-A note to God

يا الله انا بالوحدة الشديدة. تعلمون ما أحتاج إليه.
 للايجار

The Hills

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
 My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

--Psalm 121:1-2

RIP- Celebrities we lost in 2012

Whitney Houston

Donna Summer

Don Cornelius

Sherman Hemsley

Etta James

Michael Clarke Duncan

Yvette Wilson

Chuck Brown

Fontella Bass

People may not know her name, but almost all know  Fontella Bass' most famous song, "Rescue Me," a track Bass wrote and recorded in 1965 and that would go on to become one of the most famous, beloved tracks of the era.

Note to self

for 2013

For me it's self doubt, my obsessive need to put the needs of everyone before my own, my wanting to be appreciated, and after reading someone's  Facebook page about themselves on Christmas, I realized that I don't  think I love myself enough.
I need to remove what is weighing me down. But how? I need to pray on this.

_Haki R. Madhubuti

Me gusta mucho

-Prince

Another Lonely Christmas-    ( listen to it before he removes it from Youtube)

Overheard

Overheard at a sushi restaurant this afternoon:

"I heard you’re going over to Janet’s house for Christmas dinner. When you leave the house be sure you shake your coat real good before you get home. Them roaches she got be big. They have like facial expressions and stuff. They be looking at you like you entered the wrong apartment. “

Do have you a favorite Christmas memory?

My favorite Christmas memory- when I was 12, my grandfather told me he was too ill to cook and that I had to make dinner that Christmas. So he sat on the stool I always sat on as a child, and he observed as I made the Turkey and dressing, boiled the potatoes for the potato salad, made the spaghetti, cleaned and cooked the chittlin's, made the candied yams, fried the chicken, made the sweet potato pies, baked macaroni & cheese, baked a coconut pineapple cake (my first), made cornbread, made collard greens ( along the way he told me what to do and what not to do), fried some okra etc,. and when company arrived and my mom and sister set the table, he suddenly wasn't ill anymore, and everyone enjoyed everything. I doubted my ability but he was my biggest cheerleader. He told me I had sat on that same stool watching him cook since I was 3. He passed away about 15 yrs ago, but I still feel a closeness to him whenever I'm cooking or baking. He was always cooking for big groups of people. After he retired he even cooked for a homeless shelter as if it was a fulltime job, but he did it for free.

Do have you a favorite Christmas memory?

Merry Christmas, by the way!

-Donny Hathway

The Sounds of Blackness-remember them?

Just a thought

One of the biggest flaws of people are pretending to be blind to their own mistakes but do not pretend to be deaf towards the mistakes of others.
--author unknown


#Jussayin

All I want for Christmas is ...

1. A Kitchen Aid 5 Quart Artisan Mixer in purple or red, with all the attachments.
2. For my mom to tell me everything she knows about my adoption.

That's it. 

One costs about $400, and the other is free.  If  I had to pick one I'd take the latter. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, without her getting defensive every time I bring it up.

 

Note to self -- Resolution 2013

As we know this life is short and it gets shorter as the days go by....so don't waste it on people who don't care about your heart, your pain, your dreams or your love...At this point in the game have good people in your life and more important be good to others...

Happy Holidays!

Quote of the day

A single leaf working alone provides no shade.

--Chuck Page

Time To Profile White Men?

MSNBC article by David Sirota

Yesterday, during a cable news discussion of gun violence and the Newtown school shooting, I dared
mention a taboo truism. During a conversation on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of
white men,  there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.
My comment was in response to U.S. Rep. James Langevin (D) floating the idea of employing the Secret Service for such profiling, and I theorized that because the profiling would inherently target white guys, the political response to such an idea might be similar to the Republican response  to the 2009 Homeland Security report looking, in part, at the threat of right-wing terrorism. As you might recall, the same GOP that openly supports  profiling — and  demonizing-- Muslims essentially claimed that the DHS report was unacceptable because its focus on white male terrosirt groups  allegedly stereotyped (read: offensively profiled) conservatives. For making this point, I quickly became the day’s villain in the right-wing media. From the  Daily Caller, to Fox News, to Breitbart, to Glenn Beck’s the Blaze, to all the right-wing blogs and Twitter feeds that echo those outlets’ agitprop, I was attacked for "injective divisive racial politics"   into the post-Newtown discussion (this is a particularly ironic attack coming from Breitbart – the same website that manufactured the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.                                                                  

