co-constitution of masculinities and militaries is a key factor in their power.

hy military masculinities are the sites where boundary-making activity takes place, and Belkin suggests that it may be because nation-states and militaries are closely tied, and the military occupies an important symbolic position in nation-states.

male-male rape in military culture, which is both taboo and a means of socialization.

militarized masculinities may not just suppress the taboo or obscene but also incite and produce it.

militarized masculinities are about violence, but this violence is sanitized and legitimized, distinguishing it from other forms of violence.

hat intersectionality should be used to challenge the hegemonic position of men (and some women) in national military contexts, and to acknowledge the structural inequalities in global peacekeeping economies.

whiteness operates as a dominant ideology,

As another example, hypertension is more prevalent among Black adults than White adults (Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention (CDC), 2023c; Huang et al., 2022). A downstream intervention for a client with hypertensionmay involve prescribing lisinopril (a medication used to treat high blood pressure) and quarterly clinic visits tomonitor blood pressure. However, these sample interventions include nothing about a person’s race placing them athigher risk of hypertension. In fact, considering a client’srace, which is a social construct, in place ofbiology andgenetics, is an unfavorable practice that contributes to disparities and harm (American Academy of FamilyPhysicians, 2020). An upstream intervention related to hypertension might address institutional racism that leads tostress among people of color and fewer social, health, and economic opportunities across communities of color.

Probably not. But it would do us good to remember that machines are supposed to make our lives better, not faster. Perhaps we should unplug just a little before we become undone. Such decompression is why we think so many Levenger customers savor the pensive pause of the fountain pen (which David McCullough also uses).

Set you down this,And say besides that in Aleppo once,Where a malignant and a turbaned TurkBeat a Venetian and traduced the state,I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog,And smote him, thus

As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and blackAs mine own face.

Haply, for I am blackAnd have not those soft parts of conversationThat chamberers have, or for I am declinedInto the vale of years—yet that’s not much—

The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days laterwas ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city , , , forBolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of,the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of theJewish quarter,"

In World War IIas in World War I, soldiers classified friends and foes in terms of rel-ative cleanliness, but in this conflict they were much more apt tomake sweeping judgments about the population and to rank peopleaccording to rigid biological hierarchies. Even the ordinary infan-tryman adopted a racialized point of view, so that “the Russians”the Germans had fought in 1914–1918 were transformed into anundifferentiated peril, “the Russian,” regarded as “dull,” “dumb,”“stupid,” or “depraved” and “barely humanlike.”

recisely becauseGermans had begun to think in terms of Feindbilder, or “visions ofthe enemy,” Goebbels regarded exhibitions such as these a “fantas-tic success.”

Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival

But the rapid and uni-form responses by local Nazis indicated a basic readiness and desireto carry out anti-Jewish actions

The requirement that Jews add “Sarah” or “Israel” to their legalnames in January 1938 made even more clear the aim of the Nazisto register Jews as a prelude to physical expulsion.

fears based on recollections of the general strikes in 1919and 1920 and gruesome stories about atrocities in the Russian civilwar. It also fortified the image of the Jew as an intractable, immedi-ate danger.

In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.

most Germans welcomed legis-lation clarifying the position of Jews and hoped it would bring to anend the graffiti and broken windows of anti-Jewish hooliganism.

half-Jews and quarter-Jews carried both good and bad genes and therefore could not beregarded as completely Jewish. Gross and others argued that mixedJews would eventually be absorbed into the Aryan race if they wereprohibited from marrying each other.

Jewish men who were imagined to prey on Germanwomen: the gender of the Jewish peril was male, while Aryan vul-nerability was female

“What am I going to do?” won-dered Richard Tesch, an owner of a bakery in Ballendstedt’s mar-ketplace: “Israel has been buying goods from me for a long time.Am I supposed to no longer sell to him? And if I do it anyway, thenI’ve lost the other customers.

The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.

The startling events of the spring of 1933, when more andmore Germans realized that they were not supposed to shop inJewish stores and when German companies felt compelled to fireJewish employees and remove Jewish businessmen from corporateboards, moved Germany quite some distance toward the ultimategoal of “Aryanizing” the German economy.

Public humiliations such as these depended on bystanders willing totake part in the spectacle. They accelerated the division of neigh-borhoods into “us” and “them.

