Awareness Is Free

Bianca Ryan, the winner of $100 million from “America’s Got Talent”, has a talent that leaves me shaking my head in amazement. When I first saw her on youTube I thought immediately of young Judy Garland, said to have a mature woman’s voice when only 9 years old. In these clips Bianca is 11. Judge for yourself if she is the reincarnation of Garland:

On her second appearance she sang in a very different style. This one almost convinced me that Bianca is not Judy re-born but rather Janis:

Bianca’s last performance on the show convinced me that she is no one but Bianca Ryan, a young girl with a spine-tingling voice with gut-wrenching power.

I feel thankful that YouTube exists. Without it I might never have seen these awesome performances. Since I don’t live the US I don’t see US television shows for a year or two, if ever. NBC may have started the Bianca buzz but YouTube is spreading it around the world. And as fast as the Powers That Be remove clips for “piracy”, fans keep re-posting them under a different account.

NBC does have video highlights of much higher quality, but only if you know where to look.

From Maps of War
Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty
much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians,
Europeans…the list goes on.

This animated map of the Mid-East summarizes 5000 years of Ruling Powers in just 90 seconds.

Open the closets on Capitol Hill | Salon.com
“Silence about gay politicians is a relic of an era when gayness meant secrecy and shame. It’s a disservice to gay people, to voters, and to the politicians themselves.
By Louis Bayard

Photo by
Kelly Owen/Zuma Press

Mark Foley at a Palm Beach County, Fla., fundraiser.

Oct. 7, 2006 | In 1960, when Gore Vidal ran for Congress, his Republican opponent tried to spread word that Vidal was a homosexual. This was not, strictly speaking, news. Vidal had written one of the first explicitly gay novels in American literature (”The City and the Pillar”) and had never been at great pains to conceal his private life. But in trying to fan the flames that Vidal himself had ignited, J. Ernest Wharton ran up against a strange conundrum. The same media outlets that would have jumped all over a heterosexual scandal turned strangely mum the moment homosexuality entered the picture. For the New York Times and the Associated Press and Time magazine, this was the love that could not speak its name.

And still can’t. In the swirl of controversy surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley and his overtures to congressional pages, one thing has been clear all along: Foley’s offenses have nothing to do with being gay, everything to do with being a pedophile. And one thing is emerging with new clarity: The mainstream media’s treatment of gay politicians is essentially unchanged from when Gore Vidal ran for office 46 years ago. This long-standing policy of nondisclosure can now safely be called a disservice — to gay people, to voters, to the politicians themselves, to everyone. It must change.

Read the whole article at Salon….

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