Troy

Mzuri, did you read that I have already followed up on one of your links and it led me to a query? I followed Pioneer's link to "The Guardian" and it led me to a fake site. You have to appreciate I don't have the time to go on all these wide goose chases. All I'm asking for a single source reputable source, that you have hopefully read in advance, describing the creation of race-based bio weapons, which is one of the pillars of the anti-vaxxer argument? Now if you don't, more likely can't, do this I understand -- just admit it. I have a global scientific community to do this on my behalf. Which is why I took the vaccine. Your "research" as obviously led to to a completely different conclusion. I'm trying to understand how this happened and where you are getting your information. Pioneer talked about race-based bio weapons and you backed him up. Neither of you have presented anything to support this. Telling to do my own research on this matter makes about as much sense as telling to research humans having six heads. No, I'll keep it up, because in the context of this conversation I think it will be useful to lurkers or other who are unsure, but opened minded enough to see how misinformation created, justified, and spread by well intentioned people.

To a point, as the situation becomes more dire people begin to turn on each other. This is the thing the country needs to concern itself with. @Cynique the question is will Pioneer receive the comment as a perfectly valid critique, or become defensive, reject the idea completely, and continue believing all Black men like big butts 😉

NO! That is why the website is using the name to confuse people like you. Whether the mistake was "honest" or malicious does not really make much of a difference when spreading misinformation that can literally end of killing someone. OK Mzuri lets this just take one of the headlines and read the article to find the evidence to support the headline (BTW @Pioneer1 did you edit your post to change the wording from "Race" to "Ethnic?")... I just followed the link and see that it is merely a query?! Of course at the top of the result is the article from the fake guardian site that Pioneer previously shared. Again, you are simply reinforcing the same misinformation. You can find articles supporting any hair brained idea on the on the WWW. Are you actually interested in learning something or are you more interested in defending a position? Here, let me make make it easy for you Mzuri (and Pioneer): Pease find me one article from, a reputable source, that shows Bioweapons Designed to Kill Only People of Particular Race. I'll wait...

Her class was similar to mine. Now that I think about it, she probably struggled more with transitioning up in class. Therein lies the rub Cynique, for you see that it is actually harder for someone trying to be middle class than for someone was was born into it over a period of generations. For example of grew up with the "get over" mentality. It was not a mentality that my mom instilled in me, it was one I learned in the street. It encompasses everything from cheating on tests, beating fares, shoplifting, selling drugs, not paying of lying on taxes, etc, etc. This mentality sees nothing wrong with any of these activities -- in fact you are a sucker if you don't do these things. So while middle class values are indeed available to anyone, the lower you are on the social-economic ladder, the more difficult it might be to achieve. Of course the transition is easier for some than others. Staying in the middle class, is particularly for Black people -- there are quite a few new books written on this subject from different angles.

Maybe it is part of human nature on some level. As a resident or a predominantly white neighborhood, I can tell you that white folks do the same thing. I love music and understand the power it has to move people, but the operative word is "considerate." I always wondered about this, but never aw any reports of this being the case. I suspects thing will be worse with people blasting music in their headphones so loud I can hear their music on a crowded subway Again, I disagree, you and Cynique are both Black, but you are in different social classes You have proclivity for making sweeping generalizations. While this may make it easier for you to understand the world for you, the relatively is that if gives you a faulty perspective. I'm a cis gender heterosexual male and I not a fan of big butts. They have bass settings on all radios because people, including Black ones have difference preferences for the amount of bass in music. The recent hullaballoo over Dave Chappelle's latest special should tell you that there are other factors than class that determines what one finds funny.

Dude, this is a MAJOR mistake. You won't even take the time to question your sources. All jokes aside this is problematic. No. Neither of the articles you shared supported @Pioneer1's assertion, of the creation of "ethnic-based weapons." It is however fascinating that Pioneer made a statement that anyone with a cursory understanding of science knows is absurd. Pioneer shared a questionable source (did you read the article or even examine the source?). Next Mzuri says Pioneer's statement was supported by numerous credible sources, which it was not. Do y'all see how misinformation is spread? Again, I don't think you two are malicious, you are just not careful, and this one of the problems that social media, in particular, has made so much worse. On social media you can be in a silo with thousands of other people spreading misinformation recklessly misinforming each other. On a more traditional forum, like this one, there is algorithm filtering what you see. At the end of the day most of what we say here is of little consequence and for fun, but when you start talking about vaccinations being bad it matters. Believe it or not, I value your perspectives. Because it helps me understand how people think.

