Women Born Transsexual

As promised Friday, another in an admittedly small circle of female jazz artists who play an instrument. It has long blown my mind how few women there are in jazz or rock for that matter who are more known for their instrumental skills than their vocal skills.

When I want to feature a female jazz singer I have so many to choose from, when I try to feature a woman instrumentalist I can practically count them on my fingers.

Jazz has become a somewhat neglected art form.  There aren’t the clubs, the days of the major labels are in the past.  Hell many of my favorite artists are long dead.

Artists play house concerts and self distribute their recordings.

This is a form of music that is uniquely American. It grew up in New Orleans, it grew out of the Blues and so many other uniquely American influences.

It was nurtured in Harlem, Chicago, St Louis Los Angeles and all the cities from the east coast to the west coast.

While it is thought of as a Black form of music there were integrated bands having to deal with Jim Crow laws years before say professional base ball was integrated.

Jessica is still around just like Carla Bley, who I featured a couple of weeks ago.

I want people to listen to this music.  If you don’t understand it get the Ken Burns series and listen to Wynton Marsalis explain its origins and development.

Jessica Williams

It would be all too easy for me to claim I immediately smelled a rat, but the truth is I had the video in my tray of items to be posted.

Sometimes sloth is its own reward, even for someone who has chosen the underground papers of the 1960s as a sort of model for her blog.  Having a bit of lag time can be a good thing as questions regarding the video cropped up almost immediately.

There were compelling reasons to believe it.  People like Charles Taylor and Idi Amin have been monsters.  Genocidal atrocities have happened in places like Rwanda.  Horrible civil wars have raged for years and years across the continent of Africa.

But, and here comes the big”BUT”, Europe and the US have this history of colonialism and the backing of some really nasty right wing dictators. We in the US and Europe have supported virtual Nazis, who were friendly to our corporations. We’ve helped these monsters put down rebels who might have brought changes that would have meant democracy in various countries and have removed some very evil dictators.

Our interventions generally have nothing to do with the liberating of people and everything to do with opening countries to the rape and exploitation by our corporations.

As the day passed my initial suspicions were confirmed.

I collected a few articles over the past days that reinforced my initial suspicions.  a sampling follows:

From Socialist Worker:  http://socialistworker.org/2012/03/12/left-out-of-the-kony-2012-video

What they won’t say about Kony 2012

Bill Crane examines the politics behind the “Kony 2012″ media campaign–and argues that further U.S. intervention in Uganda won’t help the country’s people.

March 12, 2012

“KONY 2012,” a social media campaign by the charity group Invisible Children that caught fire last week, has brought the wars of central Africa into the media spotlight.

A video produced by Invisible Children that got some 71 million views in less than a week focuses on Joseph Kony, leader of the Ugandan rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The 30-minute video claims that Kony is “the most dangerous man in the world.”

Invisible Children says it hopes the video will “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” The campaign, which jumped from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to the front page of newspapers across the U.S., asks supporters to make Kony “famous” by posting flyers with his image. This, the video suggests, will convince the U.S. government to step up support for the Ugandan military in its quest to “stop Kony”–to kill him or to bring him to trial at the International Criminal Court.

It’s certainly understandable that a campaign against child soldiers and sex trafficking would gain widespread attention. But the Kony 2012 campaign is leaving out a lot of facts that every opponent of violence and injustice needs to know.

Not only does the video dangerously oversimplify the history of Kony and the LRA in Uganda, but it bolsters the position of U.S. imperialism on this question–particularly in its support for the repressive Ugandan government. And this comes at a time when the U.S. military is intervening more aggressively in Africa, including basing troops on the continent.

Continue reading at:  http://socialistworker.org/2012/03/12/left-out-of-the-kony-2012-video

But then some far more disturbing people started to show up as being behind this video:

From Right Wing Watch:  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/invisible-children-and-kill-gays-pastor-martin-ssempa

Invisible Children and ‘Kill the Gays’ Pastor Martin Ssempa

Submitted by Josh Glasstetter on Fri, 03/16/2012

A video posted five years ago by a student group at Grove City College – a small evangelical school in Pennsylvania – raises questions about whether Invisible Children, the organization behind the viral juggernaut Kony 2012, has worked with notorious Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa.

