BOBBEE BEE: THE END OF UNIVERSITIES AS WE KNOW IT

by Nathan Harden

“In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades.

Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes.

Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions.

Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.

The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity.

Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.”…

We are all aware that the IT revolution is having an impact on education, but we tend to appreciate the changes in isolation, and at the margins. Very few have been able to exercise their imaginations to the point that they can perceive the systemic and structural changes ahead, and what they portend for the business models and social scripts that sustain the status quo.

That is partly because the changes are threatening to many vested interests, but also partly because the human mind resists surrender to upheaval and the anxiety that tends to go with it. But resist or not, major change is coming. The live lecture will be replaced by streaming video.

The administration of exams and exchange of coursework over the internet will become the norm. The push and pull of academic exchange will take place mainly in interactive online spaces, occupied by a new generation of tablet-toting, hyper-connected youth who already spend much of their lives online. Universities will extend their reach to students around the world, unbounded by geography or even by time zones. All of this will be on offer, too, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional college education.

How do I know this will happen? Because recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information.

The internet destroyed the livelihoods of traditional stock brokers and bonds salesmen by throwing open to everyone access to the proprietary information they used to sell. The same technology enabled bankers and financiers to develop new products and methods, but, as it turned out, the experience necessary to manage it all did not keep up.

Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, it seemed absurd to think that storied financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers could disappear seemingly overnight. Until it happened, almost no one believed such a thing was possible. Well, get ready to see the same thing happen to a university near you, and not for entirely dissimilar reasons.

Nathan Harden is the author of Sex & God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad (St. Martin’s, 2012). He was a 2011 Novak Fellow at the Phillips Foundation and is editor of The College Fix, a higher ed news site.

To read the entire article go to www.americaninterest.com

BOBBEE BEE AND HUGO CHAVEZ

Hugo Chavez: New World Rising

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“For 14 years, they have painted the Bolivarian Republic as illegitimate, dictatorial, primitive.”

The darker majorities of Latin America mourn the passing of the people’s champion, President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the man whom the racist white Venezuelan elite called ese mono – “that monkey.”

Since 1998 – with a 48-hour break during the 2002, U.S.-sponsored coup – the four-fifths of Venezuela that is some variety of Indigenous-mestizo-mullato-African – like Chavez – has known power for the first time since the conquistadors of Western Europe launched their 500-year war against the rest of planet Earth.

South America’s emergence as the most promising zone of resistance to U.S. imperial savagery is inseparable from the dark awakening in the barrios, favelas, rural villages and native highlands of the continent. Chavez’s triumph, and that of the Aymara-descended Bolivian president, Evo Morales, in 2005, are the most dramatic expressions of what has been called the “Latin Spring” – a reclamation of national patrimony that is, by historical necessity, socialist. As a result, a large majority of South Americans now live under relatively progressive governments.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was, of course, the great hemispheric breakaway from Yankee empire in the 20^th century, the seminal event in the disintegration of what later came to be called the “Washington Consensus” in Latin America.

Chavez’s victory, almost 40 years later, was the other shoe dropping, a phenomenon nearly as racially-weighted, in Latin American terms, as the Haitian Revolution that culminated in 1804. Fidel, the son of a Spanish soldier, declared that “the blood of Africa runs deep in our veins” and that Cuba is an “African Spanish” nation. However, that reality was hardly visible in the Cuban hierarchy.


NOT so, with Chavez, the pardo whose lineage was obvious and proudly worn. "My Indian roots are from my father's side. He is mixed Indian and black, which makes me very proud," said Chavez – a circumstance of birth and pride that made the whites of affluent east Caracas neighborhoods like Altamira spitting mad, hysterical in their hatred.

The racial-political color line has long been plain to see in the complexions of pro- and anti-government demonstrations in Venezuela.

“The ‘Latin Spring’ is, by historical necessity, socialist.”

The purported “ambiguity” of race in South America is largely limited to those who belong to the innumerable subgroups of the Not-White, in all their flavors.

However, for the fraction of the population that believe themselves to be purely European, there is no ambiguity; they know precisely who they are (or claim to be).

Color lines may be fuzzy among the mixed race majorities of much of Latin America, but white elites quickly bring these boundaries into stark relief when fundamental questions of privilege and power arise. Popular power means the rule of people like “that monkey,” Chavez – illegitimate and bestial.

U.S. corporate media speak the language of the pale denizens of Altamira. For 14 years, they have painted the Bolivarian Republic as illegitimate, dictatorial, primitive.

Chavez is delegitimized as a “strongman,” rather than a remarkably popular politician and icon who has won more elections than any other head of state in the western hemisphere during the same space of time. As former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said, last year: "As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world."

In assessing Chavez’s “legacy,” the global bourgeois media cite the “divisions” that plague Venezuelan society and, in the words of Business Week, an economy in “shambles.” But, Chavez and his comrades would have been abject failures – and been tossed from office – had they not drawn lines between the oppressed majority and the privileged exploiters. Division is good and necessary. Consequently, the economy has succeeded in reducing the proportion of households in poverty from 44 percent in 1998 to 27 percent in 2011. Chavez has served the people.

“The racial-political color line has long been plain to see in the complexions of pro- and anti-government demonstrations in Venezuela.”

Just before Chavez’s last electoral victory, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, a product of the post-1998 wave of leftist triumphs at the polls, said: "A victory for Chávez is not just a victory for the people of Venezuela but also a victory for all the people of Latin America … this victory will strike another blow against imperialism."

