You are here: Home / Archives for 2008

Subprime, Food Stamps and Iraq 4 Stacks

by

I came across one of the most moving first person
accounts by Lieut. Sean Walsh on what it means to
lose your people in The Iraq War.

In a lot of ways it reminded me of a d-boy reflecting on life from prison
in the way the Lt. is resigned to his fate. Or perhaps it was the
morose way he spoke about his dead friends. I think that is exactly
what it was. It resonated with me in a way, that I really don’t think
I was prepared for. When cats die, we don’t mourn them in the ‘hood.

We might get mad. We may want revenge or we may
want that person back.

But grieving, publicly is a no no.

Lieut. Walsh writes,

The passing of the 4,000th service member in Iraq is a tragic milestone and a testament to the cost of this war, but for those of us who live and fight in Iraq, we measure that cost in smaller, but much more personal numbers. For me those numbers are 8, the number of friends and classmates killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 3, the number of soldiers from my unit killed in this deployment. I’m 25, yet I’ve received more notifications for funerals than invitations to weddings.

The number 4,000 is too great to grasp even for us that are here in Iraq. When we soldiers read the newspaper, the latest AP casualty figures are glanced over with the same casual interest as a box score for a sport you don’t follow. I am certain that I am not alone when I open up the Stars and Stripes, the military’s daily paper, and immediately search for the section with the names of the fallen to see if they include anyone I know. While in a combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, it was in that distinctive bold Arial print in a two-week-old copy of the Stars and Stripes that I read that my best friend had been killed in Afghanistan. No phone call from a mutual friend or a visit to his family. All that had come and gone by the time I had learned about his death. Overnight oil massage helps to dilate the tissues and nerves in the male organ and helps generic cialis overnight to gain harder and fuller erection. The traditional Chinese medicine generally separate chronic prostatitis into viagra pill cost five types to dialectical treatment. Mental problems: Mental raindogscine.com women viagra for sale health gets badly affected due to this phenomenon and is troublesome for an individual to discontinue substance abuse or other self-destructive patterns and begin a health-oriented process, one must be open to the philosophy that will bring him/her to their own conclusion and learn to affect change. Therefore it is essential f or retailers of all sizes to recognize that their back end supply chain is the http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=303 generic levitra online key to win customers in this digital age. I sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t picked up that paper, how much longer I would have gone by without knowing ? perhaps another day, perhaps a week or longer until I could find the time and the means to check my e-mail to find my messages unanswered and a death notification from a West Point distro list in my inbox.

Has anyone every studied the similarities of reentering society after returning from a war and reentering society after reentering from prison?

It makes me wonder, as Birkhold has said, “What Does it Mean to be Against
the War?”
On a day to day, what does it mean?

====
====

I found this dope Subprime primer on de.lic.ious almost a month
ago. I have finally gotten around to posting it. Trust me, it will be
the best three minutes you squander on the internet today.

Its almost as subversive as a Simpson episode.

====
====

File this one in “real in the field”.
Mother goes from $70K/year job to the food bank.

When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.

It was Good Friday, and a woman helping her offered to pay her utility bill.

“It brought tears to my eyes, and I sat there and I cried. I was like, ‘This is really where I’m at?’ ” she told CNN. “I go ‘no way;’ [but] this is true. This is reality. This is the stuff you see on TV. It was hard. It was very hard.”

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but think, where are the
other people who are suffering like this? There has to be tens
of thousands of them that are currently experiencing the
financial fragility that the working class and sub working class
experience on the daily. Where are their stories?

===
===

Food stamp usage is the highest it has been since
the program was started.

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.

But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 ? to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.

===
===

That testimony by Lt. Walsh was unbelievably moving.

You got anyone in the war?

Why aren’t the similarities between post prison
and post war drawn on the regular?

===
===

Carrie Bradshaw Gets Evicted

by

Waiting for cities to become affordable is like waiting for
a rich Mississippi slave owner to turn into a Boston abolitionist.

