Heavy Mentalist

I just received info that the great sci-fi writer Octavia Butler has passed. What a loss. This is the AP news on her death from today’s E-Drum:

Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:53 p.m. ET

SEATTLE (AP) — Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58.

Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.

Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.  Continue reading...

Imagine if everywhere you go there’s Black folks. In the stores, at the gas station, the barbershop, the restaurants, up and down the street and all around you, all the townspeople and business folk are Black people.

Most folks can’t imagine this now, but there are several small towns in America that are either all Black or more than ninety-five percent so. On Tuesday, Feb. 28, a documentary, This Side of the River, will premiere at Durham’s Hayti Heritage Center about one such town.

Princeville, North Carolina was the first town in America to be chartered by Blacks and is still a Black town. Princeville was founded by freed slaves and built off what was once swamp land. The film tells the story of Princeville’s beginnings, and how the town has had to struggle against racism, economic hard times, and a devastating flood in 1999 (caused by Hurricane Floyd) followed by an attempted FEMA buyout which would have erased Princeville from the map.  Continue reading...

In response to the R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop call for action to achieve balance in Hip-Hop, I propose this action plan for establishing a nationwide volunteer Hip-Hop Awareness Street Team.

This plan is not set in stone, and is merely one citizen’s open-ended suggestion of a possible way to disseminate critical Hip-Hop action alerts on a ground level to those who may not have internet access or are unaware of where to find critical Hip-Hop information on the net. Additionally, the Hip-Hop Awareness Street Team may serve as a vital link to breach the perceived gap between ”Hip Hop elites” and “the streets” and may have other possible positive applications.

The skeleton of the plan is as follows:

1. Establish lead figures for overseeing the Street Teams. These Lead Figures form a council which oversees representatives of each region in the US who serve as “regional coordinators”.

2. These regional coordinators oversee (hate to use that word…) all the states in their respective regions. They actively recruit one-two Street Team Leader(s) per state from a pool of hard-working persons already known for their activism work in each state.  Continue reading...

Watching O’Reilly. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t even give that station my time, but he had a segment about horse meat being eaten in Europe and I thought it looked interesting so I watched it. Actress Bo Derek, ie, the lady who made cornrows officially “safe” for White women in 10, was on talking about how disturbed she was about this trend as she loves horses.

So what if people eat horses? If you eat any animal, why not another? The idea that some animals are okay to eat, but others are not, that slays me, just like “vegetarians” who eat fish.

Then, Bill pretty much suggested what I just said, asking why some animals are safe to eat and not others, like dogs. To this the “actress/activist”said, and this is not a direct quote, but something to the effect of “We have millions of stray dogs in this country but we don’t invite Asians to come open up slaughterhouses.” This woman is a glaring example of the kind of twit who made it to the top the old fashioned way – she used her pussy. She had to. Obviously it’s a little airy up top.  Continue reading...

And I thought I was on some *other* shit. Check out this anonymous comment I got the other day.

Here’s a great quote from it: “The advent of the modern Christmas was a brilliant move. It created a vested interest among those who would prefer the Church be destroyed:::: As goes the Catholic Church so goes the majority of annual retail sales. The similarity between the names “Santa” and “Satan” is no coincidence….Jews maim the body formed in the image of “god”, and inflicted circumcision upon all other white people.”

While I’m not completely convinced that Jews helped spawn homosexuality or that they need to be segregated from other people…some of my best friends are Jews! (LOL!)…I must say I have always wondered why certain things…like circumcision, the marking of “K” on foods to denote its kosher status, etc…have become part and parcel of “American” life, when these things stem from the Jewish faith. Still, I can’t now, nor will I ever condone mass annihilation of any people. But on the real…I do believe Cheney and them are a bunch of gotdamn reptilians. How can they possibly be human?  Continue reading...