Dear Young Warriors fighting the wrong wars! Killing each other is definitely played out. Being hurt from the loss of a love one was never cool.
Dear Young Warriors fighting the wrong war! I know that feeling, that frustration with life and needing to take it out on someone, anyone. But….
We chose the dumbest things to go the hardest for. I remember seeing deaths over 8 ball jackets, fila’s, and name plate chains. Deaths over “he say she say”!!!!! “I’m from This block or I’m from that block,” or “my moms n pops is f*cked up now the whole world gotta pay!!!”
I remember feeling like I was the hardest “n*gga” breathin. And I couldn’t wait to prove it. But let’s think. What r we really proving?? And proving what to who?? Everybody knows Chicago breeds the strongest of the strong but I just feel, me, being ya brother from another state, feel your pain as if I grew up with you in ya very own household.
You have the ability and mindpower to change the way we are looked at. Look who’s watching us young warriors, look who’s throwin us in jail constantly, look at the ignorance in the world. Look at the racist dogs who love to see us down. Lovin to bury us in the ground or in jail where we continue this worthless war on one another. Young warriors…. We are WASTING more and more time. We gotta get on our jobs and take over the world. Cuz this movie left the theaters years ago, Juice, Menace, Boys n the Hood, Blood n Blood Out, Belly!
When we see each other why do we see hatred? Why were we born in a storm, born soldiers, WARRIORS….and instead of building each other up we are at war with each other.. May the soul of this young person find peace with the Almighty. I’m with you young warriors. You’re me and I’m you. But trust me! You are fighting the wrong war.
If you love soccer then you’ve heard of Mario Balotelli. He’s under the age of 20, playing on one of the best soccer teams and also one of the brightest budding stars. Despite all that, he has been going through some racial turmoil.
Mario is an Italian/international player, or is he?:
The beauty of sports is that they often force folks to confront racial, social and economic issues head-on. Mario Balotelli, by most people’s assumption, would be a fair-skinned Italian. He’s actually a
After 26 long years, I can finally rest easy. Twenty-six years I spent standing in front of a camera, gritting my teeth, and shilling the latest works of every hack children's book author imaginable. For 26 years, I've told kids they could open a magical door to another world just by reading a book, when the only door it ever opened for me led to a soul-sucking career in the horrifying abyss of public television.
But now, at last, it is over. I don't have to lie anymore. I don't have to live that nightmare.
When the news came that Reading Rainbow would be canceled due to a lack of funding, I felt—well, to use a cliché like you'd find in one of the hundreds of books I pimped endlessly—like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Every day I went to work hoping that maybe the studio had burned down, that maybe the program had been cut, that maybe PBS would finally stop squeezing the life from me drop by drop. Now that it's over, I feel the relief a bruised and broken soldier must feel when he is rescued after rotting away for decades in some dank, forgotten POW camp.
May that godforsaken show burn in hell.
At long last, I can pick up a book and read for pleasure! Haven't read one in ages. You know what I was reading during those 26 insufferable years? Scripts. Scripts for roles that went to actors who weren't stigmatized by their association with a TV show occupying the time slot right after Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
I happen to be an accomplished actor. I starred in Roots, which was the most-watched show in American television history. My stirring portrayal of Kunta Kinte got me an Emmy nomination. But you know what? At 25 years old, when the opportunity to earn a regular paycheck working on a children's show came along, it seemed like a pretty damn good idea.
I was dead, dead wrong.
Little did I know the next quarter century of my life would be an unrelenting blur of excruciating trips to some of the most boring places on earth. Apiaries, steam trains, old mills—every week they sent me to a fresh hellhole, and every week I had to interview the dullest people imaginable.
And those humiliating books. Maebelle's Suitcase and The Jolly Postman. These were not the classics. Anyone who could glue paper between two pieces of cardboard and hire a publicist could get a book on that show. And there I was, in sheer agony, trying to keep a smile on my face while talking up Germs Make Me Sick!
Before long, people began recognizing me on the street, and inevitably they'd come over and start singing this awful, cloying tune. When I finally asked somebody what the hell it was, I was sickened to learn that it was the show's theme. I'd never heard it. They didn't play it on the set, and Lord knows I never saw one episode of that garbage when it aired.
Hoping to escape Reading Rainbow's clutches, I started taking any role I could get. I'm proud of some of them: I played Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Martin Luther King in Ali. But you know what the most challenging role of my career was? Hosting Reading Rainbow and acting like I gave a shit about getting kids interested in books.
Fact is, I couldn't care less whether kids learn to read. There, I said it.
Look, Reading Rainbow was a television program. That should tell you something right there. What I should have done is hosted a show that taught children how to watch more television. I bet they would have come up with the funding to renew that show.
All I've done for 26 years is drive to work, clock in, read my lines, clock out, go home, and cry myself to sleep. Now I'm much older, a broken man, but I've reached the end of my terrifying journey. And do you know what's at the end? Do you what's at the end of the "Reading Rainbow"? A giant crock of shit, that's what.
For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible. The vaccine cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world’s largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok. Even though the benefit is modest, “it’s the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine,” Col. Jerome Kim said in a telephone interview. He helped lead the study for the U.S. Army, which sponsored it with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Even a marginally helpful vaccine could have a big impact. Every day, 7,500 people worldwide are newly infected with HIV; 2 million died of AIDS in 2007, the U.N. agency UNAIDS estimates. “Today marks an historic milestone,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, an international group that has worked toward developing a vaccine. “It will take time and resources to fully analyze and understand the data, but there is little doubt that this finding will energize and redirect the AIDS vaccine field,” he said in a statement. The Thailand Ministry of Public Health conducted the study, which used strains of HIV common in Thailand. Whether such a vaccine would work against other strains in the U.S., Africa or elsewhere in the world is unknown, scientists stressed. “This is a scientific breakthrough,” Thai Health.
