It’s cheaper to give homeless men and women a permanent place to live than to leave them on the streets.
That’s according to a study of an apartment complex for formerly homeless people in Charlotte, N.C., that found drastic savings on health care costs and incarceration.
Moore Place houses 85 chronically homeless adults, and was the subject of a study by the University of North Carolina Charlotte released on Monday. The study found that, in its first year, Moore Place tenants saved $1.8 million in health care costs, with 447 fewer emergency room visits (a 78 percent reduction) and 372 fewer days in the hospital (a 79 percent reduction).
The tenants also spent 84 percent fewer days in jail, with a 78 percent drop in arrests. The reduction is largely due to a decrease in crimes related to homelessness, such as trespassing, loitering, public urination, begging and public consumption of alcohol, according to Caroline Chambre, director the Urban Ministry Center’s HousingWorks, the main force behind Moore Place.
One tenant, Carl Caldwell, 62, said he used to go to the emergency room five to seven times a week, late at night, so he could spend the night there. “You wouldn’t believe my hospital bills,” Caldwell, who hasn’t had health insurance for years, told The Huffington Post. Caldwell was a teacher for 30 years and became homeless five years ago, when he lost his job and his roommate moved out.
While living on the street, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The disease was particularly challenging for Caldwell, who said he spent his days “trying not to get robbed or killed” and trying to find bathrooms and shelter from freezing weather. Since he moved into Moore Place when it opened in March 2012, Caldwell has gained a regular doctor and has undergone radiation. Now his cancer is in remission. Without having to worry about where he will sleep, he can take his medicine regularly and keep it in his mini fridge.
“Moore Place saved my life,” Caldwell said. “When you’re homeless, you are dependent on everybody. Now I am independent and can give back.” Caldwell said he regularly helps feed homeless people now and has reconnected with family members he hadn’t spoken to in years.
Chambre said she expects Moore Place tenants’ mental and physical health to continue to improve with consistent access to health care. “The idea of having a primary care doctor was just a fantasy when they were living on the street,” said Chambre. “Now they all have a regular doctor.”
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Story via CNN: article by Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs and The Ebeling Group.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know exactly how dangerous a trip I was embarking on, because when I left home in October 2013 to fly to Sudan, I was scared enough. What I had committed to was, quite frankly, the most “impossible” thing I’d ever tried to accomplish.
Three months earlier, over dinner, I’d learned about a doctor in Sudan’s Nuba mountains, Dr. Tom Catena, who was treating thousands of people — many of them children — who’d had limbs blown off in the Sudanese government’s bombing raids. By coincidence, we’d just posted an article to our website about Richard Van As, an amazing inventor who created a low-cost, 3-D printed prosthetic hand. So, over a second beer, I raised the possibility — wouldn’t it be cool if we brought printers over to Sudan and made arms for these kids?
The story might have ended there — one of those plans you cook up over dinner and forget by breakfast. Really, what can one person do in the face of such widespread sorrow thousands of miles away?
But when I got home and looked up Dr. Catena, I read about one of the patients he’d treated: Daniel — a 12-year-old boy who, in attempting to protect himself from an aerial attack, wrapped his arms around a tree. The tree protected his body, but both his arms were blown off by the bomb that exploded those few meters away.
The amputation and hospital treatment had saved his life, but when Daniel woke and realized what had happened he said he wished he would have died. It was one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’d ever read.
It was 11pm. I looked down the hallway to where my three boys were sleeping and thought, “What if it were my kid?” What if this happened to them and somebody out there could help them — and didn’t?
In that moment, I realized I couldn’t just close the computer, get a glass of water and go to bed. I had to do something.
Going to Sudan try to help thousands of people was way too daunting. There was no way I could get my head around that. I couldn’t help the many. But I could help one. I could help Daniel.
