This Public Service Announcement has been brought to you on behalf of the Baltimore Algebra Project and its allies. We are fighting to end the School to Prison Pipeline. We are aware that there is a direct connection between youth jails and education. Therefore, we are demanding that $100 Million gets diverted from youth jails towards youth employment and education. Our first major action will be a march then a sit-in on March 4th, 2010

In the next few days breaking news will come on every time the death toll climbs. Everyone will say they will not want to focus on the numbers but the numbers will help to drive the spectacle of devastation that the poor get to experience and that the rich get to experience the poor experiencing.

Scientists will explain why this quake is going to kill numbers “certainly in the 5 figures, maybe and I pray this is not the case but maybe 6″. When numbers seem lower they will de-emphasize it.

Surely we will also see a rush to help Haiti, advertisements, benefit shows, maybe even a moment of silence at a NFL playoff game this weekend.

That it is in the western hemisphere and has close connections to the United States(even if there is not support for refugees) will inevitably add additional fuel to the fire.

All the while Port au Prince, and Haiti will be consistently referred to as the poorest place in the world. Spectacular Third World Catastrophe in our own backyard.

Back in the Cold War

In the cold war cities where in the cross hairs. Both superpowers aimed their weapons at the urban centers and policy was made accordingly. In America the white, the wealthy and the powerful where evacuated from the cities. What was created was a mode of thinking which allowed the decaying urban core of America to be the tripwire for nuclear war. As American disregard developed for the Black American inner city, the threat of elimination became a less weighty proposition. (In the role of the nuclear disposable  urban Americans share something with their rural brothers and sisters, who undoubtedly would also suffer in an attack.)

This is not to say that as Black America became the primary target of American nuclear annihilation America was welcoming attack, for the same reason that Israel has not suggested a nuclear option in regards to Palestine. But it is to say as the nuclear calculations of the cold war ratcheted up the global security establishment came to see cities as disposable. A city, a permanent structure, sustaining millions of lives suddenly became something that could be wiped off the map, in the modern era.

We have heard stories in history of cities being eliminated, but modernity is supposed to protect against many of the city destroyers of the past, nuclear weapons changed that.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons whee not used in combat except of course against the indigenous people of the world. Since the 1940’s no major first world city has been wiped off the map.

Of course in the third world cities are plunged in to cataclysm all the time, by war, by earthquakes, by tsunamis.

This was also an  effect of the cold war. While no Russian or American cities where destroyed in an instant, third world cities bore the brunt of proxy wars of destruction.

Once we escaped the cold war the real damage began to become apparent. It came home to America in the form of Katrina. The resources spent on weapons to destroy and thus protect cities became the broken levees, collapsed canals and the flooded wards. The cold wars revenge comes in the lifetime of sacrifices made to win it.

Haiti’s independent revolutionary black history and it’s location in the Caribbean made it a frequent proxy battleground in the cold war, after all what the us saw in the corrupt regimes it propped up was a virulent strain of anti communism. These proxy battles helped to destroy Haiti and make it to poverty and despair(in the western hemisphere) what Yemen or Afghanistan is to Al queda.

Now cities do not get picked off by nuclear weapons, instead imminent disaster is avoided only till it occurs. Yet because we have learned to see cities as disposable when it occurs we care about the 9th ward, we care about port-au-prince, or we care about Chernobyl.

The tally of the cold war’s dead cities should not be closed quite yet.

Massachusetts Public Mandate Enrollment

There is no public option. But there is a mandate. Abortion proves that what it covers will be subject to political manipulation. Cost savings are eaten up by compromises.

But still. A lot more people will be covered, tax breaks and subsidies will be available to defer the cost. Pre-existing conditions will no longer be a preclusion of coverage. Insurance will be made more sane….even if richer.

This bill is not ideal. But it will make the world better for the majority of uninsured Americans. Even if an opportunity for universal coverage was lost, it never  had a chance of becoming law in reality. But we are closer to a public that will support universal coverage than we have been in my lifetime. Maybe we are 20 years away.

While the politicians have done some terribly incoherent and unseemly things, that is what they do. We should be critical of them, and push them to do better, but we should not surrender our agency to them.

Now that the political process has been used for making incremental change, we need to keep organizing and visualizing for the world we want. If it takes another 20 years of one-on-one discussions and debates in bars, workplaces, classrooms, street corners, buses, parks and dormrooms  before there is a mass public movement for universal coverage that translates into legislative victory, then we will have to start now.

So what do you think? Should we support the bill? Should we work against it? Or maybe we should criticize its compromises but support its passage?

When it does it will have a lot of content, some pretty cool social functionality, and some very talented contributors. You are welcome to follow along through this process, offer feedback, or contribute content or ideas.

While it may be annoying that there are undefiled categories and incomplete pages, I have a commitment to the openness of the process which drives me to iterate web form in public. Using exclusivity to build buzz is a tactic that reminds me of the late 90’s and the years before the recent crash. Artificial fan loyalty through beta invites is not my goal.

My goal is to build a web platform for the amplification of the voices of the people of the city. An open building site will draw criticism, irritation, and snickers as people watch and comment and suggest, but at the end of the day it will be a better community if it is openly developed.

So ideas, suggestions, comments and criticisms are all apprciated. In March something very cool will emerge.

Contact us here

The Storm scheduled to bring 20″-30″ inches of snow to parts of the area looks like a tropical storm.
It has an eye, it is spinning and it has precipitation bands. That it is so early in the season will be somewhat irrelevant compared to its size when it is all through.

It’s not like many other early season storms where it will be 50 on Monday. This snow is going no where fast.

Here are some predictions about it’s impact.

School is out for the year. No way city schools will be able to open again by Wednesday when they where scheduled to dismiss for the year.

Online Christmas shopping is going to have to do. No one is going much of any where anytime before Monday. The loss of this weekend will make last minute retail options madness. Even if you can’t get it shipped by Christmas(because i can’t imagine the post office is like oh yeah we got that). Print out a receipt. Publicly blame the snow, privately thank it for giving you a 30 inch city stopping cover for your procrastination.

The infrastructure is going to break. As the storm was coming in last night the city was just finishing up work on the Water problem from earlier in the week. With even a foot of snow thing are going to break. Its going to be cold, and dark for some folks tonight.

People will make global warming jokes. It is inevitable. They will of course be funny in a wrong sort of way. In fact while i wont go into it to much right now, this is not outside of Al Gore’s scope of possibilities. In fact, in honor of Al Gore, we are doing two things.

First . We are ushering in the era of the Snowicane. A tropical storm, flash frozen. Like the Winter Olympics is to the Summer Olympics  the Snowicane is to the Hurricane . Just like we should never host a winter Olympics in a place no one has heard of, we should stop referring to winter storms with out proper names. No more Presidents weekend storm of ought3 . Hello Snowicane Curtis.

Second.  In an obvious move, we are deeming this storm Snowicane Al.

If you want to become a contributor send your name, a writing sample, and what you want to write about to s.andrew.ellis@gmail.com or @bmoreconnected on Twitter (or you can just leave a comment here)

The online interface will provide users the ability to  learn more about a book, discuss and share it with their colleagues, and request it if it is available(and see where it is if it is not available).

We are in the process of adding a city school tested DIY librarian to the team and hope to expand the offerings and services much more in the near future.