Thursday 30 August 2012

POST ON WHITE RAPPERS

   
Uploaded by  on Oct 25, 2009
Music video by Cypress Hill performing Insane In The Brain. (C) 1993 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Linked Comment

  • he's not even white he's mix mexican and cuben white people never could rap.
  • Saying white people cannot rap is absurd. You clearly just have no idea what youre talking about
    3rd Bass, Aesop Rock, Atmosphere/Slug, Beastie Boys, El-P, cage, Bubba Sparxxx, Eyedea, House Of Pain, Hilltop Hoods, Ill Bill, Mad Child, MC Serch, Necro, LoopTroop, Non Phixion, RA The Rugged Man, Sage Francis, Brother Ali, Vinnie Paz. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE WHITE RAPPERS IS DOPE! Theyre just a little above your shitty hip hop knowledge.

So Slaves Built the White House

I just saw this pic on I will vote for Obama in 2012.'s page!! I love it!! If you do too CLICK LIKE!!



You didn’t build the White House; slaves did.

“Slaves were the largest labor pool when Congress in 1790 decided to create a new national capital along the Potomac surrounded by the two slave-owning states of Maryland and Virginia,” according to the June 1, 2005, Associated Press article “Capit
ol Slave Labor Studied” published in The Washington Times. It is estimated that over 400 slaves were used
to help build the U.S. Capitol.

Did you know that twelve American presidents owned slaves?

Image shared by: Micah Ray

Read more at Suite101: Did Slaves Build U.S. Capitol and White House?: How Black Labor Force Helped Construct Washington D.C. Landmarks | Suite101.com http://suite101.com/article/did-slaves-build-us-capitol-and-white-house-a87685#ixzz24yhy79h6
http://suite101.com/article/did-slaves-build-us-capitol-and-white-house-a87685
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/video/blog/2009/01/slaves_built_the_white_house_u.html


Few Americans learned in school that slaves were about half the workforce that built the White House and the U.S. Capitol. A slave named Philip Reid supervised construction of the Statue of Freedom hoisted atop the Capitol dome in 1863. Such revelations rightly disturb our view of important symbols of democracy and remind us that slavery is at the foundation of our nation's history. Well-known bastions of American capital also have the institution of slavery at their foundation. Last Tuesday, lawyers Deadria Farmer-Paellmann and Ed Fagan filed lawsuits against insurance company Aetna, railroad giant CSX, and FleetBoston bank, claiming that these companies profited from slavery. These are only a fraction of the prosperous American companies whose wealth came in part from the slave trade.

Railroads utilized slave labor to lay rail. Tobacco firms used slaves in the harvest. Southern utilities used slaves to construct oil lines. Mining companies used slaves to process salt and coal.

The unpaid productivity of these slaves was converted into corporate income and wealth that still sustains many companies today. Slaves were denied not only wages but the opportunity to buy property, build companies and pass assets on to future generations.

Many people know the expression "40 acres and a mule", but don't know it was a false promise. In 1865, General Sherman issued an order providing homesteads to freed slaves. But President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, overrode the order and gave the land back to white Confederate landowners. Instead of 40 acres and a mule, freed slaves got brutal sharecropping and segregation.

The descendants of slaves continue to find their ability to jump on board the asset-building train impaired. Fault lines laid long ago forged a vast and enduring wealth gap between white Americans and African-Americans. In 1998, the median net worth of white households was $81,700, while the median net worth of African-American households was just $10,000. The homeownership rate among white families is 74 percent, while for African-American families it is just 48 percent nationally, and much lower in some local areas.

If the foundation of the Capitol was dug and laid by slaves, and some of America's most successful corporations have profits from slavery in their early capital formation, perhaps the story we tell ourselves about the creation of all wealth needs to be examined and those invisible foundation stones be brought into the light.

Slaves weren't poor because people of African heritage are lazy. They were poor because the laws of the land prohibited them from getting paid for their work and from owning assets.

In generations since, structural obstacles have continued to impede black asset development. African-American homeowners are often subjected to discriminatory and predatory lending practices that unfairly inflate their mortgage costs and rob them of the home equity that so many Americans draw on for college, business start-ups and retirement. Insurance companies are only now coming to acknowledge that for many years they charged African- American customers unjustifiably higher rates than whites. After World War II, the GI bill and Veterans Administration helped almost exclusively white families to become homeowners.

When black farmers filed their historic lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture (DOA) in 1997, DOA investigators presented damning evidence of decades of discrimination: 84 percent of the white applicants had their loan applications approved, while only 56 percent of the black applicants received loans. The result was that black farmers lost their farms at more than triple the rate of white farmers.

We can no more replace the foundation stones of the US Capitol than we can change the wealth foundations of many American businesses. However, with the truth of these foundations now being excavated, we can and should adopt fair rules to redress the injustice of the past.

