Finally, a multi-billionare is teaching the next generation about the importance of having a financial IQ.  All too much does our school system fail at teaching kids one of the most important life lessons “How to personally manage your money”.

The Secret Millionaires Club, a cartoon for children starring billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is now available to watch for free on the Internet.  The cartoon is designed to help kids understand saving, investing, business, hard work, and analyzing money problems.  Given that almost none of this is taught in the school system within the United States, I think it is doing a tremendous good for people who want to learn to be financially independent or who wonder how to get rich.

Click HERE for episodes and the official website! If/When I have kids this will be REQUIRED learning material.

-DLake

Please watch below videos to see how “far off” they were from the original.

Waka Flocka Flame

Soulja Boy

Gucci Mane

So word on the street is that 50 cent lost something like 56 lbs for a movie role.  The only role in development in his IMDB profile doesn’t give much detail.  So I’m curious if they are making a drama about a blind man living in the south who hides his hate and prejudice behind a white robe.  If so, I hope Chappelle gets a bit role as a janitor, or a guy pretending to be a janitor, in marijuana clinic. Afterall I, for one, would be happy to see black actors sticking together, we don’t want another Wayne Brady situation going down.

]]> http://clairehux.com/?feed=rss2&p=602 0 http://clairehux.com/?p=598 http://clairehux.com/?p=598#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 18:00:07 +0000 DLake http://clairehux.com/?p=598 Wow! One Shot. No Cuts. Beautifully shot and kinda damn funny. Oh and Asher Roth killed it as usual.  If you hate him, at least appreciate the artful craft of this.

-DLake

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

• • Clay Travis
  • FanHouse Writer

On Saturday, the Tennessee Titans drafted Florida State safety Myron Rolle in the sixth round of the NFL Draft with the 207th overall pick.

Rolle, whom you previously knew as the Rhodes Scholar who spent his past season in Oxford studying for a graduate degree in medical anthropology, graduated in 2 1/2 years from Florida State, where he played safety for three years. Then he chose to skip his senior year to take advantage of the Rhodes Scholarship, an honor that only 32 men and women garner every year.

You’ve probably heard of a few of the alums from the Rhodes, guys like President Bill Clinton and former NBA great Bill Bradley.

What you may have heard and brushed off was this: Multiple NFL teams, scouts and executives questioned Rolle’s commitment to football because he made this decision.

Why?

Because the thinking goes — and we’re defining “thinking” broadly here since many of the scouts, coaches and executives making these comments would be pumping gas for a living without football — that Rolle is too smart, that his priorities in life don’t revolve entirely around a pigskin bouncing on a field.

Welcome to the 21st century NFL, where your commitment to the game doesn’t get questioned if you fail multiple drug tests, drive drunk or rape a woman. But woe unto you if you have the audacity to graduate early from college and take a year off to pursue a Rhodes Scholarship. Then you’re a smart guy, the NFL’s own version of the untouchable caste in India. That’s why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, including head coach Raheem Morris, could ask Rolle at the Senior Bowl how it felt to desert his teammates for his senior season.

---

Rolle’s “desertion”?

Accepting the Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford.

If only we could all be so lucky to be deserted by our teammates for this.

Would the Tampa Bay Bucs “brain trust” have asked a player who left college early to play pro football how he felt about deserting his teammates?

Doubtful.

Share Would the Bucs have asked a player who was caught smoking pot how he felt about letting his teammates down?

Doubtful.

Nope, because Rolle wears the NFL’s own scarlet letter, intelligence. And that’s just something the NFL can’t stand. The league wants their players focused on football or nothing else, barefoot and padded.

Rolle came on our Nashville radio show Monday and in between answering questions about American health care policy, the medical clinic he plans to build in the Bahamas, his love for football, and hanging with President Bill Clinton, he addressed the question of how having his commitment to football questioned made him feel. (Listen to that entire interview here.)

Here’s an excerpt:

“I was very surprised. I had anticipated I would get some questions. … but I didn’t expect it to be as big, or as huge of an issue in the whole scheme of the draft process. …The only thing I can say or try to convey is that I have a lot of options, I do, and I’m very proud I won the Rhodes Scholarship. Medical school will be in my future 15 years from now, Lord willing … and being a politician is not out out of the question either. But if I have all these options and I still choose to play football, that must mean that I really love it. … I really do want it, and I have to show it.”

