Thinking Green...A Better Place!

Israeli-American Shai Agassi has come up with a innovated solution to oil dependency, with his better place concept of bp style recharging stations that solve the electric car distance or range anxiety, the problem with most all electric vehicles is insufficient power to make it to your destination outside of mileage range.
Motorist are able to pull into these into a Better Place Station, and have batteries quickly replenished or replaced by robotics.

Better Place does not make cars. The company will partner with leading automakers to continue offering consumers the wide range of make and model choices they have come to expect. The Renault-Nissan Alliance is the first automaker to join in this effort.

These electric cars, sport utility vehicles and other models from leading manufacturers will look and perform much like what we drive today. They will be subject to the same safety standards, but will not have tailpipes or generate harmful emissions. They are quieter, more efficient, and more reliable than gas-powered cars. But will be designed with swappable batteries based on the same technology used for to hold 500 pound bombs in place on bombers. Designed to release bombs within millisecond precision, the technology is suited to keeping batteries safely inside the cars, yet allowing them to be easily extracted in seconds.
A Better Place robot is designed to reach under the chassis of a electric vehicle and extract the battery and swap it with a new battery, same way you would replace batteries in your remote or child's toy. The consumer will have the option of choosing batteries with ranges of 1000-3000 miles. It appears that the Israelis have figure out away to ween themselves off oil dependency.

US standoff against the Somali Pirates!

The pirates boarded and seized the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday, taking 20 American sailors hostage. Although the crew managed to retake the ship within hours, the pirates were still holding the ship’s captain as they fled the ship in an empowered lifeboat.The Wingnut in me, request immediate intervention, with all the technology available to the US Military, the WTF are they waiting for…I guess I’m waiting for Dennis Haysbet and unit to drop in with frog suits and seize the vessel. Last year a high jacking
occurred involving a French leisure vessel Le Ponant flying French flag, and with Francophone citizens that was taken off the Somalia coast by a band a raggedy, hopped-up Somali pirates last spring, in the Gulf of Aden, it looked as if the bandits had bitten off more than they could chew. But after a week-long standoff, they got what they had come for—a $2.15 million ransom. Unlike the French I don’t expect the Americans to be taken as easily.

Roland Martin on CNN

Roland S. Martin is a dynamic and engaging journalist who offers a fresh perspective for the 21st century.Roland S. Martin is currently a CNN contributor/analyst, appearing regularly on Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull as well as on The Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and other CNN programs. In August 2007, he joined Essence Magazine as a special correspondent, writing a bi-monthly column and a daily blog on Essence.com and in October 2008, Martin joined the Tom Joyner Morning Show as senior analyst. He is also a commentator for TV One Cable Network, where his “In Conversation: The Michelle Obama Interview earned the 2009 NAACP Image Award for Best Interview. He won the same award in 2008 for his In Conversation: The Sen. Barack Obama Interview.

In addition, he’s a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, and the author of Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith, and Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

He was named by Ebony Magazine in 2008 as one of the 150 Most Influential African Americans in the United States, has been recognized as one of the top 50 political pundits by the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom, and was awarded the 2008 President’s Award by the National Association of Black Journalists for his work in multiple media platforms. In 2008, he was inducted into the Texas A&M University Journalism Hall of Honor.

An insightful and provocative analyst, Martin has appeared on MSNBC, FOX News, Court TV, BET Nightly News, BBC News, National Public Radio, The Word Network, America’s Black Forum, American Urban Radio Networks, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, and NPR’s News and Notes.

He is the former executive editor/general manager of the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest Black daily newspaper.

Martin is the former founding news editor for Savoy Magazine under the team of New York-based Vanguarde Media, and the former founding editor of BlackAmericaWeb.com, owned by nationally syndicated radio show host Tom Joyner and Radio One. So now to the critics of DL Hughley, this is a welcome replacement.

Faces of Africa

After my BET rant this morning, I decided to go shopping at Barnes & Noble, and found two publications published by African Immigrants, that celebrate African culture and black beauty in all its array, JTON published by Joy Tongo, entertainment industry veteran, that brings news, fashion, and entertainment from the continent, yet is accessible to African American audience. http://jtonmagazine.com/index.asp. ARISE is a UK based African fashion and pop culture magazine.

Although we African Americans set the tone culturally, and politically for other people of colour, these publications show where we fall short.

BETs Colour Problem!

