Bringing to mind the necessity of human redemption, the condition of today’s common man bears witness that “greed, lust and inordinate self-interest” have together caused tremendous bloodshed and suffering. Not only with the earth’s human population, but also with the environment, the few who rule “this world” have done so through the degradation of the impoverished and defenseless.

The poor, many of whom live on less than two dollars a day, labor under multi-national indifference and corporate deal-making that treats them as assets or liabilities to be exploited. While the well-to-do knowingly or unknowingly live at their expense, the poor have few voices except for those bold teachers from among us who dare to speak truth to power.

Through his recordings, Michael Jackson lives and continues to teach of “the man in the mirror.” As other past and present teachers have taught, the message of individual transformation continues with his legacy. Providing the keys of redemption for both rich and poor alike, humanity, with all of its flaws and defects, is better served when voices of truth emerge as reminders. From the pulpit, to the street corner or within music itself, the speaking of truth banishes falsehood while giving people the opportunity to examine, analyze and correct their ways. A true mercy for humanity, right guidance and correction may take many forms as those who teach virtue struggle to do so in a world of opposition.

Reflective of a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach, the most effective servants and advocates for the poor have usually been from among those encouraging change from within self. While government and philanthropic organizations clearly have a role to play in the correction of society’s ills, it is the collective change of an ethos that ultimately forgives our trespasses and heals our world.
(more…)

As I rode in the car for 16 hours listening to the radio with my daughters, I noticed that Lil Wayne seemed to feature in every song. I think I upset the girls when I said, “Yeah, Lil Wayne’s song about wanting to have sex with every girl in the world reminds me of Eazy-E…Oh by the way, he eventually died of AIDS.”

Yes, I had just puked on my daughters’ parade, but I had to say it. Kids don’t want to hear that kind of stuff, it disrupts their celebrity buzz. So, the same way my daughters grimaced when I compared Lil Wayne to Eazy-E, some execs at BET might grimace when they read this article. I hope they will take comfort in the fact that I am not into blanket indictments. But that never seems to matter in a dichotomous world, where you are either a critic or a supporter. I’m just a man with a brain and two eyeballs, and I try to use them both.

I’ve done a great deal of work with BET, and I’ve always loved it. The staff is courteous, respectful and professional. Many of their specials have been informative, progressive and provocative. I do not, however, consider the most recent BET Awards to be one of these shows.

The great challenge for BET is that there is a genuine concern from the African American community that BET has slipped away from acknowledging any kind of double bottom line that merges necessary profitability with equally critical social responsibility. For every million dollars earned in revenue, there is at least another 20 million dollars in lost productivity created by a generation that was raised to shake their butts in the club all night while holding a bottle of Cristal. Now, every black boy wants to be a rapper, and millions of little girls think that the word “bitch” or “hoe” in a song means that the rapper is talking about somebody else. Sorry sweetie, but Soulja Boy wants to “super soak” you too, and you’re dancing while he says it.
(more…)

The King of Pop was working for the past few weeks with a team of top choreographers to perfect a new dance move to rival the moonwalk. Four mornings a week, an SUV with darkened windows drove Michael Jackson through the gates outside a nondescript building near the Burbank airport. He spent the next six hours on a soundstage.

Jackson planned to perform between 18 and 22 songs, joined by smoke, fire, and acrobats in the concerts. Ten dancers were working with Jackson, scampering across as many as 22 different sets, in what was to be the biggest, most technologically advanced arena show – and the most expensive – ever mounted!

Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk), who has known Jackson for 15 years, said Jackson was “very energetic” during workouts and “was in fantastic shape”. Ferrigno, 57, said he last trained with Jackson about three weeks and would go to the singer’s home three or four times a week.

The two used tools like exercise balls and did a lot of core training to get Jackson in shape. “He didn’t look like he was in pain because he was on the treadmill. He did the stretching exercises.” In addition to training, it seems that Jackson kept a strict diet.

A four-hour physical with an independent physician this spring found no medical problems.