Crash course in 3–D printing
Mind you, at the time I knew very little about 3-D printing, and even less about prosthetic arms. So I did what I always do: surround myself with smart people, shut up, and absorb their brilliance. I brought together all the experts — including the great Van As himself — to give me a crash course in 3-D printing and prosthetic arms.
Step 1: 3-D print the files.
Step 2: Soften orthoplastic in hot water, then wrap it around the patient’s limb to mold the custom-fitted, medical-grade, breathable plastic that will anchor the printed components.
Step 3: Attach the hand and the gauntlet, and thread the cabling through each digit, running it back to an attachment point behind the patient’s wrist or elbow. The motion of the wrist (up and down) or elbow (side to side) then pulls on the cabling and draws the fingers to a close. In short, the cables tense and release around a pivot point.
BEIJING — On a visit that was supposed to be nonpolitical, first lady Michelle Obama delivered an unmistakable message to the Chinese on Saturday, saying in a speech here that freedom of speech, particularly on the Internet and in the news media, provided the foundation for a vibrant society.
On the second day of a weeklong trip to China with her two daughters and her mother, Mrs. Obama spoke to an audience of Americans and Chinese at Peking University, and in the middle of an appeal for more American students to study abroad, she also talked of the value for people of hearing “all sides of every argument.” “Time and again, we have seen that countries are stronger and more prosperous when the voices and opinions of all their citizens can be heard,” she said.
The United States, she said, respected the “uniqueness” of other cultures and societies. “But when it comes to expressing yourself freely,” she said, “and worshiping as you choose, and having open access to information — we believe those are universal rights that are the birthright of every person on this planet.”
The forthright exposition of the American belief in freedom of speech came against a backdrop of broad censorship of the Internet by the Chinese government. The government polices the Internet to prevent the nation’s 500 million users from seeing antigovernment sentiment, and blocks a variety of foreign websites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The authorities compel domestic Internet sites to censor themselves.
Growing up in the 1970s at opposite ends of New York State, two girls were immersed in all things cool, black and funky.
Saturday morning cartoons won their hearts. Loreen Williamson, in Rochester, and Pamela Thomas, in the Bronx, would park themselves in front of the The Jackson 5ive, featuring a tiny Michael sporting a big Afro, and Josie and the Pussycats, with the black tambourine-playing Valerie Brown performing in a hip girl band.
Eventually, the two met and bonded over their mutual interests. Not content to leave the funk (or their pasts) behind, Ms. Williamson, now 49, and Ms. Thomas, 51, have amassed more than 300 pieces of black animation art from the 1960s and ’70s, a collection that they believe is one of the world’s most extensive in that field. In 2007, they created the Museum of UnCut Funk, an online showcase for original animation cels, posters, storyboards and other objects celebrating black culture of the 1970s and its standard-bearers. Now, the two collectors have hit the road with a traveling museum exhibition, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution, which represents 24 animated productions, including Saturday morning and after-school cartoons and animated feature films.
The revolution that it documents is from stereotype to superhero: Funky, which is currently at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and will travel to museums in Chicago, Seattle and West Reading, Pa.honors the cartoons’ image-affirming black characters, including those of The Harlem Globetrotters, Kid Power, Schoolhouse Rock and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
The programs are more than entertaining nostalgia, the two curators and some cultural historians say. They represent the fruits of a struggle for a say in the representation of blacks in television images, among other rights, and the newfound ability of popular black entertainers to get such programming on the air, based on their own appeal to a wide audience.
The shows offered a striking counterpoint to the previous stereotypical portrayals of blacks as buffoons in mainstream films, books, theater, advertising and cartoons. “It shows a time in American history when art and diversity and civil rights aspirations all came together,” said Christopher P. Lehman, a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and the author of The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954 (University of Massachusetts Press). “Before 1970, African-Americans were not much on television at all, except as the domestic servants of Jack Benny and Danny Thomas or as guests on variety series.”
