Hasta La Gadget!

4TB has become an established size for external drives, and a bunch of models from different vendors are now readily available. So, selecting the best one to store your precious data can be daunting. Can’t decide? Let me give you a hand.

Alicia Keys’ baby boy, Genesis, is very adorable.

The star took to Facebook on Friday to share the first photo of her son, whom she welcomed with husband Swizz Beatz, a rapper and music producer, on Dec. 27, 2014. Along with the couple and baby, Keys’ son Egypt and stepson Kaseem Jr. are also pictured.

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Keys announced Genesis’ birth in an Instagram post back in December, along with an image of the little one’s footprints.

“The joy of joy is joy!! It’s a boy!!,” she wrote at the time. “We are so grateful!! #blessings!!”

(Reuters) – Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the “throwaway culture” of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society.

In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the “dizzying rise in unemployment” and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs.

For those living “at the existential margins” the current social and political system “seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats,” he said.

The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and inequality, said people were forced to work long hours, sometimes in the black economy, for a few hundred euros a month because they were seen as easily replaceable.

“‘You don’t like it? Go home then’. What can you do in a world that works like this? Because there’s a queue of people looking for work. If you don’t like it, someone else will,” he said in an unscripted change from the text of his speech.

“It’s hunger, hunger that makes us accept what they give us,” he said.

His remarks have a special resonance in Italy, where unemployment, particularly among young people, is running at record levels after years of economic recession.

The cooperative movement in Italy, whose roots go back to 19th century workers’ associations, have long had close ties to the Catholic Church, with credit services, agricultural and building co-ops forming an important part of the overall economy.

Pope Francis said they could help find new models and methods that could be an alternative model to the “throwaway culture created by the powers that control the economic and financial policies of the globalized world.”

Perhaps mindful of a wide-ranging corruption scandal linked to some cooperatives in Rome last year, he attacked those who “prostitute the cooperative name”.

But his overall message was that economic rationale had to be secondary to the wider needs of human society.

“When money becomes an idol, it commands the choices of man. And thus it ruins man and condemns him. It makes him a slave,” he said.

“Money at the service of life can be managed in the right way by cooperatives, on condition that it is a real cooperative where capital does not have command over men but men over capital,” he said.

When Mary Nelson started working at a restaurant in Honolulu last year, she hid in the back as a dishwasher.

Despite her lively personality and quick humor, she was too intimidated to interact with the customers, so for the first six months of the job, she washed dishes.

It was only the second job the 53-year-old had ever had. Before starting at Seed, a “justice restaurant” that provides employment for the community’s at-risk population, Nelson had been a prostitute for 38 years.

She started working on the streets of New York City at the age of 14, after her mother committed suicide. When she was 18, she heard that clients were a lot less violent in Hawaii, so she hopped on a plane and moved to Waikiki.

It wasn’t until she was in her early 50s that a church group persuaded her to leave the streets and try working at Seed. She spent the first six months washing dishes because she wanted to be far away from the customers or, what she would call, the “good people.”

It was hard work, but the past year has been revolutionary for Nelson. She is now one of the most popular waitresses at the restaurant, and at Seed, she told The Huffington Post, “I get to be the person I was never able to be. I get to help people without someone trying to take advantage of me.”

The Justice Restaurant

Seed was founded by Jordan and Sonya Seng, community leaders at Bluewater Mission, a nondenominational church that runs a number of recovery homes for at-risk individuals in Hawaii.

The recovery homes were succeeding as havens, but the Sengs and the organization kept running into one frustrating problem: They could not find these individuals jobs. So, they decided to create the jobs themselves.

Seed, a for-profit restaurant, was created to provide flexible jobs in the community. The restaurant — which serves healthy, locally sourced meals — is staffed by former convicts and prostitutes and victims of domestic violence, human trafficking and other societal or physical challenges.

“Seed is an expression of a whole community of people,” Seng told The Huffington Post. “A lot of people we employ need a little care. So they get to exist in a broader community and that’s where the bulk of the rehabilitation is done.”

To assist the at-risk staff with their rehabilitation, an additional staff of “stable” employees take on more responsibility and, as Seng says, work twice as hard. Volunteers also jump on board, picking up shifts as often as twice a week.

“As much as possible, we run [Seed] like a normal restaurant, but with the understanding that we’re also trying to develop job skills,” Ryland Young, assistant general manager, said. “For those who are stable, the mission of our restaurant is what draws them and keeps them here.”

