Current Events - Actual things on the News

[skvorecky]

what?
i'm seeing two completely unrelated statement separated by an 'and' there.
and fuck yes, math and hard sciences have WAY fallen off of american students' radar.
the 'current apple executive' who said "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need." - certainly infers that math and the sciences relating to their types of engineering AND manufacture are in too short a supply here.

and what % of rap 'artistes' graduate berklee or juilliard?

or even 'joe's music school' in bayonne?

Frank Zappa was an amazing musician/composer that didn't go to Julliard or the Berklee School of Music so you're point there is lost on me. Neither did Eddie Van Halen for that matter, Jimi Hendrix, or a lot of other amazing musicians.

Chuck D has a degree in Graphic Design from Adelphi University. He is in Public Enemy.

Multi-platinum rapper and actor Ludacris has churned out hit after hit since 1998. He has won Screen Actors Guild, Critic's Choice, MTV, and Grammy Awards, and even raps on teen superstar Justin Bieber's monster song "Baby." But Luda—birth name Christopher Bridges—also graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in business from Georgia State University.

Rapper and record producer David Banner hit it big in 2003 with his track "Like a Pimp" and has since collaborated with everyone from T.I. to Lil Wayne. But don't be fooled by the gritty song title. Banner—real name Lavell Crump—earned a bachelor's degree in business from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and dropped out of a master's of education program at the University of Maryland after his hip-hop career took off.

Grammy award winning artist Young MC—real name Marvin Young—is best known for the 1989 hip hop classic "Bust a Move." Discovered while he was a student at the University of Southern California, Young co-wrote fellow artist Tone-Loc's multi-platinum hits "Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina" in between classes. Despite being signed to a record label and getting his tracks played on Los Angeles radio, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree in economics. Young promised his parents he'd attend graduate school if hip hop didn't work out, but his debut album went multi-platinum.

Indie producer, rapper and soul singer Aloe Blacc began MC'ing in high school and was a member of indie rap group, Emanon. Since going solo, Blacc—also known as Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins, III—has brought Latin, folk music, and Negro spiritual influences into hip hop. He's collaborated with John Legend and his song "I Need A Dollar" is the intro track for the HBO series How to Make It in America. He holds a bachelor's degree in linguistics and pyschology from the University of Southern California.

Grammy Award nominated British rapper, singer, and producer Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam—known to the world as M.I.A.—is famous for her triple platinum song "Paper Planes," socially conscious lyrics, and eclectic style. She earned a degree in fine art, film, and video from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Talib Kweli studied experimental theater at New York University (NYU). It's no surprise that Kweli went to college - he was raised in Brooklyn by two professors. Kweli first appeared on the rap scene in 1997, and released his debut solo album, 'Train of Thought' in 2002.

Paul Wall has an International Communications Degree from the University of Houston.

Sage Frances has a degree in Journalism from the University of Rhode Island.

[skvorecky]

The current Apple CEO is Tim Cook.

What Apple isn't telling you, and alot of other tech companies are guilty of this as well, is that they get tons of applicants and engineers who want to work for the company who are American, they just don't want to pay those kinds of salaries. They can outsouce their manufacturing to China, pay Chinese engineers decent wages according to Chinese standards, and reap huge profits in the process.

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all

[RocDoc]

that quote wasn't attributed to any current apple 'CEO' in that article, just simply, plainly 'an executive' who likely was speaking off the record NOT wanting to be identified.
re apple going for cut-rate talent which CAN still perform...and within a dirt cheap worker pool on a bottom line basis, sure, it could easily be.
but i have read article after article that hard science students in the top american universities are largely asian (incl arabic, pakistani and indian)...the coddled anglo kids aren't choosing physics, chem and bio sciences the way that they used to.
~
missing my point, skv - um, zappa and hendrix were NOT rap or hiphop but they PLAYED and composed, worked within structure and melody.
i'm talking purely on the basis of MANY (not all obviously) of the people of those genres, sampling, blurting whatever they blurt over existing music - they (as you so much have proven there^) put no time into the study of music.
MANY are educated but here you've SHOWN they have chosen to go outside their fields of study for the brass ring.
they don't WANT to 'study music', they've found the means where it's been made acceptable that they're 'savants' on their own say so, and no study was necessary>
music's been made some sort of a paint-by-numbers through the worldwide acceptance of some sort of a spoken 'art' from the street as being 'music'.
hated it from the get go, sorry.

