Modern Native throat singer, "Animism" (video)

Crystal Quintero, Seven, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Tanya Tagaq (Q/CBC)

The Buddha had blue eyes? It's not so rare in Central Asia extending south from Gandhara/Afghanistan north to Kalmykia/Russia to the Far East of Buddhist Siberia, North Asia

A little bird told me, and it wasn't twitter. We are all interconnected (No Strangers)

Q's Jian Ghomeshi speaks with Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq about her new album, "Animism," and how she went from being a self-taught throat singing vocalist, honing her skills in the shower, to collaborating with the likes of the Kronos Quartet and Björk. Indeed, it was her lack of formal training that attracted Björk to her, says Tagaq, adding that the Icelandic artist didn't think she was "supposed to" sound a certain way. That's a perspective Tagaq shares.

• CBC Music: First play of Tanya Tagaq's Animism (free)

• 

  Inuk Tagaq reclaiming Nanook of the North

  Animism? (from Latin animus, -i "animator, soul, life") is the worldview that all entities (animals, plants, inanimate objects and phenomena) possess a spiritual essence. In the anthropology of religion it is used as a term for the underlying belief system or cosmology of some indigenous tribal peoples, especially prior to the infiltration of colonialism and organized "religion." Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, the term "animism" is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives -- so fundamental and taken-for-granted that most animistic indigenous people have no word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"). More

Shaman medicine (thefederationoflight.com)

"I like to live in a world that's not supposed to be. Or it's just there already as it is. It doesn't have to be anything, you know, because we put a lot of constraints on ourselves everyday in this crazy society," she says, adding that she gives "zero sh*ts about what people" think about her -- even as a trendy rave dancer -- but instead respects herself, her instincts, and her emotions. "And I every day do what I can to be a good person.... That's why breath is so important; it's the common denominator."  More

• VIDEO: Tuvan throat singing of shaman Mongolia
• L.A.'s HAIM shows off Himalayan throat singing 
• Vancouver's Push Festival: From Throat Singing to Puppets
• Science: Native Americans came from Asia
• Afghans and Chinese beat Columbus to America
• Ancient skeleton in Mexico reveals Asian DNA

(GSS) "Tantric Choir": Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist lamas of Gyuto chant in the Mongolian style of Bön "medicine men," shamans, and nomadic reindeer herders.

Standing by her #Sealfie: Manitoba's Tanya Tagaq addresses the controversial anti-Ellen campaign. Despite the considerable backlash after posting a photo of her daughter beside a dead seal, she supports native hunting and "being a part of what you [kill to] eat" (CBC.ca).

KARMA IS A B-TCH: When the "hunter" becomes the hunted, guilty of killing then mauled for it by another "hunter" in the samsaric wheel of survival. (LOL? Schadenfreude?) Don't kill.

Greenwald: "Collect it ALL" (U.S. spying)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman (democracynow.org)

"Collect it All": Glenn Greenwald on NSA bugging electronic hardware, economic espionage, and spying on U.N.

Today and tomorrow, Democracy Now! airs a two-part special with The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who brought the Edward Snowden information to light.

• Edward Snowden: "The [criminal, unconstitutional] stuff I saw [being done by the NSA] really began to disturb me": How the U.S. Drone War pushed [me] to leak NSA docs

The National Spying Agency wants it all

He, Laura Poitras, and others went through The Guardian, a mainstream media British publication at one time brave enough to expose U.S. spying activity through the government's National [Spying] Agency the NSA. This revealed a web of corporate complicity in the "social media" arena. The CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, and others have been up to their elbows in Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, Google (especially Google), Yahoo, and other data collection businesses. Everyone used to wonder how they made money while reporting quarterly losses period after period. Now the world knows; it was more than Wall Street speculators propping it up.

• Glenn Greenwald: The explosive day we revealed Edward Snowden's name to the world (The Guardian)

I think we sold out for the right pice. - Me, too

And Greenwald has more to say after winning a Pulitzer for his reporting and being threatened by the military-industrial-spying complex. An American, he now lives abroad in Brazil but was brave enough to return to the U.S. talking about his new book. Snowden is fighting the good fight to rein in our out of control secret-government. But it doesn't want to be reined in and hopes to do more harm to our privacy before anyone stops it or enacts laws to curb it. Some localities already have. But the cover up is the size of tsunami raising all boats in the harbor and threatening to smash us to smithereens against the rocks. More (MP4 video only)

PHOTOS: "#my NYPD" (police state on Twitter)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Newser; Occupy; PoliceStateUSA

F your dolly Lama, motherfather, you don't block crosstown traffic on my beat! (RB/T)

What's this, tainted baby food?! Hell no, b_tch, you're goin to be occupying my nightstick!

