Why social networks ain't 'social'...

The term 'social network' was coined by professor J.A. Barnes in 1954. 

He defines this as a social structure made of nodes that are generally individuals or organizations. He also stated that a social network represents relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. 

Now, today, when we hear the term 'social network', we instantly think of websites directly associated with our interactions with friends; like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

At least, that's what I used to think. 

What changed my mind, was an incident where I was sitting in an airport lounge, facing directly across from one of the terminal's bars. 

Two women who looked to be in their later twenties or early thirties, were conversing over cocktails, until one of them said they had a message on their Facebook page. So this woman clutched her phone closer and began gazing into it. After about five minutes, her friend took out her 'ipad', saying she wanted to 'Tweet' something.

After I finished looking over my magazine, it was thirty minutes later, and my eyes went back to these women. 

Both were facing away from each other, while still staring into their devices.

Now, beyond this example, I can't tell you how many people I've actually had to say, "watch out" to, because they were either texting, or looking at a text, or they were on some social network, while they were walking directly into me. I've seen people nearly walk into walls trying to text 'hello' to a friend. 

But this isn't a coincidence...and let me explain why...

These social networks were designed by elites to actually pull or draw people away from others, and into a virtual realm where the only person that really exists, is them. 

See, if the public at large can be kept on social networks and in a feigned sense of connectedness, they can be lead into what I call a 'hyper-narcissism', where they're not concerned about the welfare of others. And they can be conditioned into literally hundreds of pseudo-relationships that don't require any real intimacy. 

Basically, these social networks were created to make us 'individualists'. 'Cause when you're constantly obsessing over yourself, you don't have to care about anyone else's plight. So, old African proverbs like, 'It takes a village to raise a child', go right out the window. 

And exactly how do they have us embracing 'individualism' via these networks? Notice now, how the average person, especially young persons, 'talk' to their friends less and 'text' them more. Now understand, the sound of your friend's voice evokes emotions and releases certain types of stress relieving chemicals in the brain. Moreover, there's a bonding effect that happens upon hearing a person's voice; and this doesn't take place when you're just looking at a text on a screen. 

The elites understand how important this is to a child's development, that's why they continually give our young people mechanized sounding music to listen to.  

I remember when the first 'synthesizers' started being produced...now what's this instrument's real job? Not only to act like a classical piano keyboard, but to produce 'synthetic' music; 'mechanized' sounding music to get the populus into more of a 'mechanical' mind-state, so it would be easier to turn us into automatons, or robots. The more we learn to 'compartmentalize' our emotions, the easier it is for the elites to maintain control. 

And all of this is especially detrimental to the Black Diaspora. Here's why...

Beyond the nearly two decades of conditioning we get in pre, middle and high school(s) to hate ourselves, we're also exposed to the media's mediums like TV and movies, which are rife with these messages directed at us. And let me add again, even though I've said this ad nauseum; the conditioning we get to hate ourselves is TEN TIMES WORSE than any other ethnic group gets. We literally are made to hate ourselves more than any other kind of person on the planet. 

And this conditioning HAS WORKED!!

It's worked and is working too damn well! 

I was thinking the other day, I can't remember a time in my life, when Black men and women didn't have a deep rift between them. And actually, this rift has gotten deeper! So much so, that what I'm hearing continually from Black men is 'we're done' with Black women, and Black women in turn are saying they're done with Black men in droves. 

Now, with this being a reality for our Diaspora, the last thing we need is some 'social network', which is really an 'anti-social network', to aid in deepening the schism between us. 

If you're a Black man reading this, understand, if you can be kept obsessing exclusively on Black men's issues, you can be kept hating Black women; and ditto for a Black woman who's kept obsessing exclusively on Black women's issues...you can be kept hating Black men. That's the game white supremacists are running on us, and their campaign has been wholly successful. Once more, if we're kept in a 'hyper-individualism', we'll never think about the whole of the Black Diaspora.

Now, when I first started this Blog, my intention was to offer a meditative solution to the problem of self-hatred(s) that plagued us. But what I'm finding is, not only is our Diaspora not receptive to doing this kind of work at the subconscious level, but the majority of us don't even wanna' acknowledge how white supremacists have conditioned us to hate ourselves. 

I'm thinking okay, people aren't open to the idea of meditating, but if we don't at least see how we've been made to hate ourselves more than any other ethnic group walking this earth, then we have NO CHANCE AT GETTING RID OF OUR SELF-HATRED.

The majority of us are so comfortable in our self-hatred, that we think this mind-set will benefit us more than learning to love ourselves and each other. We still think our closer proximity to whites will guarantee a better life, even if it means they're coming into our neighborhoods, buying up its properties and kicking us out. 

