St. Louis Wedding and Portraiture Photography - Pinxit

Well I am sitting in the real estate office about to close on our home/investment property. This has been quite the…experience My mother has warped into GiGi in her cool new wig - (I’ll post pics forth coming) and the weekend went much without event. The tuckpointing guy didn’t show up… twice… the electrician didn’t do all the work we wanted - ran out of time - still got paid the same..figures. Don’t know when the plumber is gonna show, but we’ve budgeted his money into close. Daddy came by and showed Jerry the fine art of spackling and sanding. So the hall way will get painted. We fixed the screen, and when I say we I mean Jerry. He imerged as Wonder Hubby - able to fix all his pre-wifes meltdowns before they even occur. Able to juggle a manic mother-in-law, a grandmother who knows everything and a wife who’s bouncing off of walls with one infant on hip! Randomly I post reasons why I love that man - closing this house provided me with like a hundred. Makes me want to do sexy things for him - like laundry.
Am I turning you on baby? Yeah I thought so - gimmie that downy!!! YEAH BABY!!!

When Usher hits the hottest spots in Hollywood, Hotlanta and
NYC, he never travels lightly. He always packs an army of bodyguards, a doting
entourage, the finest cigars on the market and a pocket full of serious cash.
When it comes to parties, this playa spares no expense. From exotic animals to
masquerades to free-flowing Dom Perignon, his star-studded soirees make history.

And when he needs some down time he cools off in his five bedroom
Georgia estate, tricked out with a recording studio, luxury pool, fully-loaded
guest house and driveway crowded with the ultimate fantasy cars. Even when he’s
far from home, Usher stills lives like a prince in presidential suites at five
star hotels. At the $3,800 a night Beverly Hills L’Hermitage, he is pampered by
staff that know how treat their elite guests.

Home buying sucks. It’s an endless maze of opinions, in the form of appraisals  and payoffs in the form of fees. And the worst part of all of this is I’m not getting what I want out of this purchase. Over a hundred thousand dollars and I can’t get what I want! A home. I get investment properties.  My landlord is getting jittery and dramatic but I said that was gonna be his M.O from the very beginning. Our neighbor is selling a unit very nearby for a lot more money and now he’s very very nervous.   Feels like he’s getting the short end of the real estate stick, so he’s bad mouthing us to the neighbors he never sees normally because he’s absent tee - unless his old friends are having a party then he’s around - he was totally taken back by all the things the in inspection report. He claims we (both us and the guys upstairs) never told him all the things that were wrong with the house but who lives with moldy walls and never calls their landlord? Really? My real estate agent is my mother - enough said. My future tenant is not being very helpful. And actually he’s not even my tennant he’s just staying with the guy untill he finds an apartment. The guy who lives upstairs is in Florida. This should not be as difficult as it is or has been.  

Random thought: I need to rent a rototiller for the gardens.

 Don’t get me wrong, it is what is best for our family. Establishing rental income, building wealth, capitalizing on a great opportunity, ect ect and so forth. But I wanted to find a place to call home.  I wanted to buy a place Cammy could grow up in. Make memories in – where our family can grow- Jerry and I agree on at least one more child  (he wants two – that’s another post) I wanted to find a home we could have that family in and not need to move again when the baby is four- who wants to move with a toddler? I wanted to plant my herb garden and not have to use portable pots because we don’t know hat next year will bring, wanted to mold and fold some home around us. But I guess more than that I didn’t want to move. Which was why I gave my vote for buying our apartment building. I hate moving in general, and I understand why we have chosen this way I really do. I sometimes just want to be regular and not know any better.

Just buy a house and live in it… But I guess that was what renting was for the most part. Just living in it. Anywho, its all neither here nor there. We close soon and can start fixing all the stuff that we know is wrong. Try and make our tenants happy – get the downstairs unit ready for renting and then maybe I can get my home.  

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Mos Def on Assata Shakur

I am, I believe, the worst kind of revolutionary. The kind that exists the most through out Nubian America. I know there is a problem and I know there is a struggle. I know we need to fight it but I’m so busy living I don’t have time to fight the battles. I know black people need to unify, I don’t have the energy to research and review to find the fight that fits my beliefs and fight it. I know my voice should be heard but I can’t neglect my family, my child to make the world better for her or her children. I know if someone doesn’t say it no one will hear. But I cannot fight the fight the revolution asks me for. I work for corporate America. My family has a large group of non black friends. I am the safe negro on most occasions. I am the one those non black friends can ask the stupid questions that have been burning in their minds but know they can’t ask just anyone. So I fight where I can. I make the best of what I can, do the little things that I can. Say the things that I believe and learn more so I can do better.

My lesson last week was presented by professor Mos Def on Assata. I have read her autobiography. And hope to read more of her work soon. Courtesy of Take a left here is a little back ground

Assata Shakur was a Black Panther Party member in New York. The Black
Panther Party was a revolutionary and socialist party that was greatly feared by
FBI head J Edgar Hoover, who led a campaign of repression in which dozens of BPP
leaders were murdered and many more jailed on trumped up charges. Assata ended
up in jail in the 1970s and broke out of jail in 1979 and went into exile in
Cuba, where she received political asylum. In recent weeks, New Jersey
government officials in collaboration with the Dept of Homeland Security
increased the bounty on Shakur’s head to $1 million, and added her to the US
government’s official “terrorist” list.

