MY MOTHER

For all the mothers out there, we celebrate you with this poem written by Ann Taylor

MY MOTHER

Who sat and watched my infant head
When sleeping on my cradle bed,
And tears of sweet affection shed?
My Mother.

When pain and sickness made me cry,
Who gazed upon my heavy eye,
And wept for fear that I should die?
My Mother.

Who taught my infant lips to pray
And love God’s holy book and day,
And walk in wisdom’s pleasant way?
My Mother.

And can I ever cease to be
Affectionate and kind to thee,
Who wast so very kind to me,
My Mother.

Ah, no! the thought I cannot bear,
And if God please my life to spare
I hope I shall reward they care,
My Mother.

When thou art feeble, old and grey,
My healthy arm shall be thy stay,
And I will soothe thy pains away,
My Mother.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, FOLKS…….

 

THE UPCOMING RELIGIOUS WAR

warAccording to TIME magazine, the terror group ISIS has released another video of how its operatives targeted and beheaded Ethiopian Christians in Libya.

This is not the first time that ISIS, a terrorist organization that is obviously of Muslim affiliation has proudly and daringly released a video of its atrocious acts against unprotected Christians.

Since the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Nigeria, Muslim terrorism against Christians has been on the rise. If they are not bombing them in churches, they are killing them in their towns. Recently we saw how Al-Shabaab, another terrorist organization of Muslim affiliation that operates in East Africa attacked a university in Kenya and singled out 147 Christians for kill while sparing their Muslim brothers. The stories are endless and are both heartbreaking and frustrating.

The stories are heartbreaking not just because these victims were singled out for their Christian faith, which they practice at no one else’s cost, but also because these are people. They are someone’s brother, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, someone’s father, someone’s mother, and someone’s child. They are the reason someone smiles everyday, they are the breadwinners to their respective families, and they are the inspiration other people look up to. And their lives just got wasted on the account of sheer madness called religion. It is indeed heartbreaking.

The stories are frustrating because world powers especially the seat of world power – the White House is doing nothing about it. Rather than call it what it obviously is, at the least (a war by Muslim terrorists against Christians), President Obama rather chooses to pick a fight with people calling it what it exactly is. What cowardice. And the terrorists listens. And the terrorists get emboldened. They are killing in the name of religion, Mr. President. They are Muslims. And they are killing Christians. And what does that add up to, Professor Obama?

Continue reading “THE UPCOMING RELIGIOUS WAR”

TRIBUTE TO MY FATHER

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My father, Chief Benaiah Chikwem Ezeocha is a great man. He was born in 1937. And 1937 was a very, very, very good year.

Born into a family of 4 boys and a girl, my father was the youngest of all. He was a bright chap and he was very ambitious. And consequently, he is the most successful among his siblings.

As a child born under the British colonial rule, even though his parents couldn’t afford the cost of travelling to the United Kingdom to acquire Western education, that did not discourage my father’s desire for one. Consequent of his hard work, he got admitted for a distant learning program at the prestigious Bethel College, a Christian liberal arts college located in Mishawaka, Indiana, United States. After his education, he ended up becoming an elementary school teacher, a career that took him to several elementary schools in numerous towns in different states of Southeastern Nigeria, and retired as the headmaster of the elementary school in my hometown. He left a great legacy as a teacher. His protégés and folks he disciplined into becoming better people still come around to pay homage to him. He was a great educator and disciplinarian.

As a youth, my father was a playboy kind of guy. He had his ways with women. Built at 5’ 5”, he is a skinny guy, light-skinned and soft-spoken. Girls loved him. He used to tell me stories of his escapades with women. Especially during his teacher-training school days in Nigeria. He lived by himself. Having lost his dad early in his life, he was raised by his mother. And being so connected with his mother who was just getting by, he used to make his female fans bring lots of foodstuff for him to his place, ostensibly to keep him fit and healthy for them, but primarily to have sufficient foodstuff to send home to his struggling mother. He was a smart fella and loved his mother dearly. And I love him.

Continue reading “TRIBUTE TO MY FATHER”

OPEN LETTER TO THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

I know I said I did not care whether it is a Democrat or a Republican that wins the 2016 presidential election. Of course I do not care. I am not a political party freak. But I know a man who I know will continue to build on the enormous gains the Obama administration has made on the economy.