At the UN Conference Against Racism held in South Africa last fall, governments around the globe declared the slave trade a "crime against humanity." Aetna, CSX, FleetBoston and others should be held accountable for any complicity in this crime.

Public policies can also help people of all races build lasting financial security. We can protect and strengthen affirmative action policies that redress past discrimination. We can ban predatory lending practices. We can enforce non-discrimination at the Department of Agriculture. We can launch a new GI bill to offer all working families a boost to homeownership. These are the kind of policies that should serve as democratic cornerstones of our 21st century economy.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

Men, who needs them


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Men, Who Needs Them?

Boise, Idaho
Kelsey Dake
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MAMMALS are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.
That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.
The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents.
With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.
That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead.
Think about your own history. Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.
After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you.
Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass.
Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago.
And while birth seems like a separation, for us mammals it’s just a new form of attachment to our female parent. If your mother breast-fed you, as our species has done for nearly our entire existence, then you suckled from her all your water, protein, sugar, fats and even immune protection. She sampled your diseases by holding you close and kissing you, just as your father might have done; but unlike your father, she responded to your infections by making antibodies that she passed to you in breast milk.
I don’t dismiss the years I put in as a doting father, or my year at home as a house husband with two young kids. And I credit my own father as the more influential parent in my life. Fathers are of great benefit. But that is a far cry from “necessary and sufficient” for reproduction.
If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw or turkey baster, and the basic technique hasn’t changed much since Talmudic scholars debated the religious implications of insemination without sex in the fifth century. If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.
Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis.
It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs.
Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?
Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.
When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”
Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.
Greg Hampikian is a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University and the director of the Idaho Innocence Project.
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    • ZephyrLake
    • Florida
    NYT Pick
    From a strictly biological perspective yes, men do play a limited role in reproduction but life and raising children is far more than just the physical aspects of reproduction. To suggest that men are irrelevant to the lives of their offspring because of their limited involvement in the procreation process is absurd. Despite Hampikian’s citing of one sociologists claim that the number of parents has less of an effect on children than poverty, most studies of child development indicate that a stable 2 parent male/female household is the best environment for children. I realize this is contrary to liberal dogma whereby all forms of family structure are equally good for child rearing, but the evidence does not support that position.

    Presumably at some point in the future artificial wombs will be developed making both men and women irrelevant to procreation. What then?

    Hampikian reduces a serious and complex subject to a very limited and strictly biological position to make a case that since men don’t have much to do with procreation they’re irrelevant to children’s lives and can be dispensed with. This is a gross oversimplification of reality but I’m sure it plays well in certain quarters.

The Real Romney


OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Real Romney

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The purpose of the Republican convention is to introduce America to the real Mitt Romney. Fortunately, I have spent hours researching this subject. I can provide you with the definitive biography and a unique look into the Byronic soul of the Republican nominee:
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Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god ofmutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.
Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.
Mitt grew up in a modest family. His father had an auto body shop called the American Motors Corporation, and his mother owned a small piece of land, Brazil. He had several boyhood friends, many of whom owned Nascar franchises, and excelled at school, where his fourth-grade project, “Inspiring Actuaries I Have Known,” was widely admired.
The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn.
The teenage years were more turbulent. He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter. He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless, and organized bake sales with proceeds going to the moderately rich.
Some people say he retreated into himself during these years. He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection. He bought a mood ring, but it remained permanently transparent. His ability to turn wine into water detracted from his popularity at parties.
There was, frankly, a period of wandering. After hearing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Romney decided to leave Mormonism and become Amish. He left the Amish faith because of its ban on hair product, and bounced around before settling back in college. There, he majored in music, rendering Mozart’s entire oeuvre in PowerPoint.
His love affair with Ann Davies, the most impressive part of his life, restored his equilibrium. Always respectful, Mitt and Ann decided to elope with their parents. They went on a trip to Israel, where they tried and failed to introduce the concept of reticence. Romney also went on a mission to France. He spent two years knocking on doors, failing to win a single convert. This was a feat he would replicate during his 2008 presidential bid.
After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance. After Harvard, he took his jawline to Bain Consulting, a firm with very smart people with excessive personal hygiene. While at Bain, he helped rescue many outstanding companies, like Pan Am, EasternAirlines, Atari and DeLorean.
Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band’s music “too angry.”
Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.
After a successful stint at Bain, Romney was lured away to run the Winter Olympics, the second most Caucasian institution on earth, after the G.O.P. He then decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. His campaign slogan, “Vote Romney: More Impressive Than You’ll Ever Be,” was not a hit, but Romney won the race anyway on an environmental platform, promising to make the state safe for steeplechase.
After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run. He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed. At the convention, where his Secret Service nickname is Mannequin, Romney will talk about his real-life record: successful business leader, superb family man, effective governor, devoted community leader and prudent decision-maker. If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.
Joe Nocera is off today.