Category Archives: Freedom

OK. I guess my four-step plan to end Obamacare was too difficult for the GOP, so let me make this easier. There is one thing you guys need to do to save medicine and therefore health care for Americans: Restore freedom. Its really that simple. Sadly, thats not what you in Congress do. Every move you make, every rule you adopt and every law you write whittles away at the liberties our forefathers tried to insure. So lets back up.

Step 1: Repeal Obamacare. Last I looked, you have a majority everywhere, and you therefore control the purse and the bills coming out of Congress. Just renounce Obamacare as the unconstitutional mess that it is. You said on the campaign you would do it. You have bills to do it. Just do it. We the American people who voted for Donald Trump expect you to honor that commitment.

Step 2: There is no step 2. You wont succeed in replacing one egregious law with another. There is a reason government medicine always fails of its own ponderous weight. All you self-proclaimed smart guys in Congress cannot know the facts of day-to-day medicine better than the doctors and patients who interact in the process of health care.

This is the same principle proposed by Adam Smith and reiterated by Hayek and other free-market economists a few people at the top cannot do as well as the millions and billions of participants in figuring out the best economic options for their daily lives. The principle that separates statism/communism from liberty is a simple one it is who makes decisions about your life. You? Or the government?

Weve seen for hundreds of years the problems when a few people at the top make economic decisions for the populace. The Soviets starved because the Politburo could not accurately predict how many tractors would be needed for harvest (among other errors). But the many farmers individually on a minute-to-minute basis know what to do. So too, all the Medicare bureaucrats and all the presidents men cannot figure out what health care should be worth. They cannot accurately predict how many doctors to train yet they try all the time by limiting money for graduate education. They try to set drug prices and surgery prices and regulate every sponge that is placed on every patient. We are drowning in over 160,000 pages of regulation and thats before we got to Obamacare! And now the Republicans think they are smarter than everyone who has tried to regulate medicine before?

We have a great food supply because (thank God!) Congress has not tried to control it. For now, food in America is cheap and abundant. It is sheer hubris for the gang of 535 to presume to direct knee replacement surgery or blood pressure care through the bureaucracy of Health and Human Services. And it is based on the false belief that before government there was no health care. In fact we built the finest health care in the world prior to 1964 because government was NOT involved. We treated the poor and the rich. We built charity hospitals and private hospitals. We didnt think we needed you government bureaucrats. But you came in anyway, and its been downhill every regulation since.

So heres the answer, GOP. Get the heck out of the business of health care. And it will correct itself. Just like the grocers who tailor their products for the area in which they live and work, doctors and hospitals and all health-care providers will figure ways to stay afloat and compete in a free market with lowered prices. Let Medicare patients choose to opt out for the free market. Get out of the insurance business. End the FDA control over our drugs. Freedom actually works. Give it a try.

Get Dr. Hiebs manual for living under a centralized health-care system order Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare

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Health care, GOP? Try freedom -- it works! - WND.com

Arts & Culture By Andrea Kurth | 6 hours ago

Andrea Kurth for the Rivard Report

The exhibition celebrates feminity in many ways, from a portrait of artist Frida Kahlo in "Pasional y soadora (Mi Frida)" to many representations of the female form.

A new exhibition celebrating International Womens Dayopened on Thursday at the San Antonio campus of Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico(UNAM) in Hemisfair Park. The exhibition,Female Freedom,features the works of 18 women artists17 Mexicans and one Cubanand celebrates the artistry of women and their freedom in creativity.

After the success last yearof a similar exhibition featuring many of the same artistsat UNAMs Chicago campus, the university asked curator Alejandro Dorantes to exhibit at the San Antonio campus in 2017. Female Freedom is part of a rotating crop of exhibitions at UNAM, which showcases different works of visual and performing arts featuring Mexican and local artists each month.

The artists inFemale Freedom expressedthe equality and capacity of the female gender, Dorantes said. The 18 works, mostly oil and mixed media on canvas, depict the theme of woman as creator of children, nature, and artistic expression. Although the artists were constrained by the size of the canvas, they had freedom in expressing femininity through their artwork in their own particular way, Dorantes said.

The colorful canvases measuring 3 ft. x 2 ft.line the walls of the schools foyer, each expressing a different take on femininity. Although the subject matter of each painting varies, the female form from shadowy silhouettes to feminine faces presents itself in many of the works. The paintings also pay tribute towomens many relationshipsas mothers to their children, as keepers of the natural world, and as those who commune with the spiritual world.