By Amanda Zheranova

Updated 07:43 AM CT, Monday March 23, 2015

Joe

Editor’s Note: Amanda is a Grade 12 high school student from Houston, Texas.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(EP) — Hello, Mr. or Madam President-Elect, my name is Amanda, a 17-year old high school kid from Houston, Texas. As a citizen interested in public policies and how they affect the lives of the common man, there are certain things that I will need you to do for us before your first 100-days in office runs through.

I do not know whether you will be a Democrat or a Republican. I do not really care. I only want the best man or woman for our country. And since the American people have chosen you, I accept that you are the best we have to lead our nation for the next four year.

If you are a Republican, please do not repeal Obamacare. Since it was passed into law and became operational, my mother, who is a single parent has been able to afford health insurance for our household. I am the oldest in a family of four including my mom. As we are all under the age 26, my brothers and I are covered under our mom’s insurance. And that is a good thing. Of course I watch television and I listen to political debates. From my analysis, there are some good prescriptions in the law and there are also some prescription in it that are not well thought-out. Rather than repeal the law, please work with Congress to review some of those aspects of the law that adversely affects small businesses and the little man and then pass a compromise appendage healthcare law to complement the already good things in Obamacare. If you repeal the law and we return to the status quo before the law was passed, we will lose our health insurance and you would lose your legitimacy as the president of all Americans.

If you are a Democrat, please do something about welfare. It is a good thing that we have programs such as food stamps to help people who are going through some hard times in their life until they find their feet. But what is not fair to taxpayers and hardworking people like my mom is when other adults make a career of living off of food stamps and refuse to better themselves. I will want you to reform the food stamp program and put a cap on the number of months a person can be on the program. It is also necessary to require people who are on the program to do some community service work at least once every week for the duration of time they are receiving the benefits. And finally on this issue, I will want you to make it difficult for someone who have already received the benefit to be able to receive it again without a proof to show that she had made an attempt to get a job, go to school, or improve her life in one way or the other. When people have a sense that government will always hand out benefits to them to subsidize the irresponsible lifestyle they choose to live, the incentive to work to supplement the life they are living zeroes out.

If you are a Republican, it is likely that you are a man. A white man. And being a man, I know you are a father. As a father, you are enthused at the idea that your son will one day grow up to walk on your footsteps and hopefully succeed where you have failed in life. Through your guidance, of course. That feeling is not native to you or white men alone. That is every father’s desire including African-American fathers. So I implore you that you work with Congress to pass a law to outlaw the killings of African-American men and teenagers all over the country by police officers. To us whites, they are just another data. But a time will come when it will blow up on the face of this country and undermine our greatness if nothing drastic is done about it. Segregation was outlawed. It was done while a white man was in the White House. Civil Rights Act was passed into law. A son of the south for that matter signed it into law. Outlawing extrajudicial killings of African-American men in this 21st century jet age is far easier to do. You have your precedents. Do it!!!

Continue reading “OPEN LETTER TO THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”

Thank you…

tatataWe want to thank everyone that participated in our One Year Anniversary’s Best Essay and Most Comment contests. We are encouraged by the number of essays we received. But we cannot say that for the Most Comment contest. The participation in that category wasn’t that encouraging. Next time we will lower the bar. But someone has to win the prize.

And for the Most Comment category, the prize goes to Eva Gonzalez of Augusta, Maine.

For the cash prize for the Best Essay category, the winner is Amanda Zheranova of Houston, Texas.

We congratulate our winners.

TWO MORE DAYS BEFORE THE DEADLINE FOR ENTRY INTO OUR $100 CASH PRIZE AWARDS

100Folks, we have two more days remaining before the deadline for accepting essays for our $100 Cash Prize Award for the Best Essay Contest. And same goes entrants for the $100 Cash Prize Award for the Most Comment Contest on our blog.

The window of opportunity for you or someone you know to clinch a Benjamin is closing. So summarize your essays today and send them in. Then visit our blog and leave your comments.

Good luck.

Cry Africa

“Put $50,000 in the right hands and you can test battery acid as skin lotion.”

