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This weeks question: Noted for his short stature, which had him playing child roles well into his twenties. This versatile actor never let any “Moss” grow on his career.
Always thought of as a “outlaw” kind of a guy or “Space Cadet”, He had his own view on Hippies saying… ” They make them out to be bad. I’m not bad. I love everybody. Well, I like everybody”. He also was credited by Traffic drummer Jim Capaldi with coining the term “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys”. Who is He?
Picture credit: www.sofiaworld.com
The Oscar-nominated movie made waves at the recent Golden Globe Awards ceremony when Octavia Spencer, who plays feisty domestic worker, Minnie Jackson, walked away with the “best actor in a supporting role” award – prompting America’s National Domestic Workers Alliance to issue a statement, which said:
“Domestic workers around the country watched with pride….After generations of exclusion and invisibility, we are so grateful to Octavia for helping bring recognition and light to this workforce. And we’re thankful for all of the performances in ‘The Help’ that gave life and dignity to domestic workers stories.”
For South Africans, there is familiarity and resonance in some of the issues the film raises, however inadequately it may engage with them. In one incisive comment on social conditions, a white protagonist states, “We are separate but equal”, an ideology familiar to most South Africans and repugnant to the enlightened amongst us. Jim Crow and certain elements of apartheid were founded on these foul toxins.
Parallels with South Africa
A striking feature of the movie is the strong parallels between South Africa (SA) and the US with respect to the dynamics of race, class and power and how these are played out in the lives of the domestic workers. The often hidden and furtive nature of the abuse of domestic workers, as depicted in the film, is the experience of many women in this country too. The paternalistic relationships between employers and their employees are often accompanied by constant accusations of wrongdoing, acts of violence and threats of sudden dismissal.
According to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 88% of domestic workers in SA are African and 89% female. Like the women depicted in The Help, most are uneducated, already from impoverished backgrounds and with few prospects for improving their lives. And just as in the film, they are strongly discouraged from hoping for more. Similar to SA, those who are migrants are doubly vulnerable to abuse.
While laws aimed at improving the lot of domestic workers in SA, such as the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the establishment of a minimum wage were slow in the making, are inadequate and poorly enforced, South Africans may be surprised to learn that laws for the advancement of domestic workers’ rights, such as a minimum wage and better conditions of employment, are still largely being debated in the US. The state of New York only signed into law, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in August 2010. A year later, the bill was still being debated in California — and there’s the rest of the country that apparently still needs to get on board with the issue.
Absence of Men
A puzzling feature of the film is the absence of men in the core of the narrative. The white men are often seen retreating, letting the women deal with their squabbles while black men are unseen, but abusive and menacing somewhere in the background. read more…
By Fred Hiers,ocala.com - After two hours panhandling on State Road 40 in Silver Springs, Vito had only $1.52 to show for his efforts
Vito, who didn’t want to give his last name, has spent the past 11 years criss-crossing the country with a group known as the Rainbow Family. The loosely knit members of the traveling counterculture move from state to state, camping on public lands for as long as a month before moving on. In Central Florida, they stay in the Ocala National Forest.
Vito was one of the first to arrive for this year’s gathering, which had about 200 Rainbow Family members in the area Thursday. U.S. Forestry officials are expecting as many as 4,000 by mid-February, some coming from neighboring cities and towns.
n most years, the group has stayed in Marion County. This year, members are convening in Lake County to commune with nature and each other, play music and dance. Drugs, especially marijuana, are widely and openly used or bartered. Alcohol is frowned upon.
They are an assemblage of mostly hippies, mostly young, with a sprinkling of homeless people and some folks who are hiding from the law. The free spirits travel by catching rides with friends, hitchhiking or even stowing away on freight trains to ride the rails to the next gathering.
Many will make their way through Ocala.
“I haven’t made any money in this town,” Vito said Wednesday. “And it’s getting worse every day. You feel it the most when you’re not able to have it.”
He held a sign asking for money, but said he would appreciate a smile if someone couldn’t afford a donation.
“I don’t hate on them,” he said, watching cars pass by. “We (the Rainbow Family) are trying to walk the way of the living light — peace and love, and to carry on how you can with the majesty of life.”
Vito said he doesn’t begrudge someone a 9-to-5 job and a lifestyle of possessions.
“There are ways of living differently … but people are not just working more, but stressing more,” he said. “If I can help my brother I do. Sometimes it’s just telling them to keep it going. Without the family, I would have starved. I would be dead.”
