—The most important asset of a nation is its people. The reason why the United States or the West can NEVER outpace or defeat China lies in the inherent ability of the Chinese to scale (organically) at every level of institutional, socio-political, cultural and human capacity.
The nationalistic fervor of the Chinese is organic, not manufactured. A Chinese person does not need to belt out the national anthem with their hand on their proverbial chest, or worship a piece of cloth called a flag, in order to show their patriotism.
All it takes for that patriotism to rear its head is a simple call to duty. The Chinese have mastered the art of engagement, both from a micro functional and macro functional standpoint. When the Chinese decide to engage with you, besides the “when”, they already know the “what”the “why” and the “where” of that engagement, as well as the “how” of it, with the latter being the fulcrum that engenders the desired outcome.
The singular proof of this is that while the West have historically waged endless genocidal wars, mostly beyond their borders for world dominance, the Chinese have adopted a different approach.
While this approach has been aptly referred to as “Soft Power” by mostly western observers, it is in fact an “art of war” steeped in the basic tenet of interactive reciprocity.
China is not going anywhere anytime soon. The Chinese have in fact already won the AI race. How? Because they have scaled organically (as they always do) from the standpoint of cost efficiency maximization (which eliminates greed and avarice) and overall operational cadence.
Simply put, the Chinese have scaled AI from Concept, to Production, to Testing, to Implementation and Maintenance.
Fortune may favor the brave but it rewards and establishes the wise.
—What Africa has a shortage of, are people who actually know who they are. They know how to build (they are the ones building the West) but unfortunately have no idea about the following:
Again, who they are…., this is the most critical part, as a knowledge of self, births a clear vision that then engenders a directed sense of REAL purpose and ambition.
This thus allows you to use your capacity to know what to build, as well as when to build and why you must build.
How can a continent that still bows to a white Jesus (the God of their oppressors and eternal enemies) while killing in the name of another one created by the Turks and the Catholic Church truly build anything?
Look at the nations/entities that have always prospered (and still prospering) all through history, they had/have a sense of who they are - Ancient Kemit (Egypt), Cush, the great West African Empires, the old Western Region (of Nigeria), the Chinese, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore et al. Notice something peculiar about them? Their culture had/has its own spiritual center that forms their core identity and consequently their worldview.
Africa must wake up. We have the capacity. That is not and has never been the issue.
My people perish for lack of knowledge….. of self!
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.
Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”
“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.
As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.
“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”
Organized by the Pasadena Public Library and the Flintridge Center, with a dozen or more cosponsors, including the ACLU Pasadena/Foothills Chapter and Neighborhood Church, and the LA Progressive as the sole media sponsor, the event drew a crowd of the converted, frankly — more than two-thirds from Pasadena’s well-established black community and others drawn from activists circles. Although Alexander is a polished speaker on a deeply researched topic, little she said stunned the crowd, which, after all, was the choir. So the question is what to do about this glaring injustice.
ACLU Pasadena/Foothills President Michelle White, Author Michelle Alexander, LA Progressive Publisher Sharon Kyle, and ACLU Pasadena Past President Kris Ockershauser.Married to a federal prosecutor, Alexander briefly touched on the differing opinion in the Alexander household. “You can imagine the arguments we have,” Alexander said in relating discussions she has with her husband. “He thinks there are changes we can make within the system,” she said, agreeing that there are good people working on the issues and that improvements can be made. “But I think there has to be a revolution of some kind.”
However change is to come, a big impediment will be the massive prison-industrial system.
“If we were to return prison populations to 1970 levels, before the War on Drugs began,” she said. “More than a million people working in the system would see their jobs disappear.”
So it’s like America’s current war addiction. We have built a massive war machine — one bigger than all the other countries in the world combined — with millions of well-paid defense industry and billions of dollars at stake. With a hammer that big, every foreign policy issue looks like a nail — another bomb to drop, another country to invade, another massive weapons development project to build.
