Letting MTV Raise Your Kids Will Make You a Grandma at 32.

Bill Cosby has a point.

You can't blame the man.

In theory, Parents raise children. MTV sells advertisments. PS2's entertain and Mc Donalds is an occasional snack.

Yet, we know that in reality, hella kids get a couple meals a day from Mickey D's, they stay glued to they PS2's and MTV/BET is a built into the livingroom baby sitter.

That being said, Bill does have a point. However, I think that it would be more constructive if he instructed folks on how to be better parents in ADDITION to ripping them for poor parenting.

Cosby, 69, was critical of black parents, saying they don't involve themselves enough in their children's education and don't know what their children are doing. "We've got parents who won't check the bedrooms of their children to see if there's a gun," he said. He chided teachers for not offering clear explanations to children who ask why courses such as English and algebra are necessary. "If you teach English and you can't answer this child, then you're in trouble, and we've been in trouble," Cosby said. "We can't answer these children, because nobody's given them any goals."

For True. There needs to be a Black Parenting Guide Because letting MTV and McDonald's raise your kids is only gonna make you a grandma, of some really fat kids, at 32.

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I am very excited about the new Jay Z.

I haven't bought a Jay album since reasonable doubt.

I like the sophisticated happiness of Show Me Watchu Got, and the Subliminal and sometimes overt jabs on Lost Ones. And its Jazzy too.

Damon apparently feels like a hypocrite after the break up. He don't "love" the game anymore.

That Dame talks about what it meant to be a sort of dispute resolution mentor to street dudes, and how they can no longer say "Lets work it out like Dame and Jay" is hyper revealing.

Where do we see Black men, in pop culture talk about lets work out our differences like so and so?

Sh*t. You win some, and you win Some.

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One of my favorite Hollywood couples breakin up.

I knew it was too good to be true.

I betchu it was the Oscar.

See, thats why Julia married her camera man. I ain't mad.

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The town is the 24th MOST DANGERIOUS city in the nation.

Thats something to be proud of.

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Call Mutumbo a Monkey and Get Banned from the games.
Thats interesting.

God I heart the intersection of race and sports.

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There is nothing wrong with being "Hollywood" or "Industry".
My best friend is industry. Irony intended.

But Calling cats w/ day glo hats
and shoes to match, "THE Fresh Prince Look" is is hella bootsie.

Er. Maybe.

It just seems contrived.

To me the more accurate description is "Japanese Hip Hop flav meets Harlem".

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So. We had a hella warm Halloween. I stayed true to self and DID not go out. But actually ran errands and washed clothes. Yeah. I am an adult. And after this post, I am actually gonna work on my summary.

Who knew that getting up at 7 and having coffee on a WEEKDAY could facilitate so MUCH productivity.

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This is What Happens When You Give Athletes Guns.

President of the NBA tells Players to Leave the Gats at Home. No. I am not making this up.

Only in the NBA could the commissioner go from defending the widely criticized new ball to criticizing the players' right to defend themselves. Actually, given the angry reaction to the synthetic leather basketballs, maybe the logical next step for David Stern was to get guns out of the players' hands. You know, in case things escalate.

Yeah Well. Some players DO BE having gats.

Carrying guns is one of those Things That Only Seem Bad When NBA Players Are Doing It. You know, like going from high school straight to the pros. Fine for baseball, hockey, tennis and golf, but a danger to our society when it involves basketball. The New Jersey Nets' Richard Jefferson pointed out the double standard when he dealt the Dick Cheney card to the Newark Star-Ledger. "Shoot, our vice president shot somebody in the face," Jefferson said in the aftermath of the Jackson incident. "A dude gets punched in the face and fires off shots and all of a sudden it's, 'What's an athlete's things with guns?' Shoot, people go on hunting trips with semi-automatic weapons. Is there a need to take an AK-47 to shoot deer? Which one is worse?" Next time you're driving around town keep an eye out for how prominently guns are featured in the billboards for the new James Bond movie, "Casino Royale." The gun has always been part of the whole Bond image: tuxedo, martini (shaken, not stirred), Walther PPK. A gun is even incorporated into the 007 logo. What kind of message does that send to our kids?

