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Some places are voting early, and if you are pissed off at Trump’s….everything here is where you hit him back, voting in these elections.  If you know anybody from these states, let them know, this is is how the Tea Party fought back in 2009, now it is our turn.  

First off Delaware’s 10th State Senate District

Democrats will lose control of the State Senate if they lose one more seat to Republicans, making the 10th district crucial. The district is very close, won by an incumbent Democrat in 2014 by only 267 votes.

The election will be held on February 25th, with Democrat Stephanie Hansen facing off against Republican John Marino and Libertarian Joseph Lanzendorfer.“

To donate to Stephanie Hansen follow this link: https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/keepdeblue

Secondly we have Georgia’s 6th U.S. Congressional District

The 6th District leans Republican, but a strong Democratic primary is mobilizing the community early. The presence of well-resourced campaigns and the variability of special elections make this district flippable.

Election date is pending Tom Price’s appointment to Trump’s cabinet. Let’s elect a Democrat to replace him.”

If you know of any Democrats in the area, please pass along the message.

Finally, Michigan’s 31st State Senate District Michigan will be a key state in the 2020 presidential elections. By flipping Michigan’s state legislature—beginning with this seat—we can significantly improve our chances in 2020. The chance for upsets in well-resourced special elections makes this a target race.

Election date is pending Mike Green’s appointment to Trump’s cabinet.“

Three elections in the next 100 days, all of which can serve as the first step to taking our country back from absolute madness.  

She’s known for her “blue eyes-brown eyes experiment” where she divides a group of volunteers from the blues and the browns. The minute the people walk in, the blue-eyes know they’re not welcomed. She makes them wait in a separate room, gives them shitty chairs, bad food, and shows them less respect. And (obviously) it causes all sorts of discomfort and rage, but that’s precisely her point. It doesn’t help that most blue-eyed volunteers happen to be white as well. Sometimes they get the message, sometimes they don’t and leave, sometimes crying or screaming. And Jane Elliott says that’s exactly what minorities want to do everyday of their lives, but they simply cannot do.

IMPORTANT INFO FOR WHAT’S CURRENTLY HAPPENING IN TRUMP’S AMERICA: a lot of unwarranted raids are happening across the U.S right now. The latest states that have been targeted by this massive sweep is California, Arizona, Texas, and now Georgia. Over 100 people have been detained, most likely without a warrant. And before someone says “they’re just keeping the criminals out!1!”, lawyers who were able to consult some of the people detained did not have a criminal record. There have also been reports of officers trailing kids walking home from school to lead to their parents.  These officers DO NOT. HAVE. THE RIGHT. TO DETAIN PEOPLE. WITHOUT. A WARRANT.  

The children were going to die.

Mohamed Bzeek knew that. But in his more than two decades as a foster father, he took them in anyway — the sickest of the sick in Los Angeles County’s sprawling foster care system.

He has buried about 10 children. Some died in his arms.

Now, Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. She’s blind and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed.

Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.

“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said. “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”

Of the 35,000 children monitored by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, there are about 600 children at any given time who fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs, said Rosella Yousef, an assistant regional administrator for the unit.

There is a dire need for foster parents to care for such children.

And there is only one person like Bzeek.

“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it.”

Typically, she said, children with complex conditions are placed in medical facilities or with nurses who have opted to become foster parents.

But Bzeek is the only foster parent in the county known to take in terminally ill children, Yousef said. Though she knows the single father is stretched thin caring for the girl, who requires around-the-clock care, Yousef still approached him at a department Christmas party in December and asked if he could possibly take in another sick child.

This time, Bzeek politely declined.

Bzeek is a quiet, religious man who wants his foster daughter to know she’s not alone in this life. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

:::

The girl sits propped up with pillows in the corner of Bzeek’s living room couch. She has long, thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and perfectly arched eyebrows over unseeing gray eyes.

Because of confidentiality laws, the girl is not being identified. But a special court order allowed The Times to spend time at Bzeek’s home and to interview people involved in his foster daughter’s case.

The girl’s head is too small for her 34-pound body, which is too small for her age. She was born with an encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull, according to Dr. Suzanne Roberts, the girl’s pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Neurosurgeons removed the protruding brain tissue shortly after her birth, but much of her brain remains undeveloped.

She has been in Bzeek’s care since she was a month old. Before her, he cared for three other children with the same condition.

“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.  

Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children, he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.

Years later, through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who would become his wife. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s, before she met Bzeek. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she was inspired by them, Bzeek said. Before she met Bzeek, she opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody.

Dawn Bzeek fell in love with every child she took in. She took them to professional holiday photo sessions, and she organized Christmas gift donation drives for foster children.  