The conservative response to my statement, though, is the real news here.
Let’s review: Any honest observer should be able to admit that if the gunmen in these mass shootings mostly had, say, Muslim names or were mostly, say, African-American men, the country right now wouldn’t be confused about the causes of the violence, and wouldn’t be asking broad questions. There would probably be few queries or calls for reflection, and mostly definitive declarations blaming the bloodshed squarely on Islamic fundamentalism or black nationalism, respectively. Additionally, we would almost certainly hear demands that the government intensify the extant profiling systems already aimed at those groups.
Yet, because the the perpetrators in question in these shootings are white men and not ethnic or religious minorities, nobody is talking about demographic profiling them as a group. The discussion, instead, revolves around everything from gun control, to mental health services, to violence in entertainment — everything, that is, except trying to understanding why the composite of these killers is so similar across so many different massacres. This, even though there are plenty of reasons  for that topic to be at least a part of the conversation.
Recounting the truth of these double standards is, of course, boringly mundane, which means my comment on television summarizing them is an equally boring and mundane statement of the obvious. However, as evidenced by the aggressive attempt to turn those comments into controversial headline-grabbing news over the weekend, the conservative movement has exposed its desperation — specifically, its desperation to preserve its White Victimization Mythology.
In this mythology, the white man as a single demographic subgroup can never be seen as a perpetrator and must always be portrayed as the unfairly persecuted scapegoat. In this mythology, to even reference an undeniable truth about how white privilege operates on a political level (in this case, to prevent a government profiling system of potential security threats even though such a system exists for other groups) is to be guilty of both “injecting divisive racial politics” and somehow painting one’s "opponents as racist"— even when nobody called any individual a racist.
In this mythology, in short, to mention truths about societal double standards — truths that are inconvenient or embarrassing to white people — is to be targeted for attack by the right-wing media machine.
Of course, just as I didn’t make such an argument yesterday on MSNBC, I’m not right now arguing for a system of demographically profiling white guys as a means of stopping mass murderers (that’s right, the headline at Beck’s website, the Blaze, is categorically lying by insisting I did make such an argument, when the MSNBC video proves that’s not even close to true). After all, broad demographic profiling is not only grotesquely bigoted in how it unduly stereotypes whole groups, it also   doesn't actually work as a security measure and runs the risk of becoming yet another Big Brother-ish monster (this is especially true when a lawmaker is forwarding the idea of deploying a quasi-military apparatus like the Secret Service).
Additionally, I’m not saying we should avoid the complex discussion about myriad issues (gun control, mental health, violence in Hollywood products, etc.) that we are having in the aftermath of the Connecticut tragedy. On the contrary, I believe it is good news that those nuanced conversations — rather than simplistic calls for punitive measures against a demographic group — are able to happen, and it’s particularly good news that they are persisting in the face of pro-gun extremists’ best effort o polarize the conversation.
But the point here is that those tempered and nuanced conversations are only able to happen because the demographic at the center of it all is white guys. That is the one group in America that gets to avoid being referred to in aggregate negative terms (and gets to avoid being unduly profiled by this nation’s security apparatus), which means we are defaulting to a much more dispassionate and sane conversation — one that treats the perpetrators as deranged individuals, rather than typical and thus stereotype-justifying representatives of an entire demographic.
While such fair treatment should be the norm for all citizens, the double standard at work makes clear it is still a special privilege for a select white few. That’s the issue at the heart of my comment on MSNBC — and it is a pressing problem no matter how much the conservative media machine wants to pretend it isn’t.

Your thoughts?

Pic of the day

President Obama gets caught in Spider-Man's web.

Person of the year

Living it

 A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.

― William G.T. Shedd

Safety is nice, but when you are completely safe, you really can’t do much. To do things, you have to leave at least some of your safety behind and take risks. While prudence has a prominent role in balancing safety and risk, what you have in the absence of risk is hardly much of a life. Risk is what ships are built for. They balance the risks of the seas and waves by designing how high the sides of the ships are.
To some, racing is a thrill they cannot give up. Dirt track, motorcycles, dragsters, trucks or bicycles. The balance of safety and risk says they should use proper safety gear, and only do their racing on a closed course away from bystanders.
In the end, only you can decide if the risk is worth it, but if all you ever do is hide in your fortress, you probably aren’t going to enjoy life as much as you would if you were out there living it.
 

Tuesday Flashback

Hatred slips through the metal detector

I'm struggling to understand the shooting here in Oregon and in Connecticut, both having occurred within the  span of a week, and I'm also wondering how to deal with them,  as I'm sure you are as well. For once, I am grateful I don't have any school-age children, because I wouldn't know what to say to assure them  that they're in a safe environment when I can't even assure myself of my own safety.  I thought of my brother, his wife and my 8 year-old Goddaughter, and my friend Luke and his 4 yr-old daughter  and friends at work with their school-age children, and my eyes have been watery all day.  That's what makes it really hard. It's the children. The grief and the anger is overwhelming. I'll admit that I have cried a couple times today when no one was around.