Oh. But this the beauty of double standards in pop culture. My momma say, if its good for the goose its good for the gander. Remember when Paper magazine tried to get bell hooks to cosign on disrespecting hip hop AND lil Kim. She was like. I am not gonna talk about kim w/o mentioning the American pop culture as a whole. Why single her or hip hop out [ Especially in Paper Magazine].
I think that the author, is a man after my own heart.

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Naomi done got arrested. She needs to get on Mary's anger management plan.

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ADD and Autism caused by babies watching TV. Muy interesante.

Lo and behold, Waldman and colleagues found that reported autism cases within certain counties in California and Pennsylvania rose at rates that closely tracked cable subscriptions, rising fastest in counties with fastest-growing cable. The same was true of autism and rainfall patterns in California, Pennsylvania and Washington State. Their oddly definitive conclusions: "Approximately 17% of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth of cable television," and "just under 40% of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation."

Someone needs to study children who don't watch television and compare them to children who do.

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Your daughters tied up in a Brooklyn Basement- Biggie
Mexicano's are kidnapping fools on the reg in Tiajuana. And expecting paper. How very wild wild west of them.

The businessman's abduction marked another episode in a two-year crime wave that has turned this border city into one of the kidnapping capitals of the world.

The targets, typically middle- and upper-class businessmen or their sons, often are snatched in broad daylight by organized crime rings masquerading as commando-style federal police squads. It happens outside their homes and on busy streets. One man was grabbed as he left a circus with his kids.

American tourists are rarely targets, so the kidnappings don't get much attention across the border. They usually aren't reported to police, many of whom are working with the criminal rings, according to federal and state authorities. Estimates of the number of kidnappings this year in the Tijuana area range from 77 to 120, according to business groups, civic leaders and private security firms. The year before, they say, there were 60.

Tijuana may now have the most kidnappings in the world outside of the Middle East, said Thomas Clayton, chairman of Clayton Consultants Inc., a global private security firm. "Tijuana is going crazy," Clayton said.

Did you peep how they DONT kidnap Americans.

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Oh. Waste 10 minutes of your life watching these political campaign videos. I did.

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Why. Is. It. 80. Degrees. In. Oakland. Today?

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The Source, Sexual Harrassment, & NYC JUSTICE.

Kim Osorio was awarded 15.5M in her sexual harassment case against The Source. Guess, The Source cats were too arrogant to settle. They should have paid attention to what has happened in sexual harrassment cases on wall street. Settle. Settle. Settle.

Shout out to Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond for the text over at the Village Voice.

Women working in hip-hop often have an even tougher time reconciling that divide. Getting a paycheck for marketing products and artists that often instigate violence and portray women as only good for sex can leave staffers at all levels feeling played. That was—and is—the case at The Source magazine, according to former editor in chief and current plaintiff Kim Osorio, who found herself explaining how her former bosses sexually harassed her from a witness box in courtroom 14B at the Southern District of New York.

Well all turn the other cheek and/or take it up the a$$ at some point at work, otherwise, there would be way more work place fatalities.

But the angel on her shoulder got in her ear. "People would ask my opinion on how they portray women and just the blatant usage of the N-word—among other expletives," she remembers. "I would be like, 'Oh, you know, well, it is what it is. This is the culture now.' Deep down in my heart I knew that it wasn't right. . . . I felt a lot of internal conflict."

RARELY, do people who benefit financially from pushing the HOP, talk transparently about how they reconcile the contradictions pervasive in HH.

Hip Hop is pervasivly homophobic, yet there are a ton of gay folks that eat off the HH industry. And they don't speak up.

Hip Hop is pervasivly anti-woman, yet there are a ton of women who eat of the industry. And they don't speak up. For that Matter.

And in a similar vein, The Republican party is notorious for being anti-gay marriage and for using gay marriage initiatives as a divisive issue during election season. Yet. Gay republicans don't speak up. Peep what Frank Rich had to say in the Times a couple of weekends ago. When I was reading this article, I kept thinking, that, this is what Black people go through all the time. In terms of working someone where people like you are Blatantly and Subtly dismissed and discriminated against on the reg.

