Category Archives: Viva!

Edward Snowden releases song with French legend – The Local

Fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed widespread US foreign surveillance, has released a song with French electronic artist Jean-Michel Jarre, the Columbia record company announced on Friday.

The track, titled “Exit”, features Snowden discussing digital surveillance to the backdrop of a lively electronic soundscape created by Jarre.

The song is available to stream online and will appear on Jarre’s forthcoming album “Electronica Vol. 2: The Heart of Noise” which will be released on May 6th.

The pair were brought together by Britain’s Guardian newspaper after Jarre gave an interview and asked to be put in touch with the former National Security Agency contractor, according to the title.

“Edward is an absolute hero of our times. When I first read about him, it made me think of my mother,” Jarre told the Guardian.

“She joined the French resistance in 1941, when people in France still thought they were just troublemakers, and she always told me that when society is generating things you can’t stand, you have to stand up against it.”

After being put in touch, Jarre, 67, travelled to Moscow to meet Snowden, 32, who lives in Russia in exile, and record the samples that feature on the track.

Other guest contributors on the album will include Gary Numan and the Pet Shop Boys.

Source: Edward Snowden releases song with French legend – The Local

A Mini-Skirt Might Also be a Brainwashed Choice, and Other Points From a Transfeminist Conversation – The Ladies Finger

On Women’s Day

– “When they wish us ‘Happy Women’s Day,’ they also take the liberty to define womanhood in the process. The radical nature of the movement – protests and struggles being led by dalit-bahujan women and working class women – is ignored. This reinforces caste and class divisions in society, rather than breaking them.”

– “Speaking of Working Women’s Day – what do we understand by the word ‘working’? There are women who don’t get a salary. But we can’t say, under any circumstances, that they’re not ‘working.’ Their workplace may not be a factory or an office, but it is certainly the 24×7 grind of home. Are we excluding them from our conversations?”

– “I came to know about Women’s Day when I was a teenager, around twelve or thirteen years old. I saw something about it on the glossy paper of the Lifestyle section: there it was, written in pink, ‘Happy Women’s Day.’ Next to this there was a picture of a smiling, thin, light-skinned girl dressed in a red saree. This narrow way in which society wants to see womanhood is constantly asserted so that this day can be corporatised.”

– “A few years ago, some boys wished me ‘Happy Women’s Day’ and this made me feel good, because I felt that I was being accepted as a woman. My mother too is a woman, but this day means nothing to her. We can’t truly celebrate this day if we don’t feel free as women. I don’t.”

[…]

Source: A Mini-Skirt Might Also be a Brainwashed Choice, and Other Points From a Transfeminist Conversation – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

J’can actress joins NY Caribbean Playreading Series

Award winning Jamaican actress and singer Dianne Dixon has joined a stellar line-up of actors from across the Caribbean for the Braata Productions Caribbean Playreading Series to be held at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center (JPAC) in Queens, New York, from April 22 – 24–Jamaica’s Star reports. The Caribbean Playreading series is designed to create, […]

http://repeatingislands.com/2016/04/16/jcan-actress-joins-ny-caribbean-playreading-series/

» Live Today

What if I die tomorrow?
Nothing is so easy.
I don’t live in yesterday
because it is gone.
I don’t live in the future
because it is not here yet.
It will come, whether I am alive or not
I live today. It is the moment!
Live today,
Not the regrets of yesterday,
Not the worries of tomorrow…
Enjoy the moment,
The smile, the tea, the food,
The dance, the song, the walk
Enjoy the love and existence.
Live in today
Forget yesterday and tomorrow.
They are gone or not here yet.

By Raha

Source: » Live Today

Humans of New York

Source: Humans of New York

“I’m graduating from Columbia with a Masters’ in Public Health. I want to stay in New York for another few years, but then I want to go back to Texas. My family is from a ‘drive-through’ town off Route 66. It’s tempting to stay here in New York because there are better opportunities. The Department of Health is very developed, and there’s so much funding from the government, and the services are so extensive. I feel like there’s so much I can learn here. But then I feel like I need to bring it back home. Texas is a big ole place. People are spread out. And so many of them don’t have access to the services they need.”

a good palestinian is a dead palestinian

نادية حرحش

It is not just another killing

Of another young life that the occupation decided to perish

In cold blood

In a ceremony of hate and despise

It is the way life is under the Zionist fascist state of hate

It is the way they intend to uproot the Palestinian hearts

A Palestinian chest facing a state of horror

A state of terror

A state where a dead Palestinian is a victory

Where a Palestinian blood is nothing but a fertilizer to their soil

A state where a human is considered by his race

His ethnicity

His religion

His language

Where every other is a sacrifice to their existence

The scene of the shooting of the young Palestinian man (Fadi Allon, 19) escaping from a savagely settler Israeli mob to be shot in cold blood by an Israeli policeman who instead of saving the young man shoots him without hesitation, while…

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Beaches #atozchallenge

There is no other way but going forward, catching the wave and riding it as best you can.

Silvia Writes

07Few everyday moments equal those spent at the beach in their  serenity. In Southern California, there’s a beach every two miles along the coast. My quick research produced quite the find: over one hundred beaches in our side of the state.

There is a certain connection between the beach — the ocean — and creativity. The serenity helps; but the vastness of the ocean, I think, taps into the risk-taking side of the creative.

In Einstein at the Beach, Steven Kotler makes a connection between risk taking and creativity. Spending time at the beach, better yet in the ocean, offers a risk-taking snap shot. Einstein, as the article indicates, couldn’t swim, so venturing into the water came at a risk. Still, the ocean is vastly unpredictable.

Creativity is the act of making something from nothing. It requires making public those bets first placed by imagination. ~ Einstein at the Beach

Beach-Awesome-Wallpapers-HD[1]If true…

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Preserving Language Key to Overcoming Native Suicide Epidemic – Intercontinental Cry

“The data reported above indicate that, at least in the case of BC, those bands in which a majority of members reported a conversational knowledge of an Aboriginal language also experienced low to absent youth suicide rates. By contrast, those bands in which less than half of the members reported conversational knowledge suicide rates were six times greater.” It is important to drive this point home. In the First Nation communities where native language retention was above 50 per cent (with at least half of the community retaining or acquiring conversational fluency) suicide rates were virtually null, zero. Yet in the bands where less than half of community members demonstrated conversational fluency in their native tongue, suicide rates spiked upwards of 6 times the rates of surrounding settler communities. It is also worth noting how overall spikes in suicide prevalence found in Indigenous communities around the world indicate a strong correlation with the socio-political marginalization brought on by colonization. In other words, the suicide epidemic – which is at heart a crisis of mental health – is directly related to, if not directly caused by, the loss of culture and identity set in motion by colonialism.

Source: Preserving Language Key to Overcoming Native Suicide Epidemic – Intercontinental Cry