Human Nature (circa '92)

Thursday Comedy Corner (1/29)

This goes out to all my favorite Ni99as in the world. A Ni99a comes in all colors, ages, genders, and backgrounds. These are just the ones that we all know and love. Enjoy

Da Ni99a dat feels like he has to talk to everyone on speaker phone no matter who is around

Da Ni99a dat pays for everything with a bag of change

Da Ni99a dat is always drunk and fed up with the stuck up women in the clubs You: "Man what's wrong w/ you? MFN: "Man I'm tired of these greedy ass chicks that come to the club and only want a baller, I asked her did she want me to buy her a drink, and she talkin bout 'nah I can't right now I'm with child, Bitch I aint buyin 2 damn drinks!!!

Da Ni99a dat does crack but always manages to get his hands on the newest shit

Da Ni99a dat works at the Black Wendy's that get's mad at you for ordering a "Special Made Sandwich"

Da Ni99a dat always has the New Jordans on but won't pay the $10 cover charge at the bar

Da Ni99a dat gets mad at old people when they walk to slow in front of them

Da Ni99a dat has sex w/ 3 different chicks a week but gets mad at his main chick for having too many male friends on MySpace

Da Ni99a dat was singing I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T hard as hell in the club, but waited 30 minutes to get in free, waited 20 minutes to get a free drink, then left and got smashed for 10 minutes...you guessed it...for free

Da Ni99a dat no matter what, always has a story that tops the one you just told. You: "Man I knew this dude back in college that jumped off the 2nd floor on campus into the pool, shit was crazy" MFN: Shiiiiiiit, I know this dude that could jump so high, I saw him grab a squirrel out a tree, on my momma!"

F.D.R’s Example Offers Obama Cautionary Lessons

By STEVE LOHR
Published: January 26, 2009


In 1933, as today, a new president stepped into the White House, vowing change and decisive action at a time when a banking crisis posed a grave threat to the nation’s economy.

New Yorkers waited for food in 1934. In the ’30s, total government spending as a share of the economy was less than 20 percent and the unemployment rate averaged more than 17 percent.

The economic morass that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt 76 years ago was undeniably deeper and more ominous than the trouble President Obama is facing. Yet, according to economists and historians, there are also some telling similarities and cautionary lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.

Roosevelt had his triumphs. He stemmed panic and stabilized the banking system with a combination of deposit insurance, government investment in banks, restrictions on banking practices and his “fireside chat” radio addresses, which repeatedly steadied the national mood and bought Roosevelt time to make changes.

Still, even after the government assistance, the surviving banks were shaken and lending remained anemic — much as the nation’s banks today are reluctant to make loans again, despite receiving more than $300 billion of taxpayers’ money in Round 1 of the federal banking bailout.

So, throughout the 1930s, economic recovery remained frustratingly elusive and arrived only with the buildup for World War II in the 1940s.

The shorthand verdict on Roosevelt, economists and historians say, is that he was an eloquent and skillful politician, and an innovator in jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in regulatory steps like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street. But Roosevelt, they say, while brilliant in many ways, did not have a sure grasp of how to guide the economy as a whole.

“Roosevelt had some successes, but we hope that Obama is going to do better,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Otherwise, we’re in trouble.”

Roosevelt’s New Deal is often portrayed as an embrace of Keynesian economics, which advocates increased government spending to combat economic downturns and generate jobs.

Yet despite New Deal programs and some aid to the states, total government spending — federal, state and local — as a share of the economy throughout the 1930s remained at just under 20 percent. (Today, total government spending is more than 35 percent, a larger buffer against weakness in the private sector.)

During the 1930s, the unemployment rate fell somewhat under Roosevelt, but remained stubbornly high, averaging more than 17 percent for the decade.

In 1934, the British economist John Maynard Keynes visited Roosevelt in the White House to make his case for more deficit spending. But Roosevelt, it seems, was either unimpressed or uncomprehending. “He left a whole rigmarole of figures,” Roosevelt complained to his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, according to her memoir. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.”

Keynes left equally disenchanted, telling Ms. Perkins that he had “supposed the president was more literate, economically speaking.”

It would not be until the early 1940s, with the beginning of World War II, that a strong dose of Keynesian medicine was administered to the American economy. By 1942, total government spending as a share of the economy rose to 52 percent, and peaked at nearly 70 percent in 1944, when unemployment fell to 1 percent.

One lesson from the 1930s, economists say, is how difficult it is to engineer a recovery when an economy has spiraled down as far as it had by 1933. Swift and effective steps early in a downturn, they say, can enable an economy to avoid further slippage and joblessness. And Mr. Obama has the advantage of taking over far earlier in an economic descent than Roosevelt did.

In 1933, the United States economy had shrunk by one-third in real terms since 1929. Industrial production had fallen by 40 percent. Unemployment had soared to 25 percent, from 3 percent in 1929.

“Mute shoals of jobless men drifted through the streets of every American city in 1933,” wrote David M. Kennedy of Stanford, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Depression, “Freedom From Fear” (Oxford, 1999).

Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, amid a nationwide bank panic — the impetus of his memorable line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Roosevelt may have been lacking as an economist, but he was an extraordinary crisis manager. The next day, he declared a national bank holiday, and set the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to work on a phased program to sort good banks from bad ones, provide financing and restore confidence in the banking system.
click here for full story

‘Crack Babies’: The Epidemic That Wasn’t

By SUSAN OKIE
Published: January 26, 2009
NY TIMES

BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.

Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a pediatrician, doing a checkup on Cornell Wright, a young patient.

There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb. “Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”

Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.

Surveys by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006 and 2007 found that 5.2 percent of pregnant women reported using any illicit drug, compared with 11.6 percent for alcohol and 16.4 percent for tobacco.

“The argument is not that it’s O.K. to use cocaine in pregnancy, any more than it’s O.K. to smoke cigarettes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University. “Neither drug is good for anybody.”

But cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem, Dr. Frank said. Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed.

Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.

At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children — 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.

In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” — the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.

Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.

But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.

And Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said that in a doctor’s office or a classroom, “you cannot tell” which children were exposed to cocaine before birth.

click here for full story

Man Law Monday

No man can order Harvest Grain Pancakes w/ fruit garnish (DN)

No man can share an armrest on a plane with another man

No man can call himself or another man "shawty"

By Tyler Dirton

No man can tell another man he needs to lick his lips

No man can be afraid of thunder

No man can ask another man to scratch a "hard to reach" area

No man can ponder putting a relaxer in his hair to make conrows easier to take

No man can give another man his own personal ringtone (SA)

No man can wear socks with the furry ball on the back

No man can wear Reebok Classics

Thank you