Information Man Show

For many of us these days, it feels as if the United States has never been less united. The nation, it seems, has become irrevocably fractured along political and ideological lines Republican/Democrat, liberal/conservative, red/blue, etc. Sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner with family has never been more uncomfortable and the admonition to avoid discussing religion or politics in polite company has never been more apropos. What has happened to America? And how can we reverse the trend?

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the presidential election by the Associated Press. Some votes remain to be counted and lawsuits have been filed over some ballot counting. Still, the results won’t be set in stone until states and the Electoral College follow a set of well-established protocols.

Over the last 20 years, states have put barriers in front of the ballot box imposing strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls. These efforts, which received a boost when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, have kept significant numbers of eligible voters from the polls, hitting all Americans, but placing special burdens on racial minorities, poor people, and young and old voters.

In politics, there are winners and losers. That’s inevitable, just as it is in football, baseball, basketball or any sport. Like in sports, the audience in this case, the American electorate expects that the rules will be articulated, documented and fair. In Politics There are no permanent enemies, and nopermanent friends, only permanent interests.

Even as Trump tried to turn the tale of his illness into a parable about his personal strength and dedication to the country, he said nothing about the 210,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19 since last spring, and the 7.4 million infected so far including more than 100,000 since Friday.Nor did Trump express sympathy for the dozen or more senior advisors, campaign officials and Republican lawmakers who have contracted the virus since last week, when the White House became the latest hot spot for the disease.

If you’ve ever given any consideration at all to the state of our nation, you’ve probably been frustrated or felt powerless in some way. It seems like common sense that some things should change. Well, it is. But the government doesn’t care what you think, or what.

Kanye West Campaign Rally Leaves Attendees Stunned With His Bizarre Statements. Kanye West held his first campaign rally on Sunday, two weeks after announcing that he would run for president as an independent candidate, leaving many people confused and audibly bewildered by his ramblings. West held the event in Charleston, South Carolina as part of a campaign to get on the ballot in the state as a write-in candidate in November. At one point, he said that famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves, she just had them work for other white people,” a comment that led one attendee to say audibly over the Facebook webcast, “OK, we’re leaving now.”

Donald Trump’s public surrender to the coronavirus pandemic has proceeded in three distinct and horrifying phases. First came blithe denial. Having already disbanded the global health security team charged with fighting pandemics, ditched the 69-page playbook left to him by the Obama administration, and disregarded more than a dozen warnings in his own daily briefings, the president claimed the virus was no threat, and that it would miraculously disappear. The central goal was to keep the stock market from crashing.

Chokehold: a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die. The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something about the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.”

Oakland CA. Unified School District unanimously voted on Wednesday evening to disband its own police department. The measure passed by the school board will redirect a police budget of $2.5 million to other programs for students. Black students received more severe punishments at a rate 29 percent higher than white students. Black children make up 16 percent of the national population of students, they represent 31 percent of all arrests in schools in the U.S.

Black Lives Matter Statements on there Website: We are expansive. We are a collective of liberators who believe in an inclusive and spacious movement. We also believe that in order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities. We must ensure we are building a movement that brings all of us to the front. We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. #BLACKLIVESMATTER WEBSITE SEE FOR YOUR SELFhttps://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

A black person is killed by a police officer in America at the rate of more than one every other day. Floyd’s death followed those of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician shot at least eight times inside her Louisville, Ky., home by plain-clothes police executing a no-knock warrant, and Ahmaud Arbery, killed in a confrontation with three white men as he jogged through their neighborhood in Brunswick, Ga. Even Floyd’s anguished gasps were familiar, the same words Eric Garner uttered on a Staten Island street corner in 2014: “I can’t breathe.” Thousands of protesters gathered in cities around the world, often in defiance of coronavirus-related bans on mass gatherings, in solidarity with U.S. demonstrations calling for changes to the justice system after the killing of George Floyd while in police custody.

8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody. The Times has reconstructed the death of George Floyd on May 25. Security footage, witness videos and official documents show how a series of actions by officers turned fatal. On May 25, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, after a deli employee called 911, accusing him of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived at the scene, Mr. Floyd was unconscious and pinned beneath three police officers, showing no signs of life. By combining videos from bystanders and security cameras, reviewing official documents and consulting experts, The New York Times reconstructed in detail the minutes leading to Mr. Floyd’s death. Our video shows officers taking a series of actions that violated the policies of the Minneapolis Police Department and turned fatal, leaving Mr. Floyd unable to breathe, even as he and onlookers called out for help. The day after Mr.

