FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2019

In Miami, An Unspeakable Tragedy in a Time of Thanksgiving - South Florida suffers a grievous loss. The news about the death of young and idealistic Alejandra Agreda literally broke my heart Saturday night. @VirginTrainsMIA

In Miami, An Unspeakable Tragedy in a Time of Thanksgiving - South Florida suffers a grievous loss. The news about the death of young and idealistic Alejandra Agreda literally broke my heart Saturday night. @VirginTrainsMIA

 So now South Florida leans forward towards a 2020 that will begin with one less concerned, committed civic activist here that's ready, eager and able to make a positive difference on behalf of others in a part of America that's known for its shallowness and selfishness.



I heard from Alejandra/Bryan regularly via Twitter and received dozens and dozens of followups and DMs several times a month. Sometimes, when she was particularly vexed or exorcised about something in particular, I'd receive several of them in one day.

It's fair to say that nobody in South Florida Liked & Retweeted my tweets and blog posts more than Alejandra did, even my non-transit and non-public policy related ones.
But I think at the heart of all of her her questions, to me and to others she tweeted to and emailed,  was a curiosity on her part to understand something fundamental about South Florida.
Something that reminded me of myself when I was that age, namely, her asking me very good and pointed questions abt why SO many things in South Florida -especially regarding public transit- seem SO... perpetually counter-intuitive.

Why was it that even relatively simple things seem to take 3-4 times longer to do here in South Florida than usually seemed to be the case in most other cities in the U.S. and overseas?
Right, besides the usual issues involving corruption, incompetency, and a serious lack of necessary public/govt. oversight!

Once I finally figured out that Ale really was still just a high school student, I told her that I myself had wondered why such a high percentage of South Florida elected officials over the years weren't so much problem-solvers but rather buck-passers and problem-creators.
That I'd wondered that same thing ever since I worked so hard for so long on the Jimmy Carter and Lawton Chiles campaigns in Miami-Dade and South Florida in 1976.

 Yes, back when I was a precocious, well-read sophomore at North Miami Beach Senior High that the professional campaign staff from Washington, D.C. and the Atlanta national campaign HQ always said looked and acted like I was already in college.  Which pleased me to no end., of course.
Combined with the tons of coffee -and a never-ending supply of boxes of peanuts- that positive feedback was more than enough positivity to keep me deal with much of the drudgery in thoise pre-PC, pre-Internet days working over 7 hours a day after schol at Carter-Mondale HQ in North Miami Beach on N.E. 167th Street & NE 6th Avenue, directly behind the iconic Krispy Kreme doughnuts site there that everyone knew and depended upon, including me.

I was honest with Ale and told her I'd met lots of prominent local South Florida pols from working on the campaign and especially doing highly-visible work as part of Walter Mondale's advance team on his hectic South Florida visits from the airport to a million places in 2-3 days.
The truth was that many people whom I'd really expected to like and admire, and had from afar, via Tv or newspaper or magazine articles were, up close, unfortunately, nothing less than... truly appalling people. And dumber than rocks.
Not unlike today in South Florida, unfortunately.

She'd ask me if it'd always been that way, since she knew from what I wrote online that I knew a LOT of insider dope and had a great memory for what things were REALLY like in 1970's and '80's in South Florida, as opposed to how many in the current South South Florida news media recall it publicly. Revisionism.

She was particularly interested in how Metrorail was sold to the Dade public as a ballot issue, compared to its resulting inadequate reality for most of county, esp NE and NW Miami-dade, since she knew I'd written a lot about it and had commented on it at many places online.
Simply put, promises made, promises broken...

Alejandra's Dad Freddy's tweets, which Billy (Corben) linked to at the top, made me cry so very more than I have in quite some time. Really.

Her Dad, Freddy, sent out a very sad and upsetting note out late Saturday night, at bottom, to 
some people in South Florida involved in public policy, politics, govt. and media announcing 
that his only child, Bryan/Alejandra had committed suicide last Tuesday, and had jumped in front 
of one of the Metrorail cars she loved riding in and writing about -and criticizing.
Probably one they'd ridden in dozens and dozens of times.

The news really hit me and I cried much more than I was expecting to, as I read Freddy's note about how Bryan/Alejandra had been bullied and mistreated, which I guess I should've expected, especially
in a place as Hispanic as where we are.

And what really hits you so hard is that the last two tweets she sent right before she jumped - "i could use a hug right now"


and "bon voyage"




Wow! Me being me, a very empathetic ENFP, those tweets hit me like a ton of bricks!