"I saw a movie once...only the police and military had guns. It was called 'Schindler's List.'"

Need a mammogram, b_tch? #myNYPD has you covered!Yeah you do, you Occupy sl*t. Comply, wh**e, comply! Forget Obamacare! Fusv3WhiRZ — आनिल् (@guru0509) 4-22-14.

(OS) Think we're kidding, think we're exaggerating? Occupy protesters in the U.S. were kicked, punched, maced, assaulted, arrested, and falsely charged with the very crimes committed on them all with impunity for speaking up against corporate and police corruption.
 

Lemme at 'im, let me at 'im, I'll kill the muthaf*ther! Die, you dirty hippie, die!

You're a bad man, a very bad man. All  of you are bad men. Get out of here!

 

Occupy police brutality

An NYPD (New York City Police Department) campaign to get Twitter users to share photos of themselves with officers got a massive response -- but not the kind the department had in mind. 

 

Instead of citizens posing with friendly cops, the #MyNYPD tag became the top trending hashtag on Twitter with thousands of photos of police brutality, Occupy Wall Street arrests, and headlines about unarmed citizens being brutalized by police and even shot, reports the NY Daily News.
 

Hey, [n-word], move and you die! Break his arm, break the f'n [subhuman mongrel]'s arm! Free massages from my NYPD. What do YOUR police offer? #MyNYPD (@OccupyWallStNYC)

 

USA/MIC/CIA trained Egypt

[See plenty of shocking examples of the impending police state at the Daily Dot. Our future was evident at this year's Boston Marathon, a year after launching in the false flag operation that was the Boston Marathon "terrorist" bombing of 2013, when police shut down an entire U.S. metropolitan area, acted on Martial law, and rolled out a paramilitary door-to-door "search" for cultivated-and-planted suspects, which suspended civil liberties as citizens were forced to hunker down (Newspeak: "shelter in place") so as not to be shot, arrested, or disappeared in the crossfire.] More

• NYPD's Twitter outreach backfires in most predictable way
• NYPD in social media fail with #myNYPD
• This NYPD idea backfired horribly on Twitter

I would sooner worship a pharaoh as trust the Egyptian paramilitary police.

Punishers come to punish all perceived disobedience and disrespect (policestateusa.com)

Please stop the killings and brutality! - Are you kidding? This is why we took the job.

Journalists and Snowden expose NSA (video)

Ashley Wells, Irma Quintero, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.com, April 14, 2014); Firstlook.org/TheIntercept

Journalists exposing NSA (zimbio)

Months ago, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept) flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Poitras and Greenwald did not return to the US until Friday when they flew from Berlin to NY to accept the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. They arrived not knowing if they would be detained or subpoenaed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described journalists working on NSA stories as Snowden’s "accomplices." At a news conference following the ceremony, Poitras and Greenwald took questions from reporters about their reporting and the U.S. government intimidation it has sparked. More

Obama: Yes to NSA's unconstitutional spying

In their first return to the US since exposing the NSA’s mass surveillance operations, the Intercept journalists were honored in NYC on Friday. They play key roles in reporting the massive trove of documents leaked by Snowden. 

They were joined by colleagues Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, with whom they shared the award. In their acceptance speeches, they paid tribute to their source: "Each one of these awards just provides further vindication that what [Snowden] did in coming forward was absolutely the right thing to do and merits gratitude, and not indictments and decades in prison," Greenwald said. "None of us would be here...without the fact that someone decided to sacrifice [his] life to make this information available," Poitras said. "And so this award is really for Edward Snowden."

Suey Park vs. The Colbert Report (video)

I. Rony, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; NPR "#CancelColbert Let Asian-Americans Call Out The Real Ding-Dongs"; Colbert Report (colbertnation.com)

I won't stand for that white hipster ironical racism; people might misunderstand it.

.

Stephen Colbert responded to criticism about a tweet about his show from his TV network last week, saying he would dismantle the imaginary foundation that created the stir.

 

It surely says something about our culture that a single tweet (when the twit hit the fan) can turn into a major racial incident: Colbert's send-up of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder's new foundation to help Native Americans.