By Chinedu Ezeocha, for The Ezeocha Post

Updated 10:51 PM CT, Wed March 11, 2015

africa

“Put $50,000 in the right hands in this country and you can test battery acid on people as skin lotion.”

The 2005 movie The Constant Gardener details how European pharmaceutical companies exploit ignorant African populations, not only as guinea pigs to test the efficacy of their new drugs, but most importantly, the movie details how they (the pharmaceutical companies), under the pretense of providing vaccination for some seasonal sickness in their target country, deliberately infect naïve populations in that country with communicable diseases. Diseases that they invented in their laboratories for the sole purpose of making the target population sick. Once an epidemic-level status for the sickness they afflicted the people with is achieved, just as we saw in the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, the movie details how the pharmaceutical companies through their fifth columnists in the federal government(s) of their target country(ies), forces the hand of the government(s) to purchase from them (the pharmaceutical companies) the already-made antidote for the epidemic. And once that is achieved, walaaaa, their bank accounts grows fatter to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Corporate profiteering. But more accurately, greed.

Greed is the sole reason Africa is still underdeveloped.

The take away from The Constant Gardener is something that most people who are enlightened and in the know are pretty much aware of. Namely:

  1. Europe haven’t ceased from exploiting Africa and its resources even though the colonial days are over.
  2. Europe in the past used sheer brutality to loot Africa, but contemporarily their governments are using covert agents such as the British Council, Department for International Development (DFID), and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) to achieve this looting. Their corporations on the other hand seeks out the greedy and the unpatriotic among Africa’s lot and seduce them with money, weaponry, and the promise of power into partnering with them to impoverish their respective countries.
  3. European countries and corporations will kill anything and everything standing on their way, including their own citizens, if need be, in their single-minded objective of constant exploitation of Africa. The horrific murder of Mr. and Mrs. Quayle, a diplomat and his international activist wife in the movie buttresses this very fact.

I strongly recommend The Constant Gardener to all my readers. You can stream it on Netflix. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. And you can also watch it at so many other online movie streaming sites. It is as educating as it is true.

 

Now, of all of the 54 fully-recognized and the 2 partially-recognized African nations, none is a colony of a foreign country. All 56 of them are independent states.  Which means that they are all self-governed. Irrespective of whether they are governed by monarchs, despots, or by democratically elected leaders, they all are at the very least governed by the people of the land and not by foreigners. And even though the “government of the people by the people and for the people” mantra does not apply to all 56 African states, you are rest assured that “by the people” part of that mantra applies to all of them. They are all independent and self-governed.

africa

 

 

 

 

 

Hold your thought.

Independence means “not subject to control by others.” That’s as succinct as it can be.

Moving forward, almost all the nations in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, were colonized by Europe. And at different times in their history, each of these African nations fought and won their independence from their European oppressors.

Statesmen in each of these individual African countries that fought for their independence believed that they were capable of governing themselves. They believed they had, not only both the mental and intellectual capacities to fashion out sound policies and programs that can advance their respective countries, but also that they can actually implement those policies successfully for nation-building. They believed they were as competent as the colonialist civil and structural engineers in the building of bridges and rails. They believed they were as good as the colonialists in mining. They believed they can be as civil as the colonialist in having a great debate for national good within the democratic system of government. And most of all, they believed they were patriots and loved their respective countries exceedingly, and that when they gain their independence, that they will develop their countries better than whatever developmental plan their European dictators had in stock for them. Their love for their country and their strong desires for self-governance inspired their fight for their respective country’s independence. And they got it.

And so are they all, all independent and self-governing countries.

Continue reading “Cry Africa”

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU, IRAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS AMBITION, AND PRESIDENT OBAMA. A TALE OF MANY STORIES

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint Session of Congress on Tuesday March 3, 2015.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint Session of Congress on Tuesday March 3, 2015.

People ask me why I posted the address by Israel’s Prime Minister to the Joint Session of U.S. Congress on my blog and why I went ahead to like it on the Facebook page of my blog. And my answer is simple: journalism is not about reporting only news that I like or that I thought my readers will like. Objective journalism demands that I report every news story as it is to my readers, irrespective of whatever feelings it may elicit, and allow my readers the choice of deciding for themselves what side of the narrative they want to identify with. My job is to keep my readers informed about contemporary socio-political and economic issues facing our world. And to provide the platform for them to debate these issues for the good of the society. Ezeocha Post, by the way, is all about promoting informed debate.

