4more

Whew!

That was a close one.  At least it felt like it.

But, given the President's coattails, squashing some of the worst ideologues, partisans,  chauvinists, and intolerants in the process, I can't help but wonder if he didn't intentionally throw that first debate just to keep the dark money invested in a losing Romney campaign instead of many other winnable Senate races.

Like Andrew Sullivan says, "meep meep".

Now, let's get back to work.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his own words, on his day

Nothing I can write could match what King says himself.

Listen to the WHOLE speech.  His last speech, the night before he was assassinated.
Martin Luther King, Jr: "Mountaintop" speech full length from Filip Goc on Vimeo. It wasn't just about race, or class, or labor. It was about keeping the promise of America for everyone. Forever.

First Amendment Remedies

A very brief comment about the revolution we just saw in Egypt:

There's a reason why freedom of speech, religion, and public assembly come first in the Bill of Rights, before the right to bear arms.

THOSE are the things that are the basis of your freedom.  Not a weapon.

The founding fathers knew it.  Gandhi knew it.  MLK knew it.  And it looks like the people in the Middle East are starting to figure it out.

In the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, your 9mm cannot guarantee your freedom.

Only the courage of your convictions and the purity of your ethics has the power to do that.

One is just an emblem of your fear.  The other is a symbol of strength unfailing.

Sleep on that a bit, patriots.

Congratulations, Egyptians.

Conspiracy of Dunces

So, a few things about this year's crop of candidates.

The other night, Rachel Maddow mentioned a GOP Senate candidate who makes a point of telling his supporters that he can't pronounce names like "Sotamayor". Or "Ahmadinejad".  Or "Chu".  It's always a big laugh line for him.  To this day, Sarah Palin is OFFENDED that Kathy Couric had the nerve to ask her what newspapers she reads.

Now, there are other conservatives who at least recognize that creating the appearance of education is a good thing.  Christine O'Donnell tried to pretend she went to Princeton and Oxford. But, I can tell you for a fact that there are no mice with human brains running around the Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.  Now, Glenn Beck is trying to create his own university, with classes on Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I think about the creationists, who've now retreated into the realm of "intelligent design", which basically breaks down like this: a lot of really complicated things happened to create the universe, and I don't understand it, but since it all works, there MUST be some intelligence behind it.

I know studying and reading and learning aren't exactly easy.  But, since when did willful ignorance become a virtue?

Why are people now PROUD to proclaim that they don't know things?  Why are people ANGRY when you suggest that they should read more?

I know I'm weird, right?  Because I'm an obsessive researcher.  I love to know, well, everything.  So I study like crazy.  But I'm not asking people to be like me.  I'm just asking people to, I don't know, learn something.

I mean, if you got on a plane, you wouldn't want the guy who is proud that he doesn't know anything about aerodynamics or flight controls or, well, flying, to actually pilot the plane, right?   I mean, no, I don't know how to fly, but I'm not insisting that the pilot be as ignorant as I am about flying just so I don't feel, what, inadaquate as we're soaring at 30,000 feet.

So why are we so ready to vote for "the guy I could have a beer with".  Christine O'Donnell says "vote for me because I'd do what you'd do".

No!  I want someone who'd do what someone who knows more about these kind of things than me.  At least it gets done right.  My pride is not so fragile that I need to see the country go down the tubes just so I can say to my congressman "I could do your job".

I remember reading Bill Bradley's book, "Times Present, Times Past", where he talked about his involvement in the US Senate with water management legislation in California, which is a stupidly complex thing involving land rights, aquaduct construction & management, and a ton of other things I know nothing about.  The end result is that clean water comes out of my tap.  I WANT someone smart about these issues in there making the decisions.

Representative government means representing my interests, not replicating my own stupidity.

Wake up, people!

But the reality is that all of these GOP/Tea Party loons are just a big distraction.  There are people who fundamentally don't believe in government who support these clowns, because the government is all that stands between them and a state of nature, which is what they really want.  There are some economically powerful people who want all of the laws to go away so that we're returned to a world where only the strong survive, because they figure they're strong and they'll win.  They want you to think that government doesn't serve a purpose, or is only worthy of clowns, charlatans, and con men.  And, frankly, I think those people are just fundamentally unAmerican, because the end result of such a world is feudalism.

