DL Open Thread: Sunday, June 2, 2024
Shout-Out To The Portland Fruit Tree Project! My daughter has volunteered here. Come to think of it, even I spent a day there pulling up weeds. Seems to me that something similar could work right here in our heat deserts and food deserts:
A group aiming to battle food waste planted 162 fruit trees in low-income Portland neighborhoods last year — and they’re hoping their efforts are fruitful in more ways than one.
In the spring of 2023, the Portland Fruit Tree Project, funded by a $34,000 grant from the charity One Tree Planted — partnered with local organizations to find community members interested in adding fruit trees to their gardens in historically low-income neighborhoods.
Founded in 2007, the PFTP initially began as a response to food waste, connecting overwhelmed homeowners with prolific fruiting trees with neighbors and community organizations that could use the produce. The group hosted volunteer harvest parties and fruit preservation workshops and taught general fruit tree care. Today, the majority of harvests are picked and made available to local community organizations, with a portion going to harvest volunteers.
The group turned to a measurement designed by the organization American Forests called the Tree Equity Score. The score uses factors like an area’s tree canopy, income and racial demographics, surface temperature and overall health to designate a number from 0 to 100. The lower the number, the more vulnerable the area is to the negative effects of climate change.
“People will talk about [how] fruit trees are small,” said Keisler Fornes. “Some of us who live out in these low-canopy neighborhoods don’t want to plant a bunch of large-form trees. … There was a clear preference for fruit trees from communities of color and the different immigrant communities that were asked specifically in East Portland.”
There is no reason why a program like this can’t work in Delaware, and Wilmington in particular. Don’t even need a mayor with vision to accomplish it. Fortunately.
“Trump’s Dumbest Lie”? ‘I did not have sex with those women’. Here’s why:
Trump’s lawyers, in their opening and closing statements, asked jurors to believe that Trump did not have sex with those women. It was a key part of their effort to show that prosecutors had failed to prove the complicated case.
But Trump’s lawyers didn’t have to do that. Extramarital sex isn’t a crime. They could have simply argued that regardless of the details of those relationships, or what jurors might think of the former president, hush money payments aren’t themselves illegal. They could have argued that the prosecutors had failed to make the multi-part crime they alleged clear enough to warrant a conviction.
Jurors, experts say, often decide cases based on whose story they believe. And judge Juan Merchan told Trump’s team: “Your denial puts the jury in the position of choosing who they believe.” The jurors ultimately sided with the prosecutors and with Daniels, who for years has offered a consistent and specific account of a sexual encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada.
In other words, this is what happens when you have a fool for a client.
Netanyahu Accepts, Yet Doesn’t Accept, Biden Deal Proposal:
An aide to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by US president Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden’s proposal was “a deal we agreed to … it’s not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them”.
“There are a lot of details to be worked out,” he said, adding that Israeli conditions, including “the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation” have not changed.
Biden, whose initial lockstep support for Israel’s offensive has given way to open censure of the operation’s high civilian death toll, on Friday aired what he described as a three-phase plan submitted by the Netanyahu government to end the war.
Can you say ‘rope-a-dope’?
Shout-Out To The Food Bank Of Delaware! One of Delaware’s most-essential agencies continues to grow its mission:
“We can do all that and still not be able to reach all the people that need us in Delaware,” Ms. Kanefsky said. “The biggest mechanism to getting food out is our network of partners throughout the state. We have about 200 agencies that operate food closets, food pantries and different methods for getting food.
“We also have another 500 partners that just partner with one element, like the Backpack Program.”
And, with the growth of technology, the food bank is utilizing the power of mapping to determine areas that need help the most.“Our hope is to take a particular ZIP code and determine if it is oversaturated with services or other ZIP codes that did not raise their hand and ask for help that we didn’t know about,” Ms. Kanefsky noted.
The agency also wants to gain a deeper understanding of the places it is helping.“We want to have a good handle on where those pockets are,” she said. “Not just pockets of hunger, but what are the ethnicities there, what are the nuances, what are the nutritional needs and one population over another?”
Now that the food bank has grown in its services, it is looking toward job training.
“We don’t just put food on people’s tables,” Ms. Kanefsky said. “We help people figure out how to get the training and expertise they need to get to the next point in their life.”
Maybe the Food Bank can partner with a nascent fruit tree project. A win-win.
What do you want to talk about?
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2024/05/31/unemployment-insurance-administrator-michael-brittingham-delaware-embezzlement-of-unemployment-fund/73919535007/
I think John Kowalko and DelCOG are absolutely right – there seems to be something really fishy going on here.
Yes. Like a full-blown cover-up. The Carney Administration looks more and more like a Potemkin Village administration every day.
It’s corruption. Plain and simple. Lies. Lies by omission. They have abused the public trust time and time again. John Carneys thing was he was supposed to be a responsible and honest guy. He turns out to have been neither. Breathtakingly incompetent, entitled and insecure man. The hell if I’m going to give him another government job.
He also bought into that ‘only the insiders need know what’s going on’ secrecy mode. Privatizing economic development with public funds so that mere citizens wouldn’t know what was happening until after the fact. The ongoing shenanigans at the Port, and the like.
He is, in many ways, the logical LAST governor to fully embrace the Delaware Way and have the General Assembly go along with it.
The General Assembly is changing–fast. We need a governor who will move along that process.
But think of the lost jobs! How are incompetents like Delaware Way insiders supposed to compete on what little talent they have alone?
Also, has there been an investigation in the inner workings of the del dept of revenue? Months with zero tax refunds issued