Apparently Ale's father was, eventually, okay with the idea of a "transition," or, at least had reconciled himself to it, but because Ale was 17, well, obviously, there's lots of things involved that could not be done legally right now.

I wound up staying up late Saturday night/Sunday morning writing down some thoughts -some of which I've included here- and shared them with a bunch of the same people her Dad sent his original letter to who'd interacted with Alejandra.

So yeah, I've been feeling very down the last few days, not least because this news has also made me rethink of all the things I knew about someone I loved whose suicide attenpt and the ricky road afterwards, not least, because many of her friends turned their backs on her prior to that because they'd told many times that the person she was getting involved in was trouble. And was.
So, what are we left with? A bright and caring 17-year old kid who wanted Miami/South Florida to be better than it was, and who was utter fascinated by public policy and transit... commits suicide.
By jumping in front of a train she probably had ridden in at least once before.

How the hell do you even begin to make sense of that?
I can only imagine how totally devastated Alejandra's family is right now.

No need to respond to this post, I just needed to get this out of my system.

















----------
Alejandra's Celebration of Life / Memorial service will be held this Saturday (December 7th) at Mapsons Funeral Home, 3500 SW 8th Street, Miami, Florida.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/alejandra-agredo-miami-riders-alliance


 If you consider her ideas and value the huge amount of dedication and time she invested in building her non-profit and writing her application please donate to allow her team to keep working on it. Thank you so much for reading. Her family and those who ride trains and buses will really appreciate it. Thank you.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/obituaries/article237935779.html

https://twitter.com/Kounikishi/status/1200699123013435392?s=20

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2536385439750099&id=100001360044353






— RIP My Little Heart 💔 (@Kounikishi) December 5, 2019

@BillyCorben, @Kounikishi, @RidersMIA, @VirginTrainsMIA, Alejandra Agreda, Billy Corben, Brightline, City of Miami, development, Florida, Metromover, Metrorail, Miami-Dade County, Miami-Dade Metrorail, redevelopment, RidersMIA, SMART Growth, South Florida, teen suicide, transit, Tri-Rail, Twitter, transportation, Virgin Trains
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Wednesday, July 10, 2019

In light of U.S. Appeals Court ruling against President Trump's use of Twitter and Blocking people, when can we expect Broward School Board to publicly say when it'll conform to the spirit and letter of the law? Don't hold your breath!


Above and below, July 13, 2010 photo by me, looking south at the Broward County Schools HQ, 600 S.E. Third Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In 2016, quite out-of-the-blue, I received an interesting Tweet from someone I'd never met or ever heard of before, Angela Greben, a San Jose, California resident. Among other things, Angela really hates government agencies and officials who seem to not think twice about violating norms (or even laws) about public records and transparency and what the public is entitled to expect in the way of access to public information. 

Her tweet caused quite a ripple after I wrote about it and what I thought it represented.
Though I've never spoken about it before, despite all the dozens of prior blog posts I'd written here about the feckless School Board, her tweet, and actually seeing that list of Blocked people, with my name on top of it, caused me to receive lots of email from concerned people all over Broward County, South Florida and points north and west whom I'd never heard from before.
People who shared my own misgivings about the bad conduct of the scandal-plagued and mis-behaving Broward County School Board.

That is to say, the Broward School Board as a collective entity, as well as it ragtag collection of constituent members and superintendents, and their army of supporters and flacks.

For you newcomers, take a look at this post from earlier in the year:
Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell.
re The special Grand Jury impaneled by the Florida Supreme Court via Gov. Ron DeSantis investigating feckless Broward County Schools & its School Board: 
Broward education activists & taxpayers want you to make sure that Broward Schools General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick is one of first persons grilled. 
She has a LOT to publicly account for, as does nearly every School Board member
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/p/broward-school-board-supt.html

Yes, the whole cast of charcters at Broward Schools have been a frequent and popular target of my fact-filled blog posts and fact-based Twitter barbs ever since I started the blog twelve years ago, and then, finally got a Twitter acount under the nom-de-guerre @hbbtruth. 

Yes, as in Hallandale Beach Blog + Truth, because that's what this blog is all about in the end. 
Revealing the truth so that the public knows what is reality and what is, you know, Fake News.