why did the ellingtons and basies and theloniuses and yardbirds bother to learn music? in an academic sense?
the standards were higher then imo.

[skvorecky]

Thelonius Monk didn't even graduate high school and Duke Ellington didn't go to a music University. He had a bit of piano lessons and then struck out on his own. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here.

Questlove, the drummer for the Roots, is one of the highest sought after percussionists and he didn't go to a music school after high school. The guy can compose and he's in one of the most successful hip hop bands of all time. If you're unfamiliar with The Roots, they play instruments.

Kanye West actually plays piano and did the arrangements for the strings parts on his records and has studied music extensively. Same with RZA from the Wu Tang Clan. Almost all of the piano chords on most of Wu Tang's records were played by him.

There's also Rage Against the Machine. A Political hip hop rock band, really. And Zach De La Rocha can play guitar, he's not just a mouth piece.

Also, Eric Clapton went to art school and didn't go to a music school and look where that guy is. Paul McCartney didn't go to music school either and neither did John Lennon and those guys are considered to be the most successful songwriters, compositionally as well as monetarily.

Again, your reasoning is completely lost on me here. There are a ton of famous musicians out there who went to college and didn't study music at all.

As far as your point about Top American Universities, again, I'm lost on that as well. I work at the University of Texas at Austin and I see a lot of anglo kids that are studying to be engineers in the Computer Science building. I'm also at a loss as to why we're discussing ethnicities here. Americans are Americans and if those top science students are Arab Americans or Asian Americans or whatever, I still don't see your point. If we're educating foreign students, I don't have a problem with that either. They're obviously going to our Universities, where they are taught, and applying that knowledge. There a lot of Americans that study over seas as well.

Sorry but you're just not making sense to me.

[RocDoc]

that's okay...

[skvorecky]

Wah Wah Wah...

[Galactus]

Doc is saying that rap is both easy and not real music.

[skvorecky]

Andre 3000 played almost all of the instruments on this track, Prince style.

[RocDoc]

obama and hilary are handling this little israel-iraq problem very well, ain't they?

hilary answering some guy's question in tunisia, 'oh DON'T believe the promises we make during an election campaign..this is now.'
and THIS while ol' barry's all 'i say what i mean, i mean what i say' clapfuckingtrap.
wtf is wrong with thast woman, please.

yeah brainfart, OBVIOUSLY and a serious one....but no-one ever extended that courtesy to dubya ever.
hilary, you fucking moron, yes make explicit what everyone already suspected.

[skvorecky]

I'm not going to single out Secretary Hillary and President Obama as the problem here. I think this is a tough issue as we stare down the rabbit hole of our invovlement in the Middle East. Let's not overlook the fact that getting involved with Iran is going to be way more expensive than Afghanistan or Iraq. It could very well kill our economy. That region has been a quandry that we should have stayed out of. It would have behooved in the long one if we had taken a non-interventionist approach to the region from the beginning. That's not the same as isolationism, by the way, even though a lot of people confuse the two.

I also think it's disingenious to call out Hillary on the short falls of campaign promises. Almost every party has been guilty of it since the beginning of our Republic and that's why they call it "campaign promises" and not "shit we delivered on".

Not much has really changed since Bush regarding our foreign policy. Obama has kept up most of the policies set in place by the Bush Administration. I would figure that a lot of conservatives would be pleased with the job that Obama has done so far regarding that area. The killing of Osama Bin Laden AND the assassination of targets via drone in foreign lands.