A conservative I greatly respect is David Frum.  I don't agree with his philosophies or political agendas, but I admire his firm faith that government is a place where the country can be made better.  And he's commented on his blog several times that many of these so-called candidates from the GOP lately actually have no interest in running the country.  Mike Huckabee and Palin and O'Donnell are only in the race so they can get their own TV shows later on some network that pays them a lot of money.

Serving in public office is a privilege that carries a heavy responsibility.  If you believe in your principles, you should want to be the sharpest, smartest, most logically & legislatively sound public official you can be.  Frankly, I wish there were more David Frums.

Don't Let will.i.am Destroyed America!

Remember this video?



And how we were all so inspired and fired up and ready to go two years ago?

I may have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but it's worth repeating:

I had a dream back in February of 2009, about month after the inauguration. In the dream, I was at Camp David during a snow-covered winter night, interviewing President Obama for this very blog.

I kid you not.

And after he'd given me the walking tour of the place and introduced me to the First Lady (where, I'm sure, if it had been in real life, I would have traded a few stories with her about the old Third World Center at Princeton), I stopped him and asked him if there was anything he wanted to say directly to my readers. And the President's words were, and I quote:

"Keep dreaming. But be ready to do the work."

I'm reminded of John F. Kennedy's speech about the moon landing.

"We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The easy part, my friends, was electing Obama.

When it was all a wonderful silly dream about how amazing we could make this country.

But the fact of the matter is, it's a lot of freakin' work. And I don't have to tell you that work, frankly, sucks. It's tiring and time consuming and it takes away from all the games you want to play and all the movies you want to watch.

But laziness has a very high cost.

My point is, things are very hard in the country right now. And we keep hearing about this so-called enthusiasm gap, where all of the energy appears to be with the people who are so mad that Obama's not a magician and can just make 30 million jobs and trillions of dollars in debt to China and a crappy infrastructure and political corruption disappear by wiggling his nose like Samantha on "Bewitched".

And THESE fools would rather that Obama stop, so we can keep on losing 700,000 jobs a month, like we were back when I had that dream.

I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to all of you who watched that will.i.am song and decided that I should vote for Obama because it would be kewl.

To Hell with Kewl. This country still needs your help. We're moving, very slowly, in the right direction, but we need to continue to have a supportive congress and local government to make it happen.

Obama's not officially on the ballot next month, but everything that he and his supporters have bled to put into law is. And all of the positive things that have been done and could be done are in jeopardy.

Are you really telling me that just because will.i.am didn't call up all of his celebrity buddies to make a new video for this midterm election, you don't have a beat you can dance to that can take your butt into a voting booth next month?

Do we really have to have theme music before we can get to work and save the country?

Just because the Black Eyed Peas aren't inspired to make this election entertaining, that's not an excuse, people!

Click the link in the title of this blog, find out who's on the ballot locally, and VOTE!

And email 20 other people you know and make sure they vote! And tell them to do the same.

Our country is literally dancing on the precipice.

Things I Didn't Know About Black America: Clarence Thomas

Thanks to my fellow netizen Brokenbeatnik, I came across the Washington Post article about the opinion Clarence Thomas wrote supporting the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Chicago's anti-handgun law as an unreasonable restriction of the 2nd Amendment.

Now, ordinarily, I'm not big on gun rights (after all, as my brother always says, nobody in the hood manufactures Uzis), and I'm really not crazy about Clarence Thomas, but I've gotta say, he really caught my eye with this opinion.  If you look at the nearly 20 page paper he wrote, you see that his vigorous defense of 2nd amendment rights is founded in his own first hand experience, I'm sure, of growing up in the Jim Crow South.

Cue Wikipedia again.

I didn't realize that Thomas' home town was founded by freed slaves, or that Gullah (or Geechee) was the spoken language in his home.  I didn't realize the man didn't live in a house with in-door plumbing until he was 7 years old.  I didn't know that he dropped out of seminary after hearing his classmates celebrating Martin Luther King's assassination.

