Too Much?

From NJ.com - Apologies for the formatting.

How to build a sports superstar in 2015: The engineering of 15-year-old Josh McKenzie

Hours after a punishing game against the defending American Youth Football national champions from North Carolina, Josh McKenzie folds himself up in an attempt to take an ice bath inside his room at the team hotel. 12/9/2014 (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

By Matthew Stanmyre | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com 
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on September 01, 2015 at 8:00 AM, updated September 01, 2015 at 10:02 PM

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He is 15 years old, 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds of cartoonish muscles on top of muscles. He had six-pack abs when he was 6.
Today, he bench-presses one-and-a-half times his body weight and can leap
from a standing position to the top of a car. He averages four touchdowns
per game and hasn't lost a wrestling match since 2012, making him the
nation's top-ranked football player and wrestler for his grade. And even
though he doesn't begin high school for another two weeks, he already
is one of the most talked about athletes in New Jersey.
His name is Josh McKenzie.

But people just call him Man-Child, D-Train, Animal, Machine or Beast,
and he is a once-in-a-lifetime physical specimen who looks like he was
engineered in a lab, each piece meticulously sculpted, tested and refined.

Josh also embodies the runaway free-for-all youth sports have become.
Specialized training. High school coaches lining up to woo players. Working
out to the point of total exhaustion. Repeating a grade for athletic advantage.
Bouncing from team to team. It's all part of his family's all-in,
college-scholarship-or-bust gamble.

Sound extreme? Consider:

This past year, Josh's family spent more than $15,000 on specialized
training and thousands more to parade him around at showcases,
tournaments and all-star events from Florida to California.

Josh McKenzie's extraordinary training techniquesWith access to 10 private trainers and coaches — at an annual cost of more than $15,000 — Josh McKenzie, 15, trains at a level professional athletes might find overwhelming. Josh, a rising freshman at Bergen Catholic, even wears a specialized breathing mask when running to simulate training at high altitude. (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Most of the 10 specialized
personal trainers he will see during the year — that's right, 10 trainers —
rely on state-of-the-art techniques and put Josh through futuristic workouts.
He takes it a step further by wearing a Darth Vader-like elevation mask to restrict breathing and simulate training at elevations.

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There's much more to this story that can be found at the link below.

http://www.nj.com/sports/index.ssf/2015/09/the_engineering_of_15_year_old_josh_mckenzie.html#incart_river

The Cost of Being Brown & Smart in America

Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old student who built a clock to impress his teacher, and was later arrested when it was thought to be a bomb. President Obama got whiff of the nonsense and invited him to the White House.

Be Prepared . . .

For the next round of GOP debates with this spot on Bingo game.  Add a chip every time you hear one of these catch phrases uttered.

http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/09/16/republican-debate-bingo-reagan-library/

Just Like Us

Rejoicing in Cuba

From The Root - 

Black Cuba Declares, ‘Obama Brought Us Internet!’

The opening of U.S. relations with Cuba has brought a rapid technological change to the island nation, with more Afro-Cubans having affordable access to the outside world.

BY: AISHA M. BELISO-DE JESÚS, PH.D.

Posted: Sept. 16 2015 8:49 AM

 

Hundreds of Cubans and visitors from other countries gather across the street from the newly reopened U.S. Embassy to observe the flag-raising ceremony Aug. 14, 2015, in Havana.
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

T

he recent opening up of the Internet in Cuba is creating new international connections between Afro-Cubans and broader black global cultures. Francisco, a dark-skinned Cuban based in Havana who practices Santeria, an African-Diaspora religion from Cuba, stated, “Now we are finally connected,” as he added my email address to his phone and told me he would friend me on Facebook.

This past month, during carnival festivities in Havana and Matanzas, the opening up of relations with the United States was visible on Cuban streets. Amid the crowds of people enjoying the parades of Afro-Cuban music and dance ensembles (las comparsas), groups of local Cubans were huddled in open-air public spaces accessing the newfound Wi-Fi hotspots brought about by the agreed opening up of online technologies for Cuban nationals. Standing outside hotels, on small cobblestone streets and in parks were Cubans of all generations chatting on phones, using tablets and typing on their laptops. A black Cuban woman in Matanzas using her iPhone to video-chat the carnival floats to her religious family abroad told me, “This just happened a couple of months ago. Thanks to Obama!”