[RocDoc]

1 - to single them out as THE problem would be beyond stupid. my comment was that their 'worldbeater' optimism and 'hope' and shit has all gone south as a CONSEQUENCE of 'well, gee. we DO live in a pretty fucked up world.'

2 - it's not ME being disingenuous - questions were asked of her 'well' you (and obama) said you were going to do THIS and perform THAT with such-and-such humanitarian attitude and alacrity, so, well wtf happened?'
which SHE chose to totally fucking blow off with this 'aw election promises ain't shit, don't you folks know any better?'...rather than try for a diplomatic answer to a serious fucking question...

3 - it wasn't obama's own personal doing getting those targets.

like you said, simply a continuation of the prev admin's policies...fuck if he's due the credit.

[skvorecky]

1. I don't think that Hillary has been swallowing the mantra of "hope and change". I think she's been pretty steadfast from the beginning that engaging in foreign policy in today's world is going to present a lot of heavy challenges.

2. I don't think she totally blew them off. I think she was actually, though not in the smartest way, doing what a lot of Secretaries of State do: be duplicitous.

3. Actually, it WAS Obama's call to go with the intelligence and authorize the mission. He does deserver some credit, here. Even Dick Cheney agrees with that.

[RocDoc]

1. 'that engaging in foreign policy in today's world is going to present a lot of heavy challenges' especially with a complete neophyte president leading the chanting of THAT mantra...oh agreed. and their's was an uneasy alliance between 2 people who'd competed for that thankless job. she's more a realist, i'll give her that. leading to this next one=>

2. duplicitous? shit, she was the opposite of duplicitous there - what she did was call out barack obama on HIS campaign white lies and whopper grandstanding, while was being told by david axelrod 'barry, buddy come ON, you CAN be all things to all people, just DO it! trust me. you're telegenic and don't talk ghetto, so just LIE.'
to the highest office in the land.

3. oh yeah with his vast military experience (JUST like dubya), without counsel. all his. ha.
he listened well, period.
erm, like dubya did.
cheney simply appreciates what comes with taking on a job which you know next to nothing about...good advisors should be listened to. ie generals in the field understanding what their intel tells them.
unfortunately dubya's advisors listened to some crazy-fuck-bent-on-revenge iraqi 'patriot' re weapons of mass destruction...all that BS passed on to brit intelligence, to tony blair and no-one actually vetted out the truth - and i still maintain the french and russians KNEW what was up, and fucking couldn't speak frankly because their involvement with saddam was WAY too deep to baldly acknowledge to the world, 'look fucker, we KNOW he doesn't have any, don't ask why, we just KNOW, ok?'.

cocksuckers.

sorry, didn't MEAN to go there.

[RocDoc]

well, at least the world 'justice' systems' torment of john demjanjuk is over, huh?

91 years old, but with 35 years of that time taken by this eminently questionable enterprise.

1977 - Demjanjuk's claims of mistaken identity, however, gained credence after he successfully defended himself against accusations initially brought in 1977 by the U.S. Justice Department that he was "Ivan the Terrible" — a notoriously brutal guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.

1986 - In connection with the allegation, he was extradited to Israel from the U.S. in 1986 to stand trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, convicted and sentenced to death.

1993 - But the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the verdict on appeal, saying that evidence showed another Ukrainian man was actually "Ivan the Terrible," and ordered him returned to the U.S.

The Israeli judges said, however, they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor. But they declined to order a new trial, saying there was a risk of violating the law prohibiting trying someone twice on the same evidence.
(double jeopardy, right? but the fact is they acquitted him. Israel. definitive, no?)

1993 - Demjanjuk returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993 and his U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in 1998.

1998 - Citizenship REINSTATED. (the guy was 78 years old. it should have been OVER.)

2002 - Demjanjuk remained under investigation in the U.S., where a judge revoked his citizenship again in 2002 based on Justice Department evidence suggesting he concealed his service at Sobibor. (25 years after all this was begun. what, just now? to fuck with him for daring to be acquitted?)