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. “What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill,” says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. “Across the board gay people are in leadership positions.” Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Apparently, The Source thought that its readers were dumb too. In all fairness. The readers of The Source run/ran the gamut of brilliant to "look at the pretty pictures". Which is arguably the case for all magazines. However it is one thing for a main stream, mag to think that way about heads, but to hear that The Source does it too. Its like dayum, yall expectations was that low for cats!!?!?!?!?

"We were getting ready for our International Issue and I wanted to write something like, 'Look forward to next month—we'll be hitting you with the diaspora,' " Sonya recounts. "These muhfuckaz was like, 'Niggaz don't know what diaspora means so we gotta take that out.' I was like, 'You don't think muhfuckaz would wanna look it up?' "

I love how fools would speak, but only anonymosly. Oh what it must feel like to be insulated from accountability. Thats what I want to be when I grow up:)

Evan, a music video director and hip-hop documentarian who admits he's shot his fair share of "guy up against his car, a girl shaking her ass for no apparent reason" music videos to keep the lights on.
Evan didn't want to be identified since he works for a major hip-hop artist's label and feared recrimination. "By any means necessary," he continued.

Life imitating art. Life imitating art. Life imitating art. Not an excuse.

But the art-imitating-life defense is hard to swallow as these stories trickle down to consumers through agents that aren't of the culture. "For people who did not really grow up in that lifestyle, it's almost like being on a movie set," Fiona says of her primarily white former co-workers. "Like, it's not your reality, it's not your responsibility. You don't hear gunshots. . . . You're not dealing with baby-daddy drama issues. You know what I mean? Your reality is so different so it's easy for you to go to work and do something like that and feel totally disconnected from its actual effect on society."

Aw. Being Disconnected from its actual effect on society.

At least she saying something now. Lawsuits do be bringing out juicy tidbits of facts and gossip hunh!!!?!?!?

Her comments about being disconnected made me think about the beauty OF BEING disconnected.

What if all Po Po in the hood had to live in the hood that they worked?

What if all the people that work w/ 50 actually had to live where 50 lived in Queens we he got shot?

What if Teachers had to live in the neighborhoods where they taught?

What if the Senators that voted for the war were required for their children to actually go an fight in it.

What if all politicians were required to send their children to public school?

It. Would. Be. A. Different. World.

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Yes. I think I am a cold piece of work for talking about THE SOURCE, GAY REPUBLICANS AND SEXUAL HARRASMENT ALL in the same mother loving post. Gyeeah. Long live green t!
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Where is Grand Puba At?

Where: Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave @ East 2nd Street, New York City
When: October 30th @ 8 PM
Welcome reception with music provided by QOOL DJ MARV Q&A with Just For Kicks'

Director Thierry Daher Cocktail reception following the screening
Who's coming with me?

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The Father of Madonna's potential new son now claims that he did not approve adoption. He thought she was gonna take him and raise him and bring him back home after high school/college was over.

My question is, if the man cain't read and write, why is he negotiating adoption rights with Madonna without an attorney?

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I don't know how I feel about a fool who made a DOCUMENTARY about PEOPLE THAT COMMIT SUICIDE on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Doesn't this violate the rights of the deads family members.
That sh*t is morbid to me.


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Wikipidia knows Im late to sh*t too. I am working on it yall.

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Wouldn't it weird of Foxy went to jail shortly after Kim got out?


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This Negro is Making 1,500 per hour. Yes. PER F*CKING HOUR. Can I sign up for that plan?

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Apparently Puff AND Jay used that "Show me wachu got beat".

Peep over at Unkut, they game is gully. These fools got the songs AND Poll asking who freaked it better.

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Where is the new Doom Album. Its been a year right!?!?!?!

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Jay Z's Champagne Endorsement is Illegal.

Ok. Well its not illegal, but I had to get your attention some how.

Technically, only Athletes are "forbidden" from endorsing alcohol in commercials on television. But, have you seen a Nascar race recently??!??!?!

And besides, while rappers are influential, they are not athletes.

I think that it is only a matter of time till congress makes it illegal for rappers to endorse beer on tv.