To my own eternal regret and embarrassment, I was rather late to the Twitter party, especially given my ENFP personality, who I am in the scheme of things locally in this part of southeast Broward and the sheer volume of history I know as well as the number of knowledgeable and influential people I know who know even more than I do, including about the Broward School system's history, track record, and its various roster of players over the years, who've shared what they know with me.
People like Charlotte Greenbarg, for instance.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill

So, as to that part above about having "enemies"... For those of you who are newcomers to the blog, I've been writing fact-filled, analytical blog posts about the serial corruption, incompetency and fecklessness by the Broward School Board on a whole array of issues for the past twelve years.

And, I've also written about them with regularity as well on my popular South Florida Twitter handle, @hbbtruth, since October of 2013, often buttressing some other person's good point with facts, or, necessarily throwing some cold water on someone via cold hard facts who wants us to believe something that can't be believed by anyone who knows anything about common sense or human behavior.

Trust me, there's a good reason that so many activists, personalities, elected officials and members of the South Florida or Florida press corps that you know and trust are Following me on Twitter and reading my latest post on this blog, which can net anywhere between 15,000 and 90,000 page views a month, depending upon the subjects du jour and the time of year, with, not surprisingly, "the season," October thru April being highest readership numbers for the blog.

 That means not just accepting whole what is written in South Florida newspapers or on websites or seen on TV, but of my actually going to meetings all over Broward County -and especially in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach- and meeting other concerned and curious Broward citizens and taxpayers who wonder about the same things I do: ethics, accountability, public oversight, conflicts-of-interest and power plays by certain parties and groups within the Broward education Establishment and the people who support it in the Broward business community, who make lots of money on the school system as contractors and vendors for projects needed and wasteful.

So, I have seen first-hand the incriminating reports and the damning photos and the files that have been so much in the news since 2007 surrounding the culture of corruption.

 As you might imagine, that sort of consistent public questioning of elected officials and administrators and a willingness to publicly challenge people personally to substantiate and back up what they say leads to lots of things.

On the one hand, it means that many people throughout Broward who make education one of their chief concerns -regular citizens, public officials as well as many local print/TV reporters and columnists- know from personal experience that when I say something, that I not only know of what I speak, but can also personally produce the incriminating evidence, or, know the very people who can produce it so that the public finds out the truth.

That sort of effort over a dozen years also creates all sort of friction with people who are supposed to be working FOR the public, including numerous past and current elected Broward School Board members, administrators and their staffs, who do NOT like seeing the truth being publicly discussed in a logical and reasonable way.
And even worse, discussed in print where anyone can see the facts and not have to accept their own particular spin on things.

 So that kind of effort is why I was on the Top Ten list of people whom the Broward School system has been BLOCKING on Twitter since 2016, as the Angela Greben tweet above makes clear.
Yes, I wear they're BLOCKING of me like a gold medal, and proudly so.


















Yesterday we all learned that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had finally ruled in a case that has been featured dozens of times in U.S. news media over the past few years, issuing a unanimous opinion that President Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution by blocking Twitter users who criticize or mock him.

Plaintiffs Buckwalter, Cohen, Figueroa, Gu, Neely, Papp, and Pappas (“Individual Plaintiffs”) are social media users who were blocked from accessing and interacting with the Twitter account of President Donald J. Trump because they expressed views he disliked.  The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is an organization alleging a right to hear the speech that the Individual Plaintiffs would have expressed had they not been blocked.  The Plaintiffs sued President Trump along with certain White House officials, contending that the blocking violated the First Amendment.  The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Buchwald, J.) found that the “interactive space” in the account is a public forum and that the exclusion from that space was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.  We agree, and, accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the District Court.

that he engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by utilizing Twitter’s “blocking” function to limit certain users’ access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech.  We hold that he engaged in such discrimination and, consequently, affirm the judgment below

The ruling leaves open lots of other interesting questions, like whether this will also apply to other federal, state and local elected officials, governments or agencies?

Read the court's opinion for yourself:







So in thinking about all of this yesterday, I knew that someone needed to ask a reasonable question to someone at the Broward School Board about its past history of Blocking concerned Residents like me on Twitter, given that South Florida's news media has not exactly jumped on this sort of story to the extent that I and many other civic activists believe they should have.

So, I thought of whom the most reasonable person was on the School Board whom I could ask.
That was an easy call.

It certainly isn't the feckless, foul-mouthed and Runcie-supporter who represents Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, Ann Murray, long a target of public criticism here on my blog and on my Twitter handle DOZENS of times when she has repeatedly and publicly engaged in misdirection and misrepresented both herself and her long track record of inaction, inadequacy and logrolling. 
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%40hbbtruth%2C%20%23annmurray&src=typd

Because of the demographics of this part of Broward, our area should have an outstanding person on the School Board representing us. Someone who is known for their savviness, public demeanor, scrupulous ethics, their reliable, hardworking nature, and their willingness to admit when they are wrong and adjust their thinking to new facts and new realities.
None of which are qualities that have ever been associated with Ann Murray.
We could do SO MUCH better than Ann Murray, who was narrowly re-elected last November.


