Troy

Do you need a boatload of money to run for office, You are beholden beholden whoever gave you the most money. If you happen to have enough money to fund your own campaign you’ll only be interested in yourself. The entire political process has been perverted beyond repair. Literally everything is subpar, inefficient, and costs more than it should.

Thanks anonymous!

What is strange to me about living here in Tulsa is that I hear very little about the GAP Band I work a block away from Greenwood ave and Archer Street which is the G and A the GAP band’s name. I have not heard about Ronnie’s passing may he RIP.

That is because management companies automate everything. Be 5 seconds late and there is and treat to evict notice on your door. I hear you on the crypto mining. Based upon what I know it is difficult and expensive. At least for Bitcoin. i recognize @Mzuri’s excitement. Mzuri keep up appraised of your progress. I’d truly hope you make some profit.

Not necessarily. Consider a scenario where where you have; one person who needs a tremendous amount of resources to be saved and another group say 10 people who are less seriously injured, but would all perish if the available resources were used to save one life. Supposed that one person was 90 years old and the group of 10 were young adults. We had an agenda, we had many agendas. The problem is getting Black folks to follow it. Consider Tavis Smileys' Covenant With Black America. Basically most of us do what Mzuri mentioned below: This is the American way. Face it America does not have it in her to play Black folks reparations. I think it is naïve to think they will hand over anything to ADOS. IMHO it is a waste of energy and resources All of the enslaved African, and all of their children are dead, and the vast majority of their grandchildren are already dead. The rest are intermingled with groups who would not qualify for reparations or are doing quite well financially - despite the historical hardship. After more than a century and a half later why any Black person believes THIS government would directly compensate any of us for the enslavement of their ancestors is beyond me. We can help ourselves if we think about more than just ourselves.

Yeah I don’t see the links on my cell phone. I just see text. I’ll check from my Desktop in the a.m. but I hope it not, yet another, wild goose chase. I’m fine thanks for asking.

Perhaps but clearly not everyone does...

I did not know I was arguing. The page you posted did not have hyperlinks that is why I explained provided the clarification. Still, as far as I know, Amazon does not allow hyperlinks to external site - which was the point you refuted, but your example did not prove otherwise. I have to approve all guest posts. Some I reject because they are obvious span other I allow. I took a moment to comment on this guys post because it was illustrative of a what I think is a problem. People coming to a booksellers site a posting links to Amazon. If Amazon respected by allowing links back to AALBC I might not take such a firm stance.

Probably, but it would an interesting stat to know.

The complete willingness to reject new information and hold tight to an idea was surprising to me too. But I do not think it is inability to think abstractly. For example, I used to believe what @Pioneer1 believed about race. Most of us did. However after the human genome was mapped and it became crystal clear that was no generic basis for race, I dispensed with the idea as well as all the conclusions based upon that idea -- which required a substantial change in one's world view. That is the part that I think people find difficult to to do, change their world view. It is hard -- especially when the new and more accurate idea does not dove tail with your personal experience. After you present people with facts that run counter to their world view and they refuse to change -- that is a person who will not incorporate who will never accept the new information. Indeed they will twist anything they read to fit their old and incorrect understanding. One would that it is easier to accept the truth, but for some it is far more difficult. In fact it is abstract thinking that make it possible to distort reality and hold onto a fiction.

America's currency has not been back by a commodity for sometime now --think Tricky Dick took us completely off. It is back by our word. Yes they are printing money with reckless abandon. I don't really understand how this can persist unabated. There is not enough gold on the Earth to back the money out there -- we haven't even printed enough currency to reflect the "money" out there. Actually that is a completely different question. Why conflate the two? Why deny the families that have been wrong today because the US owes ADOS. Should Native American's be given back the land American's took before we are compensated? Dealing with the Mexicans is what we call "low hanging fruit." We can knock this one out and compensate these Mexican in their life times and continue to deal with Reparations it is not like the money we are giving them will make a dent in what they owe us. Again this assumes of course that you feel these people are entitled to compensation which it does not seems like anyone does.

