Category: courage
ThÃch Quảng Äức (1897 â 11 June 1963) was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11 June 1963. ThÃch Quảng Äức was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngô Äình Diá»m administration.
Photos of his self-immolation were circulated widely across the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diá»m regime. Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo of the monk’s death, as did David Halberstam for his written account.
After his death, his body was re-cremated, but his heart remained intact. This was interpreted as a symbol of compassion and led Buddhists to revere him as a bodhisattva, heightening the impact of his death on the public psyche. (read more) (mooncake)
Foolish act of bravery? Egyptian activist risks her life after posting full frontal nude shot online sparking outrage among Muslims.
Wearing nothing but a pair of stockings, red ribbon in her hair and a pair of flat red shoes, the black and white shot would not look out of place in a nude photography book.
But this is no ordinary art project. It is the work of a feminist Egyptian activist who is making a bold and potentially dangerous statement.
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, a 20-year old university student from Cairo, has sparked outrage in the Middle East with the controversial full-length image, posted on her blog last week.
It has since received 1.5 million hits and thousands flooded the site with insults. Some denounced Elmahdy as a ‘prostitute’ and ‘mentally sick’ or urged police to arrest her.
Elmahdy’s posting is almost unheard of in a country where nudity is strongly frowned upon – even as an art form and could lead to her being jailed.
On her arabic blog, Aliaa defends her actions, writing: “Put on trial the artists’ models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity, then undress and stand before a mirror and burn your bodies that you despise to forever rid yourselves of your sexual hangups before you direct your humiliation and chauvinism and dare to try to deny me my freedom of expression.”
The posting prompted furious discussions on internet social media sites, with pages for and against her put up on Facebook.
One activist, Ahmed Awadallah, praised her in a Tweet, writing, “I’m totally taken back by her bravery.”
A supporter, who identified himself as Emad Nasr Zikri, wrote in a comment on Elmahdy’s blog, “We need to learn how to separate between nudity and sex.”
He said that before fundamentalist influence in Egypt, “there were nude models in art school for students to draw”. Some 100 people liked his comment. (dailymail.co.uk)
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy
- Labels: art, courage, freedom, liberation, women
Freedom riders were civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (of 1960). The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.
Boynton v. Virginia had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South.
The Freedom Riders set out to challenge this status quo by riding various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement and called national attention to the violent disregard for the law that was used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Riders were arrested for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses.
Most of the subsequent rides were sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), while others belonged to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”). The Freedom Rides followed on the heels of dramatic sit-ins against segregated lunch counters conducted by students and youth throughout the South and boycotts beginning in 1960.
The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia granted interstate travelers the legal right to disregard local segregation ordinances regarding interstate transportation facilities. But the Freedom Riders’ rights were not enforced, and their actions were considered criminal acts throughout most of the South. For example, upon the Riders’ arrival in Mississippi, their journey ended with imprisonment for exercising their legal rights in interstate travel. Similar arrests took place in other Southern cities. (read more) (american experience)
Frida Kahlo de Rivera (July 6, 1907 â July 13, 1954; born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón) was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits.
Kahlo’s life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home known as the Blue House. She gave her birth date as July 7, 1910, but her birth certificate shows July 6, 1907. Kahlo had allegedly wanted the year of her birth to coincide with the year of the beginning of the Mexican revolution so that her life would begin with the birth of modern Mexico. At age 6 years, Frida developed polio, which caused her right leg to appear much thinner than the other. It was to remain that way permanently. Her work has been celebrated in Mexico as emblematic of national and indigenous tradition, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.
Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterized as Naïve art or folk art. Her work has also been described as “surrealist”, and during 1938 one surrealist described Kahlo as a “ribbon around a bomb”.
Kahlo had a marriage with the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera. She suffered lifelong health problems, many of which derived from a traffic accident during her teenage years. These issues are perhaps represented by her works, many of which are self-portraits of one sort or another. Kahlo suggested, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” She also stated, “I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.” (read more)
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was successfully launched toward the Moon, but the landing had to be aborted after an oxygen tank ruptured, severely damaging the spacecraft’s electrical system. The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. “Jack” Swigert as Command Module pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for the original CM pilot Ken Mattingly, who was grounded by the flight surgeon after exposure to German measles.
The mission was launched on April 11, 1970 at 13:13 CST. Two days later an explosion crippled the service module upon which the Command Module depended. To conserve its batteries and the oxygen needed for the last hours of flight, the crew instead used the Lunar Module’s resources as a “lifeboat” during the return trip to Earth. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17. NASA called the mission a “successful failure”. (read more)
Ai Weiwei (born 1957) is a Chinese artist, activist, and philosopher, who is also active in architecture, curating, photography, film, and social and cultural criticism.
Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. Besides showing his art he has been investigating in the corruption and cover-ups under the power of the government.
He was particularly focused at exposing an alleged corruption scandal in the construction of Sichuan schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He intensively uses the internet to communicate with people all over China, especially the young generation. (read more)
Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme originating 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.
In its early form, the concept has been adopted by a decentralized on-line community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal, and primarily focused on entertainment. Beginning with 2008, the Anonymous collective has become increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism, undertaking protests and other actions, often with the goal of promoting internet freedom and freedom of speech. Actions credited to “Anonymous” are undertaken by unidentified individuals who apply the Anonymous label to themselves as attribution.
Although not necessarily tied to a single on-line entity, many websites are strongly associated with Anonymous. This includes notable imageboards such as 4chan, Futaba, Ebaumsworld their associated wikis, Encyclopædia Dramatica, and a number of forums. After a series of controversial, widely-publicized protests and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by Anonymous in 2008, incidents linked to its cadre members have increased. In consideration of its capabilities, Anonymous has been posited by CNN to be one of the three major successors to WikiLeaks.
(read more)
- Labels: authority, courage, democracy, information, secrets
Have you ever wondered…
why there are no more heroes?
It’s because in today’s world…
all men and women are heroes.
One Human Family
“Whether we like it or not, we have all been born on this earth as part of one great human family. Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, belonging to one nation or another, to one religion or another, adhering to this ideology or that, ultimately each of us is just a human being like everyone else: we all desire happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, each of us has an equal right to pursue these goals.
Today’s world requires that we accept the oneness of humanity. In the past, isolated communities could afford to think of one another as fundamentally separate and even existed in total isolation. Nowadays, however, events in one part of the world eventually affect the entire planet. Therefore we have to treat each major local problem as a global concern from the moment it begins. We can no longer invoke the national, racial or ideological barriers that separate us without destructive repercussion. In the context of our new interdependence, considering the interests of others is clearly the best form of self-interest.
I view this fact as a source of hope. The necessity for cooperation can only strengthen mankind, because it helps us recognize that the most secure foundation for the new world order is not simply broader political and economic alliances, but rather each individual’s genuine practice of love and compassion. For a better, happier, more stable and civilized future, each of us must develop a sincere, warm-hearted feeling of brother and sisterhood”…Dalai Lama. (read more)
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani (Persian: سکÛÙÙ Ù
ØÙ
Ø¯Û Ø¢Ø´ØªÛاÙÛ, born ca. 1967) is an Iranian woman convicted of adultery and murder, and since 2006 has been under a sentence of death under in Iran. An international campaign to overturn her sentence was started by her daughter and son, Farideh and Sajjad Mohamamadi e Ashtiani, and it brought widespread attention to her case in 2010, when prominent media sources claimed that she was sentenced to be executed by stoning. Iranian authorities denied that this method of execution would be used, and gave her a stay of execution in September 2010.
Mrs. Ashtiani had allegedly committed adultery with the man who murdered her husband, Isa Taheri. Taheri was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Taheri was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
In 2006, Mrs. Ashtiani was brought on her first trial, charged with the murder of her husband. She was found guilty of murdering her husband, and sentenced to death by hanging. Her sentence was commuted to 10 years imprisonment, like Taheri’s, in 2007.
In September 2006, her case was again brought up in a different court, this time tried for adultery. She pleaded guilty but later recanted her confession. She was convicted of adultery while still married, and sentenced to death by stoning, and an additional sentence of 99 lashes.
The international publicity generated by Mrs. Ashtiani’s plight led to numerous diplomatic conflicts between Iran’s government and the heads of certain western governments. Due to the reaction of the international community, the execution had been stayed indefinitely.
(read more) (freesakineh.org) (Du’a Khalil Aswad video)
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 â October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress later called “the first lady of civil rights”, and “the mother of the freedom movement”.
On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind. Irene Morgan in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, respectively, in the area of interstate bus travel. Nine months before Parks refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. In New York City, in 1854, Lizzie Jennings engaged in similar activity, leading to the desegregation of the horsecars and horse-drawn omnibuses of that city. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks’ action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Parks’ act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.
At the time of her action, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for workers’ rights and racial equality. Nonetheless, she took her action as a private citizen “tired of giving in”. Although widely honored in later years for her action, she suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Eventually, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers. After retirement from this position, she wrote an autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years she suffered from dementia and became embroiled in a lawsuit filed on her behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast.
Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States’ leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. (read more)
Eat…
drink…
and be merry…
for tomorrow we shall die.
- Labels: clarity, courage, love, non violent direct action
I knew a man who once said…
Death smiles at us all…
all a man can do is smile back.
Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, is under house arrest amid rising anger in Beijing over the dissident’s prize. The wife of the imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo fears the Chinese government will prevent her from collecting the peace prize on her husband’s behalf amid rising anger in Beijing at the announcement.
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, Liu Xia said police officers had surrounded her home and warned her that she could not leave without a minder.
“They have told me not to go out, not to visit friends. If I want to see my parents or buy food, I can only go in their car,” she said. “I don’t even talk to my neighbours because I don’t want to get them into trouble.”
During a prison visit on Sunday, Liu Xiaobo asked her to collect the prize at the ceremony in Oslo, Norway, on 10 December. But she was doubtful she would get as far as the airport.
“I can’t even get out of my home, how could I go out of the country?”
The Nobel prize committee said they hoped one of the couple would attend the ceremony, but it would go ahead without the winner as it did for Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and former Polish president Lech Walesa.
The Chinese government today maintained its attack on the Nobel decision and its supporters. “If some people try to change China’s political system in this way, and try to stop the Chinese people from moving forward, that is obviously making a mistake,” the foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told the Associated Press. “This is not only disrespect for China’s judicial system, but also puts a big question mark on their true intentions.” (guardian.co.uk)
- Labels: censorship, china, choice, control, corruption, courage
“hip hip hooray”
Chilean rescuers moving at a rapid pace pressed ahead with the operation to free 33 men trapped half a mile below the earth’s surface for more than two months.
Rescuers freed the 27th miner as family members and hundreds of international media held vigil. The pace of the rescues quickened throughout the day, with some men rising to safety within 30 minutes of each other.
The 26th miner rescued, Claudio Acuña, 34, has worked in mining about 10 years. According to CNN, he’s married, has a daughter and is the youngest of eight brothers.
“We have lived a magical night, a night we will remember throughout our lives, a night in which life defeated death,” declared Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, who welcomed the miners as they emerged from the rescue pod one at a time. (latimes)
“Rise and rise again
until lambs become lions”
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film directed primarily by Victor Fleming from a script mostly by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, with uncredited contributions by others. It was based on the 1900 novel of the same name by L. Frank Baum, who died twenty years before this film was released. Notable in its use of special effects, use of Technicolor, fantasy storytelling and unusual characters, The Wizard of Oz has become, over the years, one of the best known of all films. Its impact, however, was not nearly as strongly felt at the time of its original release.
Initially, The Wizard of Oz made only a small profit due to its enormous budget, despite largely favorable critical reviews. “Over the Rainbow” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the film itself received several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
Telecasts of the film began in 1956, and because of them the film has found a larger audienceâits television screenings were once an annual tradition and have re-introduced the film to the public, making The Wizard of Oz one of the most famous films ever made. The Library of Congress named The Wizard of Oz as the most-watched film in history. It is often ranked among the top ten best movies of all-time in various critics’ and popular polls, and it has provided many memorable quotes.
In a movie section front page retrospective of The Wizard of Oz, noted San Francisco Chronicle film critic and author Mick LaSalle declared on October 30, 2009 that the film’s “entire sequence, from Dorothy’s arrival in Oz to her departure on the Yellow brick road, has to be one of the greatest in cinema history â a masterpiece of set design, costuming, choreography, music, lyrics, storytelling and sheer imagination.” (read more) (video clip)
Today is the 71st Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz
Any time now…
you will meet Death
Any time now…
your life will end
Any time now…
Tiburcio Vasquez was allegedly the inspiration for Johnston McCulley’s fictonal character “Zorro”.
Tiburcio Vásquez (August 11, 1835âMarch 19, 1875) was a Californio bandit who was active in California from 1857 to 1874. The Vasquez Rocks, 40 miles north of Los Angeles, were one of his many hideouts and are named for him. He was probably the most notorious bandit California ever saw.
In January 1875 Vásquez was sentenced to hang for murder. His trial had taken four days and the jury deliberated for two hours before finally finding him guilty of two counts of murder in the Tres Pinos robbery.
Visitors flocked to Vásquez’s jail cell, many of them women. He signed autographs and posed for photographs. Vásquez sold the photos from the window of his cell and used the money to pay for his legal defense. After his conviction, he appealed for clemency. It was denied by Governor Romualdo Pacheco. Vásquez calmly met his fate in San Jose on March 17, 1875. He was 39 years old.
He stated…”A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had numerous fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen. I believed we were unjustly deprived of the social rights that belonged to us.” (Dictated by Vásquez to explain his actions)
Vásquez was asked just before his execution, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” He replied, “I hope so… for then soon I shall see all my old sweethearts again”. The only word he spoke on the gallows was…”pronto”…soon. (read more)
…Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax…Rest In Peace…