From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/18/nyc-zuccotti-park-occupy-wall-street

More than 200 people gather to mark six-month anniversary, and organisers vow rally is first of several

Reuters
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 17 March 2012

More than 200 protesters gathered on Saturday in New York‘s Zuccotti Park to mark the six-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Clashes with police resulted in several arrests and three officers injured, officials said.

At least four people were arrested, according to organisers.

Police would not confirm the arrests but said three officers suffered injuries. Police did not provide any details as to the extent of the injuries.

Organisers vowed that Saturday’s rally was the first of several events planned to protest against economic injustice.

Protester Paul Sylvester, 24, from Massachusetts, said he was “thrilled” to be back at the park but said he hoped the movement would begin to crystallise around specific goals.

“We need to be more concrete and specific,” he said.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/18/nyc-zuccotti-park-occupy-wall-street

From Scientific American:  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/03/17/drilling-for-oil-in-eden-initiative-to-save-amazon-rainforest-in-ecuador-is-uncertain/

By R. Douglas Fields
March 17, 2012

Quito, Ecuador— The most biologically diverse habitat in the western hemisphere, the Yasuní rainforest in Ecuador, is under threat. The diversity of species in the Yasuní Park is unmatched by any other park in the world. One hectare contains more species of trees than all of North America, but hidden beneath this Garden of Eden lies temptation: oil worth billions.

Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa is bargaining the fate of the Yasuní Park against the willingness of the industrialized world to pay 3.6 billion dollars in return for a promise not to extract oil from the ecological preserve. The conservation proposal is praised internationally as a creative way to protect the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous people living there, but the fate of the Yasuní Initiative is in doubt. There is uncertainty whether the funding can be raised as governments grapple with the international economic crisis, and skeptics question whether the bargain could work.

“They are going to drill. They are going to drill,” an authority on the Yasuní project told me in confidence. “Perhaps ten years from now, perhaps 5 years from now. The next president will need that money.”

Oil is Ecuador’s top export, providing one third of its revenue, but despite the black gold pooled beneath its steamy jungles, Ecuador is a poor country. With little industry, Ecuador’s 58.9 billion GDP is among the smallest in Latin America. (By comparison, the GDP of the USA is 14,600 billion.) Exporting raw materials, primarily petroleum, bananas, and shrimp, has enriched foreign corporations, but the wealth has not trickled down to the people. 50 % of Ecuadorian citizens live below the poverty level. One third of the children in Ecuador are malnourished and 60 % in the indigenous populations according to Health Minister, Carina Vance. Between 1999 and 2000 one million Ecuadorians fled their homeland to escape the misery and financial collapse that left the country’s currency worthless. The US dollar is now the accepted currency.

“At some point conservation and ecology are kind of a luxurious thing. People have to eat,” says Prof. Hugo Navarrete, a Biologist at the Pontifica Universidad Católica del Ecuador, describing the situation from the point of view of those who would benefit from drilling.

Continue reading at:  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/03/17/drilling-for-oil-in-eden-initiative-to-save-amazon-rainforest-in-ecuador-is-uncertain/

From Addicting Info: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/17/richard-branson-asks-obama-for-marijuana-at-white-house-dinner/

By Michael Patrickson
March 17, 2012

Sir Richard Branson asked President Barack Obama for some marijuana while attending a recent White House state dinner.

On Wednesday, at a White House state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron, Richard Branson, billionaire businessman and Virgin Group founder, asked President Obama for a marijuana cigarette.

On Thursday, Branson told the story of his encounter with Obama to a prestigious forum organized by The Atlantic to discuss the failed global war on drugs. Branson said:

“I asked him (Obama) if I could have a spliff. But they didn’t have any.”

Branson claims he was only joking with Obama. Yet just by raising the issue of marijuana Branson makes a significant point .

