Notice the Viral Violence

Notice the viral violent episodes going on since the Boston bombings? Stay safe, violence begets violence, so stay safe until things calm down. That is of course, you live in a project or black urban, poverty stricken, poorly educated, drug infested area... then yours will continue a bit!

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Five people were shot and killed at an apartment complex in a Seattle suburb late on Sunday, including one man shot by police who were initially coming to his aid, local media reported.

Responding to a 9:30 p.m. report of shots fired, police found two wounded men in a parking lot of Pinewood Apartments in the city of Federal Way, Washington, police spokeswoman Cathy Schrock told Seattle television station KOMO.

As the officers approached, one of the injured men reached for a gun, the Federal Way Police Department spokeswoman said, and several officers opened fire, killing him.

The second wounded man died at the scene. Police also discovered three other people who had been shot to death, including one man found in another section of the parking lot, one man found in an apartment and a woman found in a separate apartment, KOMO reported.

Schrock said the men had apparently been in a firefight, but it was not clear what prompted the shootings.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

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Dutch police say they have arrested a suspect in an online threat to shoot a teacher and students that prompted authorities to close all the high schools in the city of Leiden.

Hague police spokeswoman Yvette Verboon confirmed the arrest Monday but would give no further details of the identity of the suspect.

Verboon says police are "investigating his involvement" in the threat that was discovered Sunday.

Police announced the school closures late Sunday, saying they do not want to take any risks while the person who posted the threat remains unknown.

Mayor Henri Lenferink told Dutch television "it could be a morbid joke" but authorities do not want to risk children's lives.

Shooting rampages are rare in the Netherlands, where gun ownership is tightly controlled.

My New Dodge Challenger

Can't wait to get into this car this summer (July 1st 2013). I can already smell the leather and the power of the car. I'm going to get the black Dodge Challenger SRT8. Going to test out a few of these in the next few weeks to be sure I'm totally in on this or the Porsche.

Novelist Chinua Achebe Dies Aged 82

This is unfortunate for the author and his family, but it is good news when a man achieves a great deal in his life time and dies full of years. I'd take that any time over being shot and killed and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Read article below detailing his career and life:


Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist seen by millions as the father of African literature, has died at the age of 82.

African papers were reporting his death following an illness and hospital stay in Boston this morning, and both his agent and his publisher later confirmed the news to the Guardian.

Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin, called him an "utterly remarkable man".

"Chinua Achebe is the greatest of African writers and we are all desolate to hear of his death," he said.

In a statement, Achebe's family requested privacy, and paid tribute to "one of the great literary voices of all time. He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him."

A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his first novel Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1958. The story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, it has sold more than 10m copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages. Achebe depicts an Igbo village as the white men arrive at the end of the 19th century, taking its title from the WB Yeats poem, which continues: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

"The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one," says Okonkwo's friend, Obierika, in the novel.

The poet Jackie Kay hailed Achebe as "the grandfather of African fiction" who "lit up a path for many others", adding that she had reread Things Fall Apart "countless times".

"It is a book that keeps changing with the times, as he did," she said.

Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, has said that Achebe "brought Africa to the rest of the world" and called him "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down".

The author is also known for the influential essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1975), a hard-hitting critique of Conrad in which he says the author turned the African continent into "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril", asking: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"

According to Brown University, where Achebe held the position of David and Marianna Fisher university professor and professor of Africana studies until his death, this essay "is recognised as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on 20th-century literary imagination".

Born in 1930 in Ogidi, in the south-east of Nigeria, the author won a scholarship to the University of Ibadan, and later worked as a scriptwriter for the Nigeria Broadcasting Service. He chose to write Things Fall Apart in English – something for which he has received criticism from authors including Ngugi wa Thiong'o – but Achebe said he felt "that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings".

His fourth novel, 1966's A Man of the People, anticipated a coup that took place in Nigeria just before the book was first published. "I'd ended the book with a coup," Achebe told the Guardian, "which was ridiculous because Nigeria was much too big a country to have a coup, but it was right for the novel. That night we had a coup. And any confidence we had that things could be put right were smashed. That night is something we have never really got over."

His most recent work was last year's mix of memoir and history There Was a Country, an account of the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970.

Achebe was a supporter of Biafran secession, but after the end of the civil war in 1970 he took what he described as a "sojourn" in politics. There he found that "the majority of people … were there for their own personal advancement", deciding instead to devote himself to academia.

He went on to write what he called a "limited harvest" of five novels – the most recent of which was 1987's Anthills of the Savannah. "I go at the pace of inspiration and what I can physically manage," he said.

In 1990 a car accident in Nigeria left him paralysed from the waist down, and forced his move to the US. "I miss Nigeria very much. My injury means I need to know I am near a good hospital and close to my doctor. I need to know that if I went to a pharmacist, the medicine there would be the drug that the bottle says it is," he said in 2007.

Achebe has twice rejected the Nigerian government's attempt to name him a Commander of the Federal Republic – a national honour – first in 2004, and second in 2011. In 2004 he wrote that "for some time now I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. 