As thousands of new converts joined the para-military units of the SA, whose numbers shot up ninefold from500,000 in January 1933 to 4.5 million one year later, the scale ofantisemitic actions expanded dramatically. Becoming a Nazi meanttrying to become an antisemite as well.

It was along this circuitry,in which Germans imagined themselves as the victims of Jews andother “back-stabbers,” that “self-love” could turn into lethal “other-hate.”

Anti-semitism did not arrive on the scene as something completely new,but it acquired much greater symbolic value when people associ-ated it with being German.

the Nazis considered theJewish threat to be “lethal” and active, a perspective that gavetheir assault on the Jews a sense of urgency and necessity that madeGerman citizens more willing to go along

The idea of normality had become racialized, so that entitlement tolife and prosperity was limited to healthy Aryans, while newly iden-tified ethnic aliens such as Jews and Gypsies, who before 1933had been ordinary German citizens, and newly identified biologicalaliens such as genetically unfit individuals and so-called “asocials”were pushed outside the people’s community and threatened withisolation, incarceration, and death.

Local Nazidoctors in Dortmund greeted “the new era” with an April 1933proposal to establish a municipal “race office” that on the basisof 80,000 files on schoolchildren would prepare a “racial archiveof the entire population of greater Dortmund.”

The Ahnenpass enabled the Nazi regime to enforce the Septem-ber 1935 Nuremberg racial law

The fact is that it is totally possible,” he carefully noted,“that the National Socialist state would use such a law to make it aduty for those without means and who are dependent on handoutsfrom the state to more or less ‘voluntarily’ take their lives.

The euthanasia “actions” anticipated the Holocaust. Figuringout by trial and error the various stages of the killing process, fromthe identification of patients to the arrangement of special trans-ports to the murder sites to the killings by gas in special chambersto the disposal of the bodies, and mobilizing medical experts whoworked in secret with a variety of misleading euphemisms to con-ceal their work

. The Nazis carried out involuntary euthanasia in order“to purge the handicapped from the national gene pool,” but war-time conditions gave the program legitimacy and cover.

In Berchtesgarden, in southern Germany, schoolteachers an-notated the tables of ancestors prepared by schoolchildren andhanded them over to public-health officials

German legal com-mentators reassured the German public by citing U.S. programs asprecedents and quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion,“three generations of imbeciles are enough”

“the police have theresponsibility to safeguard the organic unity of the German people,its vital energies, and its facilities from destruction and disintegra-tion.” This definition gave the police extremely wide latitude. Any-thing that did not fit the normative standards of the people’s com-munity or could be construed as an agent of social dissolutiontheoretically fell under the purview of the police.

However, crime could be reduced by removing the dan-gerous body, either by isolating “asocials” in work camps or bysterilizing genetically “unworthy” individuals. In the Nazi legal sys-tem, genetics replaced milieu as the point of origin of crime

Did shesympathize a little bit with people who were not considered wor-thy? Perhaps so, because Gisela recalled the incident in postwar in-terviews; but other Germans continued to improve themselves bygrooming themselves as Aryans, sitting up straighter, filling out thetable of ancestors, and fitting in at the camps, which gave legiti-macy to the selection process that had created Gisela’s anxiety inthe first place

The Ministry of Education authorized the National So-cialist Teachers’ League to organize retraining camps in order to“equip,” as Rust put it, teachers with lesson plans in “heredity andrace”; an estimated 215,000 of Germany’s 300,000 teachers at-tended two-week retreats at fifty-six regional sites and two nationalcenters that mixed athletics, military exercises, and instruction.

The consciousness of generation, and the assumption thatold needed to be replaced with new, undoubtedly opened youngminds to the tenets of racial hygiene, which were repeatedly parsedin workshops and lectures.

Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

By the middle of 1937 the Office of Racial Politics hadtrained over 2,000 “racial educators,” who on the basis of an eight-week course in Berlin received a special speaker’s certificate enti-tling them to address Germans on population and race policy. Certi-fication was part of the effort to make German racism objective

Repeated references to the “false humanity”and “exaggerated pity” of the liberal era indicated exactly whatwas at stake: the need to prepare Germans to endorse what univer-sal or Christian ethics would regard as criminal activity.