 

The controversy erupted when a Twitter account associated with Colbert's Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, took the joke too far -- away from its original context.

 

"I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," read the tweet from @ColbertReport.

 

Hipster (ironic) racism? It's not Colbert's Twitter handle, and Colbert himself had nothing to do with the tweet, but a lot of people -- specifically Asian-Americans -- didn't think it was funny. They thought it was racist.

 

But not everyone thinks so, not, for example, Jay Caspian Kang, an Asian-American who wrote a piece about the controversy for newyorker.com. Where some saw racism, he tells NPR's Rachel Martin, he saw a big misunderstanding.

 

"When the tweet came out, without the sort of context of the first part of the joke, then it does seem a little bit shocking," he says.

One of those offended was activist Suey Park, 23. Park re-tweeted in outrage, and the #CancelColbert social media campaign began. Kang understands where the anger comes from.

 

Seeing Red

Colbert responded on his show by saying he would "shut down" the imaginary foundation that sparked fury among select critics. The most vocal has been Suey Park (Twitter nickname Angry Asian Woman). She began the #CancelColbert campaign.

#CancelColbert's Suey Park, activist

In an article for Time, Park wrote last week: "The problem isn't that we can't take a joke. The problem is that white comedians and their fans believe they are above reproach." She also discussed her motivations in a video interview with Huff Po. In another tweet she stated: "White people -- please keep #CancelColbert trending until there's an apology."

Rachel Stark has the right idea: "Calm, reasoned debate among comics about which jokes should be off limits doesn’t exist"!

We love you, Suey Park, but be an activist about something more serious than satire. For if we lose our hero and white-ally Colbert because of your humorless campaign, we will not be amused, not amused in the slightest, and we'll start our own offensive imaginary foundation to continue the mission of calling attention to a racist #Redskins owner Dan Snyder by mocking Asians in the blogosphere. (Please send all complaint letters in response to our rant to "Attention: I. Rony, Features Editor, Wisdom Quarterly" via EFF.org).

 

"Some of what Suey Park was saying [was about] Asian-Americans who are second-generation: It's sort of ingrained in our heads to always protect that idea of assimilation and upward mobility," Kang says.

 

"One of the things that upsets us," he says, "is when somebody comes and agitates in a way that would reflect badly upon us."

 

But Kang defends Colbert. It's also upsetting to "reflect badly upon the people who[m] we would consider our allies, who are trying to help us have this sort of assimilation, post-racial dream," he says.

 

In his article, Kang writes, "There's a long tradition in American comedy of dumping tasteless jokes at the feet of Asians and Asian-Americans -- [which] follows the perception that we will silently weather the ridicule."

 

"I think the writers in Hollywood know that it's just not going to be an issue the way that it would be if the joke was on another minority group," he says. LISTEN
 

All jokes and satire aside, there are discomfit ting conversations to be had.

• Someone else's tweet stirs up accusations of racism
• In #CancelColbert firestorm an opportunity is lost
• On being a black woman who writes (Kima Jones)
• Demi Lovato and (distraction) Hollywood sex scandals
• Appalachia is not (only) full of white morons (reverse racism?)

Is USAID the new CIA? Another Twitter (video)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (ANALYSIS); Amy Goodman, Peter Kornbluh, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.org)

USAID, the new CIA?

How America (under its secret-government as the US Military-Industrial Complex) runs the world: By co-creating Facebook, Google, Twitter -- and/or coopting them after someone else creates them -- CIA agents and operatives (as well as the FBI, black-budget Pentagon, DARPA, DHS, the Secret Service, and of course the NSA) foment and agitate for civil war, "revolution," and liberation. 

They're doing what to my America?!

But the goal is not actual freedom and democracy for people in the US or elsewhere, it is to topple uncooperative governments without overtly sending in soldiers. Secret operatives do a quieter, and therefore better, job by avoiding all the sticky accusations of "imperialism," "war crimes," and "illegal intervention."

The CIA learned its lessons well in Vietnam, the Philippines, Egypt (Arab Spring), Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Central America, Kosovo, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet/China... It's been all over the world.

McCutcheon means 1% now rules US legally

It rules the world by subterfuge and deceit, raking in billions in drug dealing, market manipulations, and international banking. Ask the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman for the details of how we loan money to nations (Hello, Ukraine!) through the World Bank and IMF then send in jackals to call the shots making those nations very friendly to the West. What choice will they have when we assassinate their leaders who are for the people and prop up new politicians corrupt enough to do whatever America asks of them?