Isn't it crazy how Jay's actions constitute a media event!?!?!?!?! What is the distinction between him being in a Heiniken Ad and endorsing Champagne?

Rizoh had some interesting things to say at The Rap Up about "The New Negro Drink".

Anyhow, I'm not a "big drinker", and I ain't about to start just because Jay-Z said "Gold Bottles" is that next shit. If demand for this illogically exorbitant brew has truly tripled based on Jay's video alone, it just goes to show how counterproductive our community has become. It's a sad day in hip-hop when we allow ourselves to be subdued by the same tentacles we've been trying to bolt from. The new negro drink should be coffee, if you ask me, because we could really use a wake-up call.

TaMere Enslip over at the Hip Hop Game done went and did research-- he called the champagne companies and everything, to confirm weather Jay has an investment in Armand de Brignac.

In the press release, the company makes sure they say "This is not a case of product placement, as Armand de Brignac and Jay Z have not entered into an agreement, sponsorship or otherwise. I am not sure this is true. But it is very suspect. Only two days after the video airs, the allready issue a press release....

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Wow. This fool, Ziad Cattan, just said, on 60 Minutes, that nobody will arrest me. They will just kill me.

Ziad Cattan was in charge of military procurement at a time when the ministry of defense went on a $1.2 billion buying spree. Allawi estimates that $750 to $800 million of that money was stolen. Judge Radhi al-Radhi, head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, which investigates official corruption, tells Kroft that a lot of the money that wasn't stolen was spent on outdated, useless equipment.

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Um. Short post tonight. Middle of the semester. I got something cooking about Harlem though.

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Ben Stein Says Get Money or Shut Up

Ben Stein is encouraging us to be BREAD-A-HOLICS.

I normally would find such an article offensive.

But dude is hella funny.

And he makes a point.

Which is. Get money. Get next to money. Get around people that make money.

Watch him boogie.

An even more recent story has been about Brian Hunter, a commodities trader for the large hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. Mr. Hunter made big bets in natural gas trades and had been getting good returns for his investors. Then the market turned against him and he lost roughly $6 billion — yes, billion — for his investors within a few weeks. He’s no longer at Amaranth, and the fund is being dissolved. However, it was noted that his pay for 2005 would have been between $75 million and $100 million. Yes, you read it right.

That is, Tom Freston, an undeniably great guy, gets $60 million for leading a company whose stock performance was deemed unacceptably poor (although it’s been good lately). Brian Hunter is presumably still a wealthy man despite leading his investors to disaster.

You can be furious about that, and you should be. But you might also think how nice it would be to make that kind of money, or even a small fraction of that sort of wage.

For students slogging their way through school, here are the merest hints of how you can and cannot reach that top 1 percent, that place where you are paid well even if you make mistakes:

• You do not get to it by studying African feminism in the 19th century, whether or not you are at an Ivy League college. You do not get to it by studying Bulgarian poetry. You do not get to it by any field of endeavor or study that is esoteric and has no connection with helping other people either become healthy or make money.

• You do not get to it by being a civil servant unless you are the kind of civil servant — say, a cabinet member or a United States Senator — who can use his or her connections later to lobby for well-heeled clients. You do not get to it by a lifetime of work in any field in which there are government price caps on earnings.

• You do get to it by working in fields in which you can fix your wages, preferably with the government’s help. These include law, where you need a license to practice, and thereby can lift yourself out of working for free-market wages. (Everyone in this country pays homage to the free market, but no one wants to work for free-market wages.) They also include medicine, where a far more difficult license is required, and where desperate patients will pay almost anything to look and feel good. They also include accounting at the C.P.A. level.

• You are always better off working in a field where torrents of money are sloshing through and you can grab a handful as it goes by. That means Wall Street. Finance is the ultimate great business. (Warren E. Buffett famously said that you are always better off being mediocre in a great business than great in a mediocre business, and he easily could have been talking about Wall Street.) Money pours through Wall Street in vast oceans. Even if you take off a tiny helping, you are going to wind up in that 1 percent. If you can do the daily double and work on Wall Street and be in a position to fix your own wage — say, by being in high management at a major Wall Street firm that has such prestige and connections that it can control its fees and other compensation — you will wind up living a great life, at least money-wise. (It is very difficult in many other ways, and I do not envy the people who do it. The tension is just far too much for little me.)