In the upper-right corner of the photo, an iPad user records the Carnaval Matanzas.
AISHA M. BELISO-DE JESÚS

Previously, Internet connectivity was one of the most coveted and highly monitored international relations on the island. During my research between 2004 and 2012, to even be able to purchase an Internet card required a passport, and the unreliable Internet connection cost CUC$6 (Cuban convertible pesos) an hour, or slightly over US$7, a significant expense considering that the average salary in Cuba is less than US$20 a month. Legal email and Internet use was allowed either at the local phone company’s computer stations or at tourist-only hotels. Now, not only are Cubans finally admitted into hotels, but also anyone can purchase Internet cards that provide up to five hours online for CUC$10.

Wi-Fi (pronounced in Cuba as “we-fee”) hotspots are currently transforming Cuban cityscapes. People recognize these shifts in technological access and international connection as directly related to the opening up of relations with the United States. Afro-Cubans I spoke with told me that “Obama brought us Internet!” which they saw as a form of “black remission,” an outside resource seen to typically benefit mostly whites on the island (particularly those with family ties to early Cuban exiles in the U.S.).

Havana residents huddle around their iPads and cellphones to get online.
DUANE LAWRENCE

So, what will new Internet relations do for Afro-Cubans? Media technologies have been key in allowing previously marginalized communities to have access to transnational relations. For the Santeria practitioners I work with, media has facilitated new religious economies. Attracting a wide range of diverse practitioners globally, Santeria has brought travelers and tourists of all socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds to black communities on the island, and these visitors have begun to provide Afro-Cubans with formerly scarce international resources. Indeed, many Santeria practitioners supplicate the Afro-Cuban gods (oricha) to continue these positive political changes. 

Francisco saw Barack Obama’s mulato (mixed-race) heritage as key to the opening up of relations with the U.S. “It’s as Fidel said,” he declared. “We wouldn’t have change until there was a black president in la Yuma [the U.S.] and a pope from Latin America.” The Castro “quote” (it’s disputed whether Castro actually made the statement) circulated online as a popular meme that depicts the former Cuban president, in a Nostradamus-like prophecy, purportedly telling foreign press in 1973 that the U.S. and Cuba would settle their differences only once there was both an African-American U.S. president and a Latin American pope. With the Argentinian-born Pope Francis’ arrival in Cuba this weekend and Obama’s second term seeing a flurry of transformations within the socialist island, this purported Castro prophecy certainly points to the power of race, politics and religious imagination.

For practitioners of Afro-Cuban Santeria, this new global relationship is reconfiguring practice, and many see “blessings” such as Wi-Fi accessibility as related to Obama’s blackness. Young Afro-Cubans see more than just racial symbolism in the ethnic makeup of U.S. politicians. People expressed great admiration for Obama, with feelings of excitement for a new age in which Cuba and the U.S. could put aside old differences, and they looked to younger generations for hope. (This inspirational Cuban message sounded remarkably familiar to the Obama campaign’s 2008 slogan for hope and change.)

As the United States looks toward the next election, however, it is crucial to think about how different political regimes (such as a shift from Democrat to Republican) could impact the world. For Afro-Cubans in particular and Cubans in general, the opening up of relations with the U.S. has meant very visible shifts in everyday life. What might be seen as an “Obama generation” of young black Cubans is nervously celebrating the potential for more relations with the U.S. and, hopefully, an end to the woefully unsuccessful U.S. embargo. And yet there is legitimate concern that an anti-Cuba U.S. president could crush this positive momentum, creating, instead, a return to the stifling politics of the not-too-distant past.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/09/black_cuba_declares_obama_brought_us_internet.html?wpisrc=sl_ipad

Stevie Wonder Carpool Karaoke