Less than 24 hours after Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore sparked outrage by saying that Goerge Floyd’s blood is on rioters’ hands “as it is on those officers,’” he facedunanimously angry, and often profane criticism from residents at an online meeting of the L.A. Police Commission. George Floyd: Black man dies after US police pin him to ground. Four Minneapolis officers fired after the death of George Floyd, who died after being pinned down by a white officer. A Black man who yelled "I cannot breathe" as a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him down with his knee in the US state of Minnesota died late on Monday, police confirmed, drawing outrage from community members and leaders, and leading to the officers' termination. Video of the incident shows the police officer pinning down George Floyd, believed to be in his 40s, to the pavement with his knee on the man's neck for several minutes. Floyd was identified by prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who said he had been retained by the Floyd fam

One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed Slaves. Memorial Day was born out of necessity. After the American Civil War, a battered United States was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died in the single bloodiest military conflict in American history. The first national commemoration of Memorial Day was held in Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, where both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried. Several towns and cities across America claim to have observed their own earlier versions of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as early as 1866. (The earlier name is derived from the fact that decorating graves was and remains a central activity of Memorial Day.) But it wasn’t until a remarkable discovery in a dusty Harvard University archive the late 1990s that historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of freed black slaves less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

The first crisis is one of food insecurity: Tens of millions of American families are falling into hunger. For single mothers with children under the age of 12, an astonishing 40 percent are now reporting that they are running out of food without the financial ability to purchase more. Adults are missing meals to keep children fed. But many children are, nevertheless, going hungry. At the same time, huge amounts of farm produce are going to waste: Farmers are literally destroying crops, meat and dairy supplies that they have no buyers for because schools, restaurants, hotels and other big commercial purchasers are no longer buying produce.

Ahmaud Arbery, Audio recordings of two 911 calls have shed further light on the final moments before Ahmaud Arbery was shot dead by two white men while jogging through a neighborhood just outside Brunswick, Georgia. The full recordings, obtained by the Guardian, come after new video footage showing Arbery’s killing in February was released this week, prompting widespread outrage and raising questions over why no arrests have been made. Transcripts of the 911 calls have been previously reported by local media. Arbery had gone for a jog in Satilla Shores, near the Georgia coast, on the afternoon of Sunday 23 February. The 25-year-old was known around the neighborhood, and would sometimes wave to residents as he ran. But that day, a series of events unfolded that ended in his killing at the hands of Gregory McMichael, 64, and his 34-year-old son, Travis McMichael. Lawyers for Arbery’s family have said his death was a “lynching” and requested it be investigated as a hate crime.

The NYPD officer who violently arrested a man in the East Village during a social distancing stop this weekend has a lengthy history of alleged brutality garnering more than half a dozen misconduct lawsuits in five years, and costing city taxpayers nearly $200,000, according to the Legal Aid Society. In a video recorded on Saturday, a plainclothes officer can be seen punching and tackling Donni Wright, a groundskeeper with NYCHA, while shouting the n-word, brandishing a taser, and subsequently kneeling on Wright's head. The confrontation began after officers, some of whom were not wearing face coverings, spotted "a number of people not wearing masks" at the corner of Avenue D and 9th Street, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said on Monday. The officer's shield number, recorded by observers, matches that of Francisco Garcia, a housing patrol officer who's been named in at least seven civil lawsuits since 2015.

While some experts tried to calm fears by saying the Spanish influenza epidemic was "ordinary influenza by another name," according to John Barry, the author of the book "The Great Influenza," by the end of the pandemic, an estimated 675,000 Americans died, primarily in the fall of 1918, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Five days later, Denver Post headlines blared the bad news: "All Flu Records Smashed in Denver in Last 24 Hours," claiming that more Denver residents had died of influenza than Coloradans killed in the First World War. In the end, 8,000 people in Colorado died, but the towns that socially isolated consistently, like Gunnison, did far better than Denver.

Black Americans have more existing medical issues, less access to health care, and are more likely to work in unstable jobs -- all factors that have made the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately hurt blacks more. 512 coronavirus deaths so far, more than 70 percent were African American patients, who make up just 32 percent of the state's population. Chicago, too, has seen similar numbers: Among those for whom race-ethnicity is known, 72% of the city's deaths have been among blacks, who make up just 30% of the city's population. Compared to white people, blacks have lower levels of health insurance coverage and are less likely to have insurance coverage through an employer.