Yeah, what else is new? Should this mean that anyone the U.S. has ever wronged should never be compensated until reparations are paid to the American descendants of enslaved Africans?

@Mzuri OK to be clear: This is a hyperlink: https://aalbc.com if you click it it will take you to my homepage. Amazon does not allow hyperlinks This "link" https://aalbc.com is merely text it is not a hyperlink. You can't click it and be sent to another website. Text is what you find on the page you referenced. Sure one can copy and paste the URL, but this is unnecessarily cumbersome, and few people actually do it. Amazon discourages people from leaving their website. All of the largest websites rum by Amazon, Facebook, Google discourage hyperlinks, as well, either through direct policy, as with Facebook's Instagram (save one's profile page) and/or algorithmically.

What?! Oh brother, so now we are referencing to some guy, a colonizer, from the early 19th century... Once you start mixing nationality with geography in the context of the artificial concept of race the topic becomes so sloppy as to be nonsensical. But it is an open forum.

Why, don't y'all "...even like the idea of it," or feel "...these people are entitled to NOTHING?" Is you lack of sympathy for the parents who were separated from their children for years, because they illegally crossed the board, because they are Mexican, because Black folks have not been compensated for the hell America has rained us, or something else?

Please, if I'm factually wrong contradict (correct) me -- always. Opinions are one thing, but facts are well... facts. Maybe Amazon changed something that I was not aware of. Can you show me an example of hyperlink to an external site on Amazon?