Continue reading at:  http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/17/richard-branson-asks-obama-for-marijuana-at-white-house-dinner/

From PoliticusUSA: http://www.politicususa.com/tax-exempt-tea-party/

By: Dennis S
March 16, 2012

I noticed a recent Tea Party dust-up with the IRS over 501 (c) (4) tax-exempt status. The Tea Party wants it; the IRS doesn’t appear to want to give it to them. Now, you can attain that status quite easily if your group is not perceived to be trying to influence elections. It’s pretty much a ‘social welfare’ tax exemption; your little reward for giving a damn about your neighbors and helping with Policeman and Fireman relief funds, cleaning up parks, finding services for those in need, that kind of stuff. Technically a 501 (c) (4) organization is supposed to spend the lion’s share of its time promoting ‘social welfare’ not trying to elect the most radical politician in the district.

Or, in the dry syntax of the IRS, “An organization is operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the community.” Doesn’t mean you can’t stump for the occasional radical pol, it just means you have to be primarily engaged in helping your fellow man and woman.

I thought I’d take a Tea Party tour of the Internet and check out the ‘social welfare’ programs that take up so much TP time. For my first stop, I journeyed all the way to Fredericksburg, Texas seeking the presence of do-gooder programs on their Tea Party homepage.  There were notifications of a few meetings. The sheriff was going to address one of them, then some guy named Cox, founder of the Get Out of Our House Revolution was speaking at another. Don’t know what GOOH is, could be a hint to the adult children, but I doubt it’s a program to help any charities that I know about.

Continue reading at:  http://www.politicususa.com/tax-exempt-tea-party/

From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html

By SARAH HEPOLA
Published: March 16, 2012

IN 1970, when the Senate was first debating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a featured speaker was Gloria Steinem, a 36-year-old magazine writer with a growing reputation as a forceful advocate of women’s issues.

“During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country,” Ms. Steinem told the almost exclusively male gathering. “I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.”

Over the last 40 years, Gloria Steinem has almost always been at the other end of the phone when some member of the news media has sought comment about a pressing issue involving women’s rights, whether it was Roe v. Wade (“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”), the tax problems that all but doomed the chances of the first woman to run for vice president on a major ticket (“What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.”) and even the presidency of George W. Bush (“There has never been an administration that is more hostile to women’s equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right”).

And that raises a question well worth asking in 2012: Where is the next Gloria Steinem, and why — decades after the media spotlight first focused on her — has no one emerged to take her place?

The question resonated last month, when the organization Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced plans to pull financing from Planned Parenthood, and when Rush Limbaugh’s tirade against a Georgetown law student and her congressional testimony over contraceptive rights became national news.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/belief/154460/how_the_fundamentalist_mind_compels_conservative_christians_to_force_their_beliefs_on_you/

Good people are willing to subvert the U.S. Constitution and even violate human decency in their quest for converts.

By Valerie Tarico
March 7, 2012

Many evangelicals wear their religion on T-shirts and around their necks and on car bumpers and eye-blacks. They hand out tracts on college campuses and stage revival meetings on military bases. They use weddings and funerals to preach come-to-Jesus sermons. In their resolve to spread the good news that Jesus saves, some also do things that are more morally dubious.

In Tucson, nice young couples cultivate relationships with lonely college students without disclosing that they are paid to engage in “friendship missions.” In Seattle, volunteers woo first- and second-graders to afterschool Good News Clubs that the children are incapable of distinguishing from school-sponsored activities. In Muslim countries, Christian missionaries skirt laws that ban proselytizing by pretending to be mere aid workers, putting genuinely secular aid workers at risk. In the U.S. military, soldiers bully other soldiers into prayer meetings or the Passion of the Christ and then send bizarrely profane emails to people who try to stop them.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of evangelical zeal in recent decades has been millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa. Many evangelicals saw the HIV epidemic as an opportunity.

“AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history,” said Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse. Another group that pursued HIV dollars has its mission built right into its name: Community Health Evangelism. Christian ideology ultimately redirected billions of U. S. aid dollars away from science-based results-oriented interventions such as contraceptive access and safe-sex education and into programs that espoused traditional Christian values: monogamy, evangelism, and compassionate after-the-fact care for the sick.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/belief/154460/how_the_fundamentalist_mind_compels_conservative_christians_to_force_their_beliefs_on_you/

From The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/166821/occupy-and-make-them-do-it

From Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/15/shell-oil-spills-207

Energy firm reveals that chief executive’s pay doubled in 2011 as it admits to 207 oil spills, up from 195 the previous year

Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 March 2012

Shell chief executive Peter Voser earned more than £10m last year in pay and bonuses at a time of near-record oil prices and in a year when the firm was responsible for 207 oil spills – considerably more than the year before.

