Thursday Flashback--

"Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for. "
— Banksy

This reminds me of  the discussions I have with my nephew, all the time. He loves football, and is on his high school football team. He dreams of winning The Heisman trophy,  but he's lazy, and his father has to convince him to get out the house and to practice harder and be more focused if he wants to attain that goal or to even be considered. Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.

BE- (Basement Elevation)

note to self

God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with him.
--Jim Elliot

You could move.
 -Abigail Van Buren, "Dear Abby,"
 in response to a reader who complained that a gay couple was moving in across the street and wanted to know what he could do to improve the quality of the neighborhood.

You'll be glad to know that all the people who are the best at what they do are also the people who are the best at being nice to the people around them.

(love that picture!)

:free

This is good!

The story is told of a king who had a close friend with whom he grew up. The friend had a habit of looking at every situation that ever occurred in his life (positive or negative) and remarking, "This is good!"

One day the king and his friend were on a hunting expedition. The friend would load and prepare the guns for the king. In preparing one of the guns, the friend had apparently done something wrong, for after taking the gun from his friend, the king fired it and his thumb was blown off.
Examining the situation the friend remarked as usual, "This is good!" To which the king replied, "No, this is NOT good!" and proceeded to send his friend to jail.
About a year later, the king was hunting in a dangerous area. Cannibals captured him and took him to their village. They tied his hands, stacked some wood, set up a stake and bound him to it. As they approached to set fire to the wood, they noticed that the king was missing a thumb. Being superstitious, they never ate anyone that was less than whole. So after untying the king, they sent him on his way.
As he returned home, he was reminded of the event that had taken his thumb and felt remorse for his treatment of his friend. He went immediately to the jail to speak with his friend. You were right," he said, "it was good that my thumb was blown off." And he proceeded to tell the friend all that had just happened. "And so I am very sorry for sending you to jail for so long. It was bad for me to do this."
"No," his friend replied, "This is good!"
"What do you mean, 'This is good'? How could it be good that I sent my friend to jail for a year?"
"If I had NOT been in jail, I would have been with you."
Situations may not always seem pleasant while we are in them, but the promise of God is clear. If we love him and live our lives according to his precepts, even that which seems to be bleak and hopeless will be turned by God for His glory and our benefit. Hold on... God is faithful!

"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." Romans 8:28

               on TWITTER

                          @alieux9000- Time has a wonderful way of showing us what (or who) really matters.

                                                                -Alexgeorge

Listening to...

one morning

Each night I imagine my heart is a spinning ball of light that shines brighter and spins faster the more I think about it.                                              And one morning I will give that light to someone.

AVAILABLE NOW

                 Click HERE      :-)

She's done

on today

in 1848,
Frederick Douglass attends the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. He speaks in defense of its organizer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States.


      courtesy- blackfacts.com and wikipedia

"Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things."
--Lawrence D. Bell

It's your time

Congress could learn about sacrifice and leadership from this guy

18-year-old gives his $40,000 scholarship to other teens

Compton High basketball player Allan Guei felt his classmates needed the money more

This is a story of a teenager who did something so generous — so big-hearted — that it’s making plenty of adults swoon.

Allan Guei, 18, was a star basketball player at Compton High School in the Los Angeles area before he graduated last month. He also had a GPA above 3.0, and his good grades made him eligible for an unusual competition: A free-throw contest in the Compton High gymnasium. The top prize: $40,000 in scholarship money.
Guei, whose parents immigrated to the United States from the Ivory Coast, knew how much that financial aid could mean for his family. So he was feeling a fair share of pressure as students and teachers crushed into the gym to watch Guei and seven other randomly selected, academically successful students make foul shots.
Guei won the free-throw contest by one basket and netted the $40,000. But it’s what he did next that’s truly astonishing.
"The right decision’

In the weeks following the March free-throw competition, Guei learned that he’d scored a full-ride basketball scholarship to California State University-Northridge. NCAA rules allowed Guei to accept the athletic scholarship and also keep most of the $40,000 he had won.
But Guei couldn’t stop thinking about the seven talented runners-up from the free-throw contest. They, too, had dreams — and very real needs. So, he asked Principal Jesse Jones to make a surprise announcement at Compton High’s graduation ceremony: Guei wanted to donate the $40,000 to the other seven students.
“I’ve already been blessed so much and I know we're living with a bad economy, so I know this money can really help my classmates,” Guei said in a statement. “It was the right decision.”
Guei elaborated on his decision to give the money away in an interview with ESPN: “I was already well taken care of to go to school, to go to university for free. ... I felt like they needed it more than I did.”
The beneficiaries of Guei’s generosity were ecstatic.
“It was a shock,” said Omar Guzman, 17, a runner-up who plans to use the money to attend San Diego State University. “I’m really grateful there are people like that out there. It was generous.”
Another of the seven runners-up, Donald Dotson, also plans to start at Cal State Northridge in the fall. Dotson described Guei as “a very deep, intelligent and warm person.”
Story: Prosthetic helps golf prodigy drive ball 200 yards — at age 10
"He's going to go really far in life,” he said in a statement. “Because of what he’s done for us, God will bless him. That’s what life is all about — stepping forward to help other people.”
Lines that divide — and unite
The free-throw competition was the idea of Court Crandall, the Hollywood screenwriter behind the movie “Old School” and a partner at a Southern California advertising firm. Crandall was well aware of Compton’s image problems due to gang-related crime. Many of the city’s residents also deal with extreme financial pressures; according to Census data, more than 25 percent of the city’s families live below the poverty line.
One day Crandall was watching his teenage son play basketball with some bright, ambitious Compton students, and he got to thinking about the lines that divide us. Then inspiration struck: Could a free-throw line bring people together?
He decided to create the free-throw scholarship competition and make a stereotype-busting documentary film about the lives of Compton students in the process. Compton’s senior class had about 80 students with a GPA of 3.0 or higher; the eight students who participated in the competition got selected randomly from that group.

