DJ Brandon Shabazz

Chuck D on Jeremy Lin

We as blackfolk need to understand the transcending inspiration ofJackRobinson,ALI,Clemente,on a ppl.This is what JLin is doing to Asians — bshabazz (@bshabazz)

thecreatorsproject:

Two words: dubstep cat.

Whitney Houston Tribute mix.

The sensitive side of Hip Hop exposed for your listening pleasure. Made with the ladies in mind. Featuring music by Ace Hood, Drake, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Fat Joe, Red Cafe, Wale, The Weeknd, Yelawolf and many more.

New Hip Hop mix for the ladies or for the fellas when they’re with the ladies. Enjoy and spread the love & passion.

Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House. “If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.

“

—

In this NYT piece about Apple and why, as much as we love tech companies, they are not the economic drivers in the United States that their industrial brethren are/were. A telling paragraph from the same article:

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost every electronics designer relies upon to build their wares.

joshsternberg:

firthofforth:

barthel:

themattsmith:

the-mtblog:

newsweek:

Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.

This also reveals how distressingly ignorant many political representatives are. It seems they just blindly supported it without actually knowing what the hell it was about, and then when they were forced to find out, they learned, and changed their minds.

No, the number of supporters only dropped by 15, while the number of opponents went up by 70. Which is to say:

Most supporters didn’t change their minds.

Most people had no preference as of Tuesday.

Once their constituents made their preference known, they followed the wishes of their constituents.

So if there is a technical issue like this which affects you and you would like your representative to do something about it, tell them. There’s this weird expectation that political leaders, who have to address issues concerning lots of people who aren’t you (the elderly, children, farmworkers, etc.), should have all the same information we do. That’s understandable - we assume a monolithic media environment where everyone reads and watches the same things as us, even though that hasn’t been true for a decade or so, because everyone we interact with online does have the same media diet as us - but it’s not going to protect your interests. Here are some of the things the House considered yesterday: water resources in California, oil and gas rights, increasing the debt limit, the Volcker rule, and NATO’s role in the Western Balkans. SOPA/PIPA is important, but at heart it’s about allowing the DOJ or copyright holders to get a court order that would block payments to the infringer and require their ISP to deny them service. That may make sense to you, but to everyone else it’s a highly technical, niche issue. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact a lot of people (so is the Volker rule, and people in the Western Balkans would probably have some feelings on NATO), it just means that you can’t just expect people who deal with a lot of different shit to naturally come to the conclusions you do. You have to tell them - or, better yet, organize and find a way to get lots of people to tell them.

What happened yesterday was content providers got users to act as unpaid lobbyists, and it worked, because lobbying does. Our representatives aren’t stupid so much as they are easily distracted cats; you have to catch their attention, and if you yell the loudest, you get your way. So yell, for fuck’s sake. Don’t expect the political system to work perfectly without any input from you. And get a lot of other people to yell with you.

Barthel wins.

Now if we can only get people to vote…

Dreamy old school Zero 7 song. My daughter helped me remember how dope this song is.

Just the opposite,” Tebow says. “It’s by far the best thing I do to get myself ready. Here you are, about to play a game that the world says is the most important thing in the world. Win and they praise you. Lose and they crush you. And here I have a chance to talk to the coolest, most courageous people. It puts it all into perspective. The game doesn’t really matter. I mean, I’ll give 100 percent of my heart to win it, but in the end, the thing I most want to do is not win championships or make a lot of money, it’s to invest in people’s lives, to make a difference.

“

—	Just when you want to really hate Tim Tebow... (a really good article and hope he continues to do all this good as he becomes the face of the NFL.)

Android phones aren’t as simple to use as the iPhone, but they’re not that much more complicated, and “if you’re willing to do the work to understand it a little bit, well I hate to say it, but there’s more available in some ways.

“

—

Steve Wozniak

Woz often diverged from Jobs. He wanted Macs to be easily upgradable, Jobs didn’t. Same reason he likes Android.

One of the things that drove Jobs nuts was how he thought Google stabbed him in the back with Android, he felt they stole a lot of the iPhone technology from him and would not get into the smartphone business, even at just the OS level. This comment from Woz would have likely set him off if he were still around today because of the anger he carried around with him about Google.