If I did, I shouldn't have been surprised that, in his mind, the Federally protected right to own a gun, unabridged by a local or state authority, was the only think protecting him & his family (heck, even his whole home town) from organized, often local government sanctioned, white racist terrorism from the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and God knows what else.  Justice Thomas practically echoes Rob Brown's book "Negroes With Guns", a tome of self defense that became the cornerstone of Huey Newton's thinking in founding the Black Panther Party.  I have huge problems with many of Brother Clarence's votes, and I'll disagree with him with a lot of things, but I doubt I'll ever question the sincerity of his intentions again.

It reminds me of how I used to think of Condolezza Rice:  she grew up with the same four Black little girls who were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963 that Spike Lee featured in his documentary "Four Little Girls".  I used to think, "How can she not be more super-pro-Black nationalist after having lived through the horrors of that era?"

But Thomas reminds me that, while many Black folks were radicalized by the internal terrorism of the late 50's and '60's, just as many were raised in households more aligned with Booker T. Washington's thinking than, say, my man W.E.B. DuBois.  That the best revenge was success & dignity in the face of the terror, and those children like Clarence Thomas or Condolezza Rice or Colin Powell owed it to the people who died to reach and strive as far as they could.  So many radicals who didn't have access to the opportunities they had ended up dead, incarcerated, or ostracized.

Huey Newton?  H. Rap Brown?  These are not stories with happy endings.

But are those the only choices?

One could argue that Clarence, Condolezza, & Colin and many others like them earned their success by turning their backs on the broader Black community.  Yes, they're all involved in charity and philanthropy, but when decisions were made in their midsts regarding economic policy, war policy, social policy, and the like that had a direct impact on African Americans at large, did they really do all that they could to protect their voiceless brothers and sisters?

I don't know.

Just like I don't know what sort of sacrifices they had to make in order to reach their positions.  Does their mere presence in those positions carry more weight than their actions while in those positions?

My generation came of age in the post-"Black is Beautiful" era.  We take our ethnic pride and abilities as a given.  But that has not always been the case.  Folks like Clarence and Ward Connerly and others carry the scars of de-legitimacy to this day.  And the memories of the horror probably never go away.

I find myself thinking a lot about "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" as I read about Clarence Thomas this week.

Just getting to the door has been so hard for so many.  But does simply sitting there make it easier for others to join you and/or walk through?  Or are you responsible for wedging it open, no matter the personal cost?

Things I Didn't Know About Black America: Supermax

I grew up in a house with three sets of encyclopedias, which, of course, means, today, I am a compulsive researcher.

Or, as one of my friends from the all-girl's private school around the corner from my all-boy's private school once said, "You're such a little bibliophile."

Whenever I learn about something new that I can't really talk about in some detail and great length, the first thing I do is look it up on Wikipedia.

But through an odd confluence of inputs over the last few days, I find myself knee deep in the recent history of African Americans here in these United States.  So, here's the first in a series of web research diversions into my own cultural & ethnic history...
---------
I was watching Zombieland, and was wondering what else Woody Harrelson was up to as a part of his recent career resurgence.  Cue wikipedia - turns out Woody's dad was a contract killer who died in supermax prison on conviction for taking out a Federal judge and occasionally bragged that he was one of the dudes on the grassy knoll who helped take out JFK.

Crazy, right?

Realizing that I didn't really know what constituted a supermax prison (in short, solitary confinement for everybody 23 hours out of the day and no interaction with any other prisoners), I followed the links to to ADX Florence, the only supermax federal penitentiary.  And the current inmate list reads like a who's who of enemies of the state: FBI double agent Robert Hansen; the shoe bomber; the unabomber; the 1996 Olympic park bomber; Oklahoma City accomplice Terry Nichols; the guy who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing; H. Rap Brown.

H. Rap Brown?!?

Wasn't he supposed to be one of the heroes of the civil rights movement?  Shows how little I know, right?

Cue wikipedia again.

