I see no system-wide fix. Journalists themselves need to resolve this. They should look in a mirror and reflect on their very real influence. Police are taught that once you fire your pistol there is no taking back the bullet. Reporters must remember their words can have the power of a bullet and consider the consequences when they fire their journalistic guns.
Source Amme& Associates
Why does the media continue to post and repeat the Tweets of #Trump? Is it really to inform the public, surely they know we can read it for ourselves…
After the picnic is over, does one keep the grill going because the aroma is pleasing?
July is winding down, and while we’re hopeful that August brings some slightly more pleasant weather, we’re a tad wistful that National Ice Cream Month is coming to an end. As a way to celebrate just one more time, Baskin-Robbins is offering a sweet deal on all your favorite flavors. This
The development of values such as sportsmanship, fair play, and honesty through physical activity has been a major objective of physical educators and coaches for many years. Unfortunately, little evidence exists to support a positive relationship between sports participation and values development. Literature reviews completed in this area reveal a negative correlation between the length of one’s involvement in sport and the generation of sportsmanlike values (Coakley, 1982; Kroll, 1975; Stevenson, 1975). It has also been determined that nonathletes are more sportsmanlike than their athletic peers (Allison, 1981; Bovyer, 1968; Kistler, 1957; Lakie, 1964; Richardson, 1962).
On the basis of these findings, it is clear that if physical activity is to contribute to values development, then strategies that employ moral reasoning beyond social convention must be used. In response to this need, a number of intervention techniques have been designed and implemented in a variety of sports settings. Horrocks (1977, 1979, 1980) has applied the concepts of Kohlberg’s
moral reasoning to physical activity. Through the use of intervention and superordinate goals, Horrocks was able to find a positive correlation between socially accepted play patterns and moral reasoning. Weiss, Bredemeier, Shields, and Shewchuk (1984) and Romance (1984) have identified improvements in cognitive-
developmental levels through interventions using either moral development or social learning strategies.
Apparently, the #NBA does not subscribe to the moral reasoning associated with sportsmanlike behavior by using monetary values to drive the decision making of the residents of Charlotte, NC.
It’s my ball you can’t play and I’m taking it home….
The Federal Housing Finance Agency states, “Our mission is to ensure the Housing Government-sponsored Enterprises operate in a safe and sound manner so they serve as a reliable source of liquidity and funding for housing finance and community investment. Together these institutions provide more than $5 trillion in funding for the U.S. mortgage markets and financial institutions.”
(Source: milforddailynews.com) FRAMINGHAM – A former Framingham Housing Authority accountant, who doctored tenants’ computer records and skimmed money from their rent payments, faces federal charges she stole more than $70,000 in cash over the course of a year and a half, authorities said Tuesday.
Framingham Police arrested Rosa Famania, 33, at her 6 Dennis Road, Milford, home on Tuesday on behalf of federal authorities, who had obtained a warrant for her arrest. She is charged with theft from a program receiving federal funds. Famania resigned last Aug. 31 after she was suspended by the Housing Authority that month.
According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, Famania began working as an accounting assistant in February 2010.
The investigation began on Aug. 6, 2015, as a result of a mistake by one of Famania’s co-workers. Famania was out sick on Aug. 5, 2015, when several people paid their rent in cash. The money, with receipts, was put in a cash lock box – for which Famania was responsible – kept on Famania’s desk. The following day, Famania left work early. A co-worker, meaning to open a petty cash box, instead mistakenly opened the rent cash box and discovered two of the rent payments – $300 and $560 – were missing.
“A subsequent search by the FHA accounting department employee revealed that the $560 and $300 duplicate copies of the receipts that were wrapped around the tenant’s cash payment when they were placed in the lock cash rental box the previous day were torn up and thrown away in Famania’s trash barrel,” according to the affidavit.
The animated Nickelodeon series The Loud House will make history by featuring the channel’s first same-sex married couple in an episode this week. The interracial gay couple will appear in the July 20 episode of the series, which centers on a character named Lincoln Loud growing up as the only boy surrounded by 10 sisters…
50 killed described as The Deadliest Mass Shooting in U.S. History is not true! Come with me as we ride back in time.
