Very good advice to take in conversations with someone who makes racist statements.

Obama Orders US Troops To “Prepare For Civil War”

November 28, 2009 By: Freedom Fighter

United Nations Resolution: International Year for People of African Descent

Author: drjelks

How to Read Natural and Organic Product Labels

Get out your loupe, because it’s time to read some labels. This is by far the hardest thing to do when it comes to choosing personal care products, but it’s also the most instructive, and the most important. Because of lax cosmetics laws, it can be very hard to know if a product you’re using is as clean and safe as you want it to be. There are laws about ingredient disclosure, however, which means that the list of things listed in your product have to be true. To help you on your way, here are some tips:

1.  Get in the habit of reading labels and deciphering ingredients. This isn’t easy at first, because ingredients are listed according to their chemical name and many of us might not know off the top of our heads what DMDM hydantoin is. But it’s a worthwhile undertaking, and there are some great resources to help you get started. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database allows you to search for a product, ingredient, or company. The section of the website dedicated to Whole Foods’ Premium Body Care standard has lots of useful information and videos, and the Teen’s Turning Green’s Dirty Thirty is a great cheat sheet for ingredients to avoid and why.

2. Know that “natural” is ambiguous. “Natural” has no official definition when it comes to personal care products. In the absence of federal regulations for the term, it is necessary to read labels to decide if the product is truly natural or not. Note that “natural” is just one factor that constitutes a so-called “green” product. Sometimes products labeled as “natural” do not take efficacy or environmental impact into consideration in their manufacturing.

3. Learn the difference between “natural” and “organic.” Natural and organic are not the same thing. While “natural” probably means that a product or ingredient is derived from a natural source, the term “organic” applies to plants grown and managed using earth-friendly agricultural methods without the use of toxic or persistent pesticides. It’s worth noting that you may also see body-care manufacturers making claims for individual organic ingredients in the ingredient listing of their products, even though the product as a whole does not meet the USDA organic standard for food.

4.  Look for third-party certifications and symbols. The USDA organic seal on a beauty product means the same thing as when you see the seal on foods, because there are currently no federal organics standards for personal products in the United States. To carry this seal requires 95 percent organic ingredients and places strict restrictions on the substances that can be used in the remaining 5 percent. Meanwhile, products with Whole Foods’s Premium Body Care Symbol meet the strictest standards for quality sourcing, environmental impact, results, and safety. And products with the NSF International/ANSI 305 certification must contains at least 70 percent organic ingredients while meeting strict requirements regarding organic ingredients, materials, processes, and production specifications.

5. Try to avoid the following ingredients, none of which are allowed in products that meet the above standards: Synthetic fragrance, which can be highly irritating and are also a potential source of questionable sub-ingredients such as phthalates; formaldehyde-donor preservatives—such as diazolidinyl urea, DMD hydantoin, imidazolidinyl urea, and sodium hydroxymethylglycinate—which under certain circumstances of formulation and storage, these ingredients have the potential to release formaldehyde in very small amounts; and chemical sunscreens, such as oxybenzone and octyl methoxycinnamate, have safety concerns since many have been shown to have endocrine-disruption activity.

Jody Villecco is responsible for researching, coordinating, and maintaining the Quality Standards at Whole Foods Market.

This is the eleventh installment in a series inspired by No More Dirty Looks: The Truth About Your Beauty Products and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics, a book by GOOD’s features editor Siobhan O’Connor and her co-author Alexandra Spunt. It will run every Tuesday and Thursday.

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NAACP Slams BP For Sticking Minorities In The Most Hazardous Clean-Up Jobs

Philippe Dagen

• Guardian Weekly, Thursday 15 July 2010 15.37 BST

A Kota reliquary figure from the Congo River, arts of central Africa exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly. Photograph: Vincent Everarts/EPAOn finally reaching the entrance to the Congo River exhibition, on the upper ground floor, we caught sight of masks that, even from a distance, looked amazing, and equally attractive statues. But we resisted the temptation and headed for a map, in the hope of grasping the ideas underpinning the show, which aims to be much more than just a selection of works from the Congo River basin.