Turns out the brother, one of the founding fathers of the original Black Panther Party for Self Defense (yes, let's get the full name right, folks), had converted to Islam and attempted to become an arbiter of peace of sorts.... until two cops got shot up trying to serve him an arrest warrant (one died) and he fled the scene in a bullet-ridden Mercedes.

In reading this, I realized I'd confused him with Eldridge Cleaver.  Probably because they'd both written books about being Black and radical in America in the 1960's (Brown's "Die, Nigger, Die" and Cleaver's "Soul On Ice").  Honestly, I only really knew about them from Mario Van Peebles' movie "Panther".  Oddly enough, Cleaver had become a born-again Christian and a right wing Republican in his old age before he died.  Brown, for his part, had originally been involved with SNCC - the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee - who helped organize the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and the March on Washington, before interference from law enforcement and increasing threats of violence led to a schism in the group.  They had to change their name because, as one leader said at the time "I don't know how much longer we can stay nonviolent.

But, still: a supermax prison?  That guy is still considered an enemy of the state on the level of a traitorous enemy agent and Al Qaeda operatives?  Really?

More to come on these.  In the meantime, if you're not familiar with the history of SNCC, The Panthers, and the crazy political climate of the late 60's & early '70's, you may want to check some of these out:

Purple Hearts

Work can make strange bedfellows sometimes.

Case in point: Who knew that my good friend & former co-worker from my very first job back in New York City would turn into the wildly successful West Coast blogger, The Truth Laid Bear?

Now, if you look at truthlaidbear.com, the first thing you'll probably notice that he and I have WILDLY different political views. I'm a die-hard Howard Dean-iac, and he's one of the founders of the "Top Conservatives on Twitter".

But, like I alluded to in a recent tweet about Andrew Sullivan, these are the kind of conservatives I can deal with: they're principled, but rational. We can debate & disagree, while still agreeing that we all have the country's (and, consequently, each other's) best interests at heart.

So, even though I think many, many conservatives hide behind the military as an excuse for any number of, shall we say, questionable decisions, I know my friend is sincere in his beliefs and in his support for the soldiers themselves.

And, as a child of a family with deep ties to the Army & Marine Corps, support for wounded vets is the very definition of common ground.

As our president likes to say, there are no Red States or Blue States, but the UNITED States of America.

That said, Mr. Bear recently brought this project to my attention: Project Valour-IT. It's a charitable campaign designed to raise money to provide laptops & other enabling technologies for severely wounded war veterans. He mentioned to me that they'd gotten a ton of support from the conservative blogsphere, but it's virtually invisible to the left side of the social media universe.

Fellow liberals & progressives - I encourage you all to take a look, spread the word, and make a donation. Regardless of your politics, these are people in need. Show your hearts.

For Guido, or requiem for a true tiger

When I was in college, the term "facebook" may as well have been more accurately translated to "sex menu".

I cannot tell you how many hours I and my fellow classmates spent looking through the official guide book published by the university, listing names, addresses, and, yes, pictures of the faces of all the members of our incoming class to determine who was hot or not and just how far away that hotness was from our respective dorm rooms. The freshmen facebook was irreparably dog-eared well before the end of orientation week every September, and I suspect that tradition still lives on today.

Of course, Facebook now has a totally different meaning, turning into an online version of the game show "where are they now?" In many ways, I think the reason Facebook has garnered so much more attention than MySpace is that it seems uniquely designed to help you rediscover those people whom you never thought you would miss until you see their name in a friend request.

Guido Sohne was one of those people.


It would be a bald-faced lie to say that Guido and I were anything more than casual acquaintances back at Princeton. And, considering how few black faces there were, especially within the confines of the Computer Science department during the early '90's, that says a lot. It wouldn't be accurate to say Guido kept to himself, because all I really know is that he didn't really hang out with me. And there's clearly an element of arrogance there on my part - after all, I was the president for Princeton's chapter of NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers, for two years running and organized an entire little community within a community of Black & African students aimed at helping ourselves survive the Princeton E-Quad gauntlet. So I knew and studied and partied and traveled with everybody. If he wasn't where I was, he couldn't possibly be out somewhere else with a whole other set of people, right?

