grab a late night snack at a 24-hour diner we used to frequent in Adams Morgan and hung a left up Euclid Street — a dimly lit one-way street with a violent history.
I’d been up and down Euclid hundreds of times over the years — midday and late at night; alone and with friends; drunk and sober; and just about every permutation thereof. Always without incident.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged gun violence, guns, politics, race, racial profiling, stop & frisk
Leave a comment
Rape Culture At Work: Five Examples Of How Employers Turn Women Into Sex Objects
(Photo credit: luccast85)
By Tara Culp-Ressler and Bryce Covert
It’s no secret that women face a disproportionate amount of discrimination in the workplace. One-third of women say they have been subject to some type of workplace discrimination at some point in their careers — which can range from being paid less for the same type of work, to being denied a promotion, to being scrutinized more carefully than their male colleagues.
But the issues that women encounter on the job can run deeper than being unfairly assumed to be less competent or less valuable than their male counterparts. In many cases, women are up against very specific assumptions about their sexuality, their role as “objects” intended to be attractive to men, and their responsibility to prevent men from desiring them.
That attitude toward women’s bodies becomes entrenched at an early age, as girls are told what type of clothing is or isn’t appropriate to wear at school so they don’t “distract” the male students. And it carries over into the workplace, too, as adult women repeatedly receive the message that they are responsible for both obscuring and leveraging their sexuality for men’s purposes. Here are just five recent examples:
A New Jersey judge ruled that casino waitresses can be fired for gaining weight.
Twenty two former cocktail servers sued a popular casino in Atlantic City over a policy that forbids waitresses from gaining more than seven percent of their original body weight. The women were subject to regular weigh-ins, and the policy meant that a 130-pound woman was not allowed to gain more than 9.1 pounds. They alleged it was weight discrimination — but an Atlantic County Superior Court Judge disagreed. In July, the judge ruled that casino waitresses are essentially “sex objects,” and it’s okay to fire them for gaining weight because they are no longer fulfilling their contractual obligations.
Read More Rape Culture At Work: Five Examples Of How Employers Turn Women Into Sex Objects | ThinkProgress.
George Zimmerman Shops For Tactical Shotgun
Kel-tec KSG Shotgun (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
George Zimmerman was on the hunt today — for a shotgun … TMZ has learned. Zimmerman went to Kel-Tec in Cocoa, Florida … a gun manufacturing company. We’re told he was asking questions about the legality of buying a shotgun — specifically, the Kel-Tec KSG.The gun in question is a tactical shotgun, often used for home defense. It holds 12 rounds of 12 gauge shells.
And this is interesting … Kel-Tec manufactures the PF-9 gun — the pistol Zimmerman used to kill Trayvon Martin.
We’re told the owner’s son took Zimmerman on a tour of the grounds, including the area where the firearms are assembled. The photo of Zimmerman and an employee (above) was taken inside the assembly plant.
It’s unclear if he actually bought the shotgun while he was there.
Read More George Zimmerman Shops For Tactical Shotgun | TMZ.com.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Cocoa Florida, George Zimmerman, Gun Culture, guns, Kel-Tec, Manufacturing, Shotgun
Leave a comment
soulbrotherspeaks.com 