Having Been Tagged....

But first the rules of the game:

1)WE HAVE TO POST THESE RULES BEFORE WE GIVE YOU THE FACTS.

2)PLAYERS START WITH 8 RANDOM FACTS/HABITS ABOUT THEMSELVES.

3)PEOPLE WHO ARE TAGGED NEED TO WRITE THEIR OWN BLOG AND THEIR 8 THINGS AND POST THESE.

4) AT THE END OF YOUR BLOG POST, YOU NEED TO CHOOSE 8 PEOPLE TO GET TAGGED AND LIST THEIR NAMES (Scared yet…..you better be!)

5)DON’T FORGET TO LEAVE THEM A COMMENT TELLING THEM THEY ARE TAGGED, AND TO READ YOUR BLOG.

• I am a chronic procrastinator. I am excellent at doing things that need not be done right now.
  
• I hate confrontations. I would rather pass a good fight than get involved in an abrasive situation. A little of bit of liquor tilts the equation.
  
• My appetite for revenge is unhealthy. Msanii, better turn yourself in for that chess whop ass cuz one way or the other i'ma git ya! I always get the last slap!
• I love music so much that I had to start making my own...pick up Elimisha Jamii/ Teach the Masses. When does it drop? Refer to bulletin number 1!
• I am a news junkie. I watch Fox News for 3 main reasons: to raise my blood pressure, to know what the enemy is thinking and to get the news...how, you ask? By believing the opposite of what they report.
• A few things get better than a cold drink over a heated debate with my not so dumb buddies. Unfortunately, since my college days i parted ways with most of them. Now I have to pretend that i am thrilled by critical analysis of lyrics of such master pieces as "Ay bay bay"
• I think Barack Obama is overrated. I guess my feelings for him would be different if i was a soccer mom.
• Einstein is the only guy that would perform a colonoscopy on me and live to tell it. I love the guy - well, as a mentor.

Hmm...who to tag? I have no idea. That is probably a good reason why I should keep this blog updated.

Rudard Kipling

This man penned what i consider to be one of the best poems ever written.

He was born in Bombay India to British parents.

"Young Rudyard's earliest years in Bombay were blissfully happy, in an India full of exotic sights and sounds. But at the tender age of five he was sent back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea, where he was desperately unhappy. The experience would colour some of his later writing." kipling society

At age 5 he was sent to England as was the custom for many settler families so that their childeren would be imbued with the English culture.

I am a little hesitant to co-sign him 100% because of how much he did to support British imperialism. In fact he was a close friend of Cecil Rhodes, whom Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named after.

The big question here is how some of these ostensibly honorable men in history including the classic example of George Washington, were able to draw a dichotomy between ethical standards for their class and race on one hand and for the downtrodden people they were lording over on the other.

Other than that, if we look at as art for art's sake, we cannot help but fall in love with Kipling's poetry.

IF
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to,
broken,And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,'
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

THE FUTILITY OF BLACK SUBJUGATION CONSPIRACY THEORIES

My man, Talib Kweli wrote a very interesting blog in titled: The Convenience Of Comedy- Don't Be Fooled By Your TV!!! in which he predicates the Don Imus's disrespect for the black college basketball team to a systematic mental manipulation scheme that was allegedly advanced by a slave owner Willie Lynch in this speech supposed to have been delivered to other slave owners in 1712.

To give you a brief background, the Willie Lynch Speech is a treatise that offered a breakthrough method of keeping the black man enslaved for 'generations to come' not by binding him in shackles and chains but by employing various psychological tools such as 'divide and rule'.

...you must pitch the old Black male vs. the young Black male, and the young Black male against the old Black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female.

Kweli makes a lot of valid and strong points;

What Imus did had nothing to do with hip hop, do not let them fool you. Hip hop sells, so every time Hannity and Colmes does a show about hip hop, their ratings go up, period. These talking heads on the TV trot out fed up sisters, uncle tom negroes and political vultures who equate hip hop with the devil, but have never heard a record by Lupe Fiasco, the Roots, Immortal Technique, Common, Jean Grae, Little Brother, the Coup, Dead Prez, Zion I and too many other incredible artists to name. They love the earning potential of hip hop, and they how they sound bashing it, but the have zero respect for the art.

I would also take the argument further: by inferring that a 60+ years old TV veteran said something because a 21 year old ex-dope dealer says it in his songs, also allows a father to make the excuse that he 'tried to peek under the skirt of the woman at the grocery store because his son does it all the time'. I can easily see Sean Hannity decrying the double standards because the 'liberal media' says nothing when the son does the very same act!

On substance, I therefore wholly agree with Kweli but he disappoints me by falling into the trap of the conspiratorial 'they holding the black man down' school of thoughtlessness by basing almost his entire piece on the Willie Lynch speech which with just a quick research, he would have found out, is a fraud.

I quote two African American historians of great repute who have debunked the authenticity of this speech. Prof. Manu Ampim says:

...the only known “William Lynch” was born three decades after the alleged speech, that the only known “William Lynch” did not own a plantation in the West Indies, that the “speech” was not mentioned by anyone in the 18^th or 19^th centuries, and that the “speech” itself clearly indicates that it was composed in the late 20^th century.

The fact that the speech could only have been composed not earlier than in the late 2oth century is shown by the numerous anachronisms contained in the text. An anachronism is something that does not fit in the context of time. In this instance, the author of the speech uses words such as "refueling, fool-proof and Black (to refer to negroes) are all of 20th century origin.