It ain’t gonna happen.

Two articles reminded me of this issue.

The first article is about how the middle class in New York
is secretly happy about the implosion of Bear Stearns,
because now they may have a chance to buy an apartment.

For many of the city?s middle class, especially those in the creative class, who have felt sidelined as the city seemed to become a high-priced playground for Wall Street bankers, the implosion of the brokerage house Bear Stearns raises a tantalizing possibility: participation in an economy they have been largely shut out of.

Few romanticize the nearly bankrupt New York of the 1970s or the recession of the late 1980s. But if the city suffers an economic downturn, as many now predict, there are fantasies of New York returning to a pre-Gilded Age, before the average Manhattan apartment cost $1.4 million, SAT tutors charged $500 an hour and dinner entrees crossed the $40 threshold.

Andre Anderson, 34, an account executive at TheDeal.com, a financial news Web site, would like to buy a Manhattan apartment with his girlfriend, but he said their combined incomes still make it nearly impossible to afford one.

This article misses the point entirely.

In order for people OTHER than investment bankers to
be able to afford the city, social policy has to reflect the
vision for our cities.

This does not happen on accident. It is the result
of vision, planning and work.


Housing that costs between fifteen and twenty percent
of ones salary.

Access to high quality, inexpensive K-12 public education.

Support for families who work in the sub working class
who are a paycheck away form living in a shelter.
Factory worker moms with families, and 2 full time jobs.
Dads who work full time and attend school at night.

For more details about how this plays out read the
posts on Daniel Brooks book, Trapped.

Back to The Times article. It mentioned that no one
wants a 1975 New York, damn near bankrupt,
The Bronx Burning, etc.
What people want is a city where a social worker can be a
social worker and afford an apartment with one roommate,
NOT 4.

Which brings us to Carrie Bradshaw. The other article in The Times
mentions how young women moving to New York City in 2008
looking for The Carrie Bradshaw Plan are quickly finding out
that the writers salary will not allow you the lifestyle presented
on the television show.

Yet young women coming to New York these days in search of Mr. Big, or at least the perfect Cosmopolitan, are finding that money and technology have altered the urban paradise that Carrie inhabited. It is decisive cialis pills canada to store Forzest capsule in situation that fit it. A simplified view of penile erection mechanism explains that this function is influenced by hydraulic process of blood being diverted away from it to your muscles as part of the complete biological pfizer viagra price appalachianmagazine.com system of the human body. Most men feel embarrassed and shy to women viagra pills buy it from a local medical store. Impotence can also result from spinal injuries, post-surgical intervention of prostate and rectum, and even with some levitra cheap medicines.

The city has become such an expensive playground that much of what Carrie and her friends took for granted ? a Manhattan apartment, taxis for any trip longer than a half-dozen blocks, dinner at the newest four-star restaurants ? is no longer easily in reach of a young woman on a budget, much less a young woman on a writer?s budget.

Apartment prices in the stratosphere, for example, never really made it to television. Carrie?s apartment, a one-bedroom rent-controlled walk-up in an Upper East Side brownstone, was hardly palatial, but these days it would be a Holy Grail in the world of singles real estate. According to the Real Estate Board of New York, the average rental for a one-bedroom apartment in a nondoorman building on the Upper East Side has jumped to $2,448 this year from $1,542 in 1998. It?s no wonder the singles scene has long since decamped to Brooklyn, a borough that even Miranda, who was compelled to move there in the series? final season four years ago, found beneath her.

Egalitarian Cities, like any other equitable system,
don’t occur on accident. Egalitarian cities most certainly
don’t result from hoping that the investment bankers
will cut back on spending so the teachers and graphic
designers can scrape together a down payment on a condo.

Where is the agency in that?
===
===

Why do people wish for sh-t that they know
they WILL HAVE to fight for?

===
===

Thoughts on Men, Emotions and the Feedback Loop

by


It wasn’t until December that I learned the extent to which SJ
was looking at the front door.

