Bookmarks:
U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of alleged sexual assault • TV experts who aren’t • Fox news affiliate distorts coverage • Vast dogfighting ring in Baltimore, Baltimore County broken up • Monkey heroically rescues its friend • Phylicia Barnes update
Continue reading “Jackie” and The Rolling Stone
Category Archives: Local news
D.C. leasing winter space in motels for homeless families
Bookmarks:
D.C. leasing winter space in motels for homeless families • G.O.P.-led House panel exonerates CIA on Benghazi • Exceptional horoscopes update 2014-12-15 • Limits of TV realism • Deer Encounters Her Doggy Friend and Dances With Joy • Pope Francis: Doggie Heaven Is Real • More about Stuart Chase • George F. Will is upset about Eric Garner
Continue reading D.C. leasing winter space in motels for homeless families
My own experience with “ban the box”
Md. Lawmakers Overturn Hogan’s ‘Ban The Box’ Veto
From a previous post:
This affects me.
In August ’10 I became the first member of my family in three generations ever to be arrested, let alone jailed. It was the only time I have ever been arrested. I was locked up for 40 days before being sentenced to “time served” on one misdemeanor charge. I have no other convictions.
In the months following, I applied to all kinds of jobs, including at each of the half dozen major hospitals located in downtown Baltimore. I was applying for secretarial jobs, janitorial jobs, groundskeeping — anything I could possibly do, as remains so today.
Each of those hospitals has its own online application system, and they’re all very similar, so I don’t recall which specific hospital this story involves. You enter a “profile” into their database, that includes all your employment information, history, references, etc.; this takes 90 minutes to two hours. That information is kept in their database, and thereafter you can apply to any job listing with just a handful of clicks. You can also access a listing of the jobs you’ve applied to, and each application’s status.
One Saturday I was at the public library submitting applications online. Click, click, click, submit. Check out the next listing; decide “go” or “no go;” click, click, submit. I did a bunch of those, and then went to check the list of applications’ status.
A number of the applications I’d submitted in the previous half hour had already been turned down.
I really don’t think anyone was working in the HR office on a Saturday screening applications. Clearly, they had some automatic software set up to pre-screen applications and reject anyone who admitted a criminal record.
The question is whether reformed criminals can find honest work.
Subsequent post: My record cannot be expunged..
“A year-long fight against the forces of darkness”
Jimmy, part 2
Thursday 2014-07-03. Jimmy came up to me at McDonald’s yesterday and sat down and talked about the incident. He doesn’t say he’d been drinking. He says people thought he’d been drinking.
Recall his psychiatric diagnoses.
Pastor sent me this clipping about the homeless squatters’ camp underneath the Jones Falls Expressway, which the City was about to raze — again. He thought the housing vouchers it mentions might be available to me. They’re not. A different detail caught my eye: the remark that many people in the camp “struggle with mental illness and addiction.” Note the “and.”
Carloo Watson
Homeless celebrities
Anacostia High valedictorian going from a homeless shelter to Georgetown
Here’s a success story.
Just Asking: Anacostia High valedictorian on going from a homeless shelter to Georgetown
Rashema Melson, 18, will graduate on June 11. She lives with her mother and two brothers in one room at the D.C. General homeless shelter. [William Tell’s note: This is the same facility that housed Relisha Rudd.] Her father was killed when she was 7 months old.
What will you talk about at graduation?
I’m going to talk about how Anacostia pushed me. People feel like Anacostia is this place where all the ghetto kids go and that Anacostia is really easy, and I’m like, “No.” My speech is going to be dedicated to all the teachers who pushed me and who I could talk to in a time of need and who helped me when I didn’t have anything like food or clothing.
Your mom must be excited about your being valedictorian.
My mom knows how happy I am to be valedictorian, but sometimes she tells me to stop stressing and to relax and just live life. I’ve been stressing for years about grades. It has to be A, A, A, A, A. I can’t accept a B. I’m going to be the first one to graduate and get out of college and get a real job, something that can really help us.
Dawn Loggins presents a similar success story:
Harvard-bound homeless grad ‘overwhelmed’ by ovation
Dawn Loggins, Student, Heading To Harvard After Being Homeless, Abandoned By Parents
Girl, 18, who grew up homeless is accepted into Harvard
(Originally posted 06/28/14.)
This guy is a career criminal, and other news
(Originally published 06/15/13 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 06/18/14.)
3 Years Is Just Desserts for Man Who Refused to Pay Dinner Bill
No comment. Read the story.
Fatherhood programs teach men to be dads
This is a good thing. Many young men are eager to step up to the plate and, in these circumstances, overcome the disadvantages of their own background.
Give ’em a chance.
With exposure to babies, rodent dads’ brains, like moms’, become wired for nurture
We mammals aren’t reptiles.
Carter Scott, Karma and Chaos
(Originally published 06/05/13 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 06/04/14.)
Short life of Carter Scott marred by accusations of family violence
It’s difficult to start this post, as the story’s prone to leave one speechless.
What sort of karma would impel a child to be born into that context?
At the shelter, we’re compelled to attend chapel every night. A different preacher comes each night, in a monthly rotation. These generally disappoint me in their utter failure to speak to the sort of situation in question here. About 40% of the presenters are preoccupied wholly with what will become of your soul when you die; whether you’ll go to heaven or hell; and your need to “believe in Jesus” as the key to salvation. It’s all about a cognitive assent, saying “yes” to a certain set of ideas. There is no presentation of Christianity as a lifestyle, nor any discussion of the role of discipline in following Jesus.
Another 40% of the presenters are preoccupied wholly with obtaining “blessings,” principally by the means of praise: “When the praises go up, the blessings come down.” A “blessing” here is always a material, for example monetary, advantage that one has done nothing to earn. It is as if God were some cosmic King Lear jealous for flattery.
Neither group mentions the call to repent, in terms of any need to change one’s ways.
The only hell that concerns me is the living hell that folk create in this life, here and now, for themselves and their community.
Continue reading Carter Scott, Karma and Chaos