Y'all should read the article the dailymail used as a source for it's own article. Does it share you opinion at all (I assume noone actually read the DailyMail's article) I don't normally lift entire articles from other sites. Hopefully the WSJ will understand and won't sue me... U.S. in Talks to Pay Hundreds of Millions to Families Separated at Border Government is considering payments of $450,000 per person affected by Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy in 2018 By Michelle Hackman, Aruna Viswanatha and Sadie Gurman Updated Oct. 28, 2021 6:03 pm ET WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma. The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said. Most of the families that crossed the border illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. included one parent and one child, the people said. Many families would likely get smaller payouts, depending on their circumstances, the people said. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents families in one of the lawsuits, has identified about 5,500 children separated at the border over the course of the Trump administration, citing figures provided to it by the government. The number of families eligible under the potential settlement is expected to be smaller, the people said, as government officials aren’t sure how many will come forward. Around 940 claims have so far been filed by the families, the people said. The total potential payout could be $1 billion or more. As part of a so-called zero-tolerance enforcement policy, immigration agents separated thousands of children, ranging from infants to teenagers, from their parents at the southern border in 2018 after they had crossed illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. In some cases families were forcefully broken up with no provisions to track and later reunite them, government investigations found. The lawsuits allege some of the children suffered from a range of ailments, including heat exhaustion and malnutrition, and were kept in freezing cold rooms and provided little medical attention. Many of the lawsuits describe lasting mental-health problems for the children from the trauma of the months without their parents in harsh conditions, including anxiety, a fear of strangers and nightmares. The lawsuits seek a range of payouts, with the average demand being roughly $3.4 million per family, some of the people said. In recent months, lawyers for the families and the government have told courts overseeing the cases that they are engaged in settlement negotiations and hoped to reach a deal by the end of November. “President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrant-rights project and a lead negotiator on one of the lawsuits. “That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.” In his first weeks in office, Mr. Biden pledged to reunite the separated families, describing those actions undertaken by the Trump administration a “moral and national shame.” A DHS spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment. The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to a request for comment. Some Republicans criticized the potential payments on Thursday afternoon after The Wall Street Journal reported on them. “The Biden administration’s promises of citizenship and entitlement programs have already caused the worst border crisis in history—a huge cash reward will make it even worse,” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said. The discussions about the payouts have taken place over the past few months among a group of dozens of private lawyers representing the families and government lawyers. Some government lawyers have viewed the payouts as excessive for people who had violated the law by crossing the border, the people said. One government lawyer threatened to remove his name from the case out of disagreement with the potential settlement offer, the people said. In another instance, a Department of Homeland Security attorney involved in the settlement talks complained on a conference call that the payouts could amount to more than some families of 9/11 victims received, one person said. Other people said senior departmental officials were in alignment on the amount and disputed the 9/11 comparison, given that the U.S. government hadn’t been responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 victim compensation fund averaged awards to the dead of around $2 million, tax-free, at the time an unprecedented payout, the administrator of the fund has said. Trying to take the cases to trial would be unpredictable, with juries potentially awarding larger sums to the families, legal experts said. “Damage class actions in this kind of case are pretty rare, it’s hard to think of a recent comparison,” said Margo Schlanger, who ran the civil-rights office during the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security and now teaches at the University of Michigan law school. Ms. Schlanger said class-action compensation claims are more common in cases involving defective medical devices or other consumer products. “It is a complicated, complex piece of litigation” to try to resolve hundreds of different lawsuits at the same time, and “sometimes even more complex to try the cases,” Ms. Schlanger said, adding that it made sense to try to resolve them together. The Trump administration in May 2018 implemented a zero-tolerance approach, in which agents apprehended everyone crossing the border illegally, including those seeking asylum. That practice meant that children accompanying those adults were separated from their parents and put on a separate administrative track. The overall goal, the Trump administration said at the time, was to slow the number of people crossing the border illegally, but several of those officials have since apologized for the consequences of that policy. Immigration law gives children greater legal protections than adults, so while the adults’ asylum cases could be dismissed quickly, allowing them to be deported, children mostly remained in the U.S. in child-welfare shelters or living with relatives. The Trump administration also hadn’t built a system to track which children belong to which parents before beginning to separate them. A January report from the Justice Department’s inspector general faulted senior Trump Justice Department officials for knowing the policy change would result in families being separated, but pressing ahead without preparing for it. President Trump ended the policy through an executive order on June 20, 2018, following bipartisan blowback and global condemnation. Many of the families filed tort claims, a type of civil claim seeking damages for loss or harm, asking for compensation to cover mental-health treatment to address the emotional and psychological toll the practice took. Some of the cases were resolved under the Trump administration. In a 2019 settlement in New Jersey, for example, an adult and a minor received a total of $125,000. Most such cases remained pending at the start of the Biden administration. When Mr. Biden became president, he formed a task force to reunite the families that remained separated. Settlement talks are also ongoing in a separate lawsuit, known as Ms. L V. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in which the ACLU has asked the government to provide families with mental-health and other services, along with a permanent legal status. Apart from talks over damages, the administration has already begun a process of locating deported parents and reuniting them with their children in the U.S. The administration has reunited 52 families and is in the process of reuniting about 200 more. The families are being given a three-year grant of parole, a form of temporary humanitarian protection that allows them to live and work legally in the U.S. but doesn’t offer them a path to permanent legal status. Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman+1@wsj.com, Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Appeared in the October 29, 2021, print edition as 'U.S. Is in Talks to Pay Families Split at Border.'

Agreed when I get emails I'll sometimes reply the reaction is universally positive. People say they understand, but I'm not sure if it translates into changed behavior. Actually I had not considered the fact that the post was straight up spam (I did not check). I usually allow these posts if the book looks legit (book cover image and useful description, but I'll remove the hyperlink to Amazon. Did y'all know, that Amazon does not allow links to other sites? Did y'all even notice? Amazon is the antithesis of the what WWW was supposed to be.

This is true, in fact I'm one of these people and have been living this lifestyle since 2008. I still teach a college course in New York City and have not set foot in Camaous since March of 2020. In the program I'm in, here in Oklahoma, Tulsa Remote, one of the requirements for participation was being a remote worker. There are about 1,000 people in the program today. There are programs like this all over the country. The pandemic has only accelerated this lifestyle. Who knows, but the percentage of people who are doing this is probably much higher than you think. There is also a percentage of people, who would not like this lifestyle and would never do it. But it is indeed a lifestyle that is continuing to grow. Imagine having a silicon valley salary but living the Tulsa.