“They can have less complicated jobs that pay better elsewhere,” Seng added. “They work here because they’re looking for jobs that mean a little more.”

Seed restaurant serves healthy, locally sourced meals.

How It Works

When Seed hires a new at-risk employee, usually a person from Bluewater Mission’s recovery homes or a word-of-mouth referral from an employee, he or she is placed in a specific role (dishwasher, cook, server, barista, etc.) and matched with a more experienced staffer. The two work together until the new hire can work independently.

Some positions, like cook, are more difficult to learn than others, but employees move up and advance at their own pace.

“When someone’s ready to take on a challenge, we give it to them,” Young said. “If there’s someone who needs to take a little more time, like some of our servers who come from really tough situations, we take our time with them.”

Nelson says she needed those first six months as a dishwasher.

“I was always a people person,” she says, “but with the wrong kind of people … negative people [from] the street life. Then here I come around [to Seed] and it’s a whole new world. I didn’t want to deal with none of the humans. I was afraid of the rejection or that people would judge me or wouldn’t trust me.”

When Seng finally persuaded her try out hostessing, she was pleasantly surprised.

“I didn’t get any of that,” Nelson said. “I was able to be a people person with good people.”

She was promoted to server, and her colorful personality now charms customers, especially kids. Seed’s walls were once lined with all the drawings that kids left behind, addressed to Grandma Mary. Nelson has taken most of them home.

Mary Nelson, pictured here during an interview with Career Changers TV.

Does It Work?

Seng says that for every 10 at-risk employees that come to work at Seed, four will successfully stabilize into normal lives. “Either they’ll succeed here, or they’ll succeed well enough to get a job elsewhere,” he added. As the restaurant approaches its one year anniversary and prepares to close for renovations and fundraising, he hopes they can improve that number.

“There’s a lot of things that we haven’t figured out yet,” Seng said. “But what makes it successful when it works is the degree that our employees succeed at forming friendships [with their coworkers] outside of the workplace. It’s 300 percent better,” compared to not having a community-based work environment.

When Nelson’s birthday came around, for example, she invited her friends — many of whom were still actively working on the streets of Waikiki — to join her at Seed for dinner and meet her coworkers. She wanted them to see that there are people in the world who won’t judge them. “I wanted to let these girls know that there are options,” she said. “That if grandma can do it, they can too.”

‘I Never Thought I’d Be This Person I Am Now’

Nelson has been known to remind her fellow staffers that what she makes in a month at Seed, she used to make in one night on the streets. She had it all, she tells them: new cars, jewelry, travel, nice condos — though, sometimes, beatings, rape and “so much horror” came with the price.

“[Y]ou can’t buy what I’m going through right now. I’m on cloud nine,” she says. “I never thought that I’d be in Hawaii and be this person I am now.”

Nelson still lives in an apartment in Waikiki above the busy streets where she worked for more than 30 years. She says it would be easy to walk out her front door and find a customer, “but that hasn’t happened and it’s not going to. Seed has been a big influence on that.”

Recently, Nelson took some time off work to go with her church on a trip to the Philippines to try and reach out to prostitutes working there. She’s made it her mission to help women who are going through the life she freed herself from.

“I want those women to know there’s hope,” she said. “[To them, I say:] You can change. There are people out there that really want to help and you’ve got to have faith and try to believe. Just like you went out there and took a chance on the streets, you’ve got to take a chance on this as well.”

Watch Nelson talk about her past and her new life at Seed at 0:54 in the video below.

“Peace be with you,” were his finals words as he spoke to a large audience exactly 50 years ago. Then, all of a sudden, several men jumped up from the crowd in Harlem, pulled out their guns and shot him to death. The assassins aim was to silence the man, his words, his oratory and his influence. The succeeded in killing the man but failed to silence him. Malcolm X is arguably more popular today than he was 50 years ago — worldwide!

Malcolm X, the icon

You can see or hear or read about Malcolm X these days from a seemingly unlimited supply of sources. On YouTube there is even a Malcolm X Network with high viewer rates, where a rich collection of his appearances can be seen. Watching them, one usually sees an angry man with glasses speaking in front of big crowds, often in scratchy black and white film footage.