It was no accident that Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert, described by curators as the first “positive” black-cast cartoon on TV (and the basis of the later series), was an NBC prime-time special in 1969, or, in the same vein, The Jackson 5ive, the first Saturday morning cartoon series featuring black musicians, made its debut in 1971. Both were created by two entertainment powerhouses, Bill Cosby (Fat Albert and the gang were part of his stand-up comedy routine) and Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown Records, who marketed the family music act to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Recalling her generation’s response, Ms. Williamson, who works as an independent consultant for marketing and business, said, “We got to see Martin Luther King’s dream, at least in cartoon form.”
“There was a lot of cross-pollination with what was going on in black culture,” she said. “You could watch the cartoons, go to the concerts, see the stars on variety shows. And our white friends were watching, too.” Ms. Thomas, a preschool teacher, said: “It made me feel like, wow, I see myself on TV. I started feeling good about myself.”
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama awarded 24 minority U.S. soldiers, who collectively served in three of the nation’s wars and were never rewarded for their courage, with the Medal of Honor, reports the Associated Press. Only three of the 24 were alive for President Barack Obama to drape the medals and ribbons around their necks; the others were awarded the honor posthumously.
“Today we have the chance to set the record straight,” Obama said. “No nation is perfect, but here in America we confront our imperfections and face a sometimes painful past, including the truth that some of these soldiers fought and died for a country that did not always see them as equal.”
The three surviving recipients—Vietnam veterans Jose Rodela, Melvin Morris and Santiago Erevia—received a prolonged standing ovation as the stood by the president’s side.
According to AP, Tuesday’s ceremony is the largest since World War II, and issued by Congress in the 2002 National Defense Authorization Act issue and conducted under Army review. The law required the Army to go through all of the records of each Jewish-American and Hispanic-American veteran who received a Distinguished Service Cross during or after World War II to determine if they could be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. From this review some the Army found 6,505 recipients and narrowed that field to an eligible pool of 600 soldiers who may have been Jewish or Hispanic, AP reports. Of the two-dozen men honored, 18 are Latinos.
At the end of the ceremony, after a brief biography of each recipient had been recited and each medal accepted of behalf of those who had passed away, the president thanked their families for their service. “We are so grateful to them. We are so grateful to their families. It makes us proud and it makes us inspired,” he said.
Caribbean nations are preparing to demand reparations from the European nations who once enslaved them.
Sir Hilary Beckles, a historian who is pro-vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, is heading up the initiative. Beckles and heads of 15 Caribbean nations, will gather in St. Vincent to unveil their plans.
European nations are very skeptical of the plan for reparations. They think Caribbean nations are attempting to extract “vast sums from European taxpayers,” but Beckles affirms this is not the case.
He told TheGuardian.com, “The British media has been obsessed with suggesting that we expect billions of dollars to be extracted from European states.” He stated further, “Contrary to the British media, we are not exclusively concerned with financial transactions, we are concerned more with justice for the people who continue to suffer harm at so many levels of social life.”
He affirms that his plan is to open up dialogue with European nations and not to “open a can of worms leading to litigation.”
The UK Government said in a statement to TheGuardian.com, that they don’t see reparations as the answer. They insist that both nations should “concentrate on ways to move forward.”
In addition to issuing an apology for the Atlantic Slave Trade, Beckles spelled out the following demands in the 10 point plan:
Comedy Central duo Key and Peele are on a roll. After landing on the cover of New York Times Sunday Magazine last year, this week they are cover boys for national weekly news magazine Time. It’s the Ideas Issue, and Key and Peele offer an opinion piece about comedy that may or may not make you laugh, but at the very least will make you think. Check it out below:
Would you make fun of a burn victim? Well, we did. Sort of… We’re comics. In the most recent season of our TV show, in a sketch titled “Insult Comic,” a traditional stand-up comedian professes that he is “going to get everybody” in his set (the guy toward the front with big ears, the fat guy, the woman with comically large breasts). That’s the phrase, isn’t it, when a critic wants to praise a comedian for the fearless nature of his or her comedy? That he or she “gets everybody”? That “nobody is safe”? One of the club patrons in our sketch, however, is a wheelchair-bound burn victim. “You skipped me,” he calls from the audience, with a robotic-sounding artificial larynx. “Go for it,” he says, “I can take it.”
