Sia
Month: August 2016
What Grass?
*sips lemon juice* Of course, this has been common knowledge for well over a decade.
Supposed Indecency
We will never win a game that has been rigged against us from the very start. Our will and freedoms are always secondary to what is thought to be “best for us” by men.
Maylin Reynoso, 20
Maylin Reynoso was a 20-year-old Dominican woman from the Bronx who disappeared and was later found dead in the Harlem River. Her passing was tragic, and so is the media’s silence around it.
Reynoso, who was last seen leaving her job at a gas station on July 27 and was found deceased on July 30, hasn’t made headlines, unlike the recent murders of white female joggers Karina Vetrano and Vanessa Marcotte.
For many, the lack of media attention around the young Latina’s loss is yet another example of the ways in which the disappearances and deaths of women of color are treated by news outlets. It’s another reminder that lives of color are considered less important than those who die white.
Unlike Vetrano and Marcotte, whose passings were characterized as homicides, the medical examiner for Reynoso’s case says her cause of death is still pending, leading some to believe, as many do when bodies of color are found lifeless, that her loss of life wasn’t an act of violent execution but rather prompted by activity she was involved in. Others believe Reynoso, who lived with depression and bipolar disorder, might have committed suicide.
The young woman’s family and friends, however, aren’t convinced by either plot. You shouldn’t be either.
Why is that? Could it be because you don’t see Latinas – all women of color – as human beings, but as things to continuously fetishize?
100 Years of Beauty – Puerto Rico (Alex)
The nostalgia…
August Is My Bathing Month. Or, that's the excuse I'm using to explain away why I haven't been posting anything. All month long.
Secret Surveillance In Baltimore?
No, this isn’t bait from ‘Clickhole’.
This system, known as “wide-area surveillance” and run by an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, involves the deployment of megapixel cameras on a Cessna aircraft, which circles over a city for up to 10 hours at a time, continuously photographing a 30-square-mile area and giving police the ability to retroactively track any vehicle or pedestrian within that area. It is the ultimate Big Brother “eye in the sky.”
…In 2015, we learned that Cessna aircraft were circling over Baltimore in the wake of protests following the police killing of Freddy Gray, and immediately feared that this kind of wide-area surveillance was involved. Further reporting revealed that these flights, which were also spotted over many other American communities, were being run by the FBI, which told the AP that its fleet was “not equipped, designed or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance.” At the time, we were relieved to hear that.
Now we learn that wide-area surveillance is being conducted over Baltimore. And despite all the public questioning and statements of concern by us and others, and our freedom-of-information requests, and the extensive press coverage the FBI’s Baltimore flights received, the Baltimore police did not see fit to ask the public’s permission to use this startling new technology on the city’s population. Instead, it arrogated unto itself in secret the decision to deploy this technology.
…In fact, the Baltimore police went out of their way to avoid telling the public what they were doing. As Businessweek reports, they refused to comment on the program for the story, and the city has not even acknowledged that it exists. When photos from the system led the police to believe that a man was involved in a high-profile shooting, the police didn’t answer questions from the community about why they suspected the man in question. (To give credit where credit is due, McNutt, unlike the police and unlike other surveillance companies such as the makers of Stingray cell phone tracking equipment, was forthcoming about his company and technology with Businessweek, as he was with me, and said that he believes the technology should be used in a transparent, publicly acknowledged manner.)
It is all the worse given the Department of Justice’s recent scathing report of rampant, long-running and pervasive racial bias in the Baltimore Police Department and an almost total lack of accountability for wrongdoing.
The Downside to Productivity Boosters
Centuries Of Policy, Centuries Of Discrimination
f current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years. Absent significant policy interventions, or a seismic change in the American economy, people of color will never close the gap.
Those are the key findings of a new study of the racial wealth-gap released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED). They looked at trends in household wealth from 1983 to 2013—a 30-year period that captured the rise of Reaganomics, expanded international trade and two major financial crashes fueled by bubbles in the tech sector and housing prices. The authors found that the average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent during those three decades, three times the gains African-American families saw and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latino families.
To put that in perspective, the wealthiest Americans—members of the Forbes 400 list—saw their net worths increase by 736 percent during that period, on average.
If those trends persist for another 30 years, the average white family’s net worth will grow by $18,000 per year, but black and Hispanic households would only see theirs grow by $750 and $2,250 per year, respectively.
The Adorableness
loudspeakerandlemonjuice 