The map is not a firm rule. There, for example is nothing "southern" about El Paso. I would consider Texas, culturally a western state. North eastern Oklahoma has a more midwestern sensibility that the Oklahoma panhandle, but the entire state is very different than South Carolina or Georgia. I would not try to shoehorn these definitions based upon state boundaries. Besides if you got tripped up on the Brother referring to Tulsa as the Midwest, you failed to appreciate the reason I shared the video -- which is surprising given you espousing the importance of Black people supporting each other.

Now that would be a notion worth exploring. I met people like you in college Cynique, ignorantly I called them Oreos or assumed they were trying to act white, simply because their experience was not ghetto. I quickly grew out of that mentally because I recognized it did not serve me or anyone I knew. This is not to say that that all aspects of the ghetto low class mentality is bad -- it is not. Similarly, not all middle class values are positive. One I would reject is the desire for white validation. My mother values were firmly middle class, lower middle, but firmly middle class. When she moved into the projects in 1962 it was not a low class environment. It began changing after she moved in. In a less than decade, most of East Harlem was a urban slum.

Over 20 years ago I moved back to my old neighborhood, with my family. In many ways it was a completely different neighbor. There was far less crime and no vacant lots. Banks, grocery stores, and other businesses one would expect in a community were now present. @Delano has been to this place. The generified Harlem. Technically, I was a "gentrifier," someone coming into an impoverished neighborhood with contrasting middle class values. Having come from the very neighborhood, I knew better than to come in with guns blazing trying to impose bougie middle class values on the people already there. This is a mistake my white counterpart often made. Of course middle class people and lower class people will clash. It does not mean the people are inherently "bad" they have different often conflicting sensibilities, which leads to very different behaviors. One of these behaviors is blasting music for no good reason. For several eyas there was a guy who lived behind my million dollar brownstone who blasted music, speaker facing outward, for no reason that I could discern. I could not get into the building to talk to the person, the city's 311 number was useless, I just had to accept it. in 2006 I bogged about this, "Can Black People Go 5 Minutes Without Music?" It is one of my most popular Blog posts. I get comments weekly. Below is one I got a couple of hours ago: I hear u. I live in east NY bklyn it's pretty bad here 2. Only when it rains or the weather is so crappy u can't be outside. I'm talking to you today on October 2021. We had heavy rains and street flooding all night into the mid morning. As soon as the rains ended they were back out w/ the boomboxes + car stereos etc. I mean like within minutes after the rains stopped. Someone on this thread said BLACK PEOPLE MUST HAVE THE ''THUMP'', this I 💯 agree with completely. it's almost as if the neighborhood EXPECTS it. It's all over here in this area. Why do people tolerate it? My guess is they DGAF & don't care how intrusive it is. it is a cultural thing. This happens in poor black areas not just in bklyn I'm betting. High unemployment rates and truancy give mostly young black males alotta time 2 hang around and do this. Since they don't have jobs they can indulge in thisbassholery all day, every day.. it's maddening. Some of the comments I received over the years were blatantly racist. Race has nothing to do with class, but the title of my Blog post fails to make that distinction. A couple of years ago added an addendum to my original blog post pointing out that I deliberately used a provocative title to attract attention (a tactic that worked), but more importantly to emphasize that "...my title for this blog post was ill-conceived, as it implies; blasting music in public is something only Black people do."

I can’t pursue this debate as you will introduce anything to make a point. As in reincarnated slave holders have taken over the scientific community to create a vaccine to kill Black people and millions more white people as collateral damage. i can’t…. Also what is that website you shared? It is not The Guardian.

Perhaps, but both of those things are just false. having lived in both the south and in Tulsa I would not describe Tulsa as in the south.

Yeah, they are doing good work. I wish more communities did this. VC funds are no longer limited to white boys in silicon valley. There are people, who actually live here, that would disagree with you two. Culturally, the place is more western than southern. The geography is why some people say it is in the Midwest.

Are these "racist Caucasians" leaders in the scientific community? They can't be the same ones, for those people died long ago. So the people who developed the vaccines and are encouraging us to take them are like the Nazis? Is that really what you are saying? Far more white people have been vaccinated in the US than Black people. What are these racists up to? You guys who talk so much about "Investigating for themselves" kill me. I guess you are at home running double blind experiments, reading the latest academic journals, and maybe set up a home lab, huh. Wow. The Minister is old enough to have witnessed what polio can do to a human body, and it is curious that he would encourage people not to take that vaccine.