Two arrows on the map show how the Bantu languages spread out from their place of origin in Nigeria from about 3,000BC. One arrow follows the Atlantic coast south, as far as the mouth of the Congo river, arriving there about 2,000 years later. This branch corresponds to the western Bantus. The other arrow heads east towards the great lakes, also reached in about 1,000BC, bending southwards then turning west to follow the Congo and its tributaries. The two branches rejoined in the area now covered by Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The two branches thus circumscribe a vast area, consisting of the river basin and a swath of equatorial forest. To plot the routes, linguists studied successive offshoots of the original Bantu language, identifying the links between the dialects that evolved through time and migration.

This preamble is necessary because François Neyt, who curated the exhibition (until 3 October), makes ample use of the data. He seeks out visible forms of continuity in the statues and masks, and in the religious concepts they reflect. Much as the language, there is unity in the art despite the distances. The subtitle of the exhibition is essential: Correspondence and Mutation of Form.

The show is divided into three parts. It looks first at a specific style of heart-shaped face thought to be common to several peoples – the Kwele, Vuvi and Lega – who also worked with wood or ivory, regardless of whether they were living on the shores of a river or in the depths of the forest.

The second section focuses on the reliquaries associated with specific ancestors fashioned by the Mbede or Fang peoples. Some are made of polished black wood, others are covered with pieces of brass. In some cases, the form is extremely simple, while others accumulate so many votive studs and adornments as to suggest some fantastic anatomy. What is essential in all of them is their magical force: they must contain a power or a spell.

The third part concentrates on the representation of women, the exaltation of their beauty and motherhood among the Punu, Luluwa and Kongo peoples. Here again, the centres of population are often far apart. This section is less convincing, as Neyt has stretched his point here.

The works themselves are splendid though, inventive and beautifully executed, leaving an overall impression of perfection. But different peoples place more emphasis on certain aspects than others. Fang designs are particularly simple, whereas the Songye figures are magnificently overdone.

When the presentation brings together several examples of a single type of object or figure (standing male figures with a closely trimmed beard from the Boyo-Bembe area, or the Kota’s geometrical reliquaries) it is fascinating to see the persistence of a prototype and the variations from one workshop to the next. It is equally delightful to see how styles meet and combine, or how the statues and masks of a particular ethnic group are related, but without slavishly applying the same solutions in their representation of faces.

The exhibition feels inexhaustible. This is particularly the case for French-speaking visitors. Belgium having colonised and exploited the Congo, many of the finest pieces created in this region have found their way to collections there. They are represented here in large numbers, to demonstrate the ideas underpinning the show but also to show off the magnificence of what was once known as art nègre.

A detailed mural timeline provides a useful reminder of how this art form caught the western world’s attention towards the end of the 19th century. But what is surprising is not that Picasso and Apollinaire should have been so dazzled by these admirable sculptures, but that it has taken almost a century for them to gain universal recognition. This article originally appeared in Le Monde

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“Queen Elizabeth II the largest landowner on Earth.”

Queen Elizabeth II, head of state of the United Kingdom and of 31 other states and territories, is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the earth’s non ocean surface.

She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries, and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory. This land ownership is separate from her role as head of state and is different from other monarchies where no such claim is made – Norway, Belgium, Denmark etc.

The value of her land holding. £17,600,000,000,000 (approx).

This makes her the richest individual on earth. However, there is no way easily to value her real estate. There is no current market in the land of entire countries. At a rough estimate of $5,000 an acre, and based on the sale of Alaska to the USA by the Tsar, and of Louisiana to the USA by France, the Queen’s land holding is worth a notional $33,000,000,000,000 (Thirty three trillion dollars or about £17,600,000,000,000). Her holding is based on the laws of the countries she owns and her land title is valid in all the countries she owns. Her main holdings are Canada, the 2nd largest country on earth, with 2,467 million acres, Australia, the 7th largest country on earth with 1,900 million acres, the Papua New Guinea with114 million acres, New Zealand with 66 million acres and the UK with 60 million acres.

She is the world’s largest landowner by a significant margin. The next largest landowner is the Russian state, with an overall ownership of 4,219 million acres, and a direct ownership comparable with the Queen’s land holding of 2,447 million acres. The 3rd largest landowner is the Chinese state, which claims all of Chinese land, about 2,365 million acres. The 4th largest landowner on earth is the Federal Government of the United States, which owns about one third of the land of the USA, 760 million acres. The fifth largest landowner on earth is the King of Saudi Arabia with 553 million acres

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Dying to Be White: The Skin Bleaching Epidemic Amongst Africans by Khalif ‘Ras’ Williams