What was necessary, he insisted, was to“recognize yourself” (“Erkenne dich selbst”), which meant identi-fying with the idealized portraits of new Germans and following thetenets of hereditary biology to find a suitable partner for marriage,to marry only for love, and to provide the Volk with healthy chil-dren.

new visual regime repeatedly in-troduced the German body, most often in portraits of sunnyathletes, large families, and marching soldiers, and sometimes bycontrast in juxtaposed close-up shots of misshapen, degenerate

vast network of Gemeinschaftslager or com-munity camps was established across Germany; at one point or an-other, most Germans passed through them. Alongside concentra-tion camps and killing camps, the training camps were fundamentalparts of the Nazi racial project.

It was the modern, scientificworld of “ethnocrats” and biomedical professionals, not the anti-communist Freikorps veterans of the SA, who devised Ahnenpässeand certificates of genetic health and evaluated the genetic worth ofindividuals.

But it also made demands on ordinary Germans, who neededto visualize the Volk as a vital racial subject, to choose appropriatemarriage partners, and to accept “limits to empathy.”

he Germanpopulation was being resorted according to supposed genetic val-ues, a project that required all Germans to reexamine their rela-tives, friends, and neighbors.

The journalistSebastian Haffner noted that people in his circle in Berlin suddenlyfelt authorized to express an opinion on the “Jewish question,”speaking fluently about quotas on Jews, percentages of Jews, anddegrees of Jewish influence

a ministerial committeeon “population and race,” which met on 28 June 1933 to draftcomprehensive racial legislation giving the state the right to sterilizecitizens

a domestic-sounding vocabulary; a rhetoric of “cleaning,” “sweeping clean,”“housecleaning” strengthened the tendency to see politics in thedrastic terms of friends and foes

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century

. It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.

In other words, biology appeared to provideGermany with highly useful technologies of renovation. The Na-zis regarded racism as a scientifically grounded, self-consciouslymodern form of political organization.

thousands of“ethnocrats” and other professionals mobilized to build the newbiomedical structures of the Third Reich. They oriented their ca-reers and ambitions toward the wide spaces that Nazi Germany’sracial vision had opened up.

Race defined the new realities of the ThirdReich for both beneficiaries and victims—it influenced how youconsulted a doctor, whom you talked to, and where you shopped.

As parents, educators, volunteers, and soldiers, millions of Ger-mans played new parts in cultivating Aryan identities and segregat-ing out unworthy lives. They did not always do so willingly, andthey certainly did not anticipate the final outcomes of total war andmass murder.

until the very end of the Reich in 1945, they handedout hundreds of thousands of copies of the eight-mark “people’sedition” along with pamphlets providing advice on how to main-tain good racial stock and prepare Ahnenpässe, “Germans, HeedYour Health and Your Children’s Health,” “A Handbook for Ger-man Families,” and “Advice for Mothers.”

Family archives, racial categories, and individual identitiesbecame closely calibrated with one another over the course of theThird Reich

all the humor about Jewishness in Germany, the fear of stum-bling upon Jewish grandmothers and the relief when only a “Jewishgreat-grandmother,” “who cannot hurt you anymore,” turned up,did not dispel the suspicion that Jews were different.

Significantly, thestate did not issue racial passports; Germans had to prepare thempersonally. They thus attained for themselves their racial status asAryans.

Whereas an Aryanidentity opened the way for a future in the Third Reich, a Jewishone closed it down.

By 1936 almost all Germans—all who were not Jewish—had begun to prepare for themselves an Ahnenpass, or racial pass-port, which laid the foundation for the racial archives establishedin all German households

Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

caractère fantomatique du monde de la race en général, situe leurs racines dans l’expérience éprouvante de l’altérité

With this coordination the race condition is gone.

This test has never failed, but it has a race condition on paper.

Access barriers related to communication problems may be particularly acute for the subset of Latino patients for whom Spanish is the primary language. However, language issues do not fully account for access barriers faced by Latinos. In the study of emergency department pain medication cited previously, even Latinos who spoke English as their primary language were much less likely than non-Latino whites to receive pain medication. ++ Because many of these hypotheses do not satisfactorily explain the observed racial and ethnic disparities in access to care, an important consideration is whether racism may also contribute to these patterns (King & Wheeler, 2016).

Neighborhoods that have high proportions of African-American or Latino residents have far fewer physicians practicing in these communities. African-American and Latino primary care physicians are more likely than white physicians to locate their practices in underserved communities (Komaromy et al., 1996; Marrast et al., 2014).