Now if you ask me what I think about Benjamin Netanyahu’s address, I will tell you this: it is a political theatrics that amounted to little other than one politician trying to save his own political career by undermining that of another.

Netanyahu broke protocol by accepting to address the Congress without running it by the White House first. And by so doing, he stretched an already tense relationship between himself and the present White House.

Now if his address to Congress has a chance of influencing U.S. foreign policy position on Iran at it were, his dissing of the White House could have worth a peru. But Netanyahu, a Harvard educated politician who is schooled in U.S. politics, knows better than most people that it is the Oval Office that conducts U.S. foreign policy and not the House Speaker’s office. He knows that. He knows that ONLY President Barack Obama can give him the hawkish foreign policy approach towards Iran that he craves for. Yet he presumably came to address the Congress for something that Congress cannot give him. Why?

That brings us to his real reason for coming to America – Israel’s local politics.

Israel’s next general election is on March 17, 2015. And typical of politicians all over the world who during general elections at home, travel abroad to countries of importance to their domestic audience in order to shore up their credentials, Prime Minister Netanyahu came to the United States to shore up his credentials in order to increase his chances of winning re-election. And there is nothing wrong with that practice. It is unfortunate that he has ideological differences with President Obama. It is equally unfortunate that he had to badmouth President Obama in front of the U.S. Congress and the world so as to score political points in Israel.

That notwithstanding, it is important that we focus our attention to the crux of Bibi’s visit and answer the question below unequivocally:

Does Iranian’s nuclear weapons program pose immediate threat to the state of Israel and is President Obama naïve to believe that he can get any concessions from the Iranians on their nuclear weapons program?

Continue reading “PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU, IRAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS AMBITION, AND PRESIDENT OBAMA. A TALE OF MANY STORIES”

The Emasculation of the Man

Brian Banks
Brian Banks

Brian Keith Banks, an American football linebacker, was 17 years  of age when he was convicted of raping a girl and spent five years in jail and another five years  of probation for offense he did not commit. His football career was messed up and he suffered personal losses. The judicial system took the woman’s word for it. And the man’s denial of the said crime counted for nothing even though there was no evidence whatsoever of rape.

Years after this young promising man’s life was upended, the woman whose false allegation led to his misery recanted her story.

Recently, a Detroit man was ordered to pay $30,000 in back child support for a child he did not father. Even though DNA report has shown that the accused is not the father of the said child and even though the mother of the child has come forward to claim that she needed to name a father for her child and she chose to name a decent man who did not father the child, a judge still had the effrontery to order the man to pay $30,000 in back child support for a child he did not father. What a world!

In both cases, these women that messed up the career and lives of these decent men are still enjoying their freedom and paid no cost for their crime. These are just two examples of instances of collusion between the justice system and women to attack the man. In times like these, “The Emasculation of the Man” reminds us that something needs to be done to reverse this ugly trend. Have a good read.

Ezeocha Post's avatarThe Ezeocha Post

man

There used to be a time when the image of a man was the rough-shaven, macho, tough-looking, albeit, handsome guy donning his wrangler denims and cowboy boots, and carrying his ropes across his chest as he rides on his horse back. Remember the cowboy that graced the Marlboro advert on the back cover page of every mainstream magazine? The Marlboro Man.

Back in those days, when men get into a brawl, throw punches at each other, wrestle one another to the floor, and even bloody the face of one another; they make up afterwards over a bottle of beer and shake hands. There will be no police involvement. And there will not be any charges of assault. Rather a reflection of what caused the fight establishes a better understanding between them, life goes on, and friendship continues. That was the norm when men, God’s original creation, were men.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Speech to the U.S. Congress

Watch, listen, and decide for yourself what you think the U.S. position on Iran should be. To continue the current course being taken by Secretary Kerry at the behest of President Obama or to take a more militaristic course.

Make your thoughts known.

Let the debate continue…