I think that was the weird trick about Princeton: for even a relatively small school (~4,500 undergraduates back in the day), there was enough self-segregation that you could always find ways to make it seem even smaller. As one brother once told me, "I don't even see the white people. I walk around campus, and, it's like they're blurry. Like they're not even really there."

All I really knew about Guido was that he was very cool, friendly, and way, way, way smarter about computer science than I was. He'd disappear for seemingly entire semesters, while the rumors circled around him about some amazing thing he'd done back in his home country of Ghana or some other part of the world.

So, I must admit that I was very pleasantly surprised to reconnect with him via Facebook. Just glad to see his face.

He sent me a pretty long e-mail back describing all of the amazing technological and political activist work he was involved in back in Africa, although he hadn't been back to the US since he left Princeton because, in his words, he'd decided that he was going to come back successful or not at all.

That was October 1, 2007.

And I never replied.

I guess I was just lazy. Like Louis Armstrong said, "we have all the time in the world", right?

The next time I saw Guido's name was when a mutual friend send me a Facebook message this past June asking me if I'd heard that he'd died.

Died.

Of heart failure.

Guido was 34 years old.






Here's a guy who founded companies, co-founded NGOs, advised international foundations, all in the interest of bringing the promise of technology and innovation to those in his home who were less fortunate than he was. He was the living, breathing embodiment of everything Thomas Friedman talks about in his book "The World Is Flat". Someone who had dedicated his life to nothing less than transforming Africa.



It wasn't right.

Guido's death just struck me as colossally, cosmically unfair. Like a tiny crime against humanity had been committed.

And, on top of the injustice of it all, I must admit that I also felt a tremendous sense of shame.

I mean, let's be honest: I firmly believe that what I do, namely tell stories that can both move people's hearts and, if I'm really good, shift their perspectives a little, is one of the single most powerful and important ways to effect the human condition. Everything that is begins with an idea, and it takes storytellers to help grow the new ideas that become the future, especially the one that we desire. But even if I'm the most successful filmmaker the world has ever known, my effect on the world is very subtle. It's not an exercise in direct action like what Guido did every single day in Ghana. Hell, just BEING an open source programmer and advocate in the middle of Accra is a form of direct political action. Let alone those who have been educated, or empowered, perhaps even enriched, directly through his efforts.

Guido was in the arena. And his death reminded me that I hadn't really done much to get my hands very dirty.

But we all have our specific roles to play, and the fact remains that I, personally, will never be as technically proficient or politically courageous as Guido Sohne.

I cannot be Guido Sohne.

But it occurred to me that I could certainly do my best to find the NEXT Guido Sohne.

So, after a summer of informal chats with some of my other classmates and members of the university faculty and administration, we've created the Guido Sohne Memorial Fund at Princeton University.

The idea is this: In conjunction with the Engineering School, we'll conduct a search each semester for an African college student who's studying computer science, and, when we've identified the top candidate, we will pay for him or her to spend a semester studying in Princeton. And, at the end of the term, if there are funds left over, we'll send an American Princeton student over to Africa for a summer to study as well.

In order to do that, we're all engaged in the process of raising the initial $50,000 that's necessary to establish the scholarship. Ultimately, we need to raise $250,000 to make the scholarship self-sustaining over a period of years.

Most of the time, if I ask you folks who read Macroscope to do anything, it's usually to go see a movie or vote in an election. Maybe read a specific book every now and then. I believe this is the first (and, most likely, the last time) I will ever ask you to reach into your wallets so directly.

But, if you're motivated and inspired by Guido's story the way I was, I would ask you to contribute. You don't have to be associated with Princeton in any way to make a donation. Simply mail a check made out to `Princeton University', referencing the "Guido Sohne Memorial Fund", to the following address:

Jotham Johnson '64
Director of Stewardship
Princeton University
330 Alexander Road
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

Yes, I know - checks are so 20th century. Apparently, the university still only accepts direct credit card donations for their annual giving campaign, so we're still trying to figure out a way to facilitate credit card and/or PayPal donations to Princeton that doesn't put either me or any of my classmates (i.e. people who are not official representatives of the university) in charge of anyone else's money (and we're definitely open to suggestions). And I would LOVE to find a company who could do a matching gift of some sort.... especially since Guido was actually working FOR Microsoft at the time of his death (still trying to figure out how to recruit them to get involved).

