One thing I started doing a long time ago that changed my relationships is I started making myself speak up when I had nice thoughts. If Iâm in line at the grocery store & I notice that the woman in front of me has beautiful eyes, I say something. If my sister walks in the house & I like her eyebrows, I say something. People forget how much little tiny compliments like that can make someoneâs whole day. It doesnât even have to just be compliments. It could be saying âI love youâ when youâre thinking it even if itâs at a random time. Sometimes I get up and go over to my mom just to give her a hug out of the blue cause I was thinking about her. Iâll randomly send my friends texts about how I appreciate them whenever Iâm thinking it. Little gestures like that mean so much.
President Donald Trump took questions from the press in a combative news conference on Tuesday.
READ THIS FUCKING INTERVIEW!
Some things to note:
Trump did not think that he took to long to release a statement on Charlottesville and his excuse was that he didnât want to make a quick statement so he can get all the facts. But remember that he DID make a quick statement, and his most recent one that took so long was due to the backlash of the initial one. You know, the one where he blamed both sides and refused to call white supremacy by name.Â
He thinks that he is bringing the country together and fixing race relations because heâs âcreated over a million jobs since Iâm president. The country is booming, the stock market is setting records. We have the highest employment numbers weâve ever had in the history of our country. Weâre doing record business. We have the highest levels of enthusiasm.â
He was asked several times if the event was terrorism to which he responded âWell, I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family and this country, and that is ⌠you can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want. I would just call it as the fastest one to come up with a good verdict. Thatâs what Iâd call it. Because there is a question. Is it murder? Is it terrorism? And then you get into legal semantics.â Ok thenâŚÂ
When asked about Steve Bannon Trump wanted everyone to know that Bannon is âa good man,â and ânot a racist,â and that the press is very unfair to him.Â
Trump got defensive about the term âalt-rightâ and egged on the reporters to attempt to define it for him. He then blamed the âalt-leftâ for charging at the âalt-rightâ in Charlottesville and asked âDo they have any semblance of guilt.â He then said the group on one side was bad (neo-nazis) but the group on the other side was also bad, didnât have a permit, and were âvery violent.âÂ
Trump then starts to DEFEND THE SIDE WITH NEO-NAZIS AND WHITE SUPREMACISTS! He goes on that âNot all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch,â and they were simply there to protest the taking down of Robert E. Leeâs statue.  When the reporter later tells Trump that the neo-nazis came to Charlottesville to do just that, Trump said âyou have some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.â He then said that there were many people on the side of the white supremacists who werenât actually white supremacists and they are being treated âabsolutely unfairly.â
âIt looked like they had some rough, bad people: neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest.â
A reporter asked Trump outright âDo you support white nationalists, then?â As a response, Trump got defensive about George Washington being a slave owner and Thomas Jefferson being a slave owner, and asked if weâre going to start taking their statues down. He then said by taking the statues down, like Robert E. Leeâs, we are âchanging history,â and âchanging culture,â somehow.
When asked if he is going to visit Charlottesville and help heal the nation, Trump went on to talk about his property in the town. âI own a house in Charlottesville. Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville? Oh, boy, itâs going to be- itâs in Charlottesville, youâll see. Itâs a- it is the wineryâ ⌠âI own- I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States thatâs in Charlottesville.â YepâŚ
âThe only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didnât live boldly enough, that they didnât invest enough heart, didnât love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.â
- Letters of Ted Hughes
Ja Kang Song, 71, and Ja Hyun Su, 72, diving for shellfish. In South Korea, 45% of the diving women of Jeju are aged over 70. Routinely diving to depths of 20 metres and staying under for an average of two to three minutes, the pressure on the body takes its toll and, as with many others, burst eardrums have left Ja Hyun Su deaf. Each season, between seven and 10 women die diving the waters around Jeju Island. Â
From Grandpa to Emmett to Trayvon, the trajectory of lynching history has shifted over time in America. When Grandpa was killed in 1916, there was no charges brought and no trial. In 1955, Emmett Tillâs murder, there was a trial, but no convictions. And then Trayvon Martin, now you have a trial and not-guilty verdict. All the time you have dead black bodies and nobody is ever convicted for the murders. âDoria Dee Johnson
When Doria Dee Johnson was growing up, a large photo of her great-great-
grandfather Anthony Crawford hung above her auntâs dinner table. Her family would say, âWalk with a sense of pride,â because Grandpa Crawford, as the family called him, defended himself up until his last moments.Â
A successful businessman and landowner, Mr. Crawford was lynched in Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1916 after disagreeing with a white store owner over the price of cottonseed that Mr. Crawford brought to the market. His last words were, âI thought I was a good citizen. Give my bankbook to my children.â Following the lynching, the Crawford family fled the South in fear for their lives, leaving behind their 427 acres of prime cotton land.
Ms. Johnson explains that upon visiting the land her family was forced to give up, she felt compelled to become an activist and historian. Today, she is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of WisconsinâMadison, where her focus is the migration of African Americans from the South to Evanston, Illinois, during the Great Migration. On the one hundredth anniversary of her great-great-grandfatherâs lynching, Ms. Johnson, along with two hundred of her family members and the Equal Justice Initiative, erected a memorial to Anthony Crawford in Abbeville. âThe story has been denied for so long,â Ms. Johnson said. âBut now, if you go to Abbeville City Hall to do business, you have to walk right past Anthony Crawford to do it. You canât bypass him anymore.â
Click here to hear her story, and explore The Legacy of Lynching at the Brooklyn Museum now through September 3.