Minister Witthaya Kaewparadai told a news conference in Bangkok. “For the first time ever there is evidence that HIV vaccine has preventative efficacy.”
Music royalty groups ASCAP and BMI are pressing online music stores like Apple's iTunes to pay performance fees not only for actual song downloads but also videos and even the 30-second samples used to preview the music in advance. While these stores already pay the distribution fees for the songs themselves, ASCAP, BMI and labels claim that just downloading and playing the content also counts as a live performance and should bring an extra fee.
The reasons vary depending on the format. For music, it's claimed that downloads or streams, including samples, count as a public performances as with the radio or in a venue, where performance royalties are already paid. Movie and TV royalties would be different as soundtrack artist are normally paid for when the videos are aired, which is commonplace for theaters and TV networks but doesn't occur for online formats.
However, critics such as the Digital Music Association, an online media industry defender that counts Apple, RealNetworks and others as members, counter that a legal precedent has already been set that considers downloads private and thus exempt from performance fees. They also accuse ASCAP and related firms of trying to collect double royalties, of violating copyright law in trying to collect from samples, and simply of trying to exploit successful online stores like iTunes.
"These guys are afraid that the business model is shifting away from public performances to a model of private performances," DiMA executive director Jonathan Potter told CNET. "They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download."
Internet radio stations, including both generic streams and recommendation-based systems like Last.fm and Pandora, already pay royalties for each song streamed online. Those with the jukebox software playing the content are at least theoretically exempt as they only make the stations accessible.
Each September, in a flurry of deadline activity, 120 California legislators try to push through last-minute bills that have never been debated, or that seem to spring from nowhere, or that were ghostwritten by big pharma or big labor — yet are peddled by a sitting legislator who claims to be the “author.”
The controversial September crush of laws designed to please narrow special-interest groups is a big reason that about 1,000 new laws stream to the governor’s desk for his signature each year. The worst of them have been nicknamed “mushrooms” by Sacramento wags because they arise entirely in the dark, seemingly overnight.
This year, one “mushroom” attracting headlines is by Assemblyman John Perez, who represents the Eastside of Los Angeles and is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s first cousin. His Assembly Bill 813 would benefit just one Colorado billionaire, Philip Anschutz. First reported by the Los Angeles Times, AB 813 would waive a law that currently prohibits Club Nokia and other entertainment venues from slathering the interior of their spaces with ads that promote the alcohol companies whose products they sell at a steep profit.
Anschutz wants to sell big ad spaces inside the unattractive, boxlike Club Nokia, near Staples Center, to squeeze out more profit. The state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control this year ruled such liquor-ad peddling to be illegal.
Perez wants to exempt Club Nokia, and only Club Nokia, from the law — setting off an outcry about the ethically challenged California Legislature. Tracy Westen, vice chairman and CEO of the Center for Governmental Studies, calls Perez’s bill, “special-interest legislation at its worst ... to harness the power of all 120 legislators and the governor to benefit one particular person or company.” Westen adds, “We’ve got problems with prisons, a water system that’s dangerous, our schools are crumbling — and the Legislature spends its time giving an economic benefit to one man.”
Entertainment venues that won’t get the special waiver aren’t happy. Sharon Sandow, president/CEO of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, says “This puts other venues, such as those in West Hollywood, at a disadvantage due to no fault of their own.”
Perez has been slammed before for his calculated politics, beginning with his controversial election victory last year in an Eastside Assembly seat previously held by Fabian Núñez, who was forced out by term limits.
An L.A. Weekly story headlined “Who needs voters? The fix was in on the Eastside last night” explained how two well-known candidates, Arturo Chavez and Ricardo Lara, mysteriously quit the race for Núñez’s seat long before Election Day, guaranteeing that Perez would win. First, Chavez dropped out of the race. A week later, Lara dropped out. Lara then announced he had been handed a plum job by Perez’s first cousin, the mayor, who appointed Lara to the Planning Commission.
Perez’s election was widely criticized by city activists, including the outspoken Zuma Dogg, who blogged: “Antonio’s anointed candidate, who will be your new Assembly member pulling the levers for his cousin Antonio, is John Perez.”
Since then, Perez has rapidly moved up the power grid in Sacramento — he is now chairman of the 50-member Democratic Caucus in the Assembly, which for about five decades has controlled the debate and the votes in the lower house of the Legislature. But while Perez has done well as a party functionary in the Capitol, he has not fared well with the public.
Perez was a lead spokesman for the disastrous “Yes on 1A-1E” ballot-measure campaign that would have dramatically raised California taxes, paid down the deficit and propped up school funding. The package of measures lost by a landslide.
A new statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Legislature as a whole, and individual legislators like Perez are all deeply unpopular, with many Californians believing special-interest money is running roughshod. Dennis Hathaway, an antibillboard activist who has watched AEG’s power grow under Villaraigosa, says of Perez’s law written just for Anschutz: “It’s another case of what AEG wants, AEG gets, whether it’s in City Hall or Sacramento.”
The PPIC survey says that 73 percent of Californians feel Sacramento is controlled “by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”
That’s a new high for public distrust of California politicians in the 11-year history that PPIC has been tracking this topic, and a new low for Sacramento. Soon after PPIC’s poll came out, the state Senate in the wee hours of last Saturday killed the Club Nokia law, its leaders embarrassed over headlines about Perez’s blatantly special-interest Assembly bill.
In honor of second chances I thought I would just pull this jem out of the crates. IMO, Being Bobby Brown will forever be one of the most brilliantly funny reality shows I have ever seen. Take a gander at the clips above and lets all be thankful for the power of redemption.