The point is, contribute. However you can. If we can help even one kid come across the Atlantic and live up to his full potential, there's no telling how many lives will be directly transformed for the better. It's opportunities like these that can literally change the world.

If you're on Facebook, click the title of this blog post to become a fan of the Guido Sohne Fellowship there. Or just click this URL:

http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/pages/Guido-Sohne-Fellowship/42008299168?ref=ts

On that page, you can find links to a number of articles detailing Guido's work and life. And you should absolutely feel free to forward this e-mail and/or blog post to as many other people as you see fit.

Princeton's unofficial motto is "In The World's Service". Guido helped remind me of that. And I hope I'm not the only one.

Seven Days Later

Barack Hussein Obama II will be the 44th President of the United States of America.

Honestly, I don't even know where to begin.

Moments after the networks called the election on Obama's behalf, my friend called me and said, simply "this proves that Love Beats Fear."

A few days later, another friend called and said this:

"Yo, man. I had this dream last Tuesday night, where this whack dude was the President, and he was fuckin' everything up. So we had an election, and there was another old whack dude running against a black dude.

And you know what? The black dude won.

Crazy shit, right?

So, I was just callin' to ask, did you have the same dream?"

My own personal analogy is that it's the difference between standing in a room in the dark for eight years, and suddenly someone switches on the lights. Nothing physically in the room has changed. But the light banishes the shadows. It makes the gems in the room shine. It illuminates the paths forward. Where once there was nothing but fear and uncertainty, we can now, all see the possibilities.

Now, let's take them.

U.S.A.

Coming in the air tonight

I think this video says it way better than I ever could:



Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Except for the telcos that were hoping to make a mint off of new exclusive rights, and who're already unleashing the stormtroopers of lobbying to make that happen.

Do us all a favor. Sign the petition.

The Place Where Dreams Are Born

Let me wax poetic for a moment.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about the use of both negative and positive manifestation through the manipulation of collective emotional energy in the election process. I titled it "Before Sunrise", to hearken back to my Election '04 postmortem, "The Sun WILL Rise" (with a little nod to Richard Linklater), but also because so many of us seemed to be in a dark, scary place during this part of the election cycle, and, as they say, it's always darkest before the dawn.

But what else happens in the dark before the dawn?

We dream.

One of my dreams as I wrote that blog was that there would be a place where people could share their dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future of this country and the world, and where that collective, beautiful, joyous energy could coalesce into powerful, inspired action.

So, imagine my shock when a friend pointed me to this brand new blog:

Change. Hope. Dream.

Yes, a new blog, inspired by MY blog, that does exactly what I was hoping for.

Talk about a manifestation!

Dreams do become real.

So, GO THERE. Share your dreams. Share the blog. Help us all conjure the real magic that will transform the world around us.

There Has Been Blood

Whenever I've been watching one of the billions of presidential debates over the last few months, my roommate has occasionally asked me "what are they going to do to bring these gas prices down?" And my answer has been pretty pathetic: "uhm, there's not enough refineries, and China's increasing the demand, so it's out of their control until we switch to renewable fuels.... I think".

But the more I really thought about it, the more that simply didn't make sense. If Exxon is making a BILLION dollars in profit for the first three months of this year, that means that their revenues have vastly outpaced their expenditures. So, even if the processing of crude oil had become so much more expensive because of bottlenecks in the pipeline, which would, presumably, drive up the price of a barrel of oil, it still doesn't account for the huge profit disparity.

And then I saw this segment on "Countdown with Keith Olberman" last night.



In short, it's all Enron's fault. Enron and Phil Graham.