2005 - Appeals failed, and the nation's chief immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

2009 - Prosecutors in Germany filed charges in 2009, saying Demjanjuk's link to Sobibor and Trawniki was clear, with evidence showing that after he was captured by the Germans he volunteered to serve with the fanatical SS and trained as a camp guard.

Though there are no known witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor, prosecutors referred to an SS identity card that they said features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp. That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.

He was ordered tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war.
(as did millions of DPs (displaced persons') like my own parents)

Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.
(this article in yahoo, misstates this i feel - HE himself 'questioned' it? or his appointed lawyer(s) stated the FACT that there was widespread careful soviet revision of who did what, undertaken postwar in order to make the atrocities they themselves committed, less damning. and to PUNISH anyone who dared take up arms against them. organized misfuckingdirection in spades.)

~~

sorry again, i recall there having a pretty big argument years back when (i suppose) i brought this up here...back when there were people here....but this guy coulda been my dad, having some sort of very questionable accusations levelled at him, when the ONLY thing he was really guilty of was being born in THAT part of the world in an extremely difficult and extreme times.
2 of my friends had their fathers deported on the same 'lying about what you did wartime' BULLshit.

here the article states demjanjuk's biography, nearly identical the the stories of LOTS of people in that swath of western asia and eastern europe, north to the baltic sea:

<sub>He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Demjanjuk was born April 3, 1920, in the village of Dubovi Makharintsi in central Ukraine, two years before the country became part of the Soviet Union. He grew up during a time when the country was wracked by famines that killed millions, and a wave of purges instituted by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition.

As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area's collective farm. After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.

After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. In 1950, he sought U.S. citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the war.

Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Just to have admitted being in the Vlasov Army would also have been enough to have him barred from emigration to the U.S. or many other countries.

He came to the U.S. on Feb. 9, 1952, and eventually settled in Seven Hills, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland.</sub>

'barred to emigrate' here because russia, 7 years after 'the great war' was still accorded 'ally' status, just like at yalta where they were simply handed over entire countries (where most of those DPs ran from) as spoils of their 'heroism'.

yes, nazi-ism vs communism was an unsolveable conflict in terms of whom do you 'choose' when they're breathing down your necks.
well, unless you're jewish, oh yesyesyes.
at the remove of someone across the oceans like we are, it becomes obvious that few people here have any idea of what this conflictedness was, with their histories of international brutality (especially the disgrace of russian bolshevik history) preceding WWII and that fucking madmen led BOTH those sides.

[RocDoc]

news.yahoo.com/young-french-desperate-123328362.html#

Young, French and desperate

By Geert De Clercq | Reuters – 1 hr 45 mins ago

<sub>BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - Boualem Ben Moussa has delivered pizzas, worked on a building site, washed dishes in a restaurant and delivered more pizzas.

School was not his thing, he says. Now 28, he dropped out at 16 and has since stumbled from short-term contract to short-term contract.

But things are looking up. In Lormont, a dreary suburb northeast of Bordeaux, he and a dozen other young men of mainly immigrant origin are refurbishing two apartments in a complex of 1970s housing blocks, part of a second-chance education project.

As they adapt the residences for senior citizens, they learn new skills as masons, tilers, electricians and painters. Ben Moussa wants to become a plasterer.

Ophelie Latil is also 28 and she liked school. She has a double master's degree in law and management, and specialised in intellectual property. But despite her higher education, she too has never had a permanent contract, alternating between periods of unemployment and short-term jobs unrelated to her skills.

Ben Moussa and Latil represent the two faces of a generation of desperate French youngsters.

Some 150,000 pupils leave France's ruthlessly selective education system every year with no diploma whatsoever. Many end up in bleak suburbs around the big cities, where youth unemployment is high and crime is rife.

"Those who cannot follow in school are left behind, that's how it works. They just don't take care of you," Ben Moussa said.