She was funny, Bzeek said during a recent drive home from the hospital. She was absolutely terrified of spiders and bugs, so much that even Halloween decorations creeped her out — but she was never scared by the children’s illnesses or the possibility that she would die, Bzeek said.  

The Bzeeks opened their Azusa home to dozens of children. They taught classes on foster parenting — and how to handle a child’s illness and death — at community colleges. Dawn Bzeek was such a highly regarded foster mother that her name appeared on statewide task forces for improving foster care alongside doctors and policymakers.

Bzeek started caring for foster children with Dawn in 1989, he said. Often, the children were ill.

Mohamed Bzeek first experienced the death of a foster child in 1991. She was the child of a farm worker who was pregnant when she breathed in toxic pesticides sprayed by crop dusters. She was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast and wasn’t yet a year old when she died on July 4, 1991, as the Bzeeks prepared dinner.

“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of a tiny girl in a frilly white dress, lying in a coffin surrounded by yellow flowers.

By the mid-1990s, the Bzeeks decided to specifically care for terminally ill children who had do-not-resuscitate orders because no one else would take them in.

There was the boy with short-gut syndrome who was admitted to the hospital 167 times in his eight-year life. He could never eat solid food, but the Bzeeks would sit him at the dinner table, with his own empty plate and spoon, so he could sit with them as a family.

There was the girl with the same brain condition as Bzeek’s current foster daughter, who lived for eight days after they brought her home. She was so tiny that when she died a doll maker made an outfit for her funeral. Bzeek carried her coffin in his hands like a shoe box.

“The key is, you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently. “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”

“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” Mohamed Bzeek says. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Bzeek’s only biological son, Adam, was born in 1997 — with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. He was a child so fragile that changing his diaper or his socks could break his bones.

Bzeek said he was never angry about his own son’s disabilities. He loved him all the same.

“That’s the way God created him,” Bzeek said.

Now 19, Adam weighs about 65 pounds and has big brown eyes and a shy grin. When at home, he gets around the house on a body skateboard that his father made for him out of a miniature ironing board, zooming across the wood floor, steering with his hands.

Adam studies computer science at Citrus College, driving his electric wheelchair to class. He’s the smallest student in class, Bzeek said, “but he’s a fighter.”

Adam’s parents never glossed over how sick his foster siblings were, and they told him the children were going to eventually die, Bzeek said. They accepted death as part of life — something that made the small joys of living all the more meaningful.

“I love my sister,” the shy teenager said of the foster girl. “Nobody should have to go through so much pain.”

About 2000, Dawn Bzeek, once such an active advocate for foster children, became ill. She suffered from powerful seizures that would leave her weak for days. She could hardly leave the house because she didn’t want to collapse in public.

The frustrations of her illness wore on her, Bzeek said. There was stress in the marriage, and she and Bzeek split in 2013. She died a little over a year later.  

Bzeek chokes up when he talks about her. When it came to facing the difficulties of the children’s illnesses, the knowledge that they would die, she was always the stronger one, he said.  

:::

On a chilly November morning, Bzeek pushed the girl’s wheelchair and the IV pole that carries her feeding formula into Children’s Hospital on Sunset Boulevard. She was wrapped in a soft pink blanket, her head resting on a pillow with the stitched words: “Dad is like duct tape holding our home together.”

The temperatures had been bouncing up and down that week, and the girl had a cold. Her brain cannot fully regulate her body temperature, so one leg was hot while the other was cold.  

On the elevator, her face glowed bright red as she coughed, her throat filled with phlegm, screaming for air. People in the elevator looked away.

Bzeek rubbed her cheek playfully and held her hand, waving it playfully. “Heeeey, mama,” he cooed in her ear, calming her down.

For Bzeek, the hospital has become a second home. When he’s not here, he’s often on the phone with her many doctors, the insurers who fight over who’s paying for it all, the lawyers who represent her and her social workers. Any time they leave the house together, he carries a thick black binder filled with her medical records and pages of medications.

Still, Bzeek —  who had to be licensed through the county to care for medically fragile children and receives about $1,700 a month for her care — is not able to make medical decisions for her.

Roberts entered the exam room, smiling at the girl’s frilly socks and brown dress with fall-colored leaves.

“There’s our princess,” the doctor said. “She’s in her pretty dress, as always.”

Roberts has known Bzeek for years and has seen many of his foster children. By the time this girl was age 2, Roberts said, doctors said there were no more interventions to improve her condition.

“Nobody ever wants to give up,” she said. “But we had run through the options.”

But the girl, who is hooked to feeding and medication tubes at least 22 hours a day, has lived as long as she has because of Bzeek, the doctor said.