Similarly, with such a well-entrenched prison-industrial complex in place — also with a million jobs and billions of dollars at stake — every criminal justice issue also looks like a nail — another prison sentence to pass down, another third strike to enforce, another prison to build in some job-starved small town, another chance at a better life to deny.
Alexander, who drew her early inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., devotes the last part of “The New Jim Crow” to steps people can take to combat this gross injustice. In particular, she recommended supporting the Drug Policy Alliance. At the book signing afterwards, Dr. Anthony Samad recruited Michelle Alexander to appear this fall at one his Urban Issues Forums, typically at the California African American Museum next to USC.
For some of us who earn our daily bread from programming computers (I have been doing this for over 2 decades), making the connection between Ifá binary notation and programming is a no brainer.
We programmers write codes/instructions (incantations) on the cpu – made from silicon (sand) to carry out our desires.
The parallel between a Babaláwo and a computer programmer is striking. We write on sand (silicon/cpu), a Babalawo writes on Iyerosun (camwood powder). We chant/write binary codes, a Babaláwo recites Odù Ifá!
In essence, a computer code is àfọ̀ṣẹ par excellence! In Yoruba, àfọ̀ṣẹ means “oun tí a fọ̀ tí ó sì ṣẹ” – something commanded to happen.
Our incantations (computer codes) can animate the entities in the cpu (sand) and make them become whatever we want: a game console, a financial trading system, an air traffic controller, facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Bitcoin etc.
How did this come about? Well, the Binary System makes this possible.
The Binary System of Ifá is based on the Yorùbá philosophical duality of Ibi and Ire (Evil and Good); for several millennia, the Yorùbá had been using the binary system before the German mathematician – Gottfried Leibniz formalised in 1679.
These days, the Binary Numeral System (Base 2) is well known in Mathematics and digital electronics and the system underpins how computers work by representing numeric values using just two digits – zero (0) and one (1)
In Computing, a Bit (i.e. BInary digiT) is the smallest unit of storage and can either be 1 or 0
A Nible (also called half Byte or semi-octet) is the grouping of four Bits e.g 0 1 0 1
In Ifá, Odù signatures are marked with “|” and “||”. Where “|” is the binary number “0” and “||” is “1”.
For example Ogbè (0000) has the following signature: | | | |
Ọ̀sá (1000) is represented as: || | | |
Òtúrá (0100) is marked as: | || | |
We can therefore summarise the representation of the first sixteen Odus as follows: Decimal == Nibble == Odù 00 == 0000 == Ogbè 01 == 0001 == Ògúndá 02 == 0010 == Ìrẹtẹ̀ 03 == 0011 == Ìrosùn 04 == 0100 == Òtúra 05 == 0101 == Ọ̀sẹ́ 06 == 0110 == Èdí 07 == 0111 == Ọ̀bàrà 08 == 1000 == Ọ̀sá 09 == 1001 == Ìwòrì 10 == 1010 == Ọ̀̀fún 11 == 1011 == Ìká 12 == 1100 == Ọ̀wọ́nrín 13 == 1101 == Òtúrúpọ̀n 14 == 1110 == Ọ̀kànràn 15 == 1111 == Òyẹ̀kú ́ Since Ifá speaks only in binary (Odu Èjì Ogbè says: “Èjèèji ni mo gbè, n ò gbe ọ̀kan ṣoṣo mọ́” i.e “I will only support two, I will not support one”), each Odu must be paired.
For example, after pairing the main Odu, we get the following (see graphic for the main Odu signature)
This was how programmers used to write computer programs before high level programming languages like Fortran and Lisp were created in 1957 and 1958 respectively.
For programmers, entering these patterns manually was a laborious, tedious and error-prone task. Even for a seasoned programmer, it could get dizzy and nauseating after assembling a couple of these patterns.
However, a competent Ifá priest can commit to memory 256 of these patterns without breaking a sweat and able to recite close to 4,000 Ifá verses by heart!
Effectively, the meaning of the 1s and 0s in the code above is as follows:
Store the number 0 in memory location 0.
Store the number 1 in memory location 1.
Store the value of memory location 1 in memory location 2.