That answer isn’t good enough for the NFL.

What’s more, in an even larger indictment of our society, that answer isn’t good enough for football fans, either.

Because think about this for a minute: I haven’t read one iota of criticism of NFL teams, scouts, or analysts who questioned Myron Rolle’s commitment to the NFL for embracing something larger than football and seeking opportunities outside the game.

We should all be insulted, anyone who has ever played, coached, or watched a football game, that the highest level of the sport devalues intelligence to such a degree that coded language like “commitment” knocks you down several rounds.

Because let’s be clear, what NFL people are really saying when they question Rolle’s commitment is, he’s too intelligent for the game. And personally, I can’t tell you how pissed off that makes me. Not that a scout or coach or general manager would say this, but that it would go unchallenged in our society today. That NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who is so intent on protecting the shield, yet won’t come out and rip coaches and executives who make these comments about Rolle. Have we really reached a level of NFL football where you get knocked further down the draft board for being a Rhodes Scholar than you do for being arrested?

I think so.

And if we have, doesn’t that mean that we’ve broken the fundamental rule of sports, the rule that I was taught, that you were hopefully taught, and that one day I’ll teach my own sons? That rule is simple: Use the ball, don’t let the ball use you.

How did kids react when they watched the draft, saw Myron Rolle celebrating, and immediately heard draft analysts discussing his fall down the draft boards because teams questioned his commitment? I’ll tell you, kids aren’t dumb, they know what that means. That when their coaches preach academics and exploring outside interests, that’s really just a shell game. The reality is something different: we want you to care about nothing else at all.

The result?

All too often in American sports today the ball uses the athlete. We see it in the one-and-done rule of the NBA that threatens the very fiber of college basketball. We see it in the number of football players who leave college after four years and test sub-literate on the Wonderlic. How is it possible that someone could stay eligible on a college campus for four years and not have a test score high enough to be employed as a janitor?

And they have a college diploma!

We see it in the NFL, where league owners want dumb players so they can make more money than any other professional sports league while failing to guarantee employment to their players for more than one year at a time. Dumb players equal a dumb union. And a dumb union equals more money.

The NFL doesn’t want thinkers, it wants big, dumb idiots who think nothing of the future. It wants to ensure the ball uses them, it’s more profitable that way.

Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic?

That’s for nerds! (Yeah, like the nerds who own the teams.)

Yet, we wonder why so many of these athletes given the opportunity to take advantage of the options presented by their skill with a ball never amount to anything once that ball is taken away from them. We act surprised when athletes flounder post-career .

It’s because of this, the same mindset that can question how an athlete can have the audacity to graduate in five semesters of college and pursue a Rhodes Scholarship, yet not question an athlete leaving school early without the ability to read his own professional contract.

Nope, we don’t red flag the lack of intelligence.

That means the player is “committed” to his sport. He’s committed because he’s too damn fool stupid to do anything else.

And then we question the players, like Myron Rolle, who truly use the ball to make something better of themselves.

Even for the most successful sporting careers in the world, 99.9999999 percent of them are over by the time an athlete reaches his early 30’s. After all, as my radio show co-host Blaine Bishop constantly says on-air, “You know what the NFL stands for, right? Not For Long.”

Then what?

Myron Rolle might be a doctor or a congressman.

Most of the athletes we root for on the field won’t be anything else at all.

Just as the NFL prefers.

Read More: Titans AFC South NFL Draft Myron+Rolle

H2M- Part of the Craze

The Hot Magic | MySpace Music Videos

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What’s the Fuss With Badu’s Body?

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Posted on Apr 4, 2010

By John Cheney-Lippold

The rate at which our puritanical society works always astonishes me. Yet the way that forms of racism creep into our daily lives sadly doesn’t. Take a new music video by Erykah Badu, which has caused a bit of chaos in our cultural milieu of late and has resulted in a charge of disorderly conduct and international media coverage.

Badu’s video for her latest single, “Window Seat,” embedded below, shows the singer stripping her clothes as she walks through downtown Dallas, ultimately ending up naked at the spot where Kennedy was assassinated.

In the beginning seconds of “Window Seat” explicit homage is paid to the 2009 video by the duo Matt and Kim for “Lessons Learned,” embedded below, which provides an interesting case for a cross-racial nudity comparison.