But now, Michael Jackson is dead? How Did Michael Jackson Die?

Well, after suffering a cardiac arrest, a little more than 24 hours after his last rehearsal, the King of Pop went under a deep coma and later on declared dead by the staff hospital.

For many of us, until the death of Michael Jackson, sudden death from cardiac arrest is a major health problem that’s received much less publicity than heart attack.

The most common underlying reason for patients to die suddenly from cardiac arrest is coronary heart disease. Most cardiac arrests that lead to sudden death occur when the electrical impulses in the diseased heart become rapid (ventricular tachycardia) or chaotic (ventricular fibrillation) or both. This irregular heart rhythm (arrhythmia) causes the heart to suddenly stop beating.

The heart has an internal electrical system that controls the rhythm of the heartbeat. Problems can cause abnormal heart rhythms, called arrhythmias. There are many types of arrhythmia. During an arrhythmia, the heart can beat too fast, too slow, or it can stop beating. Sudden cardiac arrest occurs when the heart develops an arrhythmia that causes it to stop beating. This is different than a heart attack, where the heart usually continues to beat but blood flow to the heart is blocked.

There are many possible causes of cardiac arrest. They include coronary heart disease, heart attack, electrocution, drowning, or choking. There may not be a known cause to the cardiac arrest.

What is clear is that there are ways to lower one’s risk of sudden cardiac death such as eating healthy, exercising, not smoking and taking aspirins. The trouble, though, is that patients often don’t think they’re at serious risk until they are actually experiencing an attack. In about a third of all sudden deaths due to coronary disease, death is the first sign that anything major is wrong.

A sudden cardiac arrest is, of course, unexpected, but the process that causes it may begin many years before. In middle-aged men, it’s virtually always caused by degeneration in the wall of a coronary artery.

The sad fact is that the majority of acute heart attacks are associated with “non-significant” plaques. These plaques may suddenly rupture, which quickly leads to the formation of a blood clot. The blood clot acutely occludes the coronary artery, causing a heart attack.
(more…)

With Joe, it was never the proverbial case of you love him or hate him. It was just simply hate. The line was seemingly set by Jackson in his autobiography in 1988. He lightly hinted at regrets over skipping a normal childhood, the forced march into child stardom, and of course the beatings. He minced no words in saying that he wanted to get back at Joe for the abuse.

But Jackson also admitted that his most vivid memory was of rehearsals, countless hours, spent in the studio to get the notes and the dance steps right. Joe’s ferocious push to harness his son’s talent and whip them into a world class act wasn’t just to satisfy a father’s obsessive ego, or vicarious thrills through his children, or dollar signs dancing in his eyes. To Joe, and so many other hard case black fathers of that time, saw entertainment and the stage as his son’s ticket out of the ghetto; a sure fire escape for potentially at risk young black boys escape from poverty, racism, and the perils of the streets.

In an age when parenting roles were far more rigid and sharply defined, Joe’s idea of being a loving, caring and responsible father was to bring home the paycheck, expect their dinner to be waiting on the table, and to be stern, tough, and no nonsense with their children, especially their sons. Joe’s fierce drive paid big dividends with the Jackson’s. The fame, dollars, and adulation rolled in. They boys did not do drugs, join gangs, commit any crimes, and they could not be accused of educational or professional underachievement.
(more…)

Written By CTA

Apparently, hip-hop is singularly responsible for all that is wrong with the Black community. Misogyny just didn’t exist before hip-hop. Neither did materialism. All fathers took care of their children before hip-hop. All mothers were great mothers before hip-hop.

If it’s wrong, the hip-hop generation is responsible for it. Does hip-hop, the music and its supporters, have problems? You betcha. Is it solely responsible for all that ails the Black community? No.

Earlier this year, I attended the Trumpet Awards, which is generally an inspiring and uplifting event. Two of the honorees, one a successful businessman who rose from poverty to become a multi-millionaire and the other, a successful surgeon who has a passion for jazz, accepted their awards noting that young people need not look to just athletes and rappers as beacons of success.