Subtract the number 11 from the value in memory location 2.
If the value in memory location 2 is the number 0 continue with instruction 9.
Add the value of memory location 1 to memory location 0.
Add the number 1 to the value of memory location 1.
Continue with instruction 3.
Output the value of memory location 0.
Using names in place of numbers for memory and instruction locations, we can do the following: Set the value of “total” to 0. Set the value of “count” to 1. [loop] Set the value of “compare” to the “count” value. Subtract 11 from the value of “compare” . If “compare” is zero, continue at [end]. Add “count” to the value of “total”. Add 1 to the value of “count”. Continue at [loop]. [end] Output “total”.
In a modern programming language like Python, we can write the following:
total = 0 count = 1 while count <= 10: total = total + count count = count + 1 print total
In 2017, I wrote series of programming tutorials on this wall using the Python programming language. In the coming series of articles, I will translate the posts into Yoruba so stay tuned.
Warren Buffett told the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that the greatest threats to the philanthropic behemoth were cockiness, red tape, and self-satisfaction. The billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO, who has gifted a total of $33 billion to the foundation and resigned as its trustee in June, has warned about those forces in the past.
Mark Suzman took charge of the Gates Foundation early last year, and promptly flew to Buffett's hometown of Omaha, Nebraska to have lunch with the investor and seek his guidance.
"He told me then that my most important job was to guard against the 'ABC' risks of decay that all very large organizations face: arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency," Suzman wrote in a recent email to the foundation's employees.
Buffett pledged in 2006 to donate over 99% of his wealth to the Gates Foundation and four other foundations, and reached the halfway mark towards that goal in June. His advice to Suzman isn't surprising; he wrote in his 2014 letter to Berkshire shareholders that when he retires, a big part of his replacement's job will be warding off those exact threats.
"My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency," Buffett said. "When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter."
The Berkshire chief went on to highlight General Motors, IBM, Sears Roebuck, and US Steel as examples of corporate titans that once appeared to have unassailable grips on their industries. "The destructive behavior I deplored above eventually led each of them to fall to depths that their CEOs and directors had not long before thought impossible," he said.
Buffett noted in the letter that he structured his company to minimize red tape. Berkshire's decentralized web of autonomous subsidiaries, underpinned by a culture of trust, acts as the "ideal antidote to bureaucracy," he said. Berkshire also saves money and boosts efficiency by not having HR, PR, IR, legal, acquisitions, and other departments in its headquarters, he added.
"We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy," Buffett said.
Given Buffett's clear disdain for the ABCs, it's no surprise that he told Suzman that his primary focus should be preventing the Gates Foundation from succumbing to them.
"The best way to predict the future is to create it" -- Peter Drucker
"When you come from nothing, you appreciate everything.." - Nathan Kyle Sr. "....and sometimes, when you come from something that has everything, out of ignorance and greed, you will appreciate nothing.." - Yahaya Balogun Some men of yesterday basked in the euphoria of yesterday. To their chagrin, yesterday has now expired. "No condition is permanent!" The bitter and sweet lessons learned from the history of yesteryears' politicians must serve as a guide regarding how to live your best life today and going forward. In our quest to meet our needs today, we must constantly engage our minds to avoid the pitfalls of yesterday. Nigeria's political elite seem to forget the not-too-far-tomorrow! If a man knows the brief history of time, man will always remember that today is a great opportunity to predict and create tomorrow. Most of us see the workaday of existence as the end of life, we get fixated and relish with the selfish-proclamation to meet what we desire instead of what we need. Some of us don't realize that there is a difference between WANTS, NEEDS, and DESIRES!
When we allow our WANTS and DESIRES to override our NEEDS, we will be etching towards getting all of them (wants, needs and desires) at the same time, whereas, WANTS and DESIRES are inconsequential to people who are contented with the possession of their NEEDS. The insatiable quest for grabbing money has already been man's burden. Money like a sensual woman is a very seductive object. A greedy person will never be contented with wealth, and when the wealth is acquired, man tends to want to flaunt it ostensibly for ostentatious style. In the process of showing off their wealth, politicians tend to want more to maintain the status quo.