The two videos, at face value, are quite similar. Both document artists walking the public streets in a striptease strut, their respective song playing in the background as they move in slow-motion past gawking pedestrians. Both end in a sort of surreal calamity. And both mark a significant point in the careers of both musicians.

But outside the video screen we see two different stories. Matt and Kim’s video had no legal consequences. In fact, Kim spoke of the friendly relationship they had with the police during and after the filming. While no cops were present at Badu’s guerrilla shoot, Badu was smacked with a $500 disorderly conduct charge.

But more important, Badu’s corporeal exhibition elicited national repute. The Dallas Police Department claims it has been receiving calls from people “across the country to express their concern.” The response to Matt and Kim’s two person skin-fest was nothing but positive, which begs the question of whether a black body in downtown Dallas has a more disorderly character than two white bodies in Times Square, New York City.

To be clear, there are other considerable differences between the two acts. Badu’s video visually represents the assassination of John F. Kennedy, while Matt and Kim’s is more a political statement of abstract freedoms and rejection of social norms. Badu’s video was shot purely in a guerrilla manner, with no permits; Matt and Kim’s shoot had a tenuous permit for “tourists walking through Times Square inappropriately dressed for the weather.” And admittedly, indie-pop darlings Matt and Kim were a much less known quantity than the prolific Badu at the date of the release of their video.

But nonetheless, there is something here that cannot be dismissed as purely situational. Many critiques of Badu chastise her for being nude around children. In fact, the Dallas police used the fact that “[Badu] disrobed in a public place without regard to individuals and small children who were close by” to charge her with disorderly conduct. But Matt and Kim’s video also has run-ins with children. So is the difference just an issue of location: the intolerant, flesh-hating world of Dallas or the international nudist colony of New Amsterdam, otherwise known as New York City?

I posit another perspective.

There has been a long history of white audiences hyper-sexualizing the black body. Saartjie Baartman, known then as the “Hottentot Venus,” serves as an appropriate historical example from the early 19th century. Baartman was brought to Europe from South Africa as a specimen of black sexuality, exhibited in freak shows and causing uproar among the rabble that read her voluptuous figure as a perverse sexuality. Representations of Baartman, with her exaggerated hips and breasts, fueled not just stereotyped notions of black bodies, but also a belief that blacks were more sexual. In fact, Baartman was believed to have an elongated labia, which many read as biological evidence of a heightened sexuality. A similar historical path can be traced with the black male body, as U.S. antebellum society positioned the black male figure as dangerously and excessively sexual, the possessor of an exotic anatomy that many white men were fearful of.

But while such nonsensical beliefs may seem arcane to us, we should always be open to see how remnants of these historical forms of racism affect our perceptions of blackness even today. As we watch Badu march down Dallas’ streets only a couple of weeks ago we must not fall into the post-racial trap of understanding skin color as an unimportant character in the cultural politics of these two videos. Sure, there are differences between the two that aren’t racial, but accepting only those would allow us to ignore the importance that race still does play, especially in how we understand and define sexuality.

Nor can we completely and ignorantly collapse the public outcry against Badu’s nudity as a result of some whack-jobs with too much time phoning the Dallas Police Department and calling for Badu’s body on a platter. Rather, our interest in the video propelled it into the mainstream of society. It’s difficult to imagine some puritanical white man (let’s just assume, for sake of obviousness) going to Erykah Badu’s website and discovering her video on his own. Instead, Badu’s nudity circulated through our media landscape and found itself a home on said white man’s computer or television screen. The reasons for this are not singularly sexual but are very much indebted to the remnants of Baartman and the hyper-sexualization of blackness. Sex sells, and media clearly enjoy it when sex can be read as news (as we all are doing right now).

So is it that our society still reads sexuality through blackness, providing an eroticization of Badu that Matt and Kim’s video doesn’t have? (Yes). Is it that two scrawny naked white musicians can appear to us as childish in Times Square, while one naked black musician can appear dangerous and disorderly in Dallas, Texas? (Yes). And is it that race still matters in our society—that we should constantly think not just of how we personally understand race and racism but how race itself is constructed to mean things other than a group of people with a certain skin color? (Of course). Here’s to hoping Badu fights the disorderly conduct charge. I heard the “wardrobe malfunction” excuse still holds water.