Weve taken this opportunity to show what the women of Mexico have to offer in the world of art, said Jake Pacheco, who coordinates the art events at UNAM every month.

The university serves as an educational and social diffusion center for Mexican culture, and Dorantes envisioned using the exhibit as an outlet to present the work from Mexico City artists whodont have the resources to exhibit in big galleries in the United States, Pacheco said.

We have the feeling of crossing the wall that sometimes people want to put between us, Dorantes said about transmitting Mexican culture to Texas.

In addition to the curator, five of the exhibitors traveled from Mexico for the event and spoke about their works and their participation in the show.

Where women get the strength to make art is an enigma, said Pilar Maza, who exhibited her work entitled Enigma.Many times we are strong against adversity, and I think now is the right time to be strongespecially for women.

My position here is very important, said Marisol Gonzalez Valenzuela, the only Cuban artist exhibitor at the show. She said that although she is Cuban by heritage, she feels Mexican in many ways. Gonzalezcreated her work Symbiosis to represent the cooperation needed between women in order to improve the world, she said.

I wanted to demonstrate that Mexican women are valiant, she said. And the women of the whole worldwe are important. We can say beautiful things. We can transmit beautiful sentiments. My work Symbiosis signifies that we all need each other. One country to another, one person to another, we all cooperate to make a better life.

Female Freedom will be on display at UNAM until April 1. Other exhibitions planned at the school for this spring include a show featuring portraits of women from each Mexican state, as well as an exhibition for UNAMs childrens festival that features San Antonio artists Momo and Pompa, whose colorful sculptures are a mainstay ofthe citys art scene.

Andrea Kurth moved to San Antonio as a young child, and spent most of her life exploring the suburbs of the city. She graduated from UT in 2014 with degrees in journalism and economics. Since then, she devoted her life to exploring Asia and Australia until returning to Texas in 2017. These days, you can find her exploring the art scene in San Antonio or doing acro yoga at the Pearl.

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UNAM's Female Freedom Exhibition Celebrates International Women's Day - Rivard Report

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus freedom as an independent agency to enact regulation could soon change due to a new bill working its way through Congress.

Earlier this month, the House passed (241 to 104) the OIRA Insight, Reform, and Accountability Act, H.R. 1009, which would subject independent regulatory agencies to the regulatory review process of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget, the latest blog post fromBallard Spahrby Barbara Mishkinstated.

The bill, from here, moves on to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the blog noted.

The bureau wouldnt be the only agency affected. Other independent agencies include: theFederal Reserve Board, theOffice of the Comptroller of the Currency, theFederal Deposit Insurance Corporation, theSecurities and Exchange Commissionand theNational Credit Union Administration.

According to the blog, the new bill codifies the definition of significant regulatory action and its requirement for OIRA review of new regulations that constitute a significant regulatory action.

However, in a major change, it makes the review requirement applicable to both executive and independent agencies.

The role and requirements of independent agencies are getting closelyquestioned under President Donald Trump since he has already announced presidential actions to reduce regulation, including the regulatory burden created by Dodd-Frank.

Despite the initiative to pull back on regulation, the biggest housing regulator, theCFPB, is considered an independent agency, leaving people questioning whether there would be any regulatory relief in housing.

The Trump administration clarified shortly after he announced the executive order to reduce regulation and control regulatory costs that the CFPB didnt need to adhere to the action sice it is an independent agency.

The situation, however, wasnt that simple. As an article in Politicopoints outon the Five big questions about Trumps executive order on regulation, details are still lacking.

It seems inconceivable that the Trump administration would exempt agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or CFPB, which are front and center in the ongoing debate over the economic costs imposed by regulatory agencies, the article stated.

And then there was also talk about whether the CFPB would simply follow the presidential actions in spirit.

This new proposed bill would put to rest some of the confusion around independent agencies. The chances of the bill passing into law is 31% according to PredictGov.

Originally posted here:

New bill threatens CFPB's freedom as independent agency - HousingWire

Rep. Justin Amash apologized to his followers on Twitter after missing his first vote in 4,293 while talking to a group of reporters outside the House chamber Friday.

Amash, who has dubbed the House Republican health care plan "Obamacare 2.0," was criticizing House Republican leaders for tightly controlling the crafting of the Obamacare replacement during an extended discussion with reporters.