But can we, as a society, take it anymore?
Today it seems that we live in a world of extremes. On one end of the spectrum, we have anonymous Internet trolls looking for opportunities to dole out cruelty with impunity. But in mainstream culture, it often seems we’re drowning in a sea of political correctness that lapped up on our shores a couple of decades ago and has yet to recede.
It’s amazing to think how popular television shows like All in the Family and Good Times might fare today in a Hollywood pitch meeting. Films like Blazing Saddles and Silver Streak wouldn’t make it past the development stage at a studio. Too edgy.
The Brooklyn Nets signed center Jason Collins for the remainder of the season on Saturday, the team announced. Sources previously told ESPN.com that the Nets, who feel they’re getting everything they expected from Collins when they signed him for front court depth on Feb. 23, were already operating under the premise that the 34-year-old would finish the season with them even though his second 10-day deal didn’t expire until after Friday.
“It’s cool. Thank you to the Nets organization, coaches and players, the team is playing really well right now, and I’m glad to continue to be here,” Collins said.
Sources said that the internal expectation all along was that Collins would be a Net for the rest of the season, from the moment he signed his first 10-day deal, as long he proved that he could still be an effective defender, which he did immediately.
“We always focused on basketball,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “We let you guys do all the other stuff. But having him on the team was always about basketball.”
Collins is averaging 9.8 minutes per game off the bench in eight appearances since his historic debut against the Los Angeles Lakers last month, which made him the first openly gay athlete in North America’s four recognized major team sports. He most recently provided the Nets with some meaningful minutes defending against DeMarcus Cousins, logging 20 minutes in a 104-89 win over Sacramento last Sunday.
WALTHAM, Mass. — On the day in 1991 that the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Anita Hill — the little-known law professor who riveted the nation by accusing him of sexual harassment — faced news cameras outside her simple brick home in Norman, Okla., with her mother by her side, and politely declined to comment on the vote. In the nearly 23 years since, Ms. Hill, now a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University, has worked hard, she likes to say, to help women “find their voices.” She has also found hers — and she is not afraid to use it.
“I believe in my heart that he shouldn’t have been confirmed,” she said in a recent interview, acknowledging that it irritates her to see Justice Thomas on the court. “I believe that the information I provided was clear, it was verifiable, it was confirmed by contemporaneous witnesses that I had talked with. And I think what people don’t understand is that it does go to his ability to be a fair and impartial judge.”
It was a surprisingly candid comment from a deeply private woman who has long been careful in the spotlight. But the quiet life Ms. Hill has carved out for herself is about to be upended — by her own choice — with the release of a documentary, Anita, opening on March 21 in theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.
The directive is meant to help salaried workers, such as fast-food shift supervisors or convenience store managers, who may be expected to work more than 40 hours a week without receiving overtime pay.
For example, the Labor Department could raise the pay threshold for workers covered by overtime rules. Currently, salaried workers who make more than $455 per week are exempt from overtime.
It’s the latest move in Obama’s self-described “year of action,” a series of economy-focused executive decisions that don’t require congressional approval.
The White House official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the directive on the record before the president’s announcement, expected Thursday.
article via blackamericaweb.com
For example, the Labor Department could raise the pay threshold for workers covered by overtime rules. Currently, salaried workers who make more than $455 per week are exempt from overtime.
It’s the latest move in Obama’s self-described “year of action,” a series of economy-focused executive decisions that don’t require congressional approval.
The White House official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the directive on the record before the president’s announcement, expected Thursday.
article via blackamericaweb.com