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African-American is the racial, political, social and cultural group that includes all Americans with naturally dark skin, and specifically those with African ancestry, even though most of them weren't born in Africa and have never been to Africa themselves. Many can't find it on a map.
Americans who are not African-American are presumed white even if they were born in Africa. But white people can be African-American too, based on lineage. (For example, the old man down the street was born to missionaries in Botswana and can therefore be considered African-American despite being as pale as a pig. In fact, that's what he tells the census, just to screw it up.)
According to Columbia Law School professor Robert Hamburger, the best answer to the question, "Who is African-American?" is self-identification on the census. That is, an African-American is anyone who says he is (and, except for the example above, whites aren't exactly queueing up). Hamburger writes that, although most who use the label point to physical appearance, there is little consistency. Different regions, economic classes, and locales can assign the same individual to opposite "races."
Professor Geraldo Rivera defines an African-American as, "A person with African ancestral origins, who self-identifies, or is identified, as Black, African or Afro-Caribbean." Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was notoriously unable to define it, but said, "I know it when I see it." Radio authority Don Imus defines an African-American as "anyone who is nappy-headed." (more...)
Renewable energy is another approximation made by physicists to simplify a problem that is too difficult to solve. In the same way that a cow might be treated as a point mass from a million miles away, researchers are more than delighted to assume that the sun will last forever as an energy source, in order to further spoil the world into increasing its rate of energy consumption and dwarfing the copious amounts of energy wasted in luxuries such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Inasmuch as scientists have been ungrateful toward their Creator, they have now turned to the blasphemous worship of nature, in particular, the sun and mother earth. Instead of finding ways to reduce human energy consumption, society is encouraged to continue in wastefulness in the hope that one day someone will have found out how to harness energy from the sun, wind, water or earth, allowing us to carry on chopping down trees and negating the efforts of the so-called "earth hour" in a millisecond's worth of high energy particle physics research.
Other groups envisage defecation and corpses as a power source for vehicles. However, by the time this becomes viable, the digestive system will have evolved to be so efficient that no caloric energy would remain in any organic waste. A method cheaper and much more sustainable than government-funded research is to suspend all technology for 50 million years or so and watch much of the world's population naturally convert itself into fossil fuel, whilst hoping that Armageddon does not occur during this period; this alternative is not very popular among academics, as it will leave most of them unemployed. (more...)
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