I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the presidency … Nigeria's condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honour awarded me in the 2004 honours list."

Original Article

Me and this Kid

This kid is so cute...

I could just take him home with me...

Moses Down with the Sisters

In a recent published blogpost, I read about how Moses, the prophet of God Almighty, took upon himself to have an Ethiopian wife. In a 1615 artistic display, artist Jacobean depicted Moses' Ethiopian wife as he should, a dark skinned chocolate sister. Moses was depicted as white as you can see in the picture to the left.

This let's us know a couple of things, Robert DiNero was not pioneering anything... I'm kidding... but it let's us know that interracial dating existed back then too. It also let's us know that in 1615, artists, historians, and anybody out there with a brain knew that Ethiopians were a black African people.

Ethiopia in the Bible are the children of Cush. They were all sons of Ham. Today, we'd call the children of Ham, Africans. The children of Ham is who Moses is sitting with in this picture. The painter could have easily published Moses as being the same color seeing that Moses passed for the grandson of an Egyptian Pharaoh. You can read about this artist and his work here - Moses and his black wife. Moses was down with the 'sisters'.

The City Of Detroit Will Shock You

If you want to know what the future of America is going to be like, just look at the city of Detroit. Once upon a time it was a symbol of everything that America was doing right, but today it has been transformed into a rotting, decaying, post-apocalyptic hellhole. 

 Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation. It was the greatest manufacturing city the world had ever seen, and the rest of the globe looked at Detroit with a sense of awe and wonder. But now the city of Detroit has become a bad joke to the rest of the world. 

 Unemployment is rampant, 60 percent of the children are living in poverty and the city government is on the verge of bankruptcy. They say that Detroit is just a matter of "weeks or months" away from running out of cash, and when Detroit does declare bankruptcy it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States. But don't look down on Detroit, because the truth is that Detroit is really a metaphor for what is happening to America as a whole. 

 In the United States today, our manufacturing infrastructure has been gutted, poverty is absolutely exploding and we are rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Detroit may have gotten there first, but the rest of the country will follow soon enough.
Back during the boom years, Detroit was known for making great cars. Today, it is known for scenes of desolation and decay. It is full of vandalized homes, abandoned schools and empty factories. The following description of what Detroit looks like at this point is from an article by Barry Yeoman...

It's hard to describe the city's physical landscape without producing what Detroiters call "ruin porn." Brick houses with bays and turrets sit windowless or boarded up. Whole blocks, even clusters of blocks, have been bulldozed. Retail strips have been reduced to a dollar store here, a storefront church there, and a whole lot of plywood in between. Not a single chain supermarket remains.

So what caused the downfall of one of the greatest cities on earth?
Well, here is a hint...

Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
When you are a manufacturing area, and you lose half of your manufacturing jobs over the course of a single decade, of course things are going to get really, really bad.

So just how bad have things gotten in Detroit?

The following are 24 facts about the city of Detroit that will shock you...

#1 Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and it was once home to close to 2 million people. But over the last several decades people have been fleeing in droves. According to the 2010 census, only 713,000 people now live in Detroit, and city officials admit that the population has probably slipped under 700,000 at this point.

#2 The population of Detroit has declined by about 25 percent over the past decade. The last time the population of Detroit was this low was all the way back in 1910.

#3 Today, Detroit is only the 18th-largest city in America. It is now smaller than Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.
#4 Back in 1960, the city of Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the United States.

#5 Today, the unemployment rate in Detroit is more than 18 percent, which is more than twice as high as the nation as a whole.

#6 According to a report that was just recently released, approximately 60 percent of all children in Detroit live in poverty.

#7 Approximately one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles are either vacant or derelict.

#8 The city government of Detroit has closed dozens of schools and has decided to cut off public services to the "heavily blighted areas".

#9 According to one estimate, there are 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots in the city of Detroit today.

#10 The median price of a home in Detroit is just $9,000, and there are some areas of Detroit where you can still buy a house for $100.

#11 There are more than 85,000 streetlights in Detroit, but thieves have stripped so much copper wiring out of the lights that more than half of them are not working.

#12 Mayor Bing has announced a plan to reduce the number of streetlights in the city of Detroit to just 46,000.

#13 According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate at this point..

#14 The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.
#15 There were 377 homicides in Detroit in 2011. In 2012, that number rose to 411.

#16 Justifiable homicide in Detroit rose by an astounding 79 percent during 2011.

#17 In one recent year, the rate of self-defense killings in the city of Detroit was 2200% above the national average.

#18 Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit. Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.

#19 Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

#20 Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

#21 At one point, 100 bus drivers in Detroit refused to drive their routes because they were afraid of being attacked out on the streets in broad daylight. The head of the bus drivers union, Henry Gaffney, said that the drivers were literally "scared for their lives"....

"Our drivers are scared, they're scared for their lives. This has been an ongoing situation about security. I think yesterday kind of just topped it off, when one of my drivers was beat up by some teenagers down in the middle of Rosa Parks and it took the police almost 30 minutes to get there, in downtown Detroit," said Gaffney.

