Born to be Brave

- Due to storms, they had to evacuate the National Mall grounds. But the MAGA crowd didn't want to leave. They just stood around chanting "USA! USA!" They were convinced liberals were messing with the weather. Reportedly, one of the security guards got so fed up that he threw a chair at them.

- Fox News didn't have anything to share while they were waiting for Trump's delayed speech, so they just showed a feed of him staring at the TV. And he was watching Fox News.

- A bunch of the crowd that was evacuated wasn't even let back in, and they were raging about it on social media. Some of them waited 10 to 12 hours in record-setting heat (102°F) and never got to see anything. All special passes were canceled. So much for money privilege.

- Because the program was running so far behind, several performers were cancelled.

- Trump's speech began at 11:15 p.m., after a sizeable amount of his followers had abandoned the event. It was unremarkable in just like all of his other ones- a bunch of "America is the greatest nation," blaming Democrats for everything bad, and general gibberish.

- The fireworks didn't begin until almost midnight, so they ended on July 5th.

- They wanted to have more fireworks than ever before, but they set off so many that the sky was covered in light, and it just looked like everything was on fire. The finale was not visible due to the smoke.

- Trump appeared to fall asleep during the show.

- The immense amount of pyrotechnics fucked up the air in DC

Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).

So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!

I finally saw Sinners! Yes, it was amazing!

In honor of this gorgeous movie, here are a few books featuring history, horror, race and colorism, music, monsters, siblings, and things that go bump in the night.

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Parents and teachers in Canada will now have an “educational toolkit” to help them if they notice a child being groomed by a hate group.

The new resource, launched by the Canadian government in partnership with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, intends to combat the growing prevalence of hate groups online. Members of those groups, most of whom were raised in the digital age, are becoming more adept at recruiting. For example, the neo-Nazi terror group The Base, as well as other neo-Nazi groups, have used meme websites to recruit young people, usually male teenagers, into their movement.

Authorities are still figuring out ways to effectively combat the problem.

The toolkit can be found online free of charge here and contains modules that run teachers and parents through a variety of subjects related to hate groups, such as ideologies and recruitment techniques. One of the sections presents scenarios and offers ways to handle to them from a variety of perspectives. Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said that the examples were all taken from real-world events that had occurred in Canada.

"The scenarios in the toolkit deal with increasing severity of what hate might look like within the school community, said Simons.“You start out with anonymous hate promotion—so that could be graffiti, that could be a swastika on a desk.

“It starts from there and then it escalates all the way to overt hate organizing within the school community and outside the school community” she added.

The project is one of the latest anti-racism initiatives rolled out by Canada’s government. In a Wednesday press conference announcing the project, Ahmed Hussen, the minister of housing diversity and inclusion, said that in total the government "has invested $35 million to fund 175 anti-racism projects across the country."

Again, the link to the toolkit is https://www.antihate.school . I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but knowing the CAHN, it should be a good start. Of course, a tool can only serve its purpose if people use it, so I'm hoping this will be part of curriculum in schools across the country.