Because a far higher proportion of minorities than whites is uninsured, has Medicaid coverage, or is poor, access problems are amplified for these groups. In 2016, African American, Latino, Asian, and American Indian adults were twice as likely as whites to report difficulty obtaining a timely medical appointment for illness or injury. Analyzing a group of quality measures in 2014–16, African Americans received worse care than whites for 40% of these quality measures and Latinos and American Indians received worse care than whites for about one-third of the indicators. While some inequities in access and quality, such as adolescent immunization rates, have decreased over the past 15 years, others have widened, such as disparities in blood pressure control among African Americans relative to other groups (U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2017). Overall, there has been a clear lack of progress on health equity over the past 25 years (Zimmerman and Anderson, 2019)

For largely financial reasons, the intensity of bookings is increasing (the number of artists scheduled to perform per year, per season, etc.) and the bookings themselves are growing more and more extensive (the kilometres/miles travelled by artists continue to rise with fewer and fewer performance dates in each region)

a nefarious controller of AI presumably could teach it to be immoral

the one that 00:05:20 controls AI has enormous power over everyone else

Blues notes: a discourse of race

Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs.

the biggest challenge if you ask me what went wrong in the 20th century 00:42:57 interestingly is that we have given too much power to people that didn't assume the responsibility

this is an arms race has no interest 00:41:29 in what the average human gets out of it it

the first inevitable is AI will happen by the way there is no 00:23:51 stopping it not because of Any technological issues but because of humanities and inability to trust the other

we've talked we always said don't put them on the open internet until we know 00:01:54 what we're putting out in the world

Session race conditions are very common in Rails. Redis session store doesn't help either! The reason is Rails only reads and creates the session object when it receives the request and writes it back to session store when request is complete and is about to be returned to user.

As you can see from the example, the session cookie is updated on every request, regardless of if the session was modified or not. Depending on when the response gets back to the client last, thats the cookie that will be used in the next call. For example, if in our previous example, if get_current_result’s response was slower than get_quiz, then our cookie would have the correct data and the next call to update_response would of work fine! So sometimes it will work and sometimes not all depending on the internet gods. This type of race condition is no fun to deal with. The implications of this is that using cookie storage for sessions when you are doing multiple ajax call is just not safe.

A better solution would be to use a server side session store like active record or memcache. Doing so prevents the session data from being reliant on client side cookies. Session data no longer has to be passed between the client and the server which means no more potential race conditions when two ajax are simultaneously made!

Standards codify and institutionalize values.

I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

How could we handle a situation where there is a race condition between a legitimate user and a malicious one?

Once upon a time, I worked at a magazine, reporting to a white woman who, early in our working relationship, told me that she didn’t consider me a threat because “a black woman will never have this job.”She then proceeded to use every one of my ideas to completely redesign the magazine we worked for. It was the end of a moment in publishing when such a thing as a “big magazine job” still existed. I hung on because I really wanted to be an editor in chief one day and knew that quitting would take me out of the game.

He outspent Bass by very wide margins, largely using his own money (see below).

The problem is that if one player finds a way to undermine orcircumvent the rules and gets away with it then the others have no choicebut to follow. If they don’t they’ll lose out.

Renan's definition of a nation has been extremely influential. This was given in his 1882 discourse Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? ("What is a Nation?"). Whereas German writers like Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria such as a race or an ethnic group "sharing common characteristics" (language, etc.), Renan defined it by the desire of a people to live together, which he summarized by a famous phrase, "avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore" (having done great things together and wishing to do more).

Front-Running

Williams' model helps us see how racial marking becomes desirable to white geeks: if suffering equals virtue and moral superiority, then the virtue of a marked identity type (black, female, gay, disabled) can be reduced to how much one suffers for it. Here is also the key to why our analysis reads geeks primarily as straight white men. The anxieties of the straight white male geek's identity are transformed into the authenticating devices that paradoxically make him a moral hero in a postmodern world in which an unmarked and untroubled straight white male hero would normally be out of place.

Published criticisms of this excellent book bear the hallmarks of a style of racism that is extraordinarily difficult to counter, because so few people have the intellectual training to understand the difference between evidence-based accounts of Indigenous Australia and popular mythologies that misrepresent the facts. These criticisms are entirely unreasonable.

