I Can’t Breathe Challenge featuring the Cast & Crew from Disney’s The Lion King Nat’l Tour
While the national dialogue around #ICantBreathe #BlackLivesMatter is being framed, it’s important to remember that racism hurts all people in a society: those who practice it and those victimized by it.
Let’s make 2015 the Year of The People and take our world back.
I don’t agree with the Orthodox Jewish practice of choking public schools of money in order to fund transportation to, and expenses for, their own community’s schools. But, I do understand why the Orthodox community does feel that the taxes they pay should be funding their children’s education as well as other students’. And I understand why the Orthodox want their children to have yeshiva educations.
Yeshivas are better academically than public schools; they have dual language (Hebrew and English) curricula; midot (values) are taught; and a completely different approach to learning is part of the Torah (biblical) studies component, where students challenge the knowledge and positions of the study mates they partner up with and school days stretch from 7am until almost midnight. The learning culture at traditional yeshivas is fantastic and exceeds anything else I’ve encountered in a school environment.
Narayanan Krishnan cares for his city’s homeless, elderly, mentally ill. He worked for a major hotel in Bangalore and one day thought, I am feeding the rich but the poor of my region are dying for want of food. Now every day he feeds these people, bathes them and cuts their hair.
The philanthropist says, “Everybody has got 5.5 liters of blood. I am just a man.” On the social controversy of a person of his social class hugging and caring for the people India calls ‘Untouchables’ he says, “Food is one part, love is another part. The love and affection which you show will give them mental nutrition. Life’s ultimate purpose is to give. Start giving,” he urges. “Feel the joy of giving!”
I almost didn’t read this, as I don’t have such a big interest in how women transition into being men and vice-versa but I’m glad I did, because that’s not what this article talks about. It’s about the experience of being a black man in the US on the queer spectrum … the experience of being a black trans-gender man … the family and sociological ramifications of becoming a transgender person and the experience of being a black man in America today amidst all the social unrest, told from the perspective of a person who chose to be a man.
I came across a beautiful snippet of writing this morning. By adding several words about the woman who walks into the village carrying a tote, Shirley Rousseau Murphy transformed an abstract sentence into a visual treat replete with a subject who lays claim to habits, personality and wow – even a history. I’ve never so clearly experienced the power of the power of visualization, until now. From Cat Breaking Free (2005, p 66):
Maybe he’d wait until tomorrow, take the sensible route, lay low until Chichi walked into the village early, as she often did, carrying her big canvas tote.
I’ve been really thinking about a Facebook friend’s earlier post, saying she feels exposed by having 822 friends and will start deleting some in order to get more privacy. I just had to reply to the privacy issue and afterwards, realized that my assertions needed to be backed up by reliable data. “I must say,” I commented to my friend, “I find it strange that you would play a game on Facebook or post anything here and voice concerns about privacy,” and followed that with my first information point: “Facebook sells your data to game creators – this is a well-known fact.”
You can legally record both phone and in-person conversations in New Jersey as long as one of the people in that conversation agrees to the recording of it – and it’s fine if the one person is you. State law makes the phone recording legal; and federal law makes the in-person conversation recordings legal. If you need guidance for your state, check the Digital Media Law Project website.
Digital Media Law Project tells us that New Jersey is a “one-party consent” law state as regards the recording of both phone and in-person conversations:
D.B. Anderson tells us about the suppression and history of “They Don’t Care About Us”, the anti-racism song Michael Jackson wrote and recorded two years after being strip-searched by police in 1993.
“They Don’t Care About Us” was denounced by The New York Times even before its release, and did not reach much of its intended audience because the controversy caused by the New York Times article would go on to overshadow the song itself. Radio stations were reluctant to play it and one of the short films Jackson created for the song was banned in the US
In this well documented article, a former AP editor explains why all major media outlet’s Middle East reporting portrays little Israel as the big, bad oppressor of the long-suffering Palestinians – no matter what the truth is.
For starters, the AP alone has over 40 staffers reporting on ME affairs. And, AP and all other major news outlets’ Middle East reporters are only allowed to write stories that reinforce the “Bad Israel – Oppressed Palestinians” legend. The editors of major media publications simply refuse to publish any other type of stories.
My Mac note-keeping app of preference is BareBones’ TextWrangler, which I also use for coding. I love TextWrangler because although it’s a very powerful program, it’s also light on cpu usage even when I open a lot of windows and files with it. Navigating and managing open files through multiple windows is made easy with drag and drop functionality. And TextWrangler saves files on quit even if I don’t and will bring up unsaved files on relaunch.
So, how did I manage to create and access notes over the past couple weeks after TextWrangler suddenly stopped working for me? Since any text editing program will open the plain text files TextWrangler creates, I found a well-reputed free substitute in Sublime Text 2 and used that instead. I was able to open my old files and create new ones without needing to use Apple’s TextEdit – which corrupts text files by adding way too much bloat code to them – but oh boy, did I miss TextWrangler’s features and simplicity.
The mature, angelic voice and astonishing range of a young Dutch girl has captured hearts and souls, including my own. The purity of 9 year old Amira Willighagen’s untrained operatic voice has brought me to tears, twice now. When asked by one Holland’s Got Talent judge how she had been taught to sing, confusion appeared instantly on the little girl’s face. You can just see Amira asking herself, “How does a person get taught to sing?” – she learned by watching videos with her brother.
We may feel sometimes that we are trudging through life alone, but this is just an illusion visited upon us by the yetzer hara to make us forget that we are united on Planet Earth as one people. In actuality, we affect each other in so many more ways than we may think and certainly, in many more ways than we can know.
This brilliant under-5-minute video shows how our small acts of kindness are part of the human chain that binds us together and ripples out to multiply the good in each – and in all – of us.
#WiseFriend Ian Rowcliffe muses: Life certainly is a guessing game, where you work at improving on your guesses
I bought a nice little Le Creuset enamel-outside tea kettle second hand and when I washed it up, I spotted a little rust where the body meets the spout – and in the bottom of the spout. I googled on getting rid of rust and came across a delightful post. The technique suggested is for good advice for removing rust from a cast iron pot (which mine isn’t, exactly), but the poster’s counsel on how to choose a method out of all those offered in the thread, is absolutely wonderful! See for yourself:
Chinese actress Li Bingbing and her children campaign against ivory with this powerful 60-second film. 96 elephants are killed every day for their ivory.
When the Buying Stops, the Killing Can Too. Save the elephants.
