This isn’t a happy personal update; in fact, it’s the saddest one I have written. Animals are wonderful friends. Watching them get old is so hard though.
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Month: March 2019
Redlining Explained
With Facebook in trouble for allowing people to exclude potential renters based on race, redlining has been in the news lately. So, I thought it would be good to remind everyone of what redlining is and of ow it was critical to the federal government’s efforts to segregate America.
My Inaccessible Student Loan Site
I have student loans to pay back from law school. Recently, my loans were, without my knowledge, transferred to a new provider. When I went to create an account with the new provider, I discovered their website has a major accessibility issue. During the account creation process, you must elect an image as a part of their security features. There was no way for me to tell what the different images showed or for me to select an image. Unable to select an image, I was unable to create an account. Unable to create an account, I can’t make payments toward my loan.
Reviewing the Keepsake
Tess Gerritsen’s The Keepsake is the sixth book in the Rizzoli & Isles series. I have read each of the first six books in the series. While I have enjoyed all of them, The Keepsake is my new favorite.
Reviewing Good Kids, Bad City
Kyle Swenson’s Good Kids, Bad City is one of those books I read knowing it will infuriate me. I read it because I can’t think about this kind of injustice and racism enough. As a lawyer, I want so badly to respect the law. As someone who has learned enough to realize people enforcing, prosecuting, and judging the law as well as the law itself are too often not worth respecting, I can’t stop being disappointed. Far too often the “justice system” is really the injustice system. Way more often than many white people want to admit the reason the “justice system” becomes the injustice system is the color of the defendant’s skin.
Reviewing Goliath
Wishing to understand more about the history between the Israelis and Palestinians, I researched books to read. None of the lists I found listed Max Blumenthal’s Goliath. None of the lists also contained books that I believed tried to show the Palestinian side of the story. Frustrated, I asked a friend who knows more about this history than me to suggest some books. One of his suggestions was Goliath.
Reading Goliath I found myself looking up Israeli laws and news stories about different events. The picture painted of Israel by Max Blumenthal was not at all what we are taught to expect. Checking some of the things he covers, convinced me of the soundness of his work and the misunderstanding of reality many Americans have regarding Israel. In order to demonstrate what I’m saying, I will cover some of the laws I learned about from Goliath.
It has Been a Year
A year ago today was my first day working for the city of Portland, Oregon. It’s hard to believe it has been a year. In some ways, it has flown by. In other ways, it has seemed slow. Sitting here a year later, I can honestly say it has been a wonderful year!
Personal Updates for March 17, 2019
It looks like spring is finally trying to spring. I won’t say it has sprung, because cool rainy weather may return this week. At least we have had a few nice days lately.
Democrats Ignore People With Disabilities
Transcript
Welcome to Jonathan’s Verdicts. I’m Jonathan Simeone. The title of this episode is: Democrats Ignore People With Disabilities: The verdict for this episode is: no Democratic candidate for president talks about people with disabilities.