The Seattle Times turns off comments on “stories that are of a sensitive nature,” said Michelle Matassa Flores, executive editor of The Seattle Times. “People can’t behave on any story that has to do with race.” Comments are turned off on stories about race, immigration, and crime, for instance.

Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.

ow [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 [...] and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags.[47] Conservatives were also dismayed about the many young adults engaged in the drug culture and "free love" (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the "hippie" counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.— Lyndon Johnson

Democrat George Wallace was elected as Governor of Alabama, he emphasized the connection between states' rights and segregation, both in speeches and by creating crises to provoke federal intervention. He opposed integration at the University of Alabama and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan in 1963 in disrupting court-ordered integration of public schools in Birmingham

The main plank of the States' Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South.

Republicans regularly supported anti-lynching bills, but these were filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate.

Although the Fourteenth Amendment has a provision to reduce the Congressional representation of states that denied votes to their adult male citizens, this provision was never enforced

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats

you can’t force insight into a preconceiveddirection

Coevolutionary arms race versus host defense chase in a tropical herbivore–plant system

I’m talking about the adults flocking to school board meetings to protect children from the manufactured crisis of “critical race theory.”

Stepping Out of the Rat Race

The original critical race theorists argued for the use of a new lens to interpret the past and the present. You can dispute whether or not that lens is useful, or whether you want to look through it at all

Part of the reason "race" & "gender" as identities make people so angry (aside from those people being comemierdas) is that they're used as immutable characteristics visible from the outside -b/c the State really, really wants them to be- while they are, scientifically, not.

// if the load event does not fire because it fired before // loaded() will never be executed

Crenshaw and her classmates asked 12 scholars of color to come to campus and lead discussions about Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. With that, critical race theory began in earnest.

The late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell is credited as the father of critical race theory. He began conceptualizing the idea in the 1970s as a way to understand how race and American law interact, and developed a course on the subject.

Nine of 10 of House Republicans will be white men, calculates David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, compared to just over one-third of House Democrats.

Blue districts have attracted the expanding segments of the U.S. population and workforce; half their residents are non-white. Red districts are 27 percent non-white.

If the 15 point gap between whites and blacks, who are about 80% black, is purely genetic in origin, then the gap between whites and biracials (who are 1/4th genetically as black as self-identified blacks) should be around 3.75 IQ points. Instead, it’s 2.0.

The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman’s hypothesis.

“Regression would explain why Black children born to high IQ, wealthyBlack parents have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents.” Arthur Jensen.

“If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor.” Richard Lynn.

There were attempts to simplify this setup by building specific browsers (such as capybara-webkit and PhantomJS) providing such APIs out-of-box, but none of them survived the compatibility race with real browsers.

The lead author points out that if you make a map of the world showing the net fiscal contribution immigrants make (as shown above), and another map of the world showing the Cito scores of immigrants from those countries, the two maps correlate so strongly it is hard to tell the difference.

Thoughts, Unoriginal But Perhaps of Value, on Brains

Mike: Not even that, it's just getting with my stepdad. I'd always had trouble listening to male authority, just because I didn't have that at all. So every time he would tell me to do something, I'd get so mad. I just want to punch him in the face. And it sucked, man, because he would always try to tell me stuff—he would do it for my own good.Mike: He would never get out of hand talk to me, but I would always explode on him. I would treat him like the parent that I never had who wanted to be back in my life. So you know you could kind of treat him like however you want? That's how I would treat him. And I just started realizing over time my dad just—this guy really cares about us. He's providing for five kids and still doesn't ask for anything.Mike: It just started growing on me and we started getting along and it started getting better. But yeah, I would not get along with my mom, or my dad at all. And my mom was—I feel like a lot of Mexican women and men, they have something against black folks even if you want to or not. I feel like that's racist too, because my mom would always be like, "Why do you hang out with them? Why do you do this? Why do you do that?"Mike: I'm like, "Because they're cool, man. They're like... I feel like these are my people. They've gone through the same struggles, a lot of the same stuff that happened to them. They would happen to me." So I would always bring them over, and I remember one time my mom got so mad she grabbed an orange and threw it at my friend, but my friend was so tall, he just caught it.Mike: These were kids from Nigeria. They're African—these guys are like, "Whoa." So he caught it and then he just said hi to my mom. My mom was so mad that day, man. I didn't come home for like two or three days just because of that. I got a lot of stories. I'm sorry I get out of track.