East St. Louis Massacre of 1917 The name refers to a race riot that occurred in the industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois, over July 2-3, 1917. It is also referred to as the “East St. Louis Riot.” As historians have looked at its various causes, they have labeled it in different ways, depending on what aspect of it they have focused their attention on. Some recent historians have called it a “pogrom” against African Americans in that civil authorities in the city and the state appear to have been at least complicit in—if not explicitly responsible for—the outbreak of violence. Even in 1917, some commentators already made the comparison between the East St. Louis disturbance and pogroms against Jews that were occurring at the time in Russia.
Roving mobs rampaged through the city for a day and a night, burning the homes and businesses of African Americans, stopping street cars to pull their victims into the street, and assaulting and murdering men, women, and children who they happened to encounter. A memorial petition to the U.S. Congress, sent by a citizen committee from East St. Louis described it as “a very orgy of inhuman butchery during which more than fifty colored men, women, and children were beaten with bludgeons, stoned, shot, drowned, hanged or burned to death—all without any effective interference on the part of the police, sheriff or military authorities.” In fact, estimates of the number of people killed ranged from 40 to more than 150. Six thousand people fled from their homes in the city, either out of fear for their lives or because mobs had burned their houses. On July 1, white men driving a car through a black neighborhood began shooting into houses, stores, and a church. A group of black men organized themselves to defend against the attackers. As they gathered together, they mistook an approaching car for the same one that had earlier driven through the neighborhood and they shot and killed both men in the car, who were, in fact, police detectives sent to calm the situation. Racial competition and conflict emerged from this. The established unions in East St. Louis resented the African American workers as “scabs” and strike breakers. On May 28-29, a union meeting whose 3,000 attendees marched on the mayor’s office to make demands about “unfair” competition devolved into a mob that rioted through the streets, destroyed buildings, and assaulted African Americans at random. The Illinois governor sent in the National Guard to stop the riot, but over the next few weeks, black neighborhood associations, fearful of their safety, organized for their own protection and determined that they would fight back if attacked again.
Elaine Race Riot of 1919
The Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. While its deepest roots lay in the state’s commitment to white supremacy, the events in Elaine stemmed from tense race relations and growing concerns about labor unions. A shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union escalated into mob violence on the part of the white people in Elaine (Phillips County) and surrounding areas. Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed by whites range into the hundreds; five white people lost their lives.
The conflict began on the night of September 30, 1919, when approximately 100 African Americans, mostly sharecroppers on the plantations of white landowners, attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Hoop Spur (Phillips County), three miles north of Elaine. The purpose of the meeting, one of several by black sharecroppers in the Elaine area during the previous months, was to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops.
The East St. Louis Massacre of 1917
Between 1824 and 1943 there were over 300 events classified as “Race Riots” in which entire white communities turn on and murdered, maimed and destroyed entire Black communities. There were 26 such events in major cities during the summer of 1919 alone. This period has been tagged by historians as “The Red Summer of 1919”. Between the months of April and September of that year, tens of hundreds of Black Americans were killed or maimed for economic, social, political and other reasons. They caused over 375,000 Blacks to leave the Southern border states and flood the North. In the riots in the farthest northern states, many Blacks recalled the East St. Louis race riot and dared to fight back. The most recognized massacre of Blacks in mass was depicted in the movie “Rosewood” in which the Black township in Florida was destroyed and an estimated 150 Blacks were killed in 1923 and more recently revealed Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, were an estimated 300 to 3000 Blacks were killed and over 7800 were left homeless. Whites used airplanes and dynamite to bomb and destroy over 600 Black businesses in a 35 square block area. The Tulsa riot is also known as the story of “Black Wall Street”.
Would it be fair to say Black folk are still invisible no matter how far we “think” we have come, this land is not our land. Yet we pledge our allegiance in school, in the bank, in our associations with others and even in our disassociations, we divorce family members based on their behavior, we exclude those we deem not of the “right” distinction to be included in the club. We outcast, filter-out, walk away from, leave, divorce, separate, split, detach, sever, breach and annihilate anyone who dares to infiltrate our club of “We are better than you because we don’t ______________”. Yet every day we walk around with our eyes wide shut to global exclusion of all of us.