NOT ALL PEACE AND LOVE
The Rainbow Family has been meeting since 1972 in national forests. Regional gatherings also are held throughout the United States, as are gatherings in dozens of other countries. There is no leader. Members meditate and pray for world peace. Read more…
Image by theilr - Wiki
Other ancient cultures such as the Egyptian and Chinese have also foreseen an end of the known world, but no other predictions have become so widely acknowledged as the Mayan’s.
The theory that our world — and we — face a dramatically reduced lifespan has been widely debunked by as many critics as there are believers, among them NASA and leading scientists. Nevertheless, many proponents of our violent destruction are building bunkers and laying in stores of food, apparently assuming the best prepared will rise from the ashes and hop a speeding spaceship to another planet.
Plenty of people these days think they foresee a coming end of the world in the major weather upheavals, increasingly disastrous earthquakes, storms, wildfires, mudslides and floods and the eruption of civic, religious and cultural unrest around the world. Mistrust of government anywhere and everywhere is at a pandemic stage. Public figures are falling like leaves in autumn as news of their misdeeds and malfeasance becomes known. There’s no place to hide anymore. Many people include the global financial meltdown when they tally signs that point to our destruction. One Indian guru has been saying since 1998 that 2012 will mark the end of a “degenerate age.” Read more…
By Derek McGee,the Nation – In late September 2001, I was living in a tent in Lower Manhattan with the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit just outside the city. We were occupying Battery Park, which at the time served as the National Guard’s headquarters. “Guarding the guard,” we called it.
The two weeks I spent there were profoundly affecting. There I was, at the center of the world, watching America at its finest, showing at once nearly impossible perseverance and limitless compassion. Generosity sprouted everywhere throughout New York City; people gave out food, shoe inserts, massages, coffee, flowers, hugs, kind words and anything you needed. I told someone I liked Red Bull, and hours later he came to my tent, dragging a handcart with eight cases of the stuff. I would slip one under each of the other marines’ pillows while they slept, and when we woke up for guard duty I would say the Red Bull fairy had come.
Exploring the city on my one afternoon off, I stumbled upon the Wall Street Bull. The smooth metal sculpture is stunning, always on the verge of some wild movement—a lunge or a charge, at the least, a bellow with a head toss. Too tarnished to be gold, too big to be a calf, it’s revered nonetheless. I would come fairly close to worshiping it myself years later. But for now, I just had my picture taken on top of it. From where I stood, the whole world seemed to feel empathy. It was one of the only times in my life that I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be.
Another time was when I was living under a bridge along the Euphrates River. A nearly ceaseless convoy rolled overhead. I wasn’t particularly keen on the invasion of Iraq, but if we had to have one, I knew I needed to be there with my fellow marines. A Subaru filled with reporters pulled up and offered us cigarettes to hasten our search of their car. “They’re just outside Baghdad,” they told us. The whole world is watching, I thought.
But the last time I knew without a doubt that I was where I should be was on November 17, standing in the center of Zuccotti Park. We were corralled and outnumbered, with helicopters overhead and riot cops, tourists, media and disdainful bankers looking on. Yet for all the chaos, it felt like the whole world was suddenly awake—not just watching but thinking.
In the decade between my occupation of Battery Park and Occupy Wall Street, I saw the country descend into fear and apathy. We became so afraid of Osama bin Laden and Muslims that we borrowed a trillion dollars to wage an unneeded war in Iraq (then forgot about it halfway through). I returned from Falluja in 2006 haunted by the sense that our country had made things worse, not better, for Iraqis. Meanwhile, at home, we’d let an invasive domestic intelligence apparatus go silently to work all around us. And as money dominated politics and bipartisanship degenerated into an impotent ruckus, we let our banks more or less start regulating themselves. Read more…
Atheist teen forces school to remove prayer from wall after 49 years
State Representative calls girl, who has been escorted by police to school, ‘an evil little thing’
CRANSTON, R.I. — She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.
A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion.
In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion. More…
Twitter to restrict user content in some countries
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.
“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter wrote in a blog post published Thursday.
It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there,” it said.
Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with “certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog.
More…
‘Toddlers’ mom sues media for sexualizing daughter
She’s not sexy and she doesn’t know it!
That’s what “Toddlers & Tiaras” pageant mom Susanna Barrett insists about her 5-year-old glam princess Isabella. Barrett claims that after a video of her little girl singing LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy and I Know It” at a night spot surfaced, several media outlets tried to turn the non-sexual performance into something inappropriate, and she’s suing mad.
According to the New York Daily News, Barrett filed a $30 million libel lawsuit on Tuesday in Manhattan. She claims that TMZ, The Huffington Post and the Daily Mail described the little girl’s act as “gyrating in a nightclub and singing about her sex appeal” when in fact Isabella was sitting during the song. More…