For anyone who digs a bit into black culture, it doesn’t take long to stumble upon the name of Malcolm X. You can be looking at contemporaries including Hip-Hop, Rap, or Kwanzaa, or also at people like Beyoncé or Barack Obama and come across references or connections to Malcolm X. Even with echoes of the past like Muhammad Ali, Harry Belafonte, Sidney-Poitier-movies or old-school funk and soul music; everything seems to trace back to Malcolm X. And this ubiquitous black furthers the impression of Malcolm X as an immortal.

Anyone who wants to better understand contemporary black culture needs to take a closer look at Malcolm X.

Malcolm X, the key to black culture

Who was this man who is so influential to this day? Who was this man who never held any public office, who came out of nowhere from the Midwest? Who was this man who had no formal education and made some incredible mistakes in his life that caused him to spend long years in prison? Who was this man who gave his enemies so much ammunition and quotations that they could denounce him with? Who was this man who even President Obama has said had a big influence on his life?

American biography in times of segregation

On May 19, 1925 he was born as Malcolm Little, the son of Baptist preacher in beautiful Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were followers of nationalist Mark Garvey. In those difficult times of segregation, Garvey preached pride and – as a possible solution – a migration to escape the racial hatred and the lack of legal protection.

His family was of course threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. When Malcolm was just six years old his father died run over by a streetcar. The family did not believe in an accident and his death broke his mother’s heart.

Malcolm was raised with his half-sister in Boston, dropped out of school. When he was unable to get a decent job, he turned to the criminal underworld and ended up taking drugs. In the early 1940s, he moved to New York, began as a waiter and then went completely off the rails: drug trafficking, pimping and theft.

When the pressure from the police got too intense, he went back to Boston, was arrested and sentenced in 1947 at the age of 22 to ten years in prison. Until now, it would have been just another unremarkable story about a young man getting into trouble, the sort of thing that happened a lot in that era of racial segregation. Cynics would say it was the result of an unwritten law of the street: You have no chance, so grab it, no matter from whom. This thinking was reflected in the famous words of Enlightenment philosopher Vittorio Alfieri: “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.”

The conversion to Malcolm X

In prison, Malcolm got his inspiration from a fellow inmate who was an avid reader. Malcolm started to read. Because he did not know what to read, he started off with a dictionary. The first word: Aardvark. After that, he got swept up in a cascade of knowledge and he absorbed as much as he could from the hundreds of books that followed the animal in the dictionary. He quickly discovered his voracious appetite for knowledge and intellectual discourse. And taking part in the prison debating club, helped sharpen the rhetorical skills and tricks that would later on be so admired and feared.

Behind bars, he became acquainted with a religious sect and later joined: the “Nation of Islam.” This group, which is not recognized by orthodox Islam, preaches that all blacks are Allah’s beloved children and therefore good. Whites, on the other hand, are purely evil.

For many black prisoners those were comforting words of salvation. In a racially segregated society there had seemingly been no fair chance but instead only oppression and disadvantage. That’s why those who followed the sect dropped their last names. According to the view of the believers, everyone’s last name could ultimately be traced back to the slaveholder society that robbed them of their history and culture. As the original names were unknown, many simply swapped their last time with an X.

Rise to national fame

After spending many years in prison, Malcolm X became a preacher for the Nation of Islam, which were also known as the “Black Muslims”. From the head of the New York community he quickly rose to become a nationally known figure. The secret to his success was that he spoke the language of the street, combined with an incredibly rich knowledge of Bible, Koran and general history.

He managed to communicate with ordinary people as well as making a lasting impression on mass audiences or scholarly audiences. The emerging medium of television certainly helped. In the same way that visuals and oratory helped John F. Kennedy to win over voters, Malcolm X benefited from the new power of television as well. He certainly loved the camera and the camera loved him back. Many recordings show his casual eloquence even when he spoke about uncomfortable topics such as self-esteem.

While watching these videos it’s important to keep in mind that they were made during an era of segregation: Non-whites were not allowed to do the same things as whites; using public transport – for example – they had to sit in the back. It was the time when many believed that Muhammad Ali was not a typical black boxer because he talked so much. And then there was this man with glasses doing all the talking, and rhetorically taking whites who insisted on racial segregation for a ride.

It was his appearance; it was his uncommonly powerful eloquence that made him famous and immortal. From his speeches and comments in those days there are many quotes from him that are now heard over and over again in movies, books and pop songs.

His assertion that a person can defend his rights “by any means necessary” is perhaps his most lastingly famous quotation.