Original photography by Melissa Bunni Elian for the Equal Justice Initiative, 2017
It's just simply factually wrong to compare Confederate generals to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
âSo this week itâs Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jacksonâs coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?âŚ. [Jefferson] was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue?â â President Trump, Aug. 15, 2017
The president made this statement Tuesday while jabbing at reporters over a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where white nationalists protested the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
And he used one of his standard rhetorical techniques, âwhataboutism.â
While defending the protesters and claiming that they werenât all white supremacists, he changed the subject to attack others. âWhat about the alt-left?â he said, when asked about the white nationalist alt-right. (âAlt-leftâ is a term seemingly invented for whataboutism, making liberals seem like the moral equivalents of the âalt-right,â whose members coined that term themselves.)
The presidentâs whataboutism on history is the focus here.
During the Bubonic Plague, doctors wore these bird-like masks to avoid becoming sick. They would fill the beaks with spices and rose petals, so they wouldnât have to smell the rotting bodies.
A theory during the Bubonic Plague was that the plague was caused by evil spirits. To scare the spirits away, the masks were intentionally designed to be creepy.
Okay so I love this but it doesnât cover the half of why the design is awesome and actually borders on making sense.
It wasnât just that they didnât want to smell the infected and dead, they thought it was crucial to protecting themselves. They had no way of knowing about what actually caused the plague, and so one of the other theories was that the smell of the infected all by itself was evil and could transmit the plague. So not only would they fill their masks with aromatic herbs and flowers, they would also burn fires in public areas, so that the smell of the smoke would âclear the airâ. This all related to the miasma theory of contagion, which was one of the major theories out there until the 19th century. And it makes sense, in a way. Plague victims smelled awful, and thereâs a general correlation between horrible septic smells and getting horribly sick if youâre around what causes them for too long.
You can see now that weâve got two different theories as to what caused the plague that were worked into the design. Thatâs because the whole thing was an attempt by the doctors to cover as many bases as they could think of, and weâre still not done.
The glass eyepieces. They were either darkened or red, not something you generally want to have to contend with when examining patients. But the plague might be spread by eye contact via the evil eye, so best to ward that off too.
The illustration shows a doctor holding a stick. This was an examination tool, that helped the doctors keep some distance between themselves and the infected. They already had gloves on, but the extra level of separation was apparently deemed necessary. You could even take a pulse with it. Or keep people the fuck away from you, which was apparently a documented use.
Finally, the robe. Itâs not just to look fancy, the cloth was waxed, as were all of the rest of their clothes. Whatâs one of the properties of wax? Water-based fluids arenât absorbed by it. This was the closest you could get to a sterile, fully protecting garment back then. Because at least one person along the line was smart enough to think âGee, Iâd really rather not have the stuff coming out of those weeping sores anywhere on my personâ.
So between all of these thereâs a real sense that a lot of real thought was put into making sure the doctors were protected, even if they couldnât exactly be sure from what. They worked with what information they had. And frankly, itâs a great design given what was available! You limit exposure to aspirated liquids, limit exposure to contaminated liquids already present, you limit contact with the infected. You also donât give fleas any really good place to hop onto. Thatâs actually useful.
Beyond that, there were contracts the doctors would sign before they even got near a patient. They were to be under quarantine themselves, they wouldnât treat patients without a custodian monitoring them and helping when something had to be physically contacted, and they would not treat non-plague patients for the duration. There was an actual system in place by the time the plague doctors really became a thing to make sure they didnât infect anyone either.
These guys were the product of the scientific process at work, and the scientific process made a bitchinâ proto-hazmat suit. And containment protocols!
Confederate Soldiers Monument, Durham, North Carolina, supplied by the McNeel Marble Company, Marietta, Georgia, and dedicated in 1924 to âthe boys who wore the gray.â Resculpted 2017.
The moments inside a courtroom in Orlando in 2007 were quick and consequential for Marquis McKenzie. The 16-year-old stood handcuffed behind a lectern. A juvenile judge announced his charges, then apologized that he could no longer take up the case.
âYouâre being direct filed,â he told McKenzie, who was accused of armed robbery over a cellphone and a wallet. âYou understand what Iâm saying? Youâre being charged as an adult now.â
As a 16-year-old, Marquis McKenzie was sent to the juvenile section in one of Floridaâs medium security private prisons.
âI had never been in that situation. I had gotten in trouble, but I had never gotten arrested,â he recalls a decade later. âI just knew it was going to be a hell of a ride from there.â
The juvenile judgeâs announcement meant that McKenzie was no longer solely subject to the rehabilitative services offered within Floridaâs juvenile system. He was now facing a 10-year sentence. A judge in one of the stateâs criminal courts would have the option of sending him two hours away to residential confinement at a youth facility, or to the juvenile section in one of Floridaâs medium security private prisons.
The latter is where McKenzie ended up. That same year, more than 3,600 other kids were direct filed and sent to adult court, too.
Across the country, lawmakers, juvenile justice advocates and community groups are shifting away from direct file, and rethinking their approach to handling kids and young adults who commit crimes.
Florida, more than other states, has traditionally embraced an aggressive direct file system run by state attorneys who opt to transfer kids out of the juvenile court system and into the adult criminal system. The repercussions are great and the options for navigating the complex system are limited.
Sentenced To Adulthood: Direct File Laws Bypass Juvenile Justice System
