First music video I produced and directed. A message from Palestinian refugees of #GazaCamp to world. Featuring G Unit co-founder and Rick Ross Maybach Records affiliate Bang Em Smurf and Mid East analyst and author Moe Diab.
— Siraj Davis
Until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, apartheid in South Africa was secure. There was no substantial resistance anywhere in southern Africa. Pretoria’s neighbors comprised a buffer zone that protected the racist regime: Namibia, their immediate neighbor which they had occupied for 60 years; white-ruled Rhodesia; and the Portuguese-ruled colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The rebels who fought against minority rule in each of these countries, operating without any safe haven to organize and train, were powerless to challenge the status quo.
It would be in a place you’d recognize immediately: just another dark, clean, church basement, in an old church near a bus stop. With fluorescent lighting and folding chairs. Cool and quiet inside, with a reassuring, but somehow melancholy feel. Only the ones who’ve dropped out of the light, become invisible to the rest of the fast-moving, forward-racing world, would go there. The losers, the ones who’ve fallen in the race and sit on the sidelines as the others speed on out of sight, holding their sides and gasping, baffled and exhausted and sad.
Today James talks to Anthony Gucciardi of NaturalSociety.com about a pair of recent articles. The first, "4 Ways to Actually Make Your New Year’s Resolution Work," outlines why our resolutions often fail, and how to make sure they work. The second, "Anthony Gucciardi Donates 20,000 Meals to US Food Banks," challenges other alt media producers, as well as the general public, to start changing the world for the better through giving. Will James take up the challenge?
The Bureau of Prisons contacted me today, assigning me a prison number and a new address: for the next 90 days, beginning tomorrow, I’ll live at FMC Lexington, in the satellite prison camp for women, adjacent to Lexington’s federal medical center for men.
It was 30th May, deep autumn in Argentina. The streetlights had been turned on an hour earlier, just as I was entering the house/museum. Now inside, it was dark, silent, warm and cozy.
Magda Konopacka de Bruzzone brought two cups of tea upstairs, after locking the gate. For a while, we sat in silence.
“Now tell me about the world outside,” she whispered, after I took my first sip.
“People are freezing to death,” I said. “Argentinean people are dying.”
She looked at me and then her eyes moved somewhere behind, way beyond me.
*****
It’s those immeasurably powerful moments when we stand still and stay close to ourselves that make us see things more clearly, and that give us a better understanding of ourselves and our connectedness with each other.
It is reported that a million people marched the streets of Paris today shouting “Liberté” and “Charlie”?1
Charlie who? Charlie Hebdo? Why would I want to align myself with cartoonists who show intolerance/prejudice to other cultures and religions?
The major task for the social movement: 2015 the Year We Build Power Together.
Practicing freedom of assembly is an ongoing struggle, and it can get scary, as was our experience in Oakland on Saturday, December 13th, on the evening of which six or seven hundred of us gathered at the Oscar Grant Plaza for a march, setting out shortly before dark. Notebook in hand, I jotted down that it was 4:59 p.m. and joined in, scribbling a timeline as we marched out on 14th, then south on Jackson towards the freeway, chanting “Black lives matter!” and “Shut it down!