#22 There have been reports that gangs of young men with AK-47s have been terrorizing gas stations all over Detroit.

#23 Detroit was once known for making some of the greatest cars in the world. Now, it is known around the world as a dumping ground for the dead...

From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.

They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit's vast urban wilderness -- a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.

#24 Detroit's public schools are an absolute nightmare. The following is from one of my readers that actually attended one of the "best" public schools in Detroit...

The school was a new seven story building just a couple of years old. The bathrooms would often lack toilet paper & soap beyond the second floor (the main floor), the bathroom sinks would often not work. The water fountains on north side of the building on from the third floor & up did not work. The elevators would constantly break down. I even got stuck on the elevator before. I almost tripped down a half a flight of stairs because the elastic seal (it was the metal bar at the front of a treader of I don't know the name of it.) the stairs was not properly installed.
Students would often have sex on the stairs & throughout the school. Parents actually called the school many times & reported kids having sex on the stairs because all of them had glass windows 270 degrees.

Even over in Europe they write stories about the dramatic decline of Detroit. For example, the following is how one British reporter described his visit to Detroit...

Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

For those that want to read even more about the horrifying downfall of Detroit, there are some amazing charts that graphically show the decline of Detroit right here.

So what is the solution?

How can we fix Detroit?

Well, why don't we just build a monorail! Of course that sounds ridiculous, but the federal government has actually committed $25 million to construct "a streetcar line" that nobody really wants and that very few people would probably actually use. Perhaps they could be excused for wasting so much money on a bad idea if there had not already been 24 failed attempts to develop a successful public transit system in Detroit over the past four decades.

Well, why don't we just build a bunch of theme parks instead? After all, tourists would just flock to Detroit, right?

It has been suggested that Detroit would be ideal for an "automotive theme park", and there is actually one group of investors that wants to turn some of the worst areas of Detroit into a "zombie theme park".


What will they think of next?

Actually, a much better idea would have been to not allow millions of our good paying manufacturing jobs to be shipped to the other side of the world, but it is too late for that at this point.

But once again, please do not look down on the city of Detroit. Instead, let the city of Detroit serve as a warning for the rest of us.

The truth is that the entire U.S. economy is in an advanced state of decline...
-The percentage of the civilian labor force in the United States that is employed has been steadily declining every single year since 2006.

-An astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
-Amazingly, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans with either Master's degrees or Ph.D.s that are enrolled in the food stamp program at this point.

We are a nation that consumes far more wealth than we produce, we are a nation that is constantly bleeding jobs, businesses and wealth, and we are a nation that is going deeper into debt with each passing day.

Yes, Detroit may have gone over the edge into economic oblivion first, but the rest of the nation is steamrolling down the exact same path that Detroit has gone.

Is it too late for us to change direction?

Original Article

Please feel free to share your thoughts on that question by leaving a comment below...

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"Positive Education Activates
Constant Elevation"

Murder Murder Murder Kill Kill Kill Chicago

News like this is why we need more spiritual educating and historical education for Black Americans across the country and in Chicago. We have no regard for our fellow brother, we don't care who we're killing and who we are affecting. The article below details 5 separate killings in Chicago on one Saturday evening. These people are full of fury...

Chicago — At least five people were gunned down Saturday in Chicago, including a 34-year-old man whose mother had already lost her three other children to shootings.

Ronnie Chambers, who was his mother Shirley's youngest child, was shot in the head while sitting in a parked car on the city's West Side. A 21-year-old man who was also in the car was wounded, police said.

Shirley Chambers, whose two other sons and daughter were shot in separate attacks more than a decade ago, was left grieving again on Saturday, WLS-TV reported .

"Right now, I'm totally lost because Ronnie was my only surviving son," Chambers said. Can you believe this...I can because the love of many has waxed cold!

Shirley Chambers' first child, Carlos, was shot and killed by a high school classmate in 1995 after an argument. He was 18. Her daughter Latoya, then 15, and her other son Jerome were shot and killed within months of one another in 2000.

"What did I do wrong? I was there for them. We didn't have everything we wanted but we had what we needed," she asked Saturday.

Chambers said despite this latest tragic chapter in her life, she's not bitter or angry.

"They took my only child. I have nobody right now. That's my only baby," she said.

A few hours after Ronnie Chambers was killed, a gunman opened fire on three men near a South Side eatery, killing two of them and wounding the third, police said.

On Saturday afternoon, detectives were called to the scene of another shooting in which a man in his 30s and a teenager were shot to death. There had been no arrests.

Chicago's homicide count eclipsed 500 last year for the first time since 2008. As grim as it is, Chicago's homicide rate was almost double in the early 1990s — averaging around 900 — before violent crime began dropping in cities across America.

Last year's increase, though, stood in sharp contrast to New York, where homicides fell 21 percent from 2011, as of early December.

From The Detroit News: 

Original Source