The remuneration, made up of salary, bonuses and long-term incentive schemes, was more than double the figure for 2010 but the company said it was justified by Shell’s strong operating and share-price performance. The oil firm reported global annual earnings of $28.6bn (£18bn) in 2011 – or more than £2m an hour – a 54% increase on the previous year.

The Anglo-Dutch group has cashed in on surging oil prices – which were more than $30 a barrel higher in 2011 than in 2010 – and booming demand for gas. It makes most of its money outside Britain and claims to generate barely 1p a litre profit from petrol sales.

Voser’s £10.4m payout is composed of £4.52m in annual salary and bonus, with the balance from long-term incentive schemes. A spokeswoman said the payout “is a jump, but it’s a reflection of a number of different factors and includes a payout from a share scheme that has been running for three years”.

But she said the remuneration policy had not changed and she could not rule out another bumper payout next year.

Voser’s pay was revealed in the company’s annual report less than 24 hours after directors were criticised by British MPs for alleged complacency over safety plans for future drilling in the Arctic.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/15/shell-oil-spills-207

From Addicting Info:   http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/16/soldier-allegedly-murdered-for-being-an-atheist/

By Wendy Gittleson
March 16, 2012

The remains of US Army Specialist Jose Ramirez, missing since 2007, were found early last month near Petrolia, TX. Authorities believe he was killed shortly after he went missing. From the Associated Press:

According to a criminal complaint, authorities found bullet holes in a bedroom wall and blood stains in a hallway. A day later, they searched the area around the home and found a human skull with bullet marks as well as a pair of shorts with the word “Army,” the complaint said.

Authorities charged 30-year-old Justin Green with first-degree murder in February. Green, who once lived in the home where the bullet holes were found, remains in jail on $1 million bond and will appear in court Monday. His attorney did not return a phone message.

Brittany Green (the defendant’s sister) allegedly told authorities that her brother said he had shot Ramirez twice because he “did not believe in God and alleged that Ramirez reached for a gun,” the complaint said. Terri Green helped her son move Ramirez’s body from the home’s garage to the shallow grave, the complaint said.

In a somewhat related story, atheists in the military have organized a concert called, “Rock Beyond Belief,” on March 31st at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The event, according to organizers, “will highlight ”free thought” — atheism, humanism and skepticism — on a U.S. military base and will lead to broader recognition and support of non believers in the armed forces, where they say they receive little support and often discrimination from an overly Christianized military.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/16/soldier-allegedly-murdered-for-being-an-atheist/

From Robert Reich:  http://robertreich.org/post/19402713930

By Robert Reich
March 16, 2012

Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs vice president, resigned his post Wednesday with a stinging public rebuke of the firm on the oped page of the New York Times — accusing it of no longer putting its clients before its own pecuniary goals.

But if Mr. Smith believes his experience at Goldman is something new, he doesn’t know history. In 1928, Goldman Sachs and Company created the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, which promptly went on a speculative binge, luring innocent investors along the way. In the Great Crash of 1929, Goldman’s investors lost their shirts but Goldman kept its hefty fees.

If Mr. Smith believes such disregard of investors is unique to Goldman, he doesn’t know the rest of Wall Street. In the late 1920s, National City Bank, which eventually would become Citigroup, repackaged bad Latin American debt as new securities which it then sold to investors no less gullible than Goldman Sachs’s. After the Great Crash of 1929, National City’s top executives helped themselves to the bank’s remaining assets as interest-free loans while their investors and depositors were left with pieces of paper worth a tiny fraction of what they paid for them.

The problem isn’t excessive greed. If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The problem is endemic abuse of power and trust. When bubbles are forming, all but the most sophisticated investors can be easily duped into thinking they’ll get rich by putting their money into the hands of brand-named investment bankers.

Continue reading at:  http://robertreich.org/post/19402713930