Jelani Cobb, author and historian says:

Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been “discovered” it would’ve been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never “discovered,” but rather it “appeared” – bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way via internet directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria.

In my opinion, the Willie Lynch farce falls in the same category as the belief that the US government blew up the levees in New Orleans in order to flood out blacks. I believe that African Americans face serious challenges and by advancing a line of thinking that cannot be backed by facts or even one that goes against the facts, they are not only trivializing the true fight but also providing an easy escape route (especially in the Willie Lynch Speech case) for their community's woes.

Believers of this 'program' argue that it is for that reason that blacks are still living in miserable conditions, literary still enslaved, 200 years after the abolition. To quote Prof. Ampim,

it is naively assumed by a large number of Willie Lynch believers that this single and isolated speech, allegedly given almost 300 years ago, completely explains the internal problems and divisions within the African American community.

As much as the effects of slavery are still prevalent to date, it does not help the young kid with a whole future ahead of him/her when you tell him/her that he is essentially doomed from the get go, and that anyone is capable of manipulating his minds in way that is described in the speech. That is dispempowering them.

A modern day Martin Luther King is going to be that person that shall have enough courage to look in the mirror and admit that at times, what he sees is foul.

Debating CNBC's Darren Rovell

Darren Rovell, a CNBC sports writer wrote a piece on April 13th, 2007 on why he thought Kenyans dominated the Boston Marathon:

The Wall Street Journal's Allen St. John brings us a great stat about Kenyans and the major marathons. Kenyan men have won 14 out of the last 16 Boston Marathons. A Kenyan woman has won six out of the past seven years.

...While St. John offers up another reason -- Kenyans can train against each other versus other runners who are forced to train against the clock -- he doesn't offer up the most obvious reason why, at least in my opinion, Kenyans win these races. WHY, specifically, there are so many more Kenyans than people from other countries who excel in this sport.
It has nothing to do with race, with the air in Nairobi, with a specific diet. No, the Kenyans win because they care the most. They care because the Boston Marathon's $100,000 winner's prize is a king's ransom in their native land. It's retirement for life. It's fame and glory and permanent legend.

I wrote to Darren and respectfully disagreed. He was graceful enough to sorta admit getting it wrong and to also publish my rebuttal in his next blog. Follow this link and then scroll all the way down to the sub-heading About Those Kenyan Runners

About Those Kenyan Runners: My blog on Friday about Kenyan runners winning marathons because the $100,000 winner's prize meant more to them resulted in a flooding of my e-mail box. And the fact that Robert Cheruiyot won yesterday -- extending the Kenyans winning run in the Boston Marathon men's race to 15 out of the last 17 races -- didn't do anything to slow it down. I'll share with you two of the notes that I feel will keep this conversation going.First, I'll share with you a note from reader Wilson Kiriungi: "I agree with you that Kenyans do generally care more than say Americans when it comes to the marathon but that alone does not conclusively explain their consistent success in the sport. Being a Kenyan, I know that not all Kenyans can run. Put it this way, the same way basketball is dominated by African Americans, only Kenyans from a small tribe called the Kalenjin make the best runners. They are not historically known to put a lot of stock in materialism in the modern sense of the word; cattle is their real measure of wealth. As a matter of fact, if money were the sole fuel that keeps the Kenyan athlete's engine running, we would expect to have more runners from the Kikuyu tribe who are known to be the most enterprising tribe in Kenya. The question of what makes Kenyans such good runners (in my case the Kalenjins) still puzzles me like a lot of other people. One thing I can certainly say is that if it was about the money, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this email. I would probably be somewhere in Boston sipping Margarita, reveling in my perennial 15 minutes of fame."

baby gets a baby

who ever remembers that famous white lie that your parents told you when you were a kid that babies are bought in the store just you as you would buy a bicycle or a lawn-mower? well if you do, that tells me that you belong to a different generation because as of yesterday monday 20th news reports from Kenya, kids these days have figured what it really takes to make a baby.

what an embarassment! what a travesty it is the way the media treated the issue. i mean you would think that in Kenya 10 year olds have babies every day because there was no mention of who could have done this to the poor little girl and neither was the fact that a crime was obviously commited. this is a sad day for Africa and it ranks up there with the poor child that was photographed starving and dying as a vulture waited by only that this is a tragedy that we have visited upon ourselves.

it is going to take aeons of us whinning and blaming outsiders for the misery that we are in unless we start looking at the mirror. it is going to take us coming into terms with hard facts that the high level of corruption from the lowest level of our most of our establishments to the highest achelons probably....just probably has something to do with the poverty that we (African nations) wallow in. it is going to take some straight talk for us to pause and thing "may be our lifestyle has something to do with high number of AIDS cases amongst us".

Found You!!!

I started this blog and i thought to myself i was going to stay focused and make it a meeting point for a number of people but then the captain lost his ship! i forgot what the url was!

so i am surfing the web reading other people's blogs and i was going to post a comment when i realized that to do so, you have first to have registered. but it turns out that when i started my blog, i defaulted my log-in information to be pre-filling itself on my computer. so BOOM, and there pops out my good old blog. i now have the web address saved in my favs. so don't you worry, reader... i am not abandoning you, not anymore.

who is Ken Jennings?

how is it possible for one man to know so much about almost every field? i mean the kid answers questions about the latest in hip hop in the same breath with 17th century Spain! he is amazing.