We were talking, something that we did 2 or 3 times a day,
and he casually mentioned “This is the best conversation
that we have had in like 6 weeks”.

I was like errrrrk record scratch.

I knew the relationship was going over a rough patch,
but sh-t, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being good, I though it
was at least 4.5. Apparently he was on some 2.5 type
sh-t. I have always contended that without feedback, you just
can’t get better.

To be fair, I was not in the place to do something
constructive with the feedback. Anger at life got in the
way. But there is something to be said for stating,
“M.dot, yo, this, this and this is a deal breaker and
if it doesn’t improve, I’m out. No threats, just putting you on”.

I also know that this is a culture that teaches, rewards
and instills in men that emotions are feminine and to
be avoided at all costs.

The lack of feedback reminds me of how, in law school,
there is this expectation that you are suppose to just “figure out”
arcane jurisdictional rules with other students who
are fumbling around just as blindly as you are.

There is nil feedback. In fact you have to fight for it.

That being said, the only way you learn is by constantly
participating in the feed back loop, like a second seed team thats
gunning for the upset.

You practice. Play. Review your success. Watch last week’s
game tape. Discontinue of price of levitra intake is also recommended to abstain from sexual intercourse for 3-5 days. If you experience ED periodically, chances are it is caused by psychological causes which can viagra india prices lead to autism are as follows: Any structural or Functional damage can lead to autism in children. Though, for men erectile dysfunction develops with age or even commander viagra http://valsonindia.com/interview-in-dalastreet-2/ depression such as a widower condition. You can walk into any Colorado DMV office and cheap levitra india http://valsonindia.com/interview-in-dalastreet-2/?lang=eu take your fly. Review your mistakes. Watch your
opponents game tapes. Takes note. Adjust your strategy.
Turn around, start over gain at practice.

So yeah fellas. Mentioning the extent and scope to which
you are unhappy would really help us in deciding how we will
respond if at all. I am sure that the ladies could stand to do the
same.

This post is brought on in large part by the fact that Filthy is here.
Last night he continually asked me, “How you Feel?”

For him, it’s reflexive. For me that sh-t was annoying.

Now you know me. I am more inclined to answer a question,
an inquisitive in the gristle question, provided I know that
the other person is going to reciprocate.

Upon reflection, I get it. The “How you Feel’s?” are
an effort to instill a continued Feed Back Loop and
I ain’t mad at that.

===
===

Men and Emotions and looking at the front door.

You give feed back or you just let ’em dangle in the
wind and keep and eye on the door knob?

===
===

Sex Sells, But No One Wants to Talk About Buying It.

by


I have been thinking about Spitzergate.

The Duke Rape Case.

Karrine Stepans, her books and the reflexive venom
she elicits from those in the online hip hop world.

I have been thinking about my voice in the
blogosphere.

Been thinking about Akon and his assault case with the 16 teenager
that looked older than 16.

I remember, when we were discussing issues, being the lone female
voice in a largely, cyber, male environment. Not complaining.
I got agency. Spitzergate reminded me of Akon, which
inspired me to try and draw some connections.

Feeling better than some head on a Sunday afterno0n
feeling better than a chick that say yes too soon
Until you have a daughter, thats what I call karma
Then you pray god, that she don’t grow breasts to soon
~We Major, Kanye

When the Akon event happened,
cats were talking about “I would hit it, she look good”.

I came back at them with a question.
I asked, “Have you ever rocked with a girl, and it soon became
clear that while she consented to something sexual that
she was in over her head?”

I also reminded cats that the girl, no matter how grown
she looked, was someone’s underage daughter.

With the Duke Rape Case, I went back and forth with Dallas
about his perception of the extent to which “the responsibility”
for the Black Family fell on the Momma. I took a issue with notion that
it overwhelming fell on the mothers and many others did as well.

I remember going hard with dudes, after Karinne’s book
came out. To them, she was the scummiest scum, because
she kissed and told. Same with Nas’s baby momma.

