MTV recently came up with a list of the 10 Hottest MCs. Here’s what they came up with:

1) Lil Wayne

2) T.I.

3) The Game

4) Andre 3000

5) Kanye West

6) Young Jeezy

7) Jay-Z

50 Cent

9) Common

10) Jim Jones

Before you start organizing a protest against the network, remember that the list ranks the hottest and not the best MC. That said, I still have questions about the selection criteria. Are they going by record sales? Street Buzz? Skills? Regardless, I have major issues with this list. Why is The Game ahead of Kanye if we’re talking about record sales? If street buzz is a major issue, how is Cassidy off the list? How is Common near the bottom if we’re talking about skills? Where’s Talib Kweli, Joell Ortiz, Lupe Fiasco, or Papoose?

What would your list look like?

Michael Vick stands in judgment, and it goes without saying that a generation of young black male athletes also stand in judgment. More than Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Pacman “sometimes you need to just call a dangerous psychopath a ‘dangerous’ psychopath” Jones, Michael Vick has now become the stand-in for all that ails professional sports. And it’s not fair, but Michael Vick and his generational cohorts should know better.

The current crop of black male athletes are more visible and better compensated than every generation of black athletes that came before them. And for some of these young athletes, they believe they are beyond reproach because of it, particularly if said criticism comes from the generation of black athletes who toiled on fields, courts and tracks without the glamour and prestige that these young athletes now take for granted. I’m always reminded of Vince Coleman, a former major league baseball player who, months after signing a free-agent contract with the New York Mets in 1991, claimed that he didn’t know who Curt Flood was. It was Flood who, 20 years earlier, challenged the reserve clause in baseball, which essentially made baseball players little more than salaried chattel. Flood was the reason why Coleman and countless others can become free agents and sale their talents to the highest bidder.

As we witness the wealthiest generation of professional athletes ever, increasingly the professionalization process is beginning in childhood, as kids as young as seven and eight years of age are already being prepared for lives in professional sports. It is in this context that many of these athletes, particularly if they are black males, are denied the fullest range of social and cultural experience. The by-product is a generation of young rich athletes who, when they are not toiling for the NBA or NFL, are sitting at home playing video games 10 hours a day, before they hit the club. Lots of money and too much time on their hands and it explains, in part, why figures like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan might gamble away millions of dollars, why former NBA star Jayson Williams (the black one) might be sitting in his bedroom playing with guns, or why an athlete might become interested in betting on dog fights. The irony is that given their largely unprecedented wealth, this is a generation of athletes who could truly afford to experience the world in ways that their predecessors could only imagine.

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( photo by Anthony Russo)
Why Africa Fears Western Medicine
By Harriet A. Washington 

To Westerners, the repatriation of five nurses and a doctor to Bulgaria last week after more than eight years’ imprisonment meant the end of an unsettling ordeal. The medical workers, who in May 2004 were sentenced to death on charges of intentionally infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V., have been freed, and another international incident is averted. But to many Africans, the accusations, which have been validated by a guilty verdict and a promise to reimburse the families of the infected children with a $426 million payout, seem perfectly plausible. The medical workers’ release appears to be the latest episode in a health care nightmare in which white and Western-trained doctors and nurses have harmed Africans — and have gone unpunished.

The evidence against the Bulgarian medical team, like H.I.V.- contaminated vials discovered in their apartments, has seemed to Westerners preposterous. But to dismiss the Libyan accusations of medical malfeasance out of hand means losing an opportunity to understand why a dangerous suspicion of medicine is so widespread in Africa.

Africa has harbored a number of high-profile Western medical miscreants who have intentionally administered deadly agents under the guise of providing health care or conducting research. In March 2000, Werner Bezwoda, a cancer researcher at South Africa’s Witwatersrand University, was fired after conducting medical experiments involving very high doses of chemotherapy on black breast-cancer patients, possibly without their knowledge or consent. In Zimbabwe, in 1995, Richard McGown, a Scottish anesthesiologist, was accused of five murders and convicted in the deaths of two infant patients whom he injected with lethal doses of morphine. And Dr. Michael Swango, ultimately convicted of murder after pleading guilty to killing three American patients with lethal injections of potassium, is suspected of causing the deaths of 60 other people, many of them in Zimbabwe and Zambia during the 1980s and ’90s. (Dr. Swango was never tried on the African charges.)

These medical killers are well known throughout Africa, but the most notorious is Wouter Basson, a former head of Project Coast, South Africa’s chemical and biological weapons unit under apartheid. Dr. Basson was charged with killing hundreds of blacks in South Africa and Namibia, from 1979 to 1987, many via injected poisons. He was never convicted in South African courts, even though his lieutenants testified in detail and with consistency about the medical crimes they conducted against blacks.

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A new movement seeks to award special certificates to fetuses that are stillborn, but pro-choice advocates worry that this is yet another step toward fetal personhood that could endanger abortion rights.

The Politics of Stillbirth
By Allison Stevens 

Thirteen years ago, Joanne Cacciatore delivered a stillborn fetus, a trauma that was compounded by the fact that she received a death certificate in the mail but no birth certificate — a tangible memento she said would have helped her grieve.

Motivated by her loss, she mounted a grassroots campaign in her home state of Arizona to get the government to give parents who deliver stillborn fetuses the option of receiving a “certificate for stillborn birth” — and in so doing unintentionally waded into the turbulent waters of abortion politics.

Although reproductive rights advocates say they sympathize with Cacciatore, they also fear her effort — which has since ballooned into a nationwide campaign — could aid anti-choice groups as they attempt to chip away at or eliminate abortion rights. “There’s no question in my mind that the anti-abortion crowd will look for some way to use this,” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, has said. At issue is the question of “personhood,” or when human life begins; the answer lies at the heart of the debate over abortion.

Opponents of abortion rights contend that life begins at the moment of conception, and they have sought to define embryos and fetuses as human beings with a right to life. Under their logic, abortion is murder and should be illegal. Supporters of abortion rights do not equate embryos and fetuses with full human beings. Granting “personhood” to embryos and fetuses before they are born raises their legal status and jeopardizes women’s right to abortion, they say.

Abortion-rights opponents have not taken up the cause of stillborn birth certificates en masse, Cacciatore said. But pro-choice groups worry that Cacciatore’s movement to enact what she calls “Missing Angels” laws, which would grant fetuses that die before they are born certificates of stillbirth, will push anti-choice groups one step further in their quest to make abortion tantamount to murder.

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Report: Astronauts Flew Drunk

An internal review at NASA revealed that some of their astronauts may have been drunk when they boarded shuttle missions into space. What do you think?

Al Payton,
Well Excavator
“This isn’t a big deal. Astronauts are the best of the best. A drunk astronaut is as good as a sober commercial airline pilot.”

Doris Snyder,
Tobacconist
“Um, when are NASA astronauts not drunk? They’re being shot into outer fucking space!”

Lee Davis,
Beekeeper
“I’m just glad I’m not an astronaut and that I can get a decent buzz on at work without everyone freaking out.”

From TheOnion.Com