I’m all for expanding the realm of possibilities to our youth but, often times, when we mention athletes and rappers, the underlying implication is somehow successful athletes and rappers got lucky. That’s the tone that both honorees projected to thunderous applause from the many older attendees in the audience. It’s problematic because we miss the real key ingredient to success, which is hard work. No amount of God-given talent is solely responsible for anyone’s success. Luck does play a role but hard work is what ensures longevity.

Hip-hop and its celebration of bling are also blamed for the rampant materialism in our community. Speaking on a local panel a few years back, I noted that DeKalb County in the Atlanta metro area was the second richest Black county in the United States but it had a fifty percent high school drop-out rate. To me, if you are driving a Benz or Beamer instead of a Camry, Taurus or Civic at the expense of spending time with your children, then Jay-Z and Diddy aren’t teaching your children materialism, you are. We’re not looking at those things, though. It’s much easier to blame it on hip-hop.

In a heated discussion a couple of weeks ago, a gentleman in his fifties noted that it’s a problem when mothers and daughters are dressing alike and you can’t tell them apart. He blamed this on hip-hop and the style it promoted. The real culprit, however, is we live in an age where getting older is a crime. There was a time when a person in their 20s didn’t reel at being addressed as ma’am or sir by a teenager so hip-hop is not the culprit. Our undying need to stay forever young is.
(more…)

The body loses fluids in a variety of ways:

when urinating;
when you vomit or have diarrhea;
when sweating; and
from the lungs when you breathe.

Normally, the body cools itself by sweating. If temperatures and humidity are extremely high, however, sweating is not effective in maintaining the body’s normal temperature. When this happens, blood chemistry can change and internal organs–including the brain and kidneys–can be damaged.

The circulation in your body helps to dissipate heat, but when the air temperature is higher than 90°F, cooling by sweat is the only way to prevent the body from overheating. Cooling through evaporation, or sweating, is only possible when your body has been provided with enough fluids. Failing to properly hydrate can result in dizziness, fainting, digestive problems and even death.

Dehydration can quickly lead to fatal collapse of the circulatory system because the heart and temperature control systems cannot dissipate the core heat of your body. Your body is a little furnace- pumping blood, breathing and digestive activities all generate heat deep in the core of your body. If you are working in the heat, the activity of the muscles generates even more energy. If you haven’t consumed enough fluids to sweat and cool itself, your body core temperature will rise and begin to destroy tissues and organs. Collapse can come on quickly, although the body gives fair warning of the problem, many people fail to react to the warning signs.

As your temperature starts to rise, your hot blood burns your muscles and your muscles hurt and burn. If you continue to exert yourself, your circulation is compromised when you become extremely short of breath and no matter how hard you breathe, you can’t catch your breath. If you ignore this sign, your temperature rises above 106 and your brain is damaged, you get a headache, see spots in front of your eyes, hear ringing in your ears, feel dizzy and pass out.

Lack of fluids set you up for heat stroke, so you need to drink fluids all the time when you are in extremely hot weather. You cannot depend on thirst to tell you when you are dehydrated because you won’t feel thirsty until you have lost between two and four pounds of fluid and by then, it is too late to catch up on your fluid deficit.

We all hear the phrase, “You should drink plenty of fluids in hot weather. “Plenty of fluids” means at least 1-1/2 to 2 quarts of fluids daily. This can be water, fruit juice, or fruit-flavored or carbonated drinks. Since aging can cause a decreased thirst sensation, elderly persons should drink water, fruit juices or other fruit drinks at regular intervals during the day, even if they do not feel thirsty. Avoid alcoholic beverages and those containing caffeine. Salt tablets are not substitutes for fluids.
(more…)

There is still only a handful of African-American, Latino or Asian CEOs who run Fortune 500 companies or who sit on their Boards of Directors. The overwhelming majority of top, middle and lower corporate managers are white males. There is only one African-American in the Senate. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that the increase in the number of minorities on the federal bench has been frozen during the Bush years. Minorities still make up a small percentage of state and federal judges. The first Latina on the High Court won’t change that. Laws and public policy are still made, shaped, and enforced by white males.