Given what I wrote about her last Friday on the blog and had earlier tweeted about her, it clearly wasn't going to be Dr. Roslind Osgood, now was it?

Mystery solved at Broward School Board! The Doctor did it! New York Times revealed that Broward County School Board member Rosalind Osgood used her African-American college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, as a conduit to mobilize supporters of Supt. Robert W. Runcie at BCSB meetings earlier this year debating Runcie's future
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/mystery-solved-at-broward-school-board.html



In the end, I decided I'd use Twitter to ask School Board member Lori Alhadeff, someone who actually led the charge in March to make Supt. Runcie publicly accountable, to his one of his bosses, even though many of the School Board members defer to him so much on policy issues and decisions at meetings that you can well be forgiven for thinking that they work for him, not the other way around.
But not her.

 What Lori Alhdaeff wants doesn't seem like too much to ask for: she wants the truth, positive results and to end the reign of the faceless School bureaucrats who seemingly can never be held to account publicly, no matter how bad things get and have already gotten.
That's something and someone worth supporting, especially under the horrific and unique circumstances that led her to running for the School Board last year.
Her pain is real and omnipresent.




I'll keep you advised on what I hear about this, since we all know that unless they are pushed or shoved, there are far too many members of the South Florida press corps who simply are NOT going to see this issue for what it truly is.
A sign that for many people in government in South Florida, i.e the Broward School Board and the Supt. Runcie, there are rules for some people and special rules for special people.
And they think they are special people.

 No, the law has to apply to everyone if it is going to be both respected and followed.
No special rules for special people.
Period.



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Saturday, October 19, 2013

My first day on Twitter this week -@hbbtruth- was sometimes frustrating, but not without some unexpected surprises of a royal nature; @hbbtruth, #hbbtruth, @swedense, @KarlXVI, #sweden

A few hours in, no tweets, but that's clearly changed since then.

 Last weekend marked exactly ten years since I moved back to South Florida from the Washington, D.C. area, after being up there for 15 years, and after far too much procrastination on my part and years of getting so many Invitation emails to join, incuding from some unlikely sources, my alter ego of Hallandale Beach Blog and I are now officially on Twitter @hbbtruth, https://twitter.com/hbbtruth 


Like almost everyone else doing so, I now see more clearly than ever before, how much I was really dis-advantaging myself by not getting aboard the Twitter train, despite being a person who has been reading certain reporters/bloggers I like who were Early Adopters since they started seven years ago.
And someone who has rather consistently poured cold water on people knocking the platform, since it's not for everyone. 

 That time has given me the advantage of forming certain strong ideas on how I do and do NOT want to handle things at my feed, and that will be -I think- a somewhat different role than I employ on this blog.

 Most of you reading this, even you more regular readers of the blog, have no idea how many emails and notes I write and send during a typical week, and I mean ones that I really put some time and effort into.
Even the people receiving them have no idea, I suspect.

 Now, though, by posting them to the blog and then tweeting them, I'll have the ability to share my discoveries, surprises or outrages with a much-larger audience whom I already know are more inclined to share that information with like-minded people they know, too.

 Frankly, that was always part of my great frustration with sending out my Hallandale Beach, Broward County or South Florida-centric emails, and why not being part of Twitter ate away at me, when in saw so many people use it in ways that seemed inadequate to me.
I knew there was a finite number of people who would ever be in a position to see and react to the information, whether factual, informed speculation or soon-to-be prescient prognostications. 

 That frustration also came from knowing in advance that only so many people would be better-informed or have more context on a subject of interest.
Or have specific examples of why something being said on local TV or print was actually NOT true at all because the reporter was NOT including all the relevant facts, context or history.
And when that was an important story, and I saw how poorly something important was being reported, which is everyday in the South Florida of 2013, it just made me seethe inside.
Lots of seething over the past ten years!

I know that I'm not alone in South Florida in having those feelings, but since I've always been a blogger who didn't go in for 3-4 sentence blog posts, I always had to make a determination of whether it was worth the time to publicly criticize a reporter or columnist or public official, knowing that there was only so many people who'd see that on the blog in a timely fashion.