So let us, the Black Diaspora remember...THE VIRTUAL WORLD IS NOT REAL!!

YOU DON'T HAVE FIVE HUNDRED FRIENDS LIKE IT SAYS ON FACEBOOK! More than likely, you really have about five or ten REAL ONES!

Individualism is what whitey has taught us to embrace, and it's the very thing that's killing us and our communities. And it usually manifests in Black women saying, "I don't need no man", or a Black man saying, "The only thing a Black woman can do for me, is show me where a white woman is".

So, let's come up out of this individualistic mind-state, so we can at least acknowledge what's been done to us by white fascists. And let's at least make an attempt to get back to loving ourselves and each other again.

'Cause our UNITY is the ONLY thing that will save us, not our money...and certainly not some damn social network account(s)!

And let's also remember, saving the Black 'nuclear' family...IS ALWAYS WHAT'S UP!!

Sutekh!

MontUHURU Mimia

P.S. 

If you need another reason to get your personal information off these 'anti-social networks', and off Facebook especially, here's a bit more of an incentive. This vid will tell you where all that info. you're feeding Facebook really goes. Just a 'head's up', this vid officially ends at 4:04.

P.P.S.

For those who forgot, here's the now infamous vid of that silly spaniard, Cathy Cruz Marrero, falling into a fountain while texting and walking. What's even funnier is, she WORKED AT THIS MALL when this happened! So you'd think she'd be a bit more familiar with its layout...lol! Yet another example of how these 'anti-social networks' pull you out of reality, instead of enhancing anything in it. 

The legend of Dr. Phil Emeagwali and the creation of the internet...

Dr. Phil Emeagwali was born on August 23^rd, 1954 in Nigeria, Africa. He was the oldest of nine children and his father, who worked as a nurse's aide, earned a modest salary. Because of this, a young Dr. Phil was forced to leave school at the age of fourteen.

Even though Phil wasn't attending a formal school, his father saw his talent for mathematics. His father nurtured his abilities with spontaneous tests that forced Phil to come up with answers quickly, developing his abilities to think on his feet. Eventually, his father tasked him with answering a hundred math questions an hour; which to his father's delight, Phil succeeded at.

The young Dr. Phil journeyed to the public library, which became his alternate school. He spent his days consumed in books not only appropriate for his age, but collegiate-level tomes on subjects ranging from math, chemistry, physics and english. After this, he applied to take the 'General Certificate of Education' exam, which was a high school equivalency test given through the University of London. He passed it easily.

He applied to colleges in europe and the u.s., and at 17, received a scholarship from america's Oregan State University. He began his studies there in 1974 and received a Bachelor's Degree in mathematics in 1977. He then moved to washington d.c., and received a Master's Degree in Environmental Engineering from George Washington University in 1981. He attained a second Master's Degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1986. During the same time, he attained yet another Master's Degree from George Washington University in Ocean, Coastal and Marine Engineering; and this he did while working as a civil engineer in Maryland and Wyoming. In 1987, Dr. Phil was accepted into the University of Michigan's Civil Engineering Doctoral program and received a doctoral fellowship.

Now, in the governmental and academic worlds, there were 20 'Grand Challenges' that confronted the areas of science and engineering. One of these was 'petroleum reservoir stimulation'. Oil companies faced the problem of locating oil reservoirs, without displacing the pockets of petroleum into unreachable areas by drilling too deeply or too often. The main means of locating these reservoirs was using 'supercomputers' which cost upwards of 30 million dollars. Dr. Phil having grown up in Nigeria, which boasts some of the world's biggest oil reserves, decided to take up this challenge in his doctoral dissertation.

Dr. Phil's exposure to nature in his native Nigeria, helped him see the problem from a different perspective. He remembered an old African proverb which stated, 'a large number of chickens, coordinated in strength and efficiency, could do a better job than a small number of oxen'. With this mind-set, instead of using one of the oil industry's conventional 'supercomputers', which housed 8 microprocessors, he'd find one that housed 64,000. The grand quandary was how to gain access to this many computers and how to connect them. His answer would lead him to a massive computer called the 'connection machine'.