As I walk down a street in my neighborhood, where 98.5% of everyone looks like me, yet no one who looks like me owns an establishment on the street in my neighborhood.
2012 Statistics from the Census Bureau
Meaning of Race code
Year
Number of firms with or without paid employees
Sales, receipts, or value of shipments of firms with or without paid employees ($1,000)
White
2012
21,539,858
10,950,990,565
Black or African American
2012
2,584,403
150,203,163
I leave you with this, read more often, think less of yourself more often, what could we do to change the landscape of folks that look like us, surely we need each other.
Is Providing Access to Healthcare After Release from Prison Enough?
Providing health care after release is a great program, however, most mental illness requires constant review, which does not occur inside the prison walls. Alana Horowitz Satlin wrote in the Huffington Post, “A 2006 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that over half of all jail and prison inmates have mental health issues; an estimated 1.25 million suffered from mental illness, over four times the number in 1998. Research suggests that people with mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system by rates of two to four times the normal population. The severity of these illnesses vary, but advocates say that one factor remains steady: with proper treatment, many of these incarcerations could have been avoided.”
Connecticut’s Department of Correction’s Disclaimer reads: “The Department of Correction provides comprehensive health care to the offender population that meets a community standard of care, and includes medical, mental health, dental, addiction and ancillary services, in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and consent decrees. This spectrum of health care is carried out through a partnership the Department has established with the services of the University of Connecticut, Correctional Managed Health Care.”
Suicide Prevention
NCIA’s analysis found that only three departments of correction (California, Delaware, and Louisiana) had suicide prevention policies that addressed all six critical components and that an additional five departments of correction (Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) had policies that addressed all but one critical component. Thus, only 15 percent of all departments of correction had policies that contained either all or all but one critical component of suicide prevention. In contrast, 14 departments of correction (27%) had either no suicide prevention policies or limited policies — 3 with none, and 11 with policies that addressed only one or two critical components. The majority (58%) of DOCs had policies that contained three or four of the critical components.
Medicaid Enrollment for Prisoners
Administration officials moved to improve low Medicaid enrollment for emerging prisoners, urging states to start signups before release and expanding eligibility to thousands of former inmates in halfway houses near the end of their sentences.
Health coverage for ex-inmates “is critical to our goal of reducing recidivism and promoting the public health,” said Richard Frank, assistant secretary for planning for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Advocates praised the changes but cautioned that HHS and states are still far from ensuring that most people leaving prisons and jails are put on Medicaid and get access to treatment.
“It’s highly variable. Some states and jurisdictions are having a lot of success” enrolling ex-prisoners, said Kamala Mallik-Kane, a researcher at the Urban Institute who has studied the process. “Others of them have initiatives in place that aren’t reaching the kinds of numbers that are making a dent.”
The 2010 health law made nearly all ex-prisoners eligible for Medicaid in states that chose to expand the state and federal insurance program for the poor. Many welcomed the chance to cover a group with high rates of chronic disease, mental illness and substance abuse problems.
But prisons and jails, burdened with ineffective computers, understaffing and complicated Medicaid enrollment procedures, have been slow to sign up released inmates.
Federal and state prisons let out more than 600,000 people a year. Millions more cycle through jails. But a study published in Health Affairs found prisons and jails nationwide enrolled only 112,520 emerging inmates between late 2013 up to January 2015.
Much of HHS’ guidance repeats existing policy, reminding states that those on probation or parole are eligible for Medicaid and urging states to keep prisoners’ names in the Medicaid computers while they’re locked up. (That eases re-enrollment.)
Inmates are generally ineligible for Medicaid while incarcerated. Prison and jail medical systems care for them.
HHS is “providing encouragement and a nudge” to states to improve sign-ups as well as money to upgrade enrollment computers, said Colleen Barry, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied ex-inmate enrollment. “They understand that this is a technology issue.”