Last week, as Chavez was fading, the opposition leader, Henrique Capriles Radonski, traveled to New York, Miami and Washington – presumably, to get his marching orders.

Washington hopes that Venezuelan socialism cannot survive without Chavez. In their state of desperate decay, the imperialists are willing to throw whole regions of the world into chaos rather than be eclipsed by new alignments of trade and international relations. Venezuelans have every reason to expect a renewed U.S. campaign of destabilization, in the wake of their leader’s passing.

Chavez tried to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. On election night, 2008, at a rally in Caracas, Chavez spoke this way of the president-elect:

“We are not asking him to be a revolutionary, to be a socialist – no. We just want the black man who is about to be the U.S. president to have enough stature for the times the world is living through.

"I send an overture to the black man, from us here, who are of Indigenous, black, Caribbean, South American race. I am ready to sit down and talk ... I hope we can, and I hope we can enter a new stage."

But the Black man in the White House is smelling like sulphur, just like his predecessor.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

BOBBEE BEE: SLAM DUNKING!!!

by Eric D. Graham

NORTH CAROLINA- (BASN)

Black guys do it.

White guys do it.

Even girls can do it.

But no single play in sports can compare to it, not the homerun in baseball, the knockout in boxing, the hole in one in golf or the touchdown in football.

It is only worth two-points And for that reason alone, it is considered by many to be the most overrated shot in basketball.

As a result, many coaches despise it.

The league even tried to ban it because of “Lew” Alcindor.

But we fell in love with it.

And are still fascinated by it.

Matter of fact, we are obsessed with it.

Honestly, most of us started dreaming about it even before we were able to walk.

Even before we could dribble a ball, it gripped our imagination.

Hour after hour, long after midnight, early in the morning, we visualized ourselves dunking a basketball.

We practiced by jumping off of one foot, off of two feet, even barefoot in order to do it.

Why? Because it amazes us, leaves up bewildered, and defies the Laws of Gravity.

As a result, we awe at its acrobatics, cheer its creativity, and became dumbfounded by its devastation.

We love it so much; we even created contests to showcase it and named its ariel dynamics.

There is the Rock the Cradle, the 360, the Tomahawk, the Reverse, the Windmill, and the Double-Pump.

As children, it was all fun and games. But as we got older, it became a symbol of power, of coolness, of style, and of sexual prowess.

Why? Because…..It’s Orgasmic.
And leaves one breathless and speechless.

Quite frankly, it’s a religious experience, which causes some of us to shout… Oh my God!!

And Good God Almighty!!

Why? Because scientifically , it seems impossible.

I know on Sunday mornings in the pulpits of Black churches preachers preach about Jesus walking on water.

Well, I have seen it with my own eyes… Jordan walking on air.

Cedric Ceballos do it blindfolded.

Serge Ibaka glide from behind the free throw line.

(Sorry, Dr.J) Darryl Dawkins shatter a backboard.

Shaquille O’Neal pull down the goal.

Vince Carter spin counterclockwise.

J.R.Rider throw it down while taking the ball between his legs along the baseline.



Shawn Kemp make it rain.
Dominique Wilkins make it thunder and lightening.
Spud Webb climb the sky. Jacob Tucker do a summersault.
Antijuan Ball do a back flip.
Kenny become a “SKYwalker.”

Gerald Green blow out a candle on a cupcake.

Larry Nance do it with two balls.

Javon McGee do it with two balls in two goals at the same time.

The Air Up There do a 720.

Philly’s AO throw a lob off the shot clock, Nate Robinson jump over a man 7-foot tall, and Dwight Howard dunk a goal 13 feet high.

And just when, I thought, I had seen it all.

Blake Griffin jumped over a car.

Yes, Blake Griffin jumped over a car.

But before you get too excited, Guy Dupuy did it much better when he dunked over a car while going between his legs on the And 1 tour in Poland. …

Yes, one good one can psychologically change the outcome of a game.
And one great one, changed my life forever.

Man, what a Dunk!!

Now, Magic Johnson is willing to pay Lebron James $1 million to participate in next years Slam Dunk Contest
.

Eric D.Graham is a graduate of Winston-Salem State University, where he received a B.A in Mass Communications, with a concentration in Radio & Television, with a minor in History, with a concentration in African-American Studies. Currently, he is the Managing Editor of Black Athlete Sports Network, where his thought-provoking articles and cartoon Here Comes The Hater appears on a weekly basis. He can be reached at lbiass34@yahoo.com

BOBBEE BEE: I HAVE THE POWER!!

By definition power means mental or moral ability to act; one of the faculties which are possessed by the mind or soul; as, the power of thinking, reasoning, judging, willing, fearing, and hoping. As a result, let's take at look at Robert Greene and Joost Elffers 48 Laws of Power. Cause we all have the power to change the world and ourselves.

Law 1

Never Outshine the Master

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.
Law 2

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.
Law 3 Conceal your Intentions

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

 Law 4

Always Say Less than Necessary

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Law 5

So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Law 6

Court Attention at all Cost

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious, than the bland and timid masses.
Law 7

Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary

When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains – then attack. You hold the cards.

Law 8


Win through your Actions, Never through Argument

Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

Law 9

Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky

You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as disease. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.



LAW 10 Never appear too Perfect

Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity

If you like what you are learning please leave a comment at lbiass34@yahoo.com