This monstrous computer was made by a company called, 'Thinking Machines'. Problem was, it was so gargantuan, that no one thought it was able to be programmed. Dr. Phil found this machine at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He got approval to use it and went about the task of setting the parameters for his experiment. Dr. Phil was delighted when the computer, with his new programming, began processing 3.1 billion calculations a second. To top that off, the program was not only able to locate oil reservoirs, it was able to tell how much oil was in the reservoir, the oil's flow of speed and the direction the oil was traveling in. Furthermore, this technology provided the template for connecting computers around the world to provide a scalable network through which to provide and share information. Sound familiar? In other words, DR. PHIL'S PROGRAM, MARKED THE FIRST CREATION OF WHAT YOU'RE USING RIGHT NOW TO READ THIS POST...WHICH IS THE WORLD WIDE WEB, A.K.A., THE INTERNET!!

AND THAT'S RIGHT...DR. PHIL CREATED IT!!

If this weren't enough, along with his phenomenal achievement, Dr. Phil succeeded in building the world's fastest computer. And, in 1989 he won the Gordon-Bell Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize in computation, for this feat.

Dr. Phil has also lent his genius to weather forecasting in regards to greenhouse gases and global warming. His basing computer methods on nature, like the working swarms of chickens and bees in honeycombs, still gives him the revolutionary insight that has every meteorologist heeding his methods. Dr. Phil gave his nature-based technologies the name of 'hyperball' computing. And this will undoubtedly continue to create innovations for generations to come.

Now, I remember one day, I was in a subway looking at a billboard that told the tale of a Black man being responsible for the creation of the 'ice cream scooper'. I don't know if this is true or not, but white supremacists put that crap billboard up to keep the Black Diaspora mired in shame thinking this was the only kind of thing our feeble minds could come up with creating.

What that sign was designed to do, was reinforce the reasons why I should hate Black people; based on the fact that we're less intelligent than whites, who I and everyone of my peers, was taught created everything worth creating. And seconds after, this billboard was suppose to make me hate myself for being Black. That's the game of white supremacy.

So, if you're a Black man or woman reading this, anytime you're made to feel like the only thing your people contributed to this world was slavery and Martin Luther King, remember Dr. Phil Emeagwali; and be inspired to know that the only thing whitey created was the patent office...everything else they stole from us.

SO LET ME SAY SUTEKH! (BLACK POWER)TO THE GOD/NETCHER/NEGUS/NAGA DR. PHIL EMEAGWALI!!!

Ma'at Hotep!

MontUHURU Mimia

P.S.

Family...just wanted to let you know, I have a job conference I need to attend that requires me to travel. So if over the course of the next weeks, my posts are less consistent, this is why.

Also, in keeping with the theme of great Black inventors, if you'd like to know about brotha Henry T. Sampson and his invention of the 'Gamma Electric Cell', you can read about it here.

Smashwords, Immeasurable odds and what makes my heart weep...

"It always seems impossible until it's done."
--Nelson Mandela

Recently, I put out a pair of e-books on the 'Smashwords' publishing website; and thanks to all who downloaded copies of these tomes by the way. I never thought they'd get above ten downloads each, but they've both far exceeded that. 

So one day while I was on the Smashwords site, I decided to take a look at its 'African-American fiction' thread, just to see what it looked like. And when I clicked on to it, I gotta' tell ya' people, I was deeply saddened. 

It seemed every other book told the story of some Black man and woman, with some white man or woman...and it was almost exclusively what made up the overwhelming majority of tomes on the thread. 

I just shook my head and thought, damn... 

Then, a real dour sensation came over me...and I thought, can I really affect a good amount of the Black Diaspora with my message before I'm no longer here? Or am I just engaged in some Black Nationalist 'pipe dream' that's got me trippin'?

That's when I remembered one of my contemporary elders, Dr. Phil Emeagwali...or as I call him, the REAL 'DR. PHIL'. 

Dr. Phil Emeagwali was born in Nigeria in 1954; and like many African children he dropped out of school at age fourteen 'cause his father couldn't afford to pay for his studies. But his father continued homeschooling him; and one of his techniques for teaching a young Phil was having him perform 100 math questions in an hour. 

Living in a war-torn country, Dr. Phil saw academics as a way out; so he studied hard and eventually got a scholarship to Oregon State University when he was 17. 

He arrived to the american University system in 1974, and left with four degrees, one of which was a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Scientific Computing, the others were two Masters Degrees from George Washington University, and of course, the Bachelor's he got from Oregon U. 

His brilliance in the areas of math and computer science eventually led him to creating a method where a computer's microprocessors could 'talk' to six other microprocessors at the same time; this won him the 'Gordon Bell Prize' for building the world's fastest computer in 1989. 

His computers are now being used to forecast the weather and the effects of 'Global warming'; but for Dr. Phil...the Gordon Bell Prize was just the warm up. 