Those who do have diplomas face the barrier of a rigid labor market that overprotects the older generation and offers young people an endless series of temporary contracts, forcing them to delay mortgage and marriage for years.

"It's exasperating. In the first decade of my adult life I want to live like an adult," said Latil, a member of youth action group "Génération Précaire" (Precarious Generation).

PRECARIAT

In a presidential election campaign dominated by concerns about taxation, immigration and public debt, youth and education have not taken centre stage. But French youth have a way of inviting themselves into the debate.

In the autumn of 2005, weeks of rioting rocked poor suburbs around the country and made the integration of frustrated youth a big issue in the 2007 election. This year, a month before the first round of voting on April 22, a young Islamist gunman killed seven people in and around the southern city of Toulouse.

The intelligence service was criticized for not catching the killer. But some critics say it was the education system that failed first. The gunman - Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old of Algerian origin - dropped out of school at 16, failed vocational training for car bodywork and drifted into petty crime, ending up in jail, where he came in contact with radical Muslim views.

"Not all youngsters who are on the wrong path become Mohamed Merahs, but idleness and the lack of human relations is the worst thing for young people, and often they take refuge in delinquency," said Matthieu Neny, who runs the Batiform training centre where Ben Moussa is putting his life back on track.

While the problem of unskilled youth is concentrated in the suburbs, the inability of graduates to find steady jobs and a feeling that today's children face a life more difficult than their parents explain a wider funk in French society.

"For the young as well as for their parents, entering the labor market is a major concern, contributing to the habitual pessimism of the French, and that has an impact on what voters expect from the candidates," said Anne Muxel, a sociologist who has written about youth and politics.

In December, Gallup International's annual survey of 51 countries found that France is the most pessimistic country in the world about the economic outlook, and the French are more downbeat than they have ever been in the past 30 years.

The only politician who has put youth front and centre of his platform is Socialist challenger Francois Hollande, running neck-and-neck with Sarkozy in voting intention polls for the first round, and leading him for the May 6 runoff.

"If I am elected president, I want to be judged against one and only one objective: whether young people will have a better life at the end of my mandate in 2017 than in 2012," Hollande said in a keynote speech in January.

This may be even harder than balancing the state budget, another of his campaign promises.

His first priority is to reform schools. France has a meritocratic tradition dating back to the creation of a uniform, free and secular public education system in the 1880s. Children are tested from primary school onwards, with the aim of selecting the best students and directing them to top schools.

Those who do best in exams go on to top high schools such as the Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand Lycees in Paris, and continue via even more selective "prepa" classes to the "grandes ecoles" that train a few thousand elite students per year.

The very best vie for the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), which takes only about 100 students a year, who become top civil servants, ministers and CEOs of large companies. Hollande himself is an "enarque", as ENA graduates are called.

A system that guarantees success for so few produces failure for many, especially those whose parents do not have the means or the knowledge to help their children play the game.

SORTING MACHINE

In "La machine a trier" ("The Sorting Machine"), published last year, four researchers describe the French education system as one that continually classifies and eliminates, condemning the bottom part of every class to perpetual failure.

Olivier Galland, one of the authors, said that in a society with mass access to education, schools need a northern European focus on individual ability, teamwork and success for everyone.

"In a way, French school is a continuation of the Ancien Regime where the diploma replaces the nobility title," he said, referring to the period before the 1789 revolution.

All candidates in this year's election agree the education system is sick, but they prescribe different remedies.

Hollande says he will create 60,000 new jobs in education, pledges to halve the number of students who leave school without a diploma and plans to give every youngster between 16 and 18 some form of training or assistance.

Reversing a Sarkozy decision, Hollande also plans to add half a day to the school week - without adding subject matter - to give children more time to learn.

"The first thing that all great thinkers about education recommend, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau onwards, is to give a child time. But in our system, those who need a little more time are immediately set up for failure," said Vincent Peillon, Hollande's top education advisor and a likely education minister if the Socialists win.