Black Entertainment Television (commonly referred to by its acronym B.E.T.) is an American cable network based in Washington, D.C. and targeted towards young black and urban audiences in the United States. Robert L. Johnson founded the network in 1980. Most of the original programming of the network comprised of rap and R&B music videos and urban-oriented movies and series, news programming

In the mid nineties, BET offer progressive news programming with BET tonite with Ed Gordon, Lead Story, featuring George Curry, Clarence Paige, Barbara Reynolds. Personal Diary, BET News. However, Where BET fell short amongst its many failings...was its continue perpetuate the ages old colour caste system, the irony is that urban is usual associated with dark skinned black folks. For ten years BET has broadcast the image of the long hair light skinned black woman as the standard bearer of black beauty. How can we challenge westernize standards of beauty when we spread the same ignorance... its time to end the tradition of the light skin vixen host. 106 & Park, co-host have continued this traditional since its inception in 1999.

The Black Womans Lotto!

What is happening to Allonzo Trier is the equivalent to child exploitation, this no different from Child Labour in third world countries, Trier's youth should be spend in his development as adolescent, and not in becoming a star athlete.

The problem I have is when Trier spends 4-5 hours on developing his basketball skills, but no equivalent time on developing his social, and academic skills, and is allow to get away with a statement like "It’s hard for me because I'm not the smartest kid".

It appears that Marcie Trier is being swayed by the lure of the Black Women’s Lotto, the notion of her child becoming an NBA Multimillionaire, and providing her a life of ease. Instead of marrying a baller, steer your child into becoming the man-child baller that you were not able to capture in your youth. Allonzo Trier experience reminds me of a manager that I had, who had flown her budding child athlete all over the country to track meets and tournaments, with the hopes of him making the Olympics and carer in the NFL, providing her the life of luxury she desired.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22basketball-t.html?ref=magazine

Harlem Heights

The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought in the New York and New Jersey campaign of the American Revolutionary War. The action took place in what is now the Morningside Heights and west Harlem neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City on September 16, 1776. Hamilton Heights is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It lies between Morningside Heights to the south and Washington Heights to the north. It is the westerly part of Harlem. It contains the neighborhood of Sugar Hill. Sugar Hill is a neighborhood in the northern part of Hamilton Heights, which itself is a sub-neighborhood of Harlem, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood is defined by 155th Street to the north, 145th Street to the south, Edgecombe Avenue to the east, and Amsterdam Avenue to the west. The name originated in the 1920s, when the area became a popular place to live for wealthy African Americans.
Named to identify the "sweet life" in Harlem, it was a popular residential area of rowhouses for wealthy African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, including W.E.B. Dubois, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell, and Duke Ellington. Langston Hughes wrote about its relative affluence in relation to Harlem in his essay "Down and Under in Harlem" published in the The New Republic in 1944.
"Harlem Heights" is BET's new show that premieres at 10 pm on Monday nights. It is a docudrama, and latest addition to reality television, BETs Harlem Heights attempts to capture the hopes and aspirations of young buppie 20-30 somethings, they are the post intergrationist children that now occupied this vibrant community. Have we truly arrived, that now the post intergrationist children can engage themselves in the same type of mindless hedonism, and errant behavior as the white counterparts in the Hills
Dubbed as insight to the young, black, and fabulous crowd, the setting is in Harlem, New York and follows real friends through their professional and social ups and downs. Of particular interest is Brooke Crittenden, Kanyé West’s ex-fiancée. Feeling like she needed to lend a voice to her experience as ‘the other half to a famous person’, B.E.T. president Loretha Jones assures us that Harlem Heights is not The Hills.
The cast includes a lifestyle editor for the basketball publication Dime magazine, an aspiring actress, a fashionista, a young man contemplating a career in politics and even a young dad. It is a group of friends moving out of college and into the working world.
“This show isn’t ‘The Hills,” said BET president Loretha Jones. “The cast was friends before, so their relationships are natural and they allowed us to follow them in such a way that they were unconcerned with the cameras being there, and let us capture the real interactions.”
Jones also said that unlike some other reality shows about twentysomethings, “Harlem Heights” would explore not only emotional drama, but also professional drama and the excitement and celebrations of last year’s historical election night. After watching BET devolving into an outlet for soft-core porn disguised as music videos, I will give Harlem Heights a second viewing.