Sotomayor and any minority perceived to be a threat to corporate and political white male dominance will be branded a reverse racist. This is not new.

The bogus term cropped up in the early 1960s during the first surge of black militancy. A CBS special on the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, Mike Wallace, was labeled “the hate that hate produced.” The special played hard on the theme that the Black Muslims with their white man is a devil rhetoric and messianic religious flavored black separatism were the incarnate of racial bigotry. In the next few years, the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Chicano activists, and other militant groups were routinely reviled as reverse Klan, Nazis, and racist nightriders.
(more…)

That quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is as relevant today as it ever was.

Our children are dying in the streets and in many ways, they are being blamed for their own deaths. They are being hated for the conditions they are born into.

When we talk of violence in the Black community, many people want to blame that violence on the young Black men and women who are victims of it.

People want to blame the youth for the guns and crack that are killing them.

Automatic weapons did not just walk into our neighborhood in the arms of Tyrone the drug dealer.

It is deceptive to espouse that Black men are somehow responsible for systematic racism and classism, but making such statements is easier than taking action, or facing one’s own responsibility.

More than half a million Americans are victimized in handgun crimes each year, and our community is the hardest hit:

3,792 children and adolescents under age 20 died in 1998 due to gun violence.

While 85% of all gun deaths of people under age twenty are males, the rate for Black males is 2.4 times higher than Hispanics and 15.3 times higher than for whites.

For black males, aged 15 to 19, firearm homicides increased 158 percent during the last decade of the old century, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

In the last decade, Black males, ages 15 to 24 accounted for nearly 60 percent of the victims of homicides involving firearms.

The total number of teen deaths due to gun violence has dropped, but, really not by much. By 2002, the above number from 1998 dropped to 3,012. That is still 3,012 too many.

We hear the term “Black on Black Violence,” and we assume that African Americans are in the streets hunting each other down. Many of us fail to realize that typically violent crimes happen close to home, which means that we tend to harm the ones closest to us. In other words, none of us are out looking to increase our own death rate.

There are myriad reasons why young Black males are being subject to gun violence and the fingers don’t all point to the young men themselves.

Society itself is to blame for conditions that facilitate crime and violence, yet, even many African Americans are quick to blame each other.

For everything.

In America, Blacks are often blamed for everything, from the high crime rate to the unemployment rate of poor whites.

Today, many African Americans are blaming poor African Americans.

Talk to the average educated African American and he or she is likely to tell you that Black men are going to prison at higher rates than whites because they are simply committing more crimes.
(more…)

The president’s speech sounded good. It was sorely needed after eight years of hostility from the Bush administration. And, indeed, it was politely received by most Islamic leaders including the heads of radical organizations such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

However, everything the president said will be for naught and the situation in the Middle East will get even worse if the Obama administration does not get tough with Israel and stop the Jewish state from continuingly doing the very things which for years have made peace in the region impossible.

There is a pro-Israel bias in most of the major American media. As a result, most Americans have been led to believe that the core problems in the Middle East are the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist and terrorist acts by Palestinians who hate Israelis for reasons the media never bothers to explain.

The picture painted by most U.S. news organizations is simply false.

The core problems preventing peace in the Middle East are threefold:

1) The state of Israel was created in 1948 on land which the Palestinians feel was taken from them and for which they have never received just compensation;
2) In wars which have followed the creation of Israel, especially the 1967 war, Israel has seized additional Arabs lands and refuses to relinquish them; and
3) Israel oppresses the Palestinian people and continues to insult them by establishing even more Jewish settlements on lands which it knows belongs to the Palestinians.

During the recent U.S. meeting with newly elected, hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama and Vice President Biden made it clear that the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands had to stop and that there had to be a so-called “two-state solution” in which the Arabs would recognize Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinians would be allowed to come out from under Israeli oppression and build a nation of their own.
(more…)