“When she’s not sick and in a good mood, she’ll cry to be held,” Roberts said. “She’s not verbal, but she can make her needs known. … Her life is not complete suffering. She has moments where she’s enjoying herself and she’s pretty content, and it’s all because of Mohamed.”

Mohamed Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for the bedridden child. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Other than trips to the hospital and Friday prayers at the mosque — when the day nurse watches her — Bzeek rarely leaves the house.

To avoid choking, the girl sleeps sitting up. Bzeek sleeps on a second couch next to hers. He doesn’t sleep much.

:::

On a Saturday in early December, Bzeek, Adam and the girl’s nurse, Marilou Terry, had a celebratory lunch for the child’s sixth birthday. He invited her biological parents. They didn’t come.

Bzeek crouched in front of the girl — wearing a long, red-and-white dress and matching socks — and held her hands, clapping them together.

“Yay!” he said, cheerfully. “You are 6! 6! 6!”

Bzeek lit six birthday candles in a cheesecake and sat the girl on the kitchen table, holding the cake near her face so she could feel the warmth of the flames.

As they sang “Happy Birthday,” Bzeek leaned over her left shoulder, his beard gently brushing the side of her face. She smelled the smoke, and a small smile crossed her face.

She said she practiced this technique like 5 times in her office before she requested a meeting with her boss. I’m gonna share it with you guys because I really loved it.

You start off by thanking your employer for their support (whatever that means in the context of your work environment). You then say that you would like to take some time to discuss next year’s salary. You say, allow me to refresh your memory regarding some of my accomplishments or contributions from the past year, and you present a written summary of all that you’ve done. You close by saying, I hope that next year’s salary reflects this list of contributions and you thank them for their time and see yourself out.

I just loved how she made it seem so much less daunting of a task. She said not to underestimate your achievements as women have a tendency underreporting what they’ve done.

So I found this caterpillar on my way to class

i made him a tube room

im going to sleep, chicken nugget is snoozin and ill check up on him as soon as i wake up

hope he doesnt party too hard 

there he goes he’s free and im so proud and a little sad

this was an incredible experience

The standing rock tribe are being silenced about what is going on up there with the Dakota access pipe line.

I beg of you to help me get the topic out. It will affect millions of lives. The pipe will leave into the tribes only source of drinking water. We are trying so hard to get this out on twitter and facebook, but we are being silenced.

Today a security team came into the middle of a peaceful native american protest and numerous people got maced and bitten by the dogs. 

I want you all to take a look at the terror on these young girls faces. Then I want you to take a look at the two aggressive dogs. When did it become OK to use dogs against children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters OUR freakin people!!! The police will only let a dog go if the suspect runs or the suspect is violent and causes a threat to the public of the officer. Do you see a weapon in these young girls hands? Do these girls look dangerous? The answer would be no. No they don’t. The people with the dogs aren’t even police officers! They are security guards. They couldn’t even keep control of their own dogs leading to them being attacked also.

This is a map of Asia. North Americans, you may notice this map is not solely comprised of Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. People in the UK, you may notice India is not  a continent. That is, if those of you who generalize entire continents can even pinpoint India on a map. Indians are Asian, gasp! And not all brown skinned people are Indian, also, gasp! There are an alarming amount of people, of all ages, from all backgrounds, who seem to be unable to process this.

I’m ethnically Asian. Since Asia is an extremely large continent, I could be from any number of countries. I am neither from India, China, Korea, Japan or Pakistan, yet not so surprisingly, I am still Asian. 

Yes, there are commonalities across regions, through the conflation of cultures, colonialism, globalization, transnationalism and movement of diasporas. Sometimes these are all the same thing. Rickshaws, rice and curry can be found across the continent. But let’s not overgeneralize. You can also find Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus across Asia. Cantonese Speaking Chinese Muslims! English Speaking Indian Jews! 

No, we are not all the same. Orientalism? (Please look up Edward Said for basic concepts) No thank you. 

To the folks wondering about Russia being included, I want to mention that the cultural debates and angst about that has been going on for CENTURIES. While France has been pretty fetishized all the way back from Peter the Great, there is no question that we are not Europe, even with that influence showing really obviously in historical seats of power like St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, the whole country was under control of the Mongols (The Golden Horde) from roughly 1242 to 1480, and that left an enormous Mongolian and Tatar heritage that remains to this day. The ancient Scythians are huge in the cultural imagination as well. And besides… look at the Russians who are outside the standard “Kievan Rus” phenotype (which most folks assume is how all Russians look.) 

Here are three of the 30 distinct ethnic groups in Siberia alone:

Buryat grandfather, photo by Alexander Newby

Evenk children, photo by Evgenia Arbugaeva