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Nas concludes the song finding his anger placed at not only the new Jim Crow which through the prison-industrial complex and the failed Drug War but at one of the most important institutions within the black community: the church.

He finds here hypocrisy just below the surface, hypocrisy which permeates throughout the rest of the corrupt society. Here is a pastor who is supposed to be celibate and resist the temptations of the flesh, but instead he succumbs and is actually having sex with multiple women (even worse if he is married).

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The Mike Tyson v. Razor Ruddock was a powerful one, Tyson fighting to regain his Undisputed Heavyweight Championship title and Razor hoping to gain renown for downing Tyson. Both men fought like hell, powerful jabs to the head and bodies but Tyson came out on top with a technical knockout.

Watching a fight like that, it’s easy to see how one’s adrenaline could be heightened. One way to get out all that energy would be to jab and weave as if you were fighting an imaginary Razor Ruddock, which Nas can’t resist doing high as fuck in his nice leather jacket.

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A wise man once said:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them

Those without imagination, those who lack divergent thinking, are unable to come up with novel solutions to old problems and are stuck in the same cycle. Whether it be poverty or violence, they are unable to get out of the situation they find themselves in.

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Wisdom goes beyond simple knowledge or experience. Wisdom, as defined by the Western tradition deals with

an understanding of people, things, events, and situations, and the willingness and the ability to apply perceptions, judgments and actions in keeping with an understanding of what is the right course of actions.

So within the “ghetto habitat” that the street’s disciple roams, one must be able to correctly read the streets so they can survive. Which color to wear (or not wear), which route to take, which crew to hang with, when to look up, when to stay strapped, etc etc.

Nas, the street’s disciple, bears this in mind and thus is a wise man indeed for having made it this far and then some.

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One of the more relevant cases of the relativism the US shows the UN Declaration of Human Rights is with the situation surrounding Haiti and its refugees who regularly flocked to the United States for some 40 years in an attempt to escape US-backed dictatorships.

The U.S.-Haiti refugee relationship can be summed up in one word: “forced repatriation”.

Quite simply…

The United States has had an informal agreement since the Carter administration with Haiti’s Duvalier ruling family to return Haiti’s poor refugees who attempted to leave the nation and return them to their torture chambers.

The agreement was formalized by Reagan in 1981 and continued into the Clinton administration, a policy of returning tens of thousands of escaping Haitians back to the despotic military regime where they would be tortured, disappeared, or publicly killed for their attempts to escape.

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So in other words, the United States is giving Israel access to all of its data surrounding its under surveillance citizens, government officials, and judges and trusting that the Israeli intelligence service–which is one of the most aggressive intelligence service against the US–will not use this data to it’s own benefit or the United States' detriment.

Obviously, there is an ulterior motive to handing over raw SIGINT, without the threat of legally enforceable action or clauses. It is that this agreement is meant to allow the outsourcing of domestic spying, in the event that it becomes to costly to run a vast expansive surveillance state as actively as it is run today. Instead, data could just be passively collected and funneled to Israel. This data would also happen to contain all government official’s activities so if there were any officials who were not wholeheartedly pro-Israel then…well you do the math.

It’s probably Israel would do nothing and “destroy on recognition” as the United States nicely asks.

Unlikely, but probably.

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Barbershops within the African American community are cultural institutions of sort, in some cases bearing a relevance to the community only rivaled by the Black church.

Here the community comes together to discuss daily events, relax, socialize, and otherwise connect all while getting a haircut. Barbershops are notorious for the high ratio of “old heads”, people who would definitely remember the 90s era of hip hop and listen to Nas religiously, posting his posters around the area and explaining to the youth why Nas was the King of Hip Hop.

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A variation on the age old idiom, “it’s on the tip of my tongue”.

Fun fact: The phenomena in which one is unable to retrieve the memory of the word but can partially recall aspects of the word is also called presque vu. It’s an interesting pyscholingustic phenomenon as it sheds light into how the brain’s memory systems work for words, and quite possibly how it works on a very fundamental level. This is because you do not recall the actual word but you recall linguistic properties about it, implicitly or explicitly, which set off bells in your head.

The meaning, its syllabic stress, the first letter, and other aspects help spark this sometimes all-encompassing state of persque vu.

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This article is one of the few known within the United States among those who know the Universal Declaration exists, mainly because it was used as fodder against the Soviet Union when it rejected Article 13 and refused to grant Soviet Jews the right to leave the nation, sparking the international Soviet Jewry movement. The Soviet Jewry movement prompted the US and others to denounce the USSR for this move.

It’s interesting to followup the history of this article, however, just to get an idea of how much this article is revered. In UN Resolution 194 (unanimously accepted December 11, 1948, the day after the UD was accepted), the UN made clear that the article was intended to be universal in both the “right to leave” and “to return to [your] country”. The UN stated that:

[Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;

The most vocal supporters of Article 13, the Jewish community and the Israeli state, turned out to be also it’s biggest detractors by refusing to apply the law to themselves while they denounced the USSR for doing the same thing they were. The relativism was, at best, thinly veiled here: to decide that you don’t like the last five words of the Universal Declaration and the possible application of it in a way which would not benefit you and thus come to the conclusion that those last five words don’t exist. This is as relativistic as you can get.

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In the United States:

Children

A 2013 UNICEF report shed more light on some aspects of US poverty that had been known for a long time, but more or less suppressed. Facts which were, at the very least, startling. The report tracked the well-being of children in 35 developed countries and found the United States ranked 34th out of 35th in child poverty. The United States was “above only Romania and below virtually all of Europe plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan”.

The report found that about one in five children in United States households live below the poverty line, falling in line with general trends of increasing poverty among children. Nearly 2.8 million children live in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2 a day). Even more shocking, close to 16.7 million children live in food insecure households (food insecurity is defined by unstable food prices, seasonal food shortages, and the undertaking of coping strategies).

Women

The majority of single parent families find themselves gripped by poverty despite the 80% employment rate within that demographic. In fact, if we look to single mothers and throw in government assistance such as government child allowance or unemployment insurance, we find a whopping 51% of single mothers below the poverty line (as opposed to 63% without government aid). The United States lags far behind other developed nations in this aspect of work: it has a large amount of low-wage work, few support mechanisms for low-wage earners, and a disregard for childcare which helps perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

This is, quite simply, because failing to provide paid maternity leave (which the United States is alone in the industrialized world in doing) makes it harder to raise children properly. This manifests in a much poorer development period, subsequent educational experience, and thus employment is a struggle for the child. They are forced into low-wage work which is unable to provide anything other than a life of subsistence, continuing the cycle of poverty (especially if this child grows to be a single parent).

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