Making up to 96,000 halfway-house inmates eligible for Medicaid is new policy, designed to connect people with care before they’re fully released. Prisoners often move to halfway houses or home detention near the end of their terms, closely supervised but frequently allowed to shop, apply for jobs and see a doctor.
Under the new policy, “if you have a fair amount of freedom of movement” in a halfway house, “you’re not considered an inmate” for Medicaid purposes, said Sarah Somers, an attorney for the National Health Law Program, an advocacy group. “That will be very helpful for a lot of people who are trying to transition out of incarceration.”
Ex-inmates have extremely high rates of HIV and hepatitis C infection, diabetes, mental illness and substance abuse problems. They are especially vulnerable after they leave the prison medical system and before they connect with community doctors.
One study in Washington state showed that ex-inmates were a dozen times more likely to die than the general population in the first two weeks after their release.
Immediate Medicaid coverage “can mean the difference between life in the community and recidivism and even life and death,” Michael Botticelli, the White House’s director of national drug control policy, told reporters.
HHS has been urging states to enroll ex-inmates in Medicaid for years. But the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion made many more of them eligible for coverage, giving policymakers a new reason to promote sign-ups, advocates said.
So far 31 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid under the law.
The controversial photo of the 16 Black Female West Point Cadets. What is the controversy – did they break any DOD regulations; where they too Black for West Point; are they supporters of #BlackLivesMatter; is West Point supporting #BlackLivesMatter?
For those of you who do not know – BlackLivesMatter (BLM) is an activist movement, that campaigns against violence toward black people. BLM regularly organizes protests around the deaths of black people in killings by law enforcement officers, and broader issues of racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.
Why does this matter you ask? For a variety of reasons:
The number of peopled killed by police reportedly was 1,145 of that number 4% were white or Asian;
The disproportion number of black men serving time for crimes also committed by other races;
The many disparities across forums such as health care, child care, education from Pre-K to High School;
What is the purpose of the Military – To defend our country from potential threats, hurt, harm or danger.
What is taught at West Point – “The United States Military Academy’s mission is to educate, train and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation as an officer in the United States Army.
The Academy provides a superb four-year education, which focuses on the leader development of cadets in the academic, military, and physical domains, all underwritten by adherence to a code of honor.”
West Point’s Comparative Politics Program (excerpt) – The West Point Comparative Politics Program provides cadets with the intellectual tools and knowledge of core theories and concepts to better understand why some states fail and others remain stable. Cadets have the opportunity to view critical comparative politics issues in a multi-perspective manner by taking related courses both in and out of the department. After mastering the core concepts, cadets can tailor their program towards a regional (e.g., Africa, Middle East, etc.) or functional (e.g., negotiation, democratization, post-conflict stabilization, etc.) focus. The comparative politics courses and related electives provide cadets with the knowledge and framework to apply the core concepts and theories to relevant case studies and issues.
On the American side of Social Science –Students also consider processes such as political leadership, voting and group behavior. Strong emphasis is placed on the unique, and what some might consider exceptional ‘soldier-state’ civil-military relationship in the American experience.
The West Point American Politics program provides students with a solid understanding of the fundamentals of political science theory and practice in the context of American Governance.
In this writer’s opinion the aforementioned students were provided an outstanding education (not to mention the prerequisites for entry) which has prepared them to understand the political arena and socioeconomic development or lack of as a Cadet, as a Woman, Black Woman and now as a member of an organization designed to create and foster character.
Surely if they exhibited any other traits and/or behaviors that did not align with the mission, vision and values of West Point they would not have achieved the title of “Cadet”.
The West Point Mission
“To educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.”
I see no system-wide fix. Journalists themselves need to resolve this. They should look in a mirror and reflect on their very real influence. Police are taught that once you fire your pistol there is no taking back the bullet. Reporters must remember their words can have the power of a bullet and consider the consequences when they fire their journalistic guns.
Source Amme& Associates
Why does the media continue to post and repeat the Tweets of #Trump? Is it really to inform the public, surely they know we can read it for ourselves…
After the picnic is over, does one keep the grill going because the aroma is pleasing?
