Daily Archives: 03/13/2015

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Legally Married and Legally Fired


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The Fight For Equal Rights For LGBT Americans Does Not End At Marriage

We’ve been talking a lot about a certain Supreme Court case over the past month, with the Affordable Care Act under attack for a second time. Next up, the Supreme Court will hear another important case in April on whether to legalize marriage for committed same-sex couples throughout the country. While proponents of equality are hopeful for a historic decision to finally ensure marriage equality nationwide, regardless of the outcome, the fight for LGBT equal rights will not end in June. One aspect of that fight is securing basic non-discrimination protections for the LGBT community.

While the fundamental right to marry the one you love has been extended to Americans in over thirty states, we still have a ways to go in enacting meaningful anti-discrimination laws across the country. As the graphic below demonstrates, LGBT Americans are still vulnerable to discrimination in many other ways. And click here to learn more about all the protections that LGBT Americans don’t have.

BOTTOM LINE: While the Supreme Court may soon rightly decide that marriage equality is constitutional, the fight for fairness and full equality will not be over this summer. Congress and the States need to act to ensure equal protections for LGBT Americans.

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Aziz Ansari: Live at Madison Square Garden – Thanks Mom and Dad


~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Climate Change … Fantasy Tournament

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OFAClimate change deniers live in a fantasy world, and OFA is dedicated to making sure they’re sufficiently embarrassed by their anti-science positions.

That’s why we’re introducing our first-ever Climate Change Fantasy Tournament. We’re asking Americans to vote to decide the nation’s worst climate change deniers — and we’ll make sure the champion gets a big congratulations in their home district.

Voting starts today — go get started on the first match-up and help decide who’s the worst of the worst.

Check out this bracket

We’ve matched up 16 of the most notorious deniers in America in a winner-take-all tournament — from House Speaker John Boehner, to Ron “Sunspot” Johnson, to a congressman from California who’s so far out there on climate, his theories have landed on Mars.

We learned this week that 85 percent of eighth-graders know the basics of climate science, but only half of the U.S. Senate does. It was only a few weeks ago that one senator threw a snowball in the halls of Congress as a way of saying that climate change isn’t happening — as if the fact that winter is happening somehow trumps the agreement of 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists.

It would be funny if climate change weren’t such a serious issue.

We’ve made real progress in this fight, through the outstanding growth of clean energy like wind and solar in the past few years, and the launch of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants.

But we can’t truly tackle this problem together as long as so many of our elected officials publicly deny the basic science of climate change.

That’s why we’re not letting them off the hook — help call out the worst of the worst of the deniers.

Vote on the first match-up here:

http://my.barackobama.com/First-Round-Match-Up

Thanks,

Jack

Jack Shapiro
National Issues Campaign Manager
Organizing for Action

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Petite Noir … “The Fall” & “The King of Anxiety”


A Spare, Minimalist R&B Video Influenced by Marina Abramovic

 

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/petite-noir-music-video-the-fall/

 

Culture

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March 10, 2015 1:30 pm

The video for “The Fall,” by the musician Petite Noir, whose EP “The King of Anxiety” is out now.
 It’s been two and a half years since the debut single “Till We Ghosts” introduced the world to the crooning, beat-heavy brand of indie rock proffered by the Belgian-born, Cape Town-raised, London-based musician Yannick Ilunga, who records as Petite Noir. Since then, he’s collaborated with Mos Def, signed with the U.K. label Domino, opened for Solange and been featured on her “Saint Heron” compilation album. But Ilunga would tell you his most notable achievement to date is coining the term “Noirwave,” a new, ideologically influenced artistic genre that identifies as African first, and everything else second. “The term ‘African music’ is so overused,” Ilunga says, “to the point that when some people say it, it just sounds cheesy. Noirwave was always meant to include clothing, art, photography, music obviously — all types of things. It’s taking the Africa that we know, turning it upside down and bringing people a new black. Solange is super Noirwave. So is Beyoncé. Noirwave is pop culture — it’s coming, but right now it’s just boiling.”

The same could be said of Ilunga himself, who recently released a debut five-track EP called “The King of Anxiety” (“a book of secrets,” as he calls it), a buzzy taste of the full-length album that will drop later this year. Having moved from Brussels to Cape Town at the age of 3, Ilunga grew up eschewing pop and traditional African music in favor of metal, rock, punk and electronica, as well as “whatever my brothers and sisters were listening to, whatever was trendy.” He counts all these genres as influences on Petite Noir, but notes that discovering Kanye West’s album “808s & Heartbreak” was the single defining moment of his musical education. “He was a black guy doing whatever he wanted to do, and he was of my time,” Ilunga says. “Of course, people like Michael Jackson were big influences, but when I started listening to them, they weren’t so big. Kanye was relevant.”

A standout on “The King of Anxiety” is “The Fall,” a pensive, meditative ode to the inescapable changes wrought by time, with a quietly anthemic refrain and minimalist orchestration that might call the XX to mind. Ilunga and his girlfriend, Rochelle Nembhard, directed the video for the track, a series of intimate moments shot in a film-noir palette; they star in it together, too. Ilunga and Nembhard face each other, sometimes gazing at each other with deep affection, other times slapping each other repeatedly in the face or playing the knife game. “The video is based on my real relationship, but it’s overexaggerated,” Ilunga says, adding that the video was inspired by “The Artist Is Present,” Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA performance. “The first video we shot looked more like a timeline, and we scrapped that,” Ilunga says. “This video shows what a relationship in general is: our attempt to lose selfness and achieve unity. When we fall, we fall together.”