DeeAnn Marie

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A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.
The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.

Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.


“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”
The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.

The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.
The Bronx borough president harshly criticized the guide and the tour.
The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.” [emphasis mine]

 

A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.

The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.

Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.

image

“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”

The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.

The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.

The Bronx borough president harshly criticized the guide and the tour.

The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.” [emphasis mine]

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

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Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service.
Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013

(Source: blackgirlsupremacy, via wilwheaton)

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WHEN TO ABANDON SHIP:

If Tumblr requires an account somehow linked to Yahoo.
If David Karp steps down, no matter what the reasons are.
If you have to pay to reach all of your followers (FACEBOOK!)
If Yahoo begins censoring legal images and videos.
If your dashboard becomes three columns by default.
If more than 10% of the dashboard is taken up by advertising.

Thoughts on the Yahoo! Thing - Hank’s Tumblr

(Source: goodbyeolepaint)

24 notes &

Jesse Lava on mass incarceration: "Fear drives an awful lot of our criminal justice policy"

current:

Jesse Lava, campaign director of Beyond Bars, and Preston Shipp, a former prosecutor and a professor at Lipscomb University, join Current TV’s John Fugelsang to discuss the need for mass incarceration reform in the United States.
“The United States spends more than $200 billion a year locking people up, once you count cops and courts. If we took a fraction of that money and invested it in prevention programs, rehabilitation programs, community supervision – taxpayers would be a lot better off because they’re not paying to have people behind bars, and our streets would be safer,” Lava says. “Meanwhile, families wouldn’t be ripped apart by mass incarceration. Right now 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars.”

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

Filed under incarceration criminal justice

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Learning secrets from my husband’s childhood. @jumpjules Scouts in PA.

Learning secrets from my husband’s childhood. @jumpjules Scouts in PA.