I just read “Some Arizona University Programs Threatened by Proposed Ban on Affirmative Action” by Peter Schmidt (author of Color and Money), and it reminded me of a few questions I asked of a few Black and Hispanic lawyers during a recent meeting. Here are paraphrased versions of the questions I asked.
1) Why would a [...]
This morning, I read Exodus Mentality’s blog post “Support a Black Business.” The post resonated with me. What is being asked of me in the post makes perfect economic and ethical sense.
I believe STRONGLY that I have a moral obligation to support skilled and integrity-filled Black entrepreneurs. I suspect one way I can support Black entrepreneurs is to support [...]
The doctoral program I’d most like to complete and the one that would best prepare me to produce rigorously researched and novel scholarship would be Princeton’s Graduate Sociology Program. Cornell’s Graduate Sociology Program is a close second. If I were one of the rare quasi-Afrocentric Black men to be admitted to one of these programs, [...]
The Shock Doctrine Short Film
—A Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein, directed by Jonás Cuarón.
I don’t do much pointing here at Maxambit. Not because I dislike pointer blogs (I read several of them regularly), but because there are great pointer blogs out there already, and I write a lot of stuff that I believe [...]
Charlton Copeland put up a blog post, “What I Owe to Hampton,” over at Blackprof.com that made me scratch my head a little.
My wife and I recently escorted our daughter to a public university for her undergraduate education. We escorted our son to the same university the year before. Our son and our daughter [...]
We may study ethics in comfortable university classrooms and persuade ourselves that deontological systems are superior to consequentialist systems or vice versa. Some of us may believe that virtue ethics offers us a more robust ethical toolkit than its two main competitors because it might enable us to escape some of the tricky problems that [...]
Another good conversation, “Infrastructure, Energy Security, and Us…,” led by cnulan inspired me to write down a few thoughts about 21st Century oil-related global political economic struggles tonight. I submitted an unedited version of the following blog post to cnulan’s post’s thread as a blog comment.
Peak oil is indeed a problem, and there aren’t [...]
This morning, while listening to National Public Radio, I learned of a new book about Viktor Bout. Its title is Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible. It was written by two great investigative reporters, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. I doubt I’ll read it, because I doubt it [...]
There are various forms of capital–things we may use in order to help us accumulate wealth, power, or prestige in our society or things that would enable us to benefit from the pleasures of opulence or sense of well-being that wealth, power, or prestige can provide. Some forms of capital are forms of property, technologies, [...]
I see dots scattered around all the time. Most of the time I don’t have the time or energy to connect them. I had some free time this morning, I saw a few dots, and I played around with them a lil’ bit.
Dot 1:
This morning, while scanning my RSS feeds through NetNewsWire 3.0, the very [...]
Yesterday, one of my favorite bloggers, whose nom de blog is Prometheus 6, posted a video of a Dr. Roland G. Fryer Jr. lecture (P6’s post). Fryer is on my list of “living scholars who are much smarter than me and are doing things I wish I could do as well as or better than [...]
Physical attractiveness1 is a form of capital. Attractive people are favored over plain or unattractive people.2 And, there is substantial agreement across cultures concerning what is physically attractive.
While we inherit many unalterable bodily attributes from our parents, our levels of physical attractiveness, given the genetic cards we were dealt, are alterable. Some alterations, such as [...]
I have been calling inner-city gang-bangers and drug-dealers terrorists for years. Even though I would agree with analysts who point the finger at structural causes, failed governments and failed economies, for the growth of violent inner-city gang-bangers and drug-dealers, I still believe firmly that labeling them as terrorists is appropriate. And I believe firmly that [...]
There are many ways to combat poverty and political economic inequity in urban communities. I believe the integration of tens of thousands of asset-rich U.S. Blacks into our asset-poor U.S. Black communities would be one of the most effective ways. A higher percentage of asset-rich and asset-poor Blacks lived within only a few blocks of [...]
There is only one Black blogger from whom I might request political advice, Dr. Lester K. Spence. On May 4, 2007 Les published “Two Words You Won’t Find in Obama’s Platform.” He followed that post with “The New Poor” and “Black Suburban Isolation” on May 9, 2007. Poverty and inequality are on his and my [...]
I am a disaffected U.S. Military Veteran. I have been one for four years. I know our President is a smart man, but I don’t think he earned his job. In fact, I think he is a striking example of what happens when social rewards (wealth, power, and prestige) are distributed unmeritocratically, because someone of [...]
“These factors make Asians better at math and science. But does it make them better, holistically speaking?”—David Chen, “Why Asians are Better at Math”
Most U.S. citizens must work very hard in order to gain access to and benefit from the vast educational resources and opportunities that are guaranteed to our upper-class U.S. citizens. In fact, [...]
General Baker at the League of Revolutionaries for a New America
This post might make more sense if you watch the video first.
General Baker discusses problems that I’d like to focus on during and after law school. There are many ways to go to work on these problems. I’ll try to make my contributions by building [...]