In reading and reviewing researching this this - I was sure things couldn’t have gotten that bad for the U.S that they are now trying to convince the public that Assata Shakur is a Terrorist? It has been theorized and I agree honestly that the U.S has placed this title on Miss Shakur so they have some response to Cuba’s claim that the U.S is harboring a terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. It’s pretty transparent what the U.S. regime intends by accusing Cuba of harboring “terrorists” in granting Assata Shakur political asylum. So they can say “well you got a Terrorist so we can have one too!” Two points stand out to me in this situation.
1. Who granted the U.S the all knowing power to determine who is and is not a terrorist? The U.S government has not recognized the Venezuelan title of terrorist on a man how as been tried and convicted of that same type of crimes committed against the U.S on 9/11. He has been accused and convicted of blowing up a 747 and killing 73 people. Noted in an article about the situation with Luis it is reported that;

Castro led a crowd reportedly numbering in the hundreds of thousands past
the U.S. mission in Havana and called the United States hypocritical in the war
on terrorism for not arresting Posada.
“This is not a march against the
people of the United States,” Castro said. “It is a march against terrorism, in
favor of life and of peace.”
Castro has castigated the U.S. about Posada’s
presence in Florida in regular television addresses, questioning how he could
enter the country undetected given the increased border security after Sept. 11
and calling for his extradition.

Castro has made it clear how he feels about the situation see here. The parallel between the two stories aren’t that similar to me and that the U.S has decided that Standing against the government is cause to be called a Terrorist, one day blogging these thoughts will make me a terrorist, and my second question would be - would I still do it?or How do you define terrorist?
Though Shakur has been branded a terrorist, federal officials have shown no such zeal for bringing to justice Luis Posada Carriles, whose terrorist credentials are far more authentic. He is rumored to have been involved in terrorist activities all over the world including rumors of involvement in the Kennedy assination . And this guy gets held on Charges of not declaring himself before he applied for asylum in Miami? But you rack up the bounty on a woman who it has been medically proven could not have committed the crimes she is convicted of? In a seperate artilce is was noted:

Posada, according to his lawyer, slipped into this country last month and is
in South Florida awaiting a decision on his request for political asylum. That’s
right, this guy, who was convicted in 2000 for his role in a plot to assassinate
Fidel Castro, wants the Bush administration to harbor him.
The Cuban and
Venezuelan governments also accuse Posada of involvement in the 1976 bombing of
a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people and a 1977 Havana hotel bombing that
killed an Italian tourist.

But instead of sending the FBI to Florida to flush out Posada and cart him
off for trial in Venezuela, which has requested his extradition, the Justice
Department waffles. It won’t say what it will do if Posada is apprehended.
Rather than offer a bounty for Posada, who in 1998 admitted his role in a series
of Cuban hotel bombings (he later recanted), the Bush administration has only
acknowledged it has received his asylum request. That it was not summarily
rejected is outrageous, but not surprising.
Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile who
for many years was a close associate of Posada, has lived in South Florida since
1990, when President George H.W. Bush stopped the Justice Department from
deporting him. At the time, the Justice Department concluded that the only
country willing to take Bosch was Cuba, the main target of his terrorist acts.
The Bush administration balked, fearing that he might be mistreated.
Advocate of terrorism?
The deportation order that was overturned said
Bosch had been “resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence”
for 30 years. In 1968, Bosch was convicted of firing a bazooka at a Polish
freighter in Miami’s harbor. Like Posada, Bosch is wanted in Cuba and Venezuela,
which suspect him of involvement in the Cuban airliner attack.
What bothers
me is that while these men, whose suspected crimes fit the State Department’s
definition of terrorism, haven’t set off Justice Department alarm bells, Shakur
is being treated like a disciple of Osama bin Laden. If she killed Foerster (her
attorney argues the evidence suggests otherwise), Shakur should be returned to
New Jersey to spend her life in prison.
By not proclaiming that it will
arrest Posada on sight and deport him, the Bush administration caters to those
in the Cuban exile community who view him as a freedom fighter - and undermines
its leadership of the fight against terrorism. Article from Usa today By
DeWayne Wickham

People wonder why the US governmnet frustrates so may African Americans, why we can’t say Bush’s or many presidents names with out tasting bile on our tounges, why we don’t trust police unless we are realted to them in most cases, why the lines are so strongly drawn in our minds, its not just the history of slavery, although it should be on so many levels, not just segragation, not just jim crow laws, and false imprisionments, cointelpro, the KKK, the coutless other groups that have made hate a daily factor for black americans like sunrises and oxygen, its ALL of them piled on our backs and then thrown in our faces when the hyporcasy of the system is paraded in our faces the way this has been or when it has been hidden as this has been. Because if you don’t live in Florida, where Luis Posada lived, you probably hadn’t hear any of this? have you?

I’m hoping I’ve made it clear how I feel about the situation too. Maybe one day I’ll be a better revolutionary. I’ll teach my daughter better, show her the truth sooner so she can do better in her youth than I did.

My words to Assata, I’m trying to do better my sister and my thoughts and prayers are with you!!!

http://www.assatashakur.org/index.htm