Senator: Billionaires now "buy elections"

Now we clearly see that USAID, following the playbook, created a Twitter for Cuba. A hummingbird whispers via mobile phones and cell networks, and a government comes down with flash mobs, "Occupy" style events, protests, demonstrations, disruptions, Anarchist Bible (written by the CIA) vandalism, general hooliganism and drug use (brought in by the fine Company folks who work with the authorities who will arresting the buyers and sellers but never the distributors)...

AP reports a complex and intricate strategy devised by the U.S. gov't to artificially foment political dissent in Cuba and spur a "democratic" uprising -- rigged by the CIA -- using a fake social media platform. It's the Latin Twitter ZunZumeo (vator.tv)

.

ZunZuneo reveals how US gov't spies in US

DemocracyNow.org

NSA, Twitter, DARPA, Facebook, FBI, Google

"U.S. Secretly Created 'Cuban Twitter' to Stir Unrest" is the name of an explosive new article by the Associated Press detailing how the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) created a fake Twitter program to undermine the Cuban government.

 

The CIA has many guises and operatives

[As Americans, we have the real Twitter spying on us and undermining actual dissent while seeming to stir up all sorts of trouble by facilitating peer-to-peer conversations that are thoroughly documented and used for later investigations and to set people up.]

The communications network was called "ZunZuneo" -- slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet. It was reportedly built with secret shell companies financed through [CIA-controlled] foreign banks. According to the AP, the United States [the MIC] planned to use the platform to spread political content that might trigger a Cuban Spring.

Havana, D.C., Pretoria, South Africa

Or it might, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society." Democracy Now! speaks to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He recently wrote an article in Foreign Policy called "Our Man in Havana: Was USAID Planning to Overthrow Castro?"

"Terms and Conditions May Apply" (trailer)

Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Cullen Hoback (vimeo.com)

The "may" is a courtesy. They do apply. Snowden reveals the secret documentation.

(Trailer) Terms and Conditions May Apply, directed by Cullen Hoback, 2013 documentary about contractual terms of user-service agreements used on spy-friendly sites like Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on. Mark Zuckerberg appears in the film.
 

Admit it: no one really reads the endless terms and conditions connected to every website we visit, phone call we make, or app we download. No one can. But every day, billion-dollar corporations are spying and learning more about our interests, our friends and family, our finances, and our secrets... 

I f'd the country, it's true, maybe even the world. But I made a billion doing it, mo-fo's! Selling out to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and MIC pays big. Ask Jobs, ask Gates, ask... Oh, I've said too much. See you online...even if you don't see me seeing you, lol! Don't watch The Social Network.

  

Not only are they selling our information to the highest bidder, they are freely sharing it with the government (NSA, CIA, DHS, Pentagon, FBI, member corporations, or any of the many arms of the military-industrial complex). And you "agreed" to it when you clicked SUBMIT.

 

With fascinating examples and so-unbelievable-that-they're-almost-funny facts, filmmaker Cullen Hoback exposes what governments and corporations (together referred to as the military-industrial complex) are legally taking from us every day -- making the future of both privacy and civil liberties uncertain.

 

I agree. Spy on me: NSA malware via my Facebook (Ryan Gallagher/The Intercept)

 

From whistleblowers and investigative journalists to zombie fan clubs and Egyptian dissidents, this disquieting exposé demonstrates how everyone has incrementally "opted-in" to a real-time surveillance state, click by click. However, it also explains what, if anything, can be done about it. 

• In North America WATCH on: vimeo.com/ondemand/tacma

CULLEN HOBACK grew up in L.A. At 17 he started his own public access late night TV show but was kicked off the air for making offensive statements that angered some viewers. Hoback enjoyed sharing his perspective on strange and unfamiliar topics. In college he produced short films and a feature when digital cameras first came out. At 21, he made “Freedom State,” a comedy that captures the daily life of individualists who live “on the edge of the world.” Another narrative feature he made was “Friction,” a film about summer camp members who enact a scripted tale as the line between utopia and entity blur. In 2007, he was granted a budget to direct the LARPing documentary “Monster Camp,” which featured social outcasts coming together to create a community where magic is real and identity is limited only by imagination. In 2011, Hoback came back to the screens to create his documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply.”