Two unimaginable tragedies. Here is a fact: Video cameras, Buzzers on doors, People sitting at desks in the hallways of schools, even metal detectors are not security against an armed attacker. The people maintaining these items could very well be the first victims of the assault. These measures and methods taken by schools are to give an illusion of safety to caring parents and teachers. It is an assurance that schools are seemingly doing something to protect children. None of these measures however, protect children from an armed intruder bent on killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. In terms of schools, we must understand the people we refer to are children.

 How do you make sense of the senseless? In my lifetime these tragic attacks have occurred at the college, high school, middle school and now at the elementary school level. Most recently, they also occurred at a movie theater  shopping mall and a political open air, town hall gathering complete with a congresswoman.
The Terrorists of 911 have changed how we all travel today. Measures are taken to prevent weapons being taken aboard planes. Yes we are inconvenienced and many of us complain every time we go through those long lines. We comply, because it is reasonable, and it insures our right and freedom to travel. One imbecilic terrorist made an unsuccessful attempt to use a shoe bomb and today, and every day, any American boarding a plane takes off his/her shoes. We all complain about that, but it is a reasonable sacrifice for safety. The cost of us learning this lesson of reasonableness about safety and security in the air came at a huge price to our country. It took well over 3,000 lives in NYC, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C.

What is the total number of dead children that we need to get to before we can begin discussions to change what we are doing now? Obviously, what we are doing is not working. We need to have a discussion based on facts and not rhetoric. Too many of the facts about guns and their control have been distorted by too many people and a few organizations, well healed with the ability to put out misinformation and propaganda. We need critical thinking skills to sort through all of the BS. We need honesty, clarity and focus. We cannot start from a position stating that “nothing can be done”.  If we ask, how do we prevent another incident where 20 children, ages 5-10, and 8 adults being killed in an elementary school in a matter of minutes. How can an educated civilized culture accept that “nothing can be done” as an answer? If the solution doesn’t begin NOW with US, when will it begin? Is there an actual number of dead children that is a tipping point? More importantly, are my kids going to be in that number? Are yours? I believe in the constitution, and I believe in the Second amendment. I believe that citizens have the right too own guns. I also believe that right comes with a very big responsibility. Not everyone is responsible. Not everyone is mentally stable enough to be held responsible. I believe that we can regulate guns with commonsense laws in consideration of the facts, and not the rhetoric. I believe that reasonable people can look at real facts and come to reasonable conclusions that can lead to reasonable controls. The process however must begin with discussion. That almost never happens after these horrific events. There will be blog posts like this, editorials, documentaries, and maybe a “60 Minutes” segment, but probably no real substantive, focused meaningful discussion to protect kids will ever take place in the political arena. Politicians need to put the right to life for our kids first. The discussions will move to protect the rights of people who may not capable of responsibility to hold in their hands the lives of our children. If not now, when? If not us, who?

Survival of the fittest

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running. 

- Christopher McDougall

Throwback Pic of the week

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with baby Malia

What if?

 

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. ~Don Herold

Overheard on the train

Female 1 -"Technically it's not lying."


Female 2-"So does that mean you'll never have him meet me or the rest of the family? 'Cause I'm not lying for you.

Female 1-"Girl, you gotta keep this secret."

Female 2-"But you answered his ad. He said he wanted kids, and you ain't got no uterus. And you know why you ain't got no uterus, Felicia, formerly known as Reginald. You gotta tell him the truth.

Female 1 - "But can't I pretend to have a few miscarriages during the relationship, then convince him that we should try adoption?



( then they both got off the train)

Pic of the week

Oh. My. God.

I was watching a movie on TV1, and saw a shortened version of this commercial and I hyperventilated. You know how I do when I see Halle Berry in something new

Question of the Week

Are you the type of person that is in the moment or are you the type that takes pictures of it to prove you were there?

The Universal law

Life humbles you when you disrespect it.

The greatest among you will be your servant.  For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted (Matthew 23:11-12).

 

What I love about life is this one universal law: You will reap what you sow.  You can count on it every single time.  You cannot walk around practicing evil – being deceptive, manipulative and treating people poorly – and think that everything is going to be alright with you.  It is not so. 

Just a thought. 

A small price

                                   There's a price to pay for what we want the most.