The united snakes...I mean states government has/had a multiprocessing 'super-computer' called the 'Connection Machine'; and it housed 65, 536 processors in total. It was so vast they said it couldn't be programmed. That was until Dr. Phil (pictured at the top) came up with his 'Hyperball computer technology' that did it. 

Dr. Phil basically programmed the 'Connection machine' (The Black cubes pictured besides him) to compute at a world-record setting pace of 3.1 billion calculations per second.

I'm definitely going to write a full post about Dr. Phil sometime in the near future, 'cause this wasn't even his grandest invention; but his example has served as my 'template' on how to overcome anything I deem impossible. When it comes to going about this, he's shown me how firstly, you should spiritually center yourself; secondly, you should laser-beam your focus, and finally, you should work like hell towards your goal. 

So, this took away the mental malaise I was momentarily mired in. 

And beyond this, let me tell you how it's no coincidence that the Black cubes of the 'Connection machine' acknowledge who our ancient ancestors truly are. 

Firstly, the Black cube in Islam called the 'Kabba stone' (pictured left), is what muslims circle around seven times to perform one of their most sacred rituals, called the 'Hajj'. And in the muslim faith, the 'Kabba' or the 'Black stone' is the symbol of God.    

The jewish 'Tefillin' (pictured right) are Black cubes placed on the head and various limbs of jewish practitioners to essentially get them 'closer to God' and their commitments towards him. Isn't this funny considering how jews don't care for Black people much. 

And in a more contemporary sense, the 'Mortar board', another example of a 'Black cube', symbolizes someone who's a graduate of the scholastic university's 'higher educational' system. But what it's really symbolizing or acknowledging, is the world's first university, the Sankore Madrasah, located in Timbuktu, Africa; and how ancient Black people are the creators of ALL the world's sciences. And you heard right...it's the WORLD'S FIRST UNIVERSITY. This is where the romans and the greeks/freaks got all their sciences from. Actually, the Sankore Madrasah was called an 'omniversity', 'cause again, ALL THE SCIENCES were housed under its roof. 

But don't take my word for this, go look this up!

Plus, check the name of the 'Mortar Board'...Moors, which we and our ancestors are, plus 'tar'; now, what color is tar? This is making a direct link right back to our people. 

And my apologizes for the digression.

So, the sights of 'African-American' novels with the themes of torrid inter-ethnic trysts, no longer gets me down; it just hardens my resolve to do this work. 

Now, one thing I've been experiencing left and right lately, are Black men and women saying how tired they are of each other, and how their preference for white mates and dates has everything to do with their previous bad experiences trying to date their own kind. 

But I think I've done a pretty good job of exposing exactly why, where and how the Black Diaspora are taught to obsess over white people...but one funny thing I've found is this; even if you're a Black man or woman hell bent on dating and marrying a white person, the meditations or mental exercises I mention in previous posts to get the Black Diaspora out of our conditioned self-hatred will still help you. 

Here's how...

Once you've done these exercises to the point where you're eradicating the white supremacist dogmas in your subconscious, you'll feel better about being Black; thus, when you see your being Black as a blessing instead of a curse, your confidence will increase. 

And once that happens, whether you know it or not, you'll attract a better quality of person towards you; whether their white, Black, purple or whatever.

Of course, that's not my intention, but that's what will inevitably happen. 

And as I've told several people who still ride the fence on whether they wanna' be down with a Black Nationalist doctrine or not...you have a choice to make. 

If you want to work in the best interest of your people by engaging in the meditations I've put forth, then do that; if not, ask yourself a question...why are you reading this Blog when you know what it's message will be?

Think about that...then make the right decision.

Sutekh!

MontUHURU Mimia

White supremacist conditioning and a lovely afternoon at the library...

"Give us a boy 'til the age of seven and we'll show you the man."
--The Jesuits

Firstly, I'd like to apologize to the readers of this Blog for the paucity of posts as of late.

I've been in the midst of moving, along with a myriad of other 'life' problems I'm dealing with; one of which is, I'm currently between ISP companies right now: so, I'm doing the majority of my Blogging from the annals of my local library. 

But rest assured, I'll be operating at my max capacity in the very near future...so stay tuned, 'cause I've got a lot of cool topics I'll cover soon.

With that said, here's my latest post...enjoy!
 

The other day, I was at my local library and I had my laptop in tow.

Now, I knew from the previous hours of using it, how low its battery's power was; and when I looked around to all the seats near electrical outlets, I realized they were all occupied.

Fortunately, my local branch is mid-sized and has a couple of sections to traverse. So, reluctantly, I headed for the children's section 'cause it was the least crowded.

Now, I don't care for being in the company of pre-adolescents, but this was an emergency.