In this cycle of ignorance, they forget that they are representations of the people with whom they are accountable! This is the orbit most of our politicians ignorantly and dangerously live today. The aftermath and consequences of their narcissistic behavior are always disastrous for them and society.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to do anything drastic to improve your life. Just follow these basic guidelines and your life will change for the better:
1. Believe in yourself, and the incredible power of 'being or self' in you. Believe very strongly in the courage of your convictions, and the power of "yes, I can do it!" It's called audacity to life adventures.
2. Have contentment through identifying your needs and be happy with what you possess. Do not compete with anyone or the man whose sources of income are very questionable with doubt and mystery.
3. Do not be too self-subsumed in what you want and desire to acquire. It seems there's nothing wrong with desiring of good things; there's nothing wrong with wanting something nice for ourselves, but we must avoid gazing at mundane things that will encumber our needs and at the detriment of society.
4. Life is beautiful! Make it beautiful for yourself and society. Do not allow greed and distractions to take your joy and the joy of other people around you.
5. Be a responsible representation of yourself, your people and society. Live in the itinerary of integrity, and you always get to the destination of rectitude, uprightness, honesty, humility, probity, etc. Remember, you can never live in isolation of people around you. Even, the nitwits and wise persons who live among us see the good and bad things we do, only time can process and tell our antecedents. We will ultimately give an account of the stewardship of our actions and inactions.
In conclusion, in our dwelling of today, we must always remember the mistakes of the past (yesterday) while we're determining tomorrow. Yesterday is gone and can never be recovered. You can only use yesterday's mistakes today to determine the outcome of tomorrow: that is how we know we have made amendments and ready to move on. Let's watch what we do. We must always mumble (self-talk) responsibly to ourselves in the process of living a worthy life.
Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs died over a decade ago. With over 10 years of hindsight, we have an even greater sense of how deeply he impacted the tech industry—but also how the tech industry is beginning to move beyond some of the paradigms he established and the battles he fought.
Unlike many other tech CEOs who rose to prominence in the early part of the 21st century and subsequently faded away, Jobs continues to hold the public’s attention. He’s elevated as an icon of creativity, the rare executive who could not only run a business, but also predict what consumers really wanted. Apple’s track record during his tenure—from the iMac to the iPod and the iPhone—certainly bears this out.
“As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process,” Jony Ive, the former head of Apple’s design and a close friend of Jobs, wrote in a new piece in The Wall Street Journal. “He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.”
Ive added: “Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.”
Jobs’s focus on high quality and aesthetics helped transform Apple into a multi-trillion-dollar company. Whether Apple continues its stratospheric growth for yet another decade may hinge on whether it can successfully evolve into a provider of cloud services in addition to hardware—a shift that Jobs dimly saw before his death. In an October 2010 email, he suggested that the tech industry was on the verge of a “post-PC era,” and that 2011 would not only be “Year of the Cloud” but also see the continuation of Apple’s “Holy War with Google.” Unless Apple moved beyond an “old paradigm,” it would eventually fall behind its rivals.
While Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android still compete for their respective slices of the mobile OS market, Apple’s opponents have multiplied over the past decade. For example, Apple’s dedication to user data privacy under current CEO Tim Cook has put it in direct conflict with Facebook, whose business model hinges on vacuuming up as much data as possible from users. Apple has also been locked in a fierce legal battle with Epic Games, creator of the ultra-popular “Fortnite” game, over the size of Apple’s App Store commission.
In addition, Apple must ensure that it can continue to compete with its rivals in cutting-edge technologies including (but certainly not limited to) artificial intelligence (A.I.), machine learning, and the cloud. Although Apple was one of the first companies into the digital-assistant game when it rolled out Siri in October 2011, it has since lost ground to Amazon’s ultra-popular Alexa and Google’s voice-activated assistant. While most of the company’s hardware devices remain society-redefining hits, if there’s one thing that Jobs understood, it’s that the tech industry can shift very quickly under your feet.
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