Crandall’s advertising firm, Wong, Doody, Crandall, Wiener, raised more than $75,000 for scholarships, making it possible to give $40,000 to the first-place winner and more than $5,000 — enough to cover about a year of college expenses — to each of the seven runners-up.
Now, with Guei’s added generosity, each of those seven runners-up has around $11,000 in scholarship money.
“It was the perfect ending,” Crandall told TODAY.com. “I was ecstatic about how everything turned out. ... Most kids don’t have the sense of composure or leadership that [Allan] does, so after spending time with him and getting to know him, I really wasn’t that surprised by what he did.”
Crandall plans to submit his full-length documentary film, “Free Throw,” to the Sundance Film Festival in September.

courtesy, msnbc.com

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
 -Zora Neale Hurston

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,'

  and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'"
~C. S. Lewis~

   I'm of the first part!

only love

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that

-- Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

That Feel Goodness

Let your life bear good fruit

in need of a verse?

When a man's ways please the LORD, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him...Proverbs 16:7

Saggy Pants Arrest at California Airport Creates Dissent, Charges Dropped

Saggy pants wearers may now live in peace knowing the sagginess of their pants is not a crime in the United States of America.
They can now be saggy in the airport, or a plane, mall, or perhaps any other location.
Charges against Deshon Marman, a college football player from San Francisco, have been dropped. Marman was initially accused of resisting arrest after a June 15th incident aboard a US Airways flight- an incident that stemmed from the bagginess of Marman’s pants.
The 20-year-old was arrested and charged with trespassing, resisting arrest and suspicion of battery on a police officer at San Francisco International Airport following a flight attendant’s request the young man- who has a full scholarship, football and academic, at the University of New Mexico- pull up the pajama pants he was wearing. Marman told crew members he would adjust the saggy pants as soon as he got to his seat, as his hands were full.
San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said Wednesday that prosecutors “do not believe that criminal charges are warranted in light of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident.” The decision followed a protest at City Hall Wednesday in which 200 people gathered to demand charges against Marman be dropped.
Protesters complained Marman was targeted because he is young and black. One dramatically stated:

"You say you want the pants pulled up,” the Rev. Amos Brown said from the podium. “We say, pull up justice in America.”

A spokesman for US Airways said the airline is “in open communication” with Brown and the NAACP over the incident, but did not provide further details. The company also said it was trying to help Marman keep his scholarship.
--courtesy showbiznest.blogspot.com

They're not fooling me. They were nervous about the treatment  Deshon Marman was given, versus the treatment the guy below was given, and they wanted to squelch the PR  nightmare surrounding it.

thursday flash back

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

--Howard Thurman

What makes me come alive is-

a) writing

b) cooking for family and friends

c) baking

d) the company of family and friends

e) the love of a good woman

f) spending time with my mom

g)spending time with my nephew

h)spending time with my God-daughter
i) doing favors for people

What makes you come alive?

The realization

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.  
~Charles du Bos

                                                                                  (...sometimes it's too late)

found on twitter

@rolandsmartin A hater can watch you fail 1 million times, but will look away from one victory. Win anyway.

seek ye find ye

"So is there in us a world of love to somewhat,
though we know not what in the world that should be."
~Traherne


Still to discover and learn
of the powers that burn deep.

I am slow to learn,

though shy by nature, 

I will evolve right before your very eyes

if you choose to witness

my bumbling about. 

I will always respond

if I know 

you are there. 
                                       -- Seek ye / find ye, by AlexGeorge

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

-Albert Einstein

WTF??

Bachmann Believes Black People Were Better Off During  Slavery?       

GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has signed a conservative pledge called "The Marriage Vow -- A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family." It's not surprising that it's anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage and anti-divorce. But one particular piece has everyone up in arms over the idea that she and other signatories think that black people were better off during slavery:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.
Do Bachmann and others who signed the pledge actually think we were better off without freedom and with all of the other emotional and physical horrors that accompanied being enslaved? We don't know, quite honestly doubt they care, and don't believe that's actually the point (and the very accuracy of the statement -- including whether living arrangements during slavery are what we'd consider "two-parent households" -- is a whole different conversation).

What's actually disturbing here is the total willingness to invoke slavery -- as well as the current state of the black family -- to serve as a cheap emotional hook to promote a conservative agenda that has nothing more to do with African Americans than it does with anyone else (not unlike the infamous "The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb" billboards).
So while Bachmann and others who sign this pledge will score points with racists who like the dig at black people as well as conservatives who like the underlying political ideology of "The Marriage Vow," the rest of us should focus not so much on what they believe about the state of the African-American family but on what they're willing to say about it to serve their own political ambitions.

  --courtesy  eurweb.com


oh yeah, they had it good back then.

You could spin anything into a positive if you are twisted enough and willing to  ignore the truth..

Something Big

Listening to ...

I saw this bumper sticker today

Friday Flashback-

A really sad fact

Did you know that more African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole right now than were enslaved in 1850 ?

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that as of 2008, there were more than 846,000 black men in prison, making up 40.2 percent of all inmates in the system. The article highlights a recent talk given by author Michelle Alexander, who puts those numbers in context. Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, told an audience at the Pasadena Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, "More African-American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began."
Alexander argues that prisons have become the latest form of economic and social disenfranchisement for young people of color, particularly black men. In it, she grapples with a central question: If crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows, then why have rates of incarcerated men of color skyrocketed over the past 30 years? The "war on drugs," which focuses primarily on communities of color, is the answer, although multiple studies have proved that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or higher than blacks. Despite this data, four of five black youths in some inner-city communities can expect to be incarcerated in their lifetimes.

Alexander discusses how convicted felons are subject to forms of discrimination reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. This includes being denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits, much like their parents or grandparents.
Alexander raises a pressing issue as states like Florida move to privatize prison systems and strip convicted felons of the right to vote even after completing their sentences. The only thing sadder than having more men in prison now than in slavery during 1850 is that many don't understand that slavery is still legal within the prison system. Indeed, it is the only place where slavery is still legal in the United States. It is clear that our community is in trouble. What are we going to do about it?"


--courtesy, eurweb.com

A Proverb

Il n'y a pas d'un choix d'oreillers si doux comme la conscience claire.

R I P Caylee Anthony

(There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience)

                   ~French Proverb

I happen to have 4 married friends that desperately want to have children and can't seem to conceive.  They're taking out loans and maxing their credit cards to pay for invitro-fertilization as a last resort before trying to adopt.  My heart aches for them because they have so much love to give. I have female friends who see their husbands interacting with their nieces and nephews and all they want is to give their husbands  a  son or daughter of their own.  I have friends that are  currently adopting a little boy from Ethiopia, and another set of friends adopting a little girl from China.

And then I know people that get pregnant every time they open their legs. And they don't even want the children they produced. My mom currently takes care of 5 children, all by the same mother, the daughter of a friend from church, and the oldest  of that woman's children is 7 yrs old. And my mom has to beg the mother to come pick them up every evening.Sometimes they have to spend the night when the mother is too drunk to come pick them up.

It's just sad.  It's so unfair.

There are no words.

The essentials

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, and passion.

                                     -Nadia Boulanger

Newsflash: 15th trimester abortions now legal in Florida !!!

After less than 11 hours of deliberation, a jury Tuesday found Casey Anthony not guilty of first-degree murder and the other most serious charges against her in the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter.

But the jury convicted her on four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to law enforcement officers.As the verdict was read, Casey Anthony cried from her seat in the courtroom, breathing deeply as she looked forward. She then hugged her defense attorney Jose Baez and other members of her defense team.

Orange County Chief Judge Belvin Perry Jr. set sentencing at 9 a.m. Thursday for Casey Anthony. She faces up to a year in jail on each of the charges of lying to police.

All 12 jurors in the case have declined to speak to the media, court spokeswoman Karen Levey told reporters. "They are just not interested," she said, adding their response was an "unequivocal no." Perry has barred the release of their names at this point, Levey said.

"There are no winners in this case," Baez told reporters after the verdict. "Caylee has passed on far, far too soon." He said his motivation for the last three years has been seeking justice for Caylee as well as Casey Anthony.

"Casey did not murder Caylee," he said. "It's that simple. And today, our system of justice has not dishonored her memory by a false conviction."

--courtesy, cnn.com

It's been said that all the above photos were taken while Caylee Anthony's body was decomposing. Would you be partying after your child 'disappeared'?

Wassup with florida (and texas, and arizona)?

wassup with justice?

Did you?

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

i feel like a party

Note to self

"My father has a saying-- Get from around people with your same problem and get around the ones with the solution.”
--Taraji P Henson