• You make money by making money for people who already have money. This is another reason finance is such a well-paid field. One good day’s work for a man who has a $100 million account you are trading is worth far more than a lifetime’s work at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart. Yet, amazingly, managing wealthy people’s money is far less difficult and stressful than checking out customers at Wal-Mart. It’s not even close. As my smart sister Rachel says, you make money by making money. It’s tricky, but it’s right.

• You make money by learning skills that lead to any of these: making people feel and look better, learning how to draw their wills, learning how to manage their money so they don’t underperform the bogey terribly, learning how to make complex things like computer parts in ways that lead your employer to make money and reward you with stock options. This is by no means an exclusive list. You also make it by manufacturing cardboard boxes and selling scrap metals. But usually, education in finance, medicine, law, accounting, electrical engineering — something in which you learn to add value instead of having fun in school — is the key.

read more here.
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Madonna Got a New Accessory.

What I wanna know is, why she gotta adopt a lil-Malawian kid?

Granted, she has set up a foundation for Orphans, which is an attempt to address
the issue of "the other children" who won't be adopted.

It is an effort that should be commended.
However, the adoption comes across as cheap and contrived. The child was not an orphan. He has a father.

Apparently the childs father is glad that he is being adopted,
as he was an orphan himself.

She apparently violated Malawi Law, which states that children can only be adopted by citizens or those who have resided in the country for a year.

“We are concerned that the High Court has taken a short cut and waived the law. We are registering our concern and will seek clarification from the court, after which we will decide what action to take.”

He said Malawi’s laws do not allow international adoption unless the parents live in the country for a year, during which social welfare workers investigate their ability to care for a child.

Why don't Stars ever Adopt children from Harlem or Eastern Europe?

BL says that n*ggas should just stop mashin' which would reduce the number of potential AIDS cases and pregnancies.

And.

That instead of dropping food, condoms should be dropped. However, if the Men do not WANT to wear condoms, and refused to, then it is a moot point, correct?
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I can't wait to see this new documentary.

The Hip Hop Project. Remember, you heard about it first here.

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So its not just Negros that are not getting married.

Its Americans in general.

indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or heterosexual couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock.

In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.

Here is another one...

“It’s partially fueled by women in the work force; they don’t necessarily have to marry to be economically secure,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, who conducted the census analysis for The New York Times. “You used to get married to have sex. Now one of the major reasons to get married is to have children, and the attractiveness of having children has declined for many people because of the cost.”

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Dope T. Right. Cop it here.

"SHE", Lonnae O'Neal Parker, might have gave up on Hip Hop, but I haven't.However, I enjoyed the article because rarely do Black writers write, in a constructive way, about Hip Hop, their children and the communication gap. Peep her technique.

I keep my CD player filled with old-school tracks and I fill my kids' heads with the coolest, most conscious, most bang-bang the boogie say up jump the boogie songs from when hip-hop and I were young. Sydney says I don't like black voices and I say: Ax Butta how I zone/ Man, Cleopatra Jones .

I make Sydney listen to songs from when rap said something, but my daughter is 12 and she laughs at me. Rap says something now, Mommy, she says.

Lean wit' it

Rock wit' it

Lean wit' it

Rock wit' it

She snaps her fingers and I just nod. Change is gonna come. Meanwhile, her song is catchy. And there are no bitches!

At least not in the chorus.

In another section she discusses the way some women are dealing with the mysogyny in music.

The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. "There's no party without sisters on the dance floor," she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. "We don't want to be hypersexualized," said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don't want to be erased, either.

They would be better off buying shares of Viviendi Universal and advocating at the annual shareowners meeting that the Universal and all other lables therein no longer allow artist to put out mysogynistic music or that they put out and market artists that are different from current mainstream artist.

But I guess folks wanna "protest."

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The A's fired their coach.

They did the same sh*t last year, then turned around and hired him back.

So the fat lady might just be humming right now.

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That was a nice mix and match post.

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William Rhoden Calls Black Athletes 40 Million Dollar Slaves.