Guest Franklin, what would it take for you to send people to a Black-owned bookstore to buy your book? Imagine if I went to your business and told people to go, not just to a competing business, but a competing business whose mission it is destroy your business. How can we talk about Black Excellence and do what you have just done? How about: NO more going to Black-owned Bookstores and telling people to go to Amazon How about that dear Brother? ------------ Sorry about that y'all, but I said that to illustrate a point. I get an email or a post like this every day. I even disallowed the use of the word Amazon this site (in "*" in the word Amazon is inserted by the forum's software) Even Black people who are purportedly supportive of other Black people, don't have a clue on how to do it. We have so much work ahead of us...

I would think this number would be higher, but since I'm most familiar with the Black community I realize my perspective is biased based upon my experience. The US Census Bureau reported that the official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent. For Black people it is 19.5% which sounds about right given my personal experience. The idea that 1 out of 5 Black people, in 2020 America, are living the poverty (using this government's own definition) is ALARMING! The question is what are we gonna do about it? Mzuri as you might imagine I'm now resultant to check your sources, because they have not panned out this far. I can see that you posted a link to the Census Bureau, a valid source. I read the page. Based upon your statements you clearly do not trust the government on any level. Your interpretation based upon how you shared their information, on how they count people is reflected by this world view. Again, it is obvious that the numbers are not perfect, but given the things they are doing I'm not getting the impression that they are trying to deceive or missing large swaths of the homeless population. The numbers they are already sharing regarding Black poverty are dire enough. If they are trying to fudge number to make things look better they are not doing a very good job. At the end of the day, this is what we must do. The question is will we do it. There groups in in Tulsa trying to just that very thing. There are also groups in NY City as well. The problem is the masses are not doing very much to help. They largely support white businesses -- to a fault. They buy everything from Amazon. They can be bothered to support a Black owned business. They give Facebook all their information and spend all day on the platform, and won't even signing up with a Black site. We enrich white sites with our money and time, while at the same time complain that Black sites are not as good?! Now I'm obviously not talking about anyone reading this right now, but y'all represent a small fraction of what is possible.

I have to stop lecturing and getting bogged down in the wonky details. It was interesting to hear her describe the fact that you can learn from anyone and that everyone is a an expert in something. I always believed that that is one of the reasons I want to hear other people opinions. I hear you. In the real world this is easy to do because these are boring conversations.

Interesting. In space where can move in three dimensions. The arrow of time for corporeal beings appears to only run in one direction. You seems to be suggesting that we can move in time the was we do in space. Are you talking about our physical beings or spirits? Or am I misunderstanding you altogether.

Frustration might be a strong description, but what makes your arguments weak is that you based them solely on your personal anecdotes. When you do cite a source to support your argument it is either does not in fact support your argument or the source unreputable. The idea that, "Between 1990 and 2020, black folks living below the poverty line has gone from 29.3% to 16.8%." take at it's face is a big win. I don't know enough about the poverty statistics to know if they are meaningful. For example, during that 30 year people incarceration rate increased are people in jail counted in the poverty rate calculations? Removing a large section of the population, who would more than likely be Black and in poverty would make the number look better. How has the poverty level changed over past 30 years? How has the level changed relative to the inflation rate has it kept pace? Is Mzuri point accurate? If that is true then the numbers would be little better than a guess, so I doubt the number are collected in such a rudimentary fashion and certainly would not be expressed to the 10th of a percent accuracy. I suspect the numbers were taken from census data and a variety of other sources like income from tax returns. No one thinks the government's numbers are perfect -- perfection is impossible. What is odd, to me, is that folks would completely reject the government's numbers in favor their clearly limited personal observations.

Again one reference would have sufficed (simply because I'm not going to check them all). Again taking the first one on your list. It is an article, that I'm sure you did not read, because it does not answer the question. I just checked the subject of the article about Regions Banks and their domain does not expire until 2024: https://www.whois.com/whois/regions.com It is not clear why you shared that link. You are are not taking this seriously. I just watched an interesting video which helps me understand why getting people to think differently is extremely difficult. I have shared the video here.