Which is why easily 85% of the best material I've written the past ten years was in emails that got sent out to a fair number of people, including media types and govt. officials, but never saw the light of day on the blog because it was time sensitive.

The same things that no doubt frustrates many of you reading this, and you might use texting to get that out of your system. 
But I'm most assuredly NOT a texter.

 So, all that being the backstory, I knew in advance that I didn't want to use my own name for this twitter account and needed to substitute something for Hallandale Beach, since it' is at once both too long and too frequently misspelled by people not living here.

 In the end, after considering a few names I'd kept in cold storage for a few years, and wanting something easy to remember, I went with what I try my best to deliver on a consistent basis here on the blog that I find so lacking in the south Florida area in all sorts of place: truth! 
Irony!
I thought you'd appreciate that

This weekend when you've got a few minutes free to yourself, depending upon which country you are reading this email in, I'd like for you to spend a second to either Follow
or Följ me, or at least bookmark my Twitter feed URL on your desktop and mobile, to check back during the day and see what I've discovered or am ruminating on in between enthusiastic and discursive blog posts and emails.

Sort of like your own (free) Early Warning System in 140 character spaces.

I intend to make up for lost time and make very good use of this tool and amplify the volume and spotlight on a whole host of issues, subjects and people that I believe have been, alternately, either largely neglected, covered far too intensely in the national, state or local news media, or more commonly, being covered without enough respect for attention to facts and context, to say nothing of a lack of adequate historical perspective.

Unless something dramatic happens in the next few days, I will be using the next few days trying to get more comfortable doing this and tweeting some recent blog posts of mine, to help them get a little more attention that I think they deserve and advance some needed dialogue, but  once I'm more comfortable doing this, and am NOT so overly concerned about making a mistake, I expect that I'll be doing mostly new content for people to know, share and comment upon if they so choose.

-----

Naturally, after I wrote the above in an email and sent it out, I had problems with Twitter.

 Perhaps because more vetting at a higher level of authority was necessary to let me into this exclusive group of people, but i had all sorts of problems my first 24 hours on Twitter.

For the better part of a morning and afternoon, I was largely frozen in a sort of Twitter 
version of Dante's Gates of Hell, in-between not being able to log-off or log-on, and being afraid to turn the computer off because I was concerned that maybe there were some steps I'd accidently missed somehow.

Everywhere I went to try to resolve it on the Twitter website were ominous warnings that I was in an area that I was Not Authorized.
It was like being at Reagan National Airport trying to find someone to man the counter to file a missing luggage incident report.
As I'd know!

Obviously, I hope the Twitter situation is resolved for good.

I signed up for TweetDeck for organizing purposes but if anyone has recently had any bad experiences with them and/or can recommend something better for someone like me, who anticipates following about 225 fairly-heavy Twitter users -largely the same folks I've been reading and following all along for years based on a list I created when I started the blog's first blogroll and it got too large- I'd appreciate hearing about it.

It wasn't a complete waste of time, though, since during those five-six hours, I was able to discover something interesting on the Twitter list of Followers of Sweden.se, the terrific Swedish government website whose awesome photos and Svenska factoids I've used for many years on my blog and emails to great effect, like this one below.

(Above, in a word, for me, Heavenly! Djurgården is the island located a bit east of the Gamla Stan (Old Town) area of Stockholm and the downtown Stockholm business district, where the iconic Grona Lund amusement park is located as well as the Vasa Museum and this year's new entry, the ABBA Museum that I wrote about here on the blog on May 7th, it's opening day:

A" is for Awesome and ABBA as the new ABBA Museum in Stockholm officially opens this afternoon. Monday night's gala premiere brought Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn together, cheered on by a select group of invitees from across Swedish society and the music industry, who are, in the end, just fans of the band like everyone else, and very excited that this amazing museum is FINALLY a reality; #abba, #AbbaMuseum, #ThankYouForTheMusic, @stockholm, @sweden

Djurgården is also home to the amazing Skansen open-air museum where 'Allsång på Skansen' is televised LIVE every Tuesday night during the summer on SVT, and, of course, the source of many of the music videos I've shared on the blog and individually with some of you, including most recently, the very-talented Miriam Bryant.)

Well, it turns out that on that list of Followers, at least then yours truly was located 
directly below....Carl XVI Gustaf.
The king.


Cool!  
From the Twitter Gates of Hell, Hallandale Beach campus, to the Royal Palace in 
Stockholm in just over 5 hours.
I love happy endings!

And now i'm following the king on Twitter, too. :)
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