After 500 years of indoctrination through a process of domestication, we have been psychologically remade into soldiers fighting against ourselves in every way possible. So bad is this disease of self hatred that some colonized black people have begun to believe they can physically become their oppressors in appearance. click the link above for the entire article

Rest In Power to one of the greats Vonetta McGee

latimes.com

Vonetta McGee dies at 65; film actress during 1970s blaxploitation era

Her big-screen heyday included roles in ‘Blacula,’ ‘Hammer’ and ‘Shaft in Africa.’ She later appeared with Clint Eastwood in ‘The Eiger Sanction.’ In the ’80s, she had numerous TV credits

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

Vonetta McGee, seen in 1979, was no fan of the “blaxploitation” label that was attached to many of the films featuring black casts in the ’70s. She said the label was used “like racism, so you don’t have to think of the individual elements, just the whole. If you study propaganda, you understand how this works.”

Vonetta McGee, an actress whose big-screen heyday during the blaxploitation era of the 1970s included leading roles in “Blacula” and “Shaft in Africa,” has died. She was 65.

McGee died Friday at a hospital in Berkeley after experiencing cardiac arrest and being on life support for two days, said family spokeswoman Kelley Nayo. Although McGee had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 17, Nayo said, her death was not related to the disease.

McGee was described as “one of the busiest and most beautiful black actresses” by Times movie reviewer Kevin Thomas in 1972, the year she appeared opposite Fred Williamson in the black action movie “Hammer,” and had starring roles in the crime-drama “Melinda” and the horror film “Blacula.”

She went on to appear with Richard Roundtree in “Shaft in Africa” (1973), and co-starred with Max Julien in “Thomasine & Bushrod” (1974).

McGee also appeared with Clint Eastwood in the 1975 action-thriller “The Eiger Sanction,” prompting The Times’ Thomas to write in his review: “Her parrying with Eastwood, verbally and otherwise, is enough to scorch the screen.”

“I was pleased to see her get a role with Clint Eastwood,” said Williamson, who knew McGee before they made “Hammer.” “Not many black actors had that opportunity to be in a movie where color doesn’t matter.

“Vonetta McGee was like a lot of actors and actresses at that time, like myself, Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Billy Dee Williams and Pam Grier, in that we had more talent than we were allowed to show because everything was perceived as a black project. Once they categorize you, your marketability becomes limited.”

McGee was no fan of the “blaxploitation” label that was attached to many of the films featuring black casts in the ’70s.

That label, she told The Times in 1979, was used “like racism, so you don’t have to think of the individual elements, just the whole. If you study propaganda, you understand how this works.”

Although The Times reported that McGee “calls herself one of the lucky graduates of the black-film genre,” she pointed out that there was a difference between someone like Diana Ross and other potentially marketable black actresses.

“She has had the luxury of a studio behind her,” McGee said. “This is where a lot of us fell short. We all needed a certain amount of protection. But we were on our own.”

Among McGee’s other film credits are “The Lost Man,” “Detroit 9000,” “Brothers” (in which she played an activist based on Angela Davis), “Repo Man” and “To Sleep with Anger.”

In the ’80s, her career turned primarily to television.

That included playing Sister Indigo on Robert Blake’s short-lived 1985 dramatic series “Hell Town” and playing a social worker who takes a con man played by Jimmie Walker into her home in the syndicated 1987-88 sitcom “Bustin’ Loose.”

She also played a recurring role on “L.A. Law” and appeared in several episodes of “Cagney & Lacey” as the wife of detective Mark Petrie (played by Carl Lumbly).

McGee and Lumbly were married in 1986 and had a son, Brandon, in 1988.

Born Lawrence Vonetta McGee in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1945, she was attending what is now San Francisco State when she got involved with a local acting group.

She launched her film career in 1968 in Italy, where she appeared in the spaghetti western “The Great Silence” and played the title role in the comedy “Faustina.”

In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by her mother, Alma McGee; three brothers, Donald, Richard and Ronald McGee; and a sister, Alma McGee.

A memorial service is pending.

latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-vonetta-mcgee-20100715,0,6730780.story

Fears grow as millions lose jobless benefits

CINCINNATI (Reuters) – Deborah Coleman lost her unemployment benefits in April, and now fears for millions of others if the Senate does not extend aid for the jobless.

“It’s too late for me now,” she said, fighting back tears at the Freestore Foodbank in the low-income Over-the-Rhine district near downtown Cincinnati. “But it will be terrible for the people who’ll lose their benefits if Congress does nothing.”