It also “helped” his notoriety that he was built up as a rival of Martin Luther King, the preacher of non-violence. Malcolm X did not believe in the Christian ideal of loving one’s enemy and all that stuff about turning the cheek. He wanted his rightful respect. From everyone!

His approach was wonderfully captured in the Sidney Poitier classic “In the Heat of the Night.”

Break with the Black Muslims

In Malcolm X’s heyday the Black Muslims had grown from small sect to a mass phenomenon. Probably because of his personal popularity and his fame, there was a rupture with his congregation. Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca, converted to orthodox Sunni.

This trip opened his mind: among other things he realized that outside of the United States it was possible for different religions and races to co-exist peacefully – un-segregated. This experience changed him again – made him a humanist. He felt closer to Martin Luther King: equal rights and justice for everybody.

The Nation of Islam regarded his new thinking as betrayal, some saying publicly that he had deserved death.

The assassination

There were many death threats and he barely survived a fire bomb. At his next speech, on February 21, 1965 he was shot to death. Even today, the full background of the assassination has not been determined. Those arrested for killing him were members of the Nation of Islam and they were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Similar to the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, speculation and theories are rife about the facts and the background. Many witnesses saying that there must have been more than the three identified shooters. Because Malcolm X was under constant surveillance by the FBI the rumors never ceases that the FBI was aware of the plot to kill him.

Malcolm X: An attitude

His death started another transformation: a virtual “attitude Malcolm X”, supported by worldly occurrences. Four months after his death, his autobiography was released and became a worldwide bestseller. For many young men that book is a coming of age inspiration.

Time magazine called it one of the most important books of the 20th century. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is still in the literary canon of many American universities.

When hip-hop and rap emerged in the seventies and eighties, then music of angry young men, Malcolm X was often quoted, his words put to big beats.

In the early nineties, Hollywood star Denzel Washington breathed new life into Malcolm X. Director Spike Lee’s movie became a blockbuster.

The film is probably so successful around the world because the story is as fascinating as startling and his life sounds like a movie: a kid with seemingly no chances goes down the wrong path – drugs, theft, pimping, and prison! Then the catharsis – education – but still hating his oppressors. Another twist of fate and a pilgrimage is needed to find salvation.

It is his iron self-discipline that is so legendary: He was an incredibly hard worker since his prison days. In his autobiography, he describes wonderfully how he could not stop. In prison there is no light at night, but he kept on reading. The excessive strain of his eyes reading in the dark damaged his vision and led to a later need to wear glasses.

Personal misconducts after his catharsis are not known. Keeping in mind that the FBI went to pains to get taped recordings of Martin Luther King’s womanizing in an attempt to discredit him, there was nothing they could find in Malcolm X’s life to try to discredit him.

Malcolm X lived in the backstreets of a society, in a ghetto: The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard famously described big cities ghettos once “Excesses of crime and speculation, leftovers, which will have been never more than leftovers.”

Living one’s life, never accepting anything leftover – that’s Malcolm X.

Influence on Obama

When Barack Obama was elected, many posters and T-shirts appeared with an unusual group picture of three men: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Barack Obama. Martin Luther King had a dream. The fighter, demanding the necessary respect, was Malcolm X. And Barack Obama was the one to make a dream come true. Malcolm X is seen by many as catalyst: Without him, there would have been no President Barack Obama.

In reality, the effect on the young Barack Obama was enormous. In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, the President describes how he tried as a teenager tried to come to terms with his mixed race – white of his mother, black of his father – and this inner struggle was calmed by reading Malcolm X’s autobiography.

He found the same anger, the same doubts, and the same self-contempt. Malcolm X’s “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me: the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising, martial in its discipline, forged through the sheer force of will.”

The author Marc Ferrara analyzed in his book Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Hope that Obama and Malcolm X were anything but contradictory: “Self-reliance, continual improvement, drive, discipline, tempered and hard work,” sound almost like a direct quote from Malcolm X.

Malcolm X, the symbol

Malcolm X’s life – especially if you keep in mind that books are so 18th, 19th and 20th century – might be today’s equivalent of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther , the best coming of age book of all times. Werther was all German, Malcolm X deals with contemporary phenomenon: people are mixed and grow up with two cultures.

And Malcolm X stands for self-empowerment. He is proof that anyone, even those who have fallen far, can free himself. You just have to work harder. That’s why his spirit is very much still alive in the whole wide world even 50 years after his violent death.