Fascinating @Cynique your conversation with @Pioneer1 on this subject reveals class differences between both of you. You come from a higher class than Pioneer. It is not a value judgment, just an observation. My experience growing up in the 'hood is that it is easier to end up in prison than college for a certain class of people. So, I have no problem understanding that finishing high school can be a challenge. The cool kids dropped out and hung out in the street where the action was. The kids who did well in school were teased, which stunts performance of these students, unless their is some other factor to counter it -- and their usually isn't. Our teachers expectation were low as they were not from, or had anyu investment in our community. My kids were reared in a higher class, than the one I was raised in. They did not have to do things like fight other kids, smart kids were admired, and virtually all of their peers had two parents at home. Many girls in my neighborhood had children in high school, I knew of one who gave birth in 6th grade... By the time I was an adult, some high schools provided day care for the student's children.

What region of the country, in your opinion, is Tulsa @Pioneer1, and what does saying it is in the Mid-West reveal to you?

@Pioneer1 Your statement: “Minister Farrakhan and other Black leaders have WARNED you not to trust your open enemy. But greed and love blinds a lot of our people into having unconditional trust for them.” Who is our open enemy? The global scientific community? Do vaccinated white people have the same enemy? Who are these people with unconditional trust? Is the NOI telling people not to get vaccinated? If so is this just for Covid, or does this extend to other vaccines like MMR and the seasonal flu?

I described some of the benefits working in a coworking space in an earlier conversation, so I figured I'd share this video. The Brother in the video runs a venture capital firm which operates out of the office I'm in. This has inspired me to think about AALBC in new ways. In 60 seconds, Lightship Capital’s General Partner, Brian Brackeen, describes three of their programs to support Entrepreneurs:

One of my favorite books 🙂 Kindred by Octavia Butler ADD TO CART Buy the Audiobook A Top 10 Book in the “Science Fiction Books” Category Voted #15 of the Top 100 Books of the 20th Century 6 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book! Selected for 3 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists A QBR 100 Essential Black Book Publication Date: Feb 01, 2004 List Price: $16.00 Format: Paperback, 288 pages Classification: Fiction ISBN13: 9780807083697 Imprint: Beacon Press Publisher: Beacon Press Parent Company: Unitarian Universalist Association Borrow from Library

The following report is from El Muhajir/Marvin X who is well known for his work as a poet, playwright and essayist of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT or BAM. He attended Merritt College along with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. You should read more of his work at Black Bird Press News & Review ------------------ “Huey P. Newton, The Rain Man” Dr. Huey P. Newton, Co-Founder of the Black Panther Party, was assassinated on August 22, 1989 on Center Street in West Oakland, a few blocks from what was the Cypress freeway. On October 17, 1989, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit the Bay Area, crashing the Cypress freeway, the Bay Bridge and other structures, causing more than $5 billion in damages. The Cypress freeway was replaced as the Mandela Parkway. Today, on the 55th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, a. bust of Dr. Huey. P. Newton was unveiled on the parkway. The ceremony occurred despite a drenching storm. Was Huey saying to those attending the unveiling of his bust, "I departed as the earthquake, I return as the storm!"? As I approached the event full of people under umbrellas and tents, the first person I ran into was novelist Cecil Brown, author of The Life and Love of Mr. Jive Ass Nigga. Cecil, a Stanford University Professor, said, "Marvin, they should have a bust over there of you!" I didn't answer him but thought to myself would that mean I would be dead? As we chatted in the rain and I scanned the crowd, Cecil remarked that President Biden is pitiful. I retorted, "Do you think he's a Chinese agent?" No, Cecil said, I think they're working together. But, he continued, don't you think this Covid19 is germ warfare? I shoot back, "Absolutely. Do you think the Chinese are so stupid they would fight the white man with guns? The Chinese have ten thousand years of culture and can easily outthink the white man." Cecil said, "You're right, whitey just got out of the cave a few years ago!" I asked him where was the bust, he pointed where I could see Huey's natural above the crowd. We departed and I eased my way toward the bust but the crowd was tight so I took refuge under a tent that turned out to be the stage where Fantastic Negrito was doing a sound check. I love Fantastic Negrito and his neo-blues, but more so because Oakland's three-time Grammy winner is so humble, perhaps because he was in a terrible car accident but miraculously survived. He appreciates life. His first song was entitled From Dark to Light. But his song was interrupted by Sista Akua on another mike, and she was demanding to be heard. Apparently the MC tried to prevent her from speaking but this Chicago Black Panther woman was determined. Of course she was only the widow of Fred Hampton and you know she was pregnant in the bed with him when the Chicago pigs assassinated him with detailed information supplied by a black snitch. Akua gave a brief history of her and Fred's work in the Chicago Black Panther Party. She noted how Fred had established his rainbow coalition. After her short speech, Fantistic Negrito resumed his song From Dark to Light with a female backup singer, drummer and keyboard player. As I stood under the tent swaying to the beats of Fantastic, a masked man approached me that I recognized as D'wayne Wiggins of the band Tony Toni Tone. Although I already knew, he informed me of his trip to Accra, Ghana and meeting my daughter, Muhammida El Muhajir. I asked rhetorically, "How was she?" He replied, "She's powerful, powerful!" I wish I was humble as Fantastic Negrito and my children too, but Muhammida told me to tell North American Africans don't think they can come to Accra and not deal with her. Dad, I run this! She said her Howard University school mate, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, came to Accra and tried to get past her. They ended up at the same house party! After enjoying the neo-blues of Fantastic, I made my way toward the bust of my buddy, Huey P. As I recall in my conversation with Cecil Brown, he'd asked me about my play One Day in the Life with the scene of my last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack house across from the Acorn Projects a couple of blocks away. The scene was made into a one-act play entitled Salaam, Huey, Salaam, co-authored by playwright Ed Bullins and myself, produced off-broadway by Woody King's New Federal Theatre. I said, "Cecil, they don't want to see my play because it's not a romantic version of Huey, it's reality. Nigga's want fantasy not reality!" I made it to the bust and put my hand on the rock. Like the earthquake and rain, was the rock symbolic as well? Was it the Crack rock, the rock of chemical and germ warfare the USA's Cointerpro machine made pervasive in its war against the Black Liberation Army and North American Africans in general? Was it simultaneously the Rock of Sisyphus he was condemned to roll up the mountain for eternity, only to have it fall from his hands thus he had to begin anew. Both W.E.B. DuBois and Amiri Baraka deconstructed the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a critical myth-ritual in the North American African narrative of how I got ovah or why we didn't get ovah! As I departed the bust of Huey, several photographers took my pic at the bust, so I told them I will pay the first one who sends me some pics like yesterday. Gene Hazzard was the first. Thank you Gene. Before I could head to my car and go home since I was pretty much dripping wet, I brother on security informed me that Akua and her son Fred Hampton, Jr. were in the car to my right and wanted to speak with me. I went to the car and embraced Akua. Tell me what mother, what wife in America has been through more trauma and grief than Akua? I embraced her and then hugged her son, Fred, Jr. who told me how much he loved me and I did the same. And then I said, "Big Fred, you know who we love and who love us too: Mrs. Amina Baraka! Fred shouted yes, yes, yes. Oh, Marvin, you know I love me some Mrs. Amina Baraka!" I said good-bye to Akua (Isis in Kemit mythology) and her son (Horus) as they search to liberate the vitality of Fred Hampton (Osirus, crucified but resurrected and ascended on a rainy day in the Bay). Power to the People! --El Muhajir/Marvin X 10/24/21 Black Bird Press News & Review

…. or those furry house shoes. Ohh that is so “low class” the airport looks like a grey hound bus station. I remember when people dressed up to get on a plane. Today some dress like they are going to bed.

i forgot to ask was this just a random number you used to make a point, or did you get it from someplace? i ask because the number would be very low the discussion Forums alone have more pages than that, and the main web site has way more than that too. The reason the site is so large is because most of content is stored in a database and the webpages are created with queries. The fact AALBC was costumed designed this way it the site’s biggest distinguishing factor. Interestingly (at least to me) I learned how to build a database driven site when i started teaching web design 5 years ago. I simply did not know how to do it before that and it really has made all the difference in the world. This is s feature of what is called Web 2.0 My biggest technical challenge will be to gear up for Web 3.0…

That wouldn’t be a determination of one’s class. keep in mind i started building sites almost from the moment that HTML was introduced to the public and I’ve been working on this site for over 24 years. I also greatly enjoy the activity. So it might look hard to someone who does not share the experience. Also, there is a lot that I don’t know about web development, which is why i don’t build sites for others I’m optimized for AALBC. My time in the coworking space, with other people, has helped the website — despite the pandemic.

You forced me to do a search. I was familiar with the story, but did not know the guy’s name or that his remains were found. The “news” story was completely uninteresting to me, but now i get your joke 🙂

Hummm, that sounds like anti-vaccer rhetoric to me, but OK, we will just say that you are a covid antivaccer. You are fortunate to have the resources to shelter in place. Most people don’t. Are you suggesting that authorities are going to go door to door and force people to take the vaccine? If so, please cite a reputable source. I can see it done as a service to the sick or shut in. Otherwise it just comes across as another unsubstantiated anti vaccer talking point.

i agree with all of the above. Perhaps in a few generation the Obama descendants make become upper class, but i doubt it. Yes, I’ve been to Martha’s Vineyard. What striving Negro hasn’t? @Pioneer1 i don’t know who I don’t know who he is.