So, the question is, if the so-called "Enron Loophole", that allows energy speculators to simultaneously drive up the price of oil while hording it as an investment and then reaping insane profits, has single-handedly caused the price of oil to double since it's inception, why haven't ANY of the Presidential candidates talked about it this year? After all, you would think that Enron is a pretty easy boogeyman to present for further public flogging.

And, yes, I'm talking to YOU, Senator Obama.

Some legislation has been passed to address this, but there's much more work to be done. If you want to help do something about it, check out StopOilSpeculators.com.

The other thing that concerns me is that, near the end of Keith's report, he mentioned the term "oil bubble".

Having lived through both the 1st internet bubble and now a real estate bubble, the thought of an oil bubble makes me extremely nervous. I mean, sure, if the bubble burst, the oil prices should collapse, which would be easier on my petrol budget. But, if all of these financial institutions are acting as major oil speculators, would the crash of the oil market make some collapse like Bear Sterns, pouring even more salt in the wounds of the credit crisis?

The Original

In Monroe, North Carolina in the 1930's, many young Black girls worked as domestic servants & whatnot in the white households on the other side of town. These girls were often forced to walk home at night on unlit country roads, where they would routinely be terrorized by white men driving along the same way.

Rob Williams was a teenager at the time. He and a couple of his buddies started camping out in the woods along those same roads at night. And when a truckload of rednecks would ride pass and try to harass a young sista just trying to make it home, Rob & his buddies would stone the rednecks.

The harassment stopped.

I believe he got his first gun from his grandmother.

As you can see, very little had changed about Mr. Williams by the time he'd grown up.


In 1962, he published a manifesto called "Negroes with Guns" which eventually found it's way into the hands of another young man named Huey Newton.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

This month, PBS is airing a documentary on the life and times of Rob Williams, entitled, (surprise-surprise) "Negroes with Guns". I had the great fortune of seeing this film at the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival, and I'm so happy to see that it actually got some sort of wide distribution.

If you want to get a better idea of the origins of the Black Power movement, I highly recommend it. Click the link in the title to find out when and where it's playing in your town. Or just go to PBS.org.

You can also still buy Mr. Williams' book, here from Amazon.com:

Wal-Mart Takes Aim
So, I just saw Michael Moore's documentary on America's gun fetish, "Bowling for Columbine", which, I have to say, in light of recent political events in this country, has to be one of the best, most provocative films I've ever seen. For instance, did you know that Charlton Heston & the NRA staged an impromptu rally just a few miles away from Columbine High School within a week of the killing spree there? And, when Moore asked Heston whether he thought he owed an apology to the victims for his actions, Heston said, "Me? Apologize?!?!" and walked out. Also, did you know that Canada actually has a higher percentage of gun ownership for its citizenry than the United States, but their gun violence rate is several orders of magnitude less than ours?
Anyway, one of the biggest stunts Moore pulls in the movie is taking a couple of Columbine survivors, who still have bullets lodged in their bodies, to K-Mart's corporate headquarters. Apparently, the Columbine killers bought all of their bullets at K-Mart, so Moore brought these kids so they could return the bullets. As a result of their efforts, K-Mart agreed to stop selling bullets. Period. And who says shame isn't a powerful motivator?
So, with that in mind, Moore is trying to organize a campaign to get Wal-Mart to follow suit. The Wal-Mart situation is particularly gaulling to me, since they insist on edited versions of all albums they sell in the interests of "protecting our children". So, check out the link above and see how you can contribute.
One of the more interesting things that Moore posits in his film is that America's news culture is so exploitative that it's unjustifiably bred a culture of fear that makes people only feel safe if they sleep with a gun under their pillow. My question is: when did our news get like this? How did we leave the world of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and enter the world of Sky Copter 9 and Bill O'Reilly? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Is BARBERSHOP right about Rosa Parks?
Simply reinforcing Eddie's point - there are some things we, as Black people, need to get real about. What's interesting to me is that the mindset that unfairly criticized this movie is similar to that which led to certain Rosa Parks progenitors being denied their place in history, i.e. we need perfect symbols, not flawed human beings, to rally around.