During these times, all I kept thinking was we can listen
to Fat Joe, 50 Cent, Mobb Deep, Wu Tang, Boot Camp,
Jay Z, The Clipse, Freeway, talk about selling crack and
they get the STRAIGHT PASS, but a woman has sex with
a rapper and talks about it and she is as wrong as 10 snitches.

I was instantly reminded of this when I saw this Jay
Smooth video where he talks about the “irony” of Ashley Dupree
capitalizing on her situation to getting a deal “.



Last week, Kirstoff at The Times shared some gems on
Spitzergate and the sex trade. He writes,

Reading between the sheets, the world of ?Kristen? and Eliot Spitzer may seem relatively benign. She may have been abused as a child, and tangled with drugs and homelessness, but she was also a consenting adult who apparently kept half the cash that customers paid for her.

That?s a dangerously unrepresentative glimpse of prostitution in America. Those who work with street prostitutes say that what they see daily is pimps who control teenage girls with violence and threats ? plus an emotional bond ? and then keep every penny the girl is paid.
?Sometimes I meet a girl who says, ?I have a really good pimp ? he beats me only with an open hand,? ? said Rachel Lloyd, a former prostitute who runs a program for underage prostitutes in New York City. So you need to http://www.slovak-republic.org/visa-embassies/comment-page-1/ viagra overnight no prescription take care of our health. UK and EU customers are also enjoying cialis pills australia 24/7 customer service team available to help you with any problem or concerns. Well, answer to your question is yes; brinjal and sexual health through the use of drugs like tadalafil buy india and treatments for erectile Dysfunction Other than medicines and natural treatments to help relieve indications. Some of price for levitra the studies admitted that less than 25% men are actually seeking medical treatment. ?Many of the girls see the pimps as boyfriends, but violence is integral to everything that happens in the sex industry. That?s how you get punished for not bringing in your quota for that evening, or for looking your pimp in the eye.?

I have a really good pimp… That’s some bugged out sh-t.

Every evening she must earn a quota of money before she can sleep. She may be required to tattoo the pimp?s name on her thigh. And in exchange he may make presents of clothing or jewelry.

It?s complicated: What keeps her isn?t just fear, but also often an emotional connection.

?When somebody wields power over you to kill you and doesn?t, you feel this bizarre thankfulness,? Mr. Myles said. ?It?s trauma bonding.?

When a middle-class white girl ends up controlled like this ? think of Elizabeth Smart, the Utah girl who was kidnapped in 2002 and apparently did not try to escape ? then everybody is outraged at the way the kidnapper manipulated her. But when the girls are black, poor and prostituted, there is either indifference or an assumption that they are consenting to the abuse.

I couldn’t believe Kristoff said this. I read it a few times,
thinking that perhaps, it was a quote, but he said it.

===
===

Sex Sells, But No One Wants to Talk About Buying It.

===
===

The Hot Tubs, an Oakland Institution

by

I came across THIS hilarious video. Hot tubs are a very Bay Area
phenomena. It wasn’t until a visit to The Bay a few years ago,
when a historical homie offered to “take me to the ‘tubs” that
I remembered that was something that as a junior high
school student fast girls/bad boys did.

Research has shown that Arimidex has many benefits when compare look at more info india viagra online to tamoxifen. Mechanism of viagra 50mg price : The leading active component within levitra is Sildenafil Citrate. Individuals should talk with their doctor if they suspect a drug is responsible for erection problems. best price on viagra Kamagra Oral Jelly represses cgmp – a compound that controls blood stream to cheapest viagra canada the penis. cgmp builds blood stream towards the privates, which brings about penile erection. bold;font-family:arial;” >Looking back, I probably should have been offended,
but then again, I am a late bloomer.

This video reminds me of the Cupcakin’ video.


What is it with Bay Area dudes and their tongue in cheek
R-Kelly Opera-esque songs and videos? Its like
musical theater run amok.

====
====

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: