Troy

Well that is good news. Louisiana has historically had the poorest performing school in the country particularly for Black children. I would be happy to see LA surpass New York. Maybe the embarrassment will be enough for legislators to do something

The New York Times has identified 100 books from all the books they have reviewed over the past year to be the most "notable." Of that list 11 were books were written by Black* writers. Boy, if we depended solely upon The New York Times to identify notable books written by Black folks we'd be in for a world of disappointment. Thankfully we have other options to discover books written by Black people. The number of these options have greatly diminished over the years, which is why Ill be working with come folks promoting an effort called the 2018 Blackout #readingblackout I just learned about #readingblackout this effort today. It was started by booktuber (another new one one me. basically a person who is part of community of people who create book related videos on youtube). Enjoy. *Black is a subjective term. As a result, some may disagree that all of the author's I've identified are indeed Black.

I believe this to be true. However I have lost hope that legislative process can be a viable solution--that boats sailed long ago. Between the gerrymandering of districts, the misinformation and disinformation circulating, voter apathy, lobbyists working for the privatization of education, and the fact that wealthy people kids are getting great educations now. Is your daughter in the video? if not, it sure looks like you could have spit that child out yourself :-)

Del the read that he lead engineer refused to sign off on the launch? What does that tell you? Again, I ask you the question the Feynman reveal anything that was not previously known by others? If not, then why do you reject my statement that you give Feynman too much credit?

Thank you Mel, but of course you'll edit to correct my typos first

Sound good to me. I'll hit you up via email. Peace, Troy

@Mel Hopkins, as you said you can't know what you don't know. As someone who has also raised children into independent adulthood, all you can do is is expose them to a wide variety of things, help them to think critically and independently, and to serve as a model. If they don't discover the valuable gift(s) they were born while you are raising them, perhaps they will discover it on their own. You can't put the pressure on yourself to find this for your kids. They are their own people and ultimately have to live their own lives. The best you, and the community, can do is to create an environment is which people can achieve artistry, which I'd describe, at the risk of sound too new-agey, as finding one's bliss. The real risk, and trap, I think many people, if not most, fall into is never trying to figure out what gift they have that would allow them to achieve artistry in a pursuit they'd both enjoy and earn a living from. @Delano, do you believe Feynman was the only one aware of these problems until he reported on them? If no, that is the only point I'm making, in that you are giving Feynman too much credit. If your answer is yes, then we'll have to agree to disagree.

I've learned from videos like this and in conversations here that I have to change the way I communicate with the general public on technical issues. Sharing data with graphics and charts really does not work with people unfamiliar with the domain in which you are speaking. You have to appeal to people on an emotional level. In the video Van Jones said; I know this to be true from personal experience because people have no problem saying they don’t care how much education someone has when they disagree with them. They’ll argue with climatologist easily dismissing what the scientist knows in favor of what they themselves feel. I have a talk coming up in a couple of weeks on the impact of Facebook, Google and Amazon on the web and I'm going to consider these factors when I address the audience. We'll see how it goes. In the video, also bt VOX they talk about the environmental cost of ordering online with the next day shipping. Amazon is the obvious culprit. As long as Amazon make their owners money, this behavior will never change. Amazon own the legislators and even the Washington Post who should be reporting on their activities. The only way this will change is if people change their behavior and I see little evidence of this happening.

Hey Coach, I've added Shattering Black Male Stereotypes: Eradicating the 10 Most Destructive Media Generated Illusions about Black Men to the website. I also added the following video to your page:

When I heard that Roland Martin lost his talk show, my first impression was damn don't tell me Roland sexually abused someone too! I have not dug deeply into the reason for the show's pending cancellation, so I don't really know why it is being cancelled. I was not a fan of Martin's show and did not watch it. I caught a few youtube videos and I just did not vibe with Marin's personality. His show was one of a shrinking number of political talk shows and I would rather have his show exist than for it not to exist. That might sound like a contraction, but it really is not. We have so few platforms where Black people can talk about Black issues with a large audience. Having Martins shows is absolutely better than having nothing. Makes me long for the days when Tavis Smiley was on BET. In my book, the true giants of Black talk were Gil Noble (Like It Is) and Tony Brown (Tony Brown's Journal). I watch Gil's broadcasts today. Gil Noble introduced us to deep thinkers. You would never see Noble or Brown gossiping about what one celebrity said about another, the way I've seen Martin do on one too many Youtube clips of his show. Another Brother I like is Rock Newman (sp?) I only recently discovered him to YouTube, I'm not sure where his program broadcasts or even if it is on TV. I just notice Rock as high quality guests. They may not be celebrities, but they are deep people with important information to relate.

@Mel Hopkins I guess If the discipline is unrecognized by others us then it has no value and would not be nurtured. Those born with a gift in a field of no value would remain obscure. Sometimes this is described as being ahead of one's time. If Lebron James or Flavor Flav were born 50 years earlier I doubt they would have enjoyed any prominence and certainly no financial success. @Delano, "Morton Thiokol isn't NASA and the engineers aren't decision makers.: --Thanks for the revelation "engineers aren't decision makers." --Spoken like someone who was never an engineer. "Awareness is clearly not understanding." --Sometimes, but lack of awareness is ALWAYS not understanding. Why reject the fact that Nasa engineers were aware of the faulty O-Rings before Feynman was ever involved. Why not just admit this given the evidence I've shown you and move on? Are you really that sensitive? When did this happen?

Del I'm aware of all of the stuff you posted. Again, the faulty O-rings was known BEFORE the disastrous explosion. In fact, the lead engineer refused to sign off on the launch for this reason. This is common knowledge and was covered in a documentary film (I don't recall the name of iot) and is described on NASA website: "McDonald, the director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for the engineering contractor Morton Thiokol, was concerned that below-freezing temperatures might impact the integrity of the solid rockets' O-rings." McDonald wrote a book, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, about it. You can also learn what was at Nasa's website as well as other sources.

I think Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson were born. They were born into the stage as was Mozart, Beethoven, Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, etc. There is not enough musical training in the world that could have made me in my entire 55 years of life as talented as Stevie Wonder when he was just 12 and he is BLIND! How many little boys could you have trained to do what Michael was doing when he was 10? Maybe in the field of consciousness all is possible. Speaking of consciousness, I'm reading Dick Gregory's last book. He said while meditating one time he levitated. He also said there were witnesses to this.

Here is another one for you all. Is he “Black” or “White?” The author is Timothy B. Tyson he wrote the critically acclaimed book, The Blood of Emmett Till, which is why he is on the website. But now I'm trying to identify all of the Black writers who have written books that the New York TImes have including on their year end list of the 100 Most Notable Books. I'm almost finished the page: https://aalbc.com/books/nyt100.php and have added the 2017 and 2016 books, but I'm having difficulty with some of the authors. According to Wikipedia, Tyson; was selected as a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center was Assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and is a civil right activist My guess is that he is not a so called "Black" man, but given is books and life's work he should be. Trying to identify the Black folks is not trivial black or white as one might think

Thanks for the correction Cynique. @Pioneer1 as @Mel Hopkins mentioned this issue is collusion. By law (antitrust) the league;s owners can not get together decide to take an action,like blacklisting Kaepernick. But these guys don't have to talk to each other to know the deal. Colin was poison for the NFL's brand. I'd bet money they colluded regardless of the outcome of the grievance. Pioneer, these types of laws are in place for a good reason.

Del you are giving Feynman too much credit, Nasa's engineers knew, in advance of the disaster the Morton Thiokol', O-rings were shot at and low temperatures. I only mention it because this is the 2nd time you mentioned Feynman as if he was the only one who knew this. @Mel Hopkins, thanks. Artistry as the culmination is interesting to consider. I think artistry is an inherited skill. For example, I can design a website that is technically, on the backend, quite good IMHO. This fact is what differentiates my site from others. My weakness however is making the site visually appealing. I struggle with the homepage for example. My solution for the final stage of the two year upgrade will be to find a template and modify it for my purpose, for I do not have the artistry to design something from scratch that is both modern looking and visually appealing. Now I have the knowledge to execute someone else's design, but I could not come up with the idea myself. I'm sure one can learn to make beautiful websites, but to be really good I think you have to be born with the talent. Perhaps this is true for all pursuits; to reach the very highest levels you have to have the knowledge and the God given gifts (and @Pioneer1 notice "race" has nothing to do with any of this). People like Newton, Feynman, Einstein, and others displayed a artistry of their subject matter that truly transcended anything on that pyramid. I believe they were born with the gift.

Hey man I see you are selling your book directly, so Ill set the buy link up so that it goes to your website. I'll need the books ISBN13. Thanks.

Congrats on you new book michael, I will add it to your AALBC.com page: nextauthors/author.php?author_name=Michael+Taylor next time chance I get.

Did anyone look at the hierarchy described in the Pyramid @Mel Hopkins shared? Now you may disagree with it, but I think it is a helpful tool to understand the difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is simply the awareness of information; what years was the Civil War fought or what the formula for calculating the diameter of a circle, for example. People can know these things and do very well on some standardized tests, but they may not understand a single thing about either subject. In other words, what can they actually do with this knowledge? I can tell someone how to calculate the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle if I give them the length of the other two sides, and they may be able to remember it long enough to take a pass a test, but they may have no clue what they are doing. Worse still, they can plug the numbers into a calculator and get the right answer without even knowing what the heck is happening. I've taken more math courses, but I've forgotten much of what I learned simply because I did not understand it. I "knew" it long enough to pass some tests, but that is about it. I never had a job which required this higher level math so over three decades the knowledge is mostly gone. Later, as I got older, and was exposed to some of the concepts, through YouTube videos, it dawned on me how fascinating math really is. The facts are almost incidental and indeed can be learned later, but understanding what an intergral is, for example, and how and it can be used is far more interesting than knowing to to calculate it. Understanding this, I believe, has helped me become a better teacher. This is why knowledge alone is not enough to be a good teacher. Knowledge alone is not enough to understand, comprehend, apply or use information to come up with new ideas. It is however, as the pyramid implies, the foundation for these things. The perhaps a better title for the article would be, "Knowledge is the Basis for Understanding." Keep in mind authors don;t generally write the titles of their articles. The publishers do and sometimes they do a disservice to the article because they are motivated by generating traffic just as much as they are interested accurately relating the subject of an article

@Delano, if you are interested in understanding what I wrote, you will not divine that from @Pioneer1's statement, which is why I attempted to clarify it. With that in mind, do you what have a question about my something I wrote? I'm not going down the rabbit hole of attempting to explain, what I wrote, by way of explaining Pioneer's inaccurate interpretation. Of course @Cynique is right varying levels of intelligence. There are also many different types of intelligence--none of which have any direct correlation to one's so called race.

...something for @harry brown Harry L. Thomas, founder of the Creation Festival and senior pastor of Come Alive New Testament Church in Medford, New Jersey, has been accused of sexually assaulting four children over a 16-year period between 1999 and 2015. (as reported by Christianity Today). This is not a problem with the Church, per se, but a problem with powerful degenerates abusing their power. We've seen a rash of revelations coming from Hollyweird, politicians, media, and obviously the Church. What puzzles me is the complete lack of sexual abuse revelations coming from Wall Street. I guess those cats have enough power than to prevent any public recriminations. This represents more power than Cosby, Weinstein, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, etc... that oughta tell you something about the nature of REAL power.

The Secret Lives of the Four Wives: A Novel by Lola Shoneyin Read an Excerpt This is an excellent book from what I hear. The banner above is was provided to me by the publisher, who are advertising in the next newsletter. These ads beyond, bringing revenue, actually bring value to the website as the books are all excellent and the creatives are attractive too. One of the problems with AALBC.com homepage, a problem I intent to address ins January, is that it is too busy. One of the reasons for this is that I've allowed advertising to drive what is one the page and that has made it too overwhelming for new visitors to understand what the site is about, or what to do next... I'm considering removing all advertising from the homepage or only including well designed ads that is specifically designed for the page. The upside is that the ads well perform better (I'm sure) for the advertiser, but the downside is that the price point and the requirement to design a custom ad will exclude advertisers with small budgets....I dunno I may need to focus on the advertisers with larger budgets to keep the site alive. With enough larger clients the promote of the authors/publishers with smaller budgets can be subsidized by the larger advertisers. Just thinking out loud, but I welcome feedback.

Understood

{sigh} OK let me clarify: When I wrote anybody, I meant, any so called "race" (human) can do well academically given the right conditions and ability. Is that clearer?

Again this is the problem with the 'net, you can find a source for anything to support your belief. Del how do you think I got the 97% number? I looked it up. It is what all the reputable sites including the one from Nasa, you provided, say. Obviously, for whatever reason, you don't believe the percentage provided by the authoritative sources and have apparently found a source that matches your conspiracy theory world view.