“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
~Warsan Shire~
Warsan Shire (born 1988) is a Somali–British writer, poet, editor and teacher. Shire was born in 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents. She immigrated to the United Kingdom aged 1. Shire has a . As of 2015, she primarily resides in London.
The legality of cannabis for general or recreational use varies from country to country.
Possession of cannabis is illegal in most countries as a result of the agreement about Indian hemp, also known as hashish, in the International Opium Convention (1925). However, many countries have decriminalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis.
Some states in the US allow use of medical cannabis in state, territorial, Indian reservation, and Federal district laws, although the use is illegal by federal law. Federal agencies claim that federal law comes first.
At least 81 transgender people were murdered worldwide this year — and those are just the victims whose deaths were reported.
BY SUNNIVIE BRYDUM
NOVEMBER 20 2015
Today marks the 16th annual Transgender Day of Rememberance, after the first event was organized by Gwendolyn Ann Smith in Allston, Mass., to memorialize Rita Hester — a trans woman of color killed in 1998.
Every year since, growing numbers of trans people and advocates worldwide take a moment to pause and remember the countless lives lost around the globe to transphobic violence.
The somber occasion serves as a memorial event in which trans people and allies can mourn their dead, celebrate the lives they lived and as a popular hashtag in the wake of unabated anti-trans violence proclaims, #SayHerName.
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Facebook Timeline
Google Images
Human Rights Campaign
The Advocate Magazine
~~GALLERY~~
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
As the names listed in the graphics demonstrate, certain nations — the United States and Brazil — have particularly acute problems with fatal transphobic violence. The number of trans women killed this year in the U.S., for instance, is nearly double that of the total killed last year.
But it’s also worth noting that in many countries around the world, no formal system exists to report the deaths of trans people, and repressive societies combined with oppressive policing worldwide often give trans people good cause to be wary of law-enforcement officials.
So while we mourn those whose names are listed below, take a moment to memorialize those whose names we will never know — because they, too, had lives, and loves, and passions that were extinguished because of hate.
Charleston Church Shooting: White Gunman Kills 9 At Historic Black Church Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
These are the victims that lost their lives in the #CharlestonShooting
Six women and three men were killed.
The church’s pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney
Tywanza Sanders
Cynthia Hurd
Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Myra Thompson
Ethel Lance
Rev. Daniel Simmons
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Susie Jackson
“The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” said Charleston Mayor Joe Riley at a news conference. “It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”
Anyone else tired of kids being killed by police? Don’t try to justify it, these are very well armed cops who should be trained to deescalate these types of situations. If you are defending a cop killing a 12 or 13 year old when there are other non lethal options, you need to ask yourself why.
Learn how cops gunned down this 12 year old within 2 seconds of being at the scene. Video: http://bit.ly/1ym79Mo
13-year-old with replica assault rifle was shot 7 times in 10 seconds
The shooting death of a 13-year-old California boy believed to be carrying an assault rifle unfolded in no more than 10 seconds, police said. Andy Lopez Cruz, who was later found to be carrying a plastic replica, was struck by seven bullets.
“Prior to player introductions before Sunday’s game, five players — Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt — came out onto the field first with their hands in the air prior to being joined by their teammates.
Responding to the display, the statement reads, ‘The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.’…
While the gesture was first attributed to the shooting death of Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the display has grown as a symbolic gesture used in protests over multiple shootings of young black men by police officers.”
Infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structure needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. It can be generally defined as the set of interconnected structural elements that provide a framework supporting an entire structure of development. It is an important term for judging a country or region’s development.
The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth, and can be defined as “the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions.”
Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, and also the distribution of finished products to markets, as well as basic social services such as schools and hospitals; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to a factory.[4] In military parlance, the term refers to the buildings and permanent installations necessary for the support, redeployment, and operation of military forces. Research by anthropologists and geographers shows the social importance and multiple ways that infrastructures shape human society and vice versa.
Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, Bernie was the younger of two sons in a modest-income family. After graduation from the University of Chicago in 1964, he moved to Vermont. Early in his career, Sanders was director of the American People’s Historical Society. Elected Mayor of Burlington by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms.
Before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
Some may say “let it go”, “enough already”, “I’ve had enough”. Yet … I can’t let it go. There is something wrong here … this doesn’t seem “kosher” … this is plain “not right”.
If I let it go, this senseless loss of life would have been in vain.
According to the autopsy of Michael Brown, 18, and a shocking new reenactment video, the Ferguson teen was essentially executed by Officer Darren Wilson.
This video has begun making the rounds on social media just days after the announcement by the Missouri grand jury not to indict the killer cop in the shooting death of the unarmed teen.
Much of the entire nation knows that the city of Ferguson and entire nation is filled with racism, particularly concentrated in institutionalized police discrimination of so-called minorities. But now a reenactment of what went down between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown seems to make that case in a very strong, visual manner.
In the above link you will find another YouTube video showing the first televised interview by the police in question. I will not dignify that interview by showing it here.
The reason that I’m posting this is because I saw this graph/meme on the Facebook page of a “friend” … and the comments written blew my mind away.
The Truth About The Ferguson Case That Some People Really Can’t Accept
Adam Mordecai wrote the following post in Upworthy. I feel a need to share this and continue to give a voice to that African American (Black) community in this country. I feel a need to add my “white” voice to their concerns … that’s the least that I can do.
I’ve read post after post about the current (and previous – seems like it’s never changed) plight of the black young men in this country. How many have been killed? Most of them unarmed …. I think we will never know.
~ADAM WRITES~
“Some things I have learned:
ProPublica recently did an in-depth analysis and found that black kids between ages 15-19 are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by cops than white kids of the same age. That’s an insane statistic. That’s per capita, not total. If you are a black teenage boy, you have a 21x higher risk of being shot by police than a white teenage boy.
Also, in 2010, federal prosecutors took 162,000 cases to a grand jury. You know how many DIDN’T go to trial? Eleven.
Mike Brown’s family will never get a state criminal trial to get justice for their son. And the testimony that denied them that right technically doesn’t make any sense. Seriously, go read it.
Police have a hard job. What they do is something I couldn’t ever do. But you know what they rarely have? Accountability. In this case, the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, always gets indictments — unless it’s a cop. He’s had five cop-involved killing cases and zero indictments. Again, five cases against police haven’t made it to trial at all. He could get an indictment if he wanted one.
The fact that this didn’t at least get a trial infuriates me. But my being upset isn’t that interesting. I’m white. People will take me seriously because I don’t have the “bias” of being black. But actual black people, who live with this every day, are constantly second-guessed because they are somehow “biased.” As though not wanting to get shot by police at a 21x higher rate is a bias. It’s a daily reality of being black in America.
Danez Smith experiences this every day. He is 21x more likely than me to be shot by a police officer. And so he wrote “Not an Elegy for Mike Brown.”
Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.
It Is What It Is 