Sarkozy wants teachers to spend more time helping kids after hours and proposes they increase the number of hours they spend at school from 18 to 26 per week in return for a 25 percent pay increase. He has also said he will exempt teachers from his policy of not replacing one in two retiring civil servants, and proposed a specialised youth bank to guarantee student loans.

The authors of "The Sorting Machine" say reforming French schools is not just a matter of putting more teachers in class. "It is the very principle of an elitist system based on ranking that needs to be reviewed from top to bottom," they argue.

They also say the labour market aggravates rather than alleviates the inequalities produced by the education system.

But labour market reform is a taboo subject in this campaign. Most candidates avoid the topic, aware that labour reforms in Spain and Italy have sparked demonstrations, and mindful of how former conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's attempt to introduce a more flexible work contract for young people foundered on weeks of street protests in 2006.

Then as now, any discussion about labour market reform in France revolves around two ugly acronyms: "CDI" and "CDD". A CDI is an indefinite regular employment contract. A CDD is a short-term, temporary contract.

Getting a CDI is the holy grail for every job seeker. But French law makes firing workers on open-ended contracts so difficult and costly that companies favour temporary hires to adapt to fluctuations in activity and try out new staff.

RESERVE ARMY

Nearly 90 percent of all recruitment goes via short-term contracts, creating a dual labour market with a young generation unable to secure a permanent job and an older generation protected by strict labour laws.

"We are the reserve army for French companies," Generation Precaire's Latil said.

Many economists argue it would make sense to make open-ended contracts less rigid and short-term contracts less precarious.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a rich nations' think-tank, has recommended that France make its labour market more flexible and replace multiple terms of employment with a unified contract valid for all workers.

Only centrist candidate Francois Bayrou, who came third in the 2007 election but now runs fifth in opinion polls, proposes a single contract that would allow companies to fire employees without business or disciplinary motives.

The two leading candidates skirt the issue. To get the unemployed back to work, Hollande proposes to create 150,000 state-funded jobs for young people in poor areas. Sarkozy plans to provide mandatory training for all the unemployed, then force them to accept the first suitable job or lose their benefit.

Financial markets tend to prefer Sarkozy's approach.

"The right policy prescription is not boosting public sector employment but rather taking measures that reduce structural unemployment," Nomura economists wrote in a note to clients.

Those to whom the plans are addressed take a different view.

Génération Précaire set up a mock ratings agency dubbed "Young and Poor" that rates all the proposals on their ability to provide jobs for young people.

No candidate gets a triple A, but Hollande is commended for focusing on youth issues, and his proposals get a B rating. Sarkozy, Bayrou and far-right leader Marine Le Pen are rated D.

Their view matters, as the young are a key swing vote: people aged 18 to 30 make up about 20 percent of the electorate.

A March Ifop poll of first-time voters aged 18 to 22 gave Hollande 31 percent of first-round votes, slightly better than his 28.5 percent overall score. Le Pen came second with 23 percent of the youth vote, six points better than her 17 percent overall score. Sarkozy came third, with just 21 percent of the youth vote, despite scoring 27 percent overall.

Back in Bordeaux, apprentice plasterer Ben Moussa confirmed the trend.

"I am not sure about Hollande, not sure that everything he says is true. But I will vote for the Socialists," he said.

(Editing by Paul Taylor and Sonya Hepinstall)</sub>


very interesting article...and the comments section's got some very interesting diversions from this topic as well.

obama's buddy, chicago mayor rahm emmanuel is proposing increasing the length of the public school day here (just like sarkozy's promise), but without increasing the pay for the unionized teachers (while sarkozy says his teachers will be paid commensurately)- nice lead balloon he floated there, rife with an unmistakeable socialist undercurrent - 'you should WANT for your kids to do better, NOT better your own financial standing! selfish bitches.' paraphrased.
ai.
tha apple don't fall far from tha tree.