This should be a good post. Rhoden essentially argues:

• That Black Athletes have lost their connection with the community.

• They professional and collegiate sport system is designed for them to be out for self.

Occupants of two worlds- the streets and the world of wealth, these athletes can speak from a perch of power and influence while holding the kind of "keep it real" pedigree that makes them relevent to the core black community.

• If they leveraged their individual power, they could have an impact beyond what they could ever imagined.

...a crucial problem with Black Atheltes is that they should fee greatful for the things that they have rightfully earned, that they should come hat-in-hand in graditude for the money and power that they themselves generate. [This about as powerful as PE's Don't Believe the Hype, feel me?]

• That there school athletic system is a conveyor belt of talent.

For African American Atheltes, the threat of the Conveyor Belt process goes beyond the ways in which it undermines character. The Belt is also designed to dull any racial consciousness and eliminate communal instincts. Instead the the belt cultivates racial know-nothingism.

• Whats damaging about the proces is the lack of awareness by the person on the conveyor belt. The lack of understanding that there is a system here, and that from the time that you show any type of athletic prowess, I don't care if you were four years old...the moment he did something that made him different than the other kids, catch a ball shoot a basket.....he's on the conveyor belt.

The title comes from a statement that Larry Johnson made when he was still a NY Knick.

....money has little to do with his analogy of being like a slave on a plantation, what that he was really referring to relationships- namely between owner and worker.

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Now, if Holdens book isn't enough, Brad Snyder just published "A Well Paid Slave" about Curt Flood and his fight for free agency.
I have not read this one. But, there is a review in the Times.
Um. Where is "The Curt Flood Story" Spike?

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This post has been long over due. Jase. I did it fam. Where you at ock?

Reading this stuff will make yo' brain snap.

For true.

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The Flavor of Love is 2006 Visual Coonery.

How you gone go from 911 is a joke to this intolerable Coonery? I am all for poetic liscense. I don't believe that all art should be postive. But this show crosses the line.

• Flav's grills, clocks.
• Women fighting each other on screen.
• A woman pooped on her self on screen.
  

Three words. Coon-er-rey. ( God I sound like one of my aunties complaining about hip hop. If I do oh well. We all don't have to like everything).

His reality series, “Flavor of Love,” a ghetto-fabulous spoof of the dating series “The Bachelor,” has been a colossal hit for VH1. The show’s first-season finale in March drew nearly six million viewers, making it the highest-rated show in the cable channel’s history. More than three million people tuned in to watch the second-season premiere early August.

There is a fine line between acceptable self destructive humor AND pop culture coonery. This show falls squarly within shuckin' and jivin' for cream. Please belive we ALL suck and jive a lil bit in our lives. However, to get up and do it on screen for millions of people to watch has a huge impact on how brown people are seen around the world. VH1's highest rated show. Word?!!?!?!!?

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I don't have cable so I watched 4 episodes of the wire, back to back last week. I turned around, and went to the Village to eat and I "thought" I saw a man from the Wire. I was like, oh laaaawd, I watched so many episodes I am hallucinating. I tapped him. Come to find out. He is on The Wire.

He plays our very own Al Davis. (peace to joey for the swipey).

I told him that this season is extra intense and that I enjoyed his work.
He was personable and responsive.

I like friendly well adjusted Actors!

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Elephants now officially rank up there with Pandas. Who knew that there were so dope? They bury their dead and apparently humans that they kill too.

Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it.

Their tribes have a "big momma" Aunties Uncles and god mommas.

Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.

And when the baby elephants watch they momma/daddy get killed, they grow up to be adult elephants full of rage and agression.

But in “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

And.

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. “The loss of elephants elders,” Bradshaw told me, “and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.”

Sound familiar???!?!?!?!?!? Trust. It is a looooooong read. But I actually learned something about Animals, Agression and People for that matter.

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Awwww. The poor, poor Yankees.

All that money and cain't win. Look at the A's. They have a 5$ budget and THEY Spankin' fools. You see what happen in Minnesota (I still love you James, but your team got spizzanked).

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Wow. That was a fun post. Lets. Get busy. Ruf, ruf, ruf. I know that was corny. But I couldn't help it.

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