There were some kindergarteners roaming about their section, so I tried to look as innocuous and nonthreatening as possible; which was a lost cause on every front. But it wasn't a matter of parents or kids giving me any attitude, it was my feeling hyper-conspicuous that kept me unsettled.

But after a good while of finding a particular table to sit at, I gotta' admit the section's vibe was kinda' nice. After the better part of half an hour, the sun broke free from some oppressive cloud cover and glistened through the area's floor to ceiling windows. Right beyond the paned glass was an assortment of potted plants, angular shrubs and small trees making the area look more like a topiary; and directly across the street was a white church that seemed to glow in the sun's gaze.

The combination of the section's tan colored carpet and the mahogany desk I sat at was making this library feel more like a large Starbucks.

That's when what looked like a five year old boy, traipsed over to a section of books adjacent to my table. His father followed closely behind.

After a couple of minutes the two started conversing about different books. That's when this young white boy said “Dad, you know the southern part of the Sudan is one of the best areas (of Africa) to visit 'cause the people there are the most civil.”

Now, I hadn't heard the earlier part of the conversation and I'm paraphrasing what this young guy said, but the comment's inflection spoke to what he'd been taught and had been conditioned to believe about Africa. And what he'd obviously heard was what we've all heard about our mother continent, and that's how famine plagued and uncivilized its Black citizens are.

The father was a bit dismayed about his son's lack of discretion, but only for a second, 'cause right afterwards, they both returned to looking at books.

Then the young white boi said, “You know Dad, there are two Santas, one is white and one's Black.” The father didn't respond but you could tell he wanted his son to shut up. See, what the child didn't know, was he was exposing what kind of parenting he was getting from his father; and how he was being indoctrinated into a sublime form of bigotry.

The white boi reiterated, “Dad, the two santas are from opposite polls, one south and one north, the white santa is from the north pole...the African santa is from the south pole...and he's Black.”

That's when the father ushered his son to another section; inwardly, I was like, wow.

Mind you, this kid looked to be only about five or six, but what he already learned and was conveying to his father was how there's something intrinsically wrong with being Black. The kid hadn't developed an internal filter yet, so he was just saying what came to mind. And again, he was exposing what his father taught him.

That's when I thought about the Jesuit's saying that I wrote at the top of this post.

By the time a person is five or six years old, they have the personality and character traits that will ultimately follow them throughout their lives, unless they do the subconscious work to recondition themselves out of whatever trait they don't like.

It blew my mind how this kid already got the message that he shouldn't like Black people. And his father obviously felt the same way, but he didn't want to air out his mental dirty laundry.

Then I looked over at the church I mentioned earlier and noticed it was painted white; and even though this church had a weather-beaten look to it, and could have definitely used a new paint job in a different hue, the proprietors seemed not to want to change its exterior.

And the church had a clever saying on its marquee; it read: Seven days without prayer makes one weak. Now, even though that's catchy, it's telling of how this white supremacist message spewed by the church and other institutions, is one the white elite want us to carry with us everyday and everywhere.

This made the church's mission, as well as the mission of every institutional facet of the white supremacist social order, even clearer to me.

Why do you think we're given a white bottle of milk to drink as infants?

Understand, cow's milk is strictly for its calves, it's not suppose to be for human consumption. But we're given this so throughout our lives so we'll always have positive connotations to the color white...moreover, we'll always associate the color white to thoughts of wholesomeness, safety, and if we're given these bottles while we're with our mothers, we get the message that this color is necessary to life...like our mothers are.

Then, several minutes after the white father and son left, something else happened.

A lone Black man was looking over another book shelf near my table, and I shamefully admit, what came to my mind first was...here comes trouble.

I shook my head clear.

See, I can spout out all these posts about reconditioning the subconscious I want, but I still have work to do on myself; 'cause I still have prejudices against my own people I need to recondition myself out of.

A lyric popped into my head from a heavy metal band I once listened to: “Agony is the price that you pay in the end, domination consumes you and calls you a friend...it's a twisted foe.”

This is the plight of every person, especially every Black person, living in this global white supremacist social order.

And like myself...we've got a lot of work to do to resolve this brainwashed condition we're in.

So, like I've said a thousand times, it's imperative the Black diaspora work to get ourselves back to a place of loving one another...ASAP!! And it's imperative that we do the meditation and other mental exercises that will help us accomplish this.

'Cause we desperately need to internalize one of our African ancestors great ancient axioms, and that is: IF THERE'S NO ENEMY WITHIN, THE ENEMY WITHOUT CAN DO US NO HARM.

Word!!

Later,

MontUHURU Mimia