CNN.com is my homepage.  I get my news from twitter, facebook, aol.com (when i log into aim), random pop culture blogs, and cnn.com.  90% of the stories are garbage, 9% are informative things I need to know, and then 1% a headline like this pops up.  Cnn.com is smart because they really don’t go into too much detail about things since their readers have the attention span of a 2 year old watching sesame street.

This story/post/blurb (whatever the hell it is since it’s like 4 paragraphs long and a 3min video) is something I’m extremely passionate about.  Our education system is really like public washing machines.  Antiquated, old, and pointless.  Why in 2010, where if I go to japan and wanted a candy bar from a vending machine I could sync my smart phone to my bank account and pay for it via bluetooth, DO I NEED TO USE A BUNCH OF QUARTERS?! I understand why, the infastructure.  New things need major overhauls in the system/foundation, which then = money.  I get it… it’s always a money issue.  Why did it take us until last year to make it mandatory for everyone to use HD/Digital tv as standard?  Because of our Infastructure. I think it is because we focus our priorities on the wrong things.  We think in the industrial revolution (which happened almost 150 years ago).  We are now exiting the technology revolution and entering the financial revolution (or at least they are living symbiotically with each other).  From education, to analog television, to quarters in a washing machine, it’s OLD and it NEEDS TO EVOLVE!

I personally had a tough time in school (relatively speaking).  I knew how to BS my way through papers, tests, and classes (I call it hustling).  I did what was the bare minimum to get by with a C+/B average (High School and college).  I would always get frustrated with school and ask my mom and teachers “Why do I need this, it’s stupid, I don’t care about it and it’s boring.”  I was blessed enough to find Music Technology and Audio Production as a focus of study in college.  I love technology, computers, and music, so it made sense for me.  I then realized post college (aka Real Life, aka where i learned the majority of the things I know to this day) I could actually make money doing things I was truly interested and passionate about (Music Production, Engineering, Composition, etc.)  I was lucky I guess. (either that, or my calling from the universe was a strong one)

Now I’m not saying it’s so easy and so much fun to do what I’m doing.  Freelance work in any field is hard hard work.  I was also blessed enough to have the “sales” gene.  Hustling and freelance isn’t as hard for me like some people I know.  Some months are great, some are tough, but i’ve learned to deal with it.  I also know that it’s 100 times better than working a job that I really don’t care or have a passion for.

I’m really just rambling now, but I think if parents and teachers emphasized what young kids are naturally good at and enjoy doing,  then nurtured that talent, we would potentially have a society full of happier people doing more of what they enjoy doing and care about.  Yes yes… then there is the argument “Then where would all the janitors, and police officers, etc. etc. be?” I don’t have all the answers yet, but I do have a strong theory that the universe balances itself out and things would sort themselves accordingly.  Or…. maybe i’m crazy.  I sure as hell know that I don’t like working for the weekends

-DLake

“Alot of people in my experience, perhaps the majority live their lives doing things they aren’t concerned or interested with.  They just get along with it, they do it because they wandered into it and just wait for the weekend.  They are systematically prevented by finding their true talents because of education.  As a result many people never discover what they are naturally good at. Education’s problem is because it is based on old system of ‘Mass Production’. We are ignoring personal development because people are not cars.”

Why teaching is ‘not like making motorcars’

(CNN) — Sir Ken Robinson says our education system works like a factory. It’s based on models of mass production and conformity that actually prevent kids from finding their passions and succeeding, he said.

“The problem is that educating young people is not like making motorcars — at all,” the author and educator said in a recent interview. “And one key difference is that motorcars have no interest in how they’re made, and young people do.”

Robinson, author of “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything,” spoke to CNN after a recent lecture at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.

TED is a nonprofit group dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” which makes talks from its conferences available online.

Watch a 2006 “TED talk” with Ken Robinson

Instead of trying to mass-produce children who are good at taking tests and memorizing things, schools should emphasize personal development, Robinson said. Not all kids are good at the same things, and the education system shouldn’t pretend they should all turn out the same, he said.

“We can’t just improve [schools],” he said. “We have to radically transform them.”

Schools today are “preoccupied with certain types of ability,” he said.

The comments came before the current debate over education policy erupted in the United States. President Obama this week proposed an overhaul of the U.S. education system, and a school board in Rhode Island made headlines after it fired all of the teachers at an underperforming high school.

Robinson said his aim is to help students find their passions and to inspire creativity.

That will keep them from turning into complacent and bored adults, he said.