For nearly two years, Coleman says she has filed an average of 30 job applications a day, but remains jobless.

“People keep telling me there are jobs out there, but I haven’t been able to find them.”

Coleman, 58, a former manager at a telecommunications firm, said the only jobs she found were over the Ohio state line in Kentucky, but she cannot reach them because her car has been repossessed and there is no bus service to those areas.

After her $300 a week benefits ran out, Freestore Foodbank brokered emergency 90-day support in June for rent. Once that runs out, her future is uncertain.

“I’ve lost everything and I don’t know what will happen to me,” she said.

The recession — the worst U.S. downturn since the 1930s — has left some 8 million people like Coleman out of work.

Unemployment has remained stubbornly high at around 9.5 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in June 6.8 million people or 45.5 percent of the total are long-term unemployed, or jobless for 27 weeks or more.

Before the recession began in late 2007, the unemployed received benefits, usually a few hundred dollars a week, for 26 weeks or around six months after losing their jobs.

Under the federal/state programs, which are administered by state governments and partly funded by taxes on business, only full-time workers are eligible for benefits. Within federal guidelines, benefits and eligibility vary from state to state.

As the downturn left more Americans out of work for longer periods, Congress voted to provide funding to extend benefits to as long as 99 weeks in some areas.

Some critics say this adds to the country’s large fiscal deficit, and may even discourage job-seeking.

FOOD BANKS FEAR STRAIN

An attempt to pass another extension has become bogged down in partisan political bickering in the Senate. Relief agencies fear that failure to extend benefits will strain their resources and may worsen the U.S. housing crisis.

“This will put a great deal of stress and strain on our organization, which has already been working hard,” said Vicki Escarra, chief executive of Feeding America, which has a network of more than 200 food banks. In the year ended June 30, Feeding America distributed 3 billion pounds (1.36 billion kg) of food, a 50 percent increase over the past two years.

The benefits debate has pitted the majority of Democrats against most Republicans and some conservative Democrats.

When the House of Representatives passed a $34 billion benefit extension on July 1, 11 fiscally conservative Democrats voted against it. The Senate may take up the issue again in mid-July, but Republicans like Senator Tom Coburn have argued any extension must be paid for with cuts elsewhere.

“Even then he (Coburn) is not sure if that’s a good idea,” said John Hart, a spokesman for the Oklahoma senator. “The longer the unemployed have benefits, the less incentive there is to find a job.”

Most economists argue that cutting benefits could slow recovery, describing benefits as direct economic stimulus because almost every penny of it gets spent. In a June 28 client note, Goldman Sachs said if all additional U.S. stimulus spending expires, it could slow the economy up to 1.5 percentage points from the fourth quarter 2010 to the second quarter of 2011.

The note added that extending unemployment benefits and a $400 tax credit would “substantially mitigate” that impact.

3 MILLION CUT OFF IN TWO MONTHS

During the Senate impasse, from the week ended June 5 to the week ended July 10, more than 2.1 million Americans lost their benefits. Another million will join them by July 31.

In Ohio alone, where unemployment stood at 10.7 percent in May, more than 83,000 people lost their benefits in June.

Sister Barbara Busch, executive director of non-profit housing group Working in Neighborhoods in Cincinnati, 65 percent of the people who come seeking help with their mortgages are unemployed or underemployed.

“I fear once the benefits run out, I suspect we’ll see a new wave of foreclosures,” she said. “I just hope I’m wrong.”

Ohio is a bellwether U.S. state in elections. The state’s Democratic attorney general Richard Cordray said blocking extending jobless benefits was politically motivated ahead of the midterm elections in November.

“If people lose their benefits they will blame the congressional majority and the administration,” he said. “As unappetizing as it is, that would appear to be the strategy.”

Senator Coburn’s spokesman Hart said suggestions the Republicans were playing partisan politics were “ludicrous.”

“The Democrats say that because they want to avoid making the hard decisions,” he said.

Alonzo Allen, 55, a former aid agency worker in Cincinnati whose benefits will run out in September, spends two days a week volunteering at the food bank in Over-the-Rhine and the other three looking for work. He said he worries about the one-bedroom apartment he rents and how he will feed his dog Ginger, who is the “only family I have.”

“If the benefits stop, I’ll be out on the street and I’ll lose all my furniture,” he said. “That’s going to be tough.”

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100714/ts_nm/us_usa_economy_unemployment