At one point Amash, a House Freedom Caucus Member who was instrumental in former House Speaker John Boehner's departure in 2015, implied he wished he had Boehner back instead of Ryan.

"At the end of the day, the people at home are seeing this is run in a top-down fashion, that you have a few people who tell everyone this is what we're going to do and that's it. And ... the place may have been more open under Speaker Boehner, sadly," he said.

Rep. Steve Womack -- an Arkansas Republican probably best known for formally adopting the rules at the Republican Convention last year that cleared a path for President Donald Trump's nomination -- quickly boasted about overtaking Amash as holding the perfect voting record in the House -- now at 4,298 and counting.

"I am humbled by the opportunity to serve my constituents and thank God that no personal hardships have kept me from representing them on a single vote since taking office," Womack said in a statement Friday shortly after Amash's missed vote.

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House Freedom Caucus member Justin Amash breaks vote streak after blasting Ryan, health care bill - CNN

Freedom. We sing about it in our patriotic songs. We teach it to our children in school. Hollywood and Madison Avenue glorify it. Here in the United States, freedom is the civic religion.

But if freedom is our civic religion, why is the libertarian movement in the U.S. so small? Why is government so big and our jails so full? Is all our talk of freedom mere lip service? Are we a nation of sheeple duped by the powers that be?

To some degree, yes. But these are not the major reasons why the libertarian movement is so small. Pure libertarians lack credibility with the masses because they dont necessarily offer liberty. Abolish the government willy nilly and reduced liberty is the likely result. The power vacuum left by vanished government is likely to be filled by feudal warlords, a military junta and/or invading armies. Anarchy with liberty may be possible but it is not automatic. The People are prudent to refuse the risk.

What about moderate libertarians? What about those who would like to shrink the federal government to its Constitutional bounds? Why havent freedom lovers joined their banners en masse? Well, some did, for Ron Pauls recent run for President, but not nearly enough to win the Republican nomination, much less elect a President. This is supposed to be the Land of the Free. What gives?

It took me years to figure it out, but I believe I have the answer. It is an answer most active libertarians will not like to hear. Pragmatic libertarians do indeed offer liberty, but liberty is not the same thing as freedom!

By liberty I mean what my libertarians friends mean by liberty: liberty is the absence of coercion. It is a state of being where transactions are voluntary, where all constraints are the result of honest contracts. I like liberty. I wish we had more of it, here and in other parts of the world. I even have a series on libertarian strategy in the the hope that libertarians become more successful in increasing liberty. But liberty is not the same thing as freedom. Freedom is something bigger.

So what is freedom?

You can pull out a dictionary for a stilted definition. I will define it simply: freedom is being able to do what you want to do. Free speech and free beer both speak of freedom. Free speech is a freedom that comes directly from liberty. Free beer, however, requires more than mere permission to drink fermented barley. It requires that someone has gone through the trouble to brew the beer and is willing to give it out. If no one is so inclined brew beer and give it away, the ideal of Freedom as in Free Beer contains a conflict. Free beer for you means beer servitude for someone else.

This is why freedom-loving Vulcans stick to promoting liberty. They see the potential conflict inherent in free beer freedoms as a contradiction. Liberty can be granted to all who respect the liberty of others or at least thats the ideal. (In practice we run up against a few conflicts or even contradictions.) So many libertarians would define freedom down to mere liberty, and thus wall off from their minds the messy business of balancing trade-offs.

I say mere liberty because for many people more liberty need not translate into more freedom. A marginal increase in liberty can result is subtantially less freedom, especially in the short run. This, I submit, is why libertarianism has limited popularity here in the Land of the Free. For millions of people liberal and conservative ideas offer more increments freedom than many libertarian ideas.

Consider a single mom who has to put in 50 hour weeks at Dennys to support her children. A cuddly fascist offering government childcare and socialized medicine along with his program of censorship of naughty TV and conquering Bolivia for no good reason offers more freedom to this mother than a smaller government libertarian. This is but one illustration. I give others elsewhere.

Libertarianism has limited popularity for good reason.

This is not a libertarian site. It is a pro-freedom site. Here, we attempt to balance several freedoms, including:

Back when I was a libertarian and active in the Libertarian Party, I spent thousands of dollars and hours promoting the party and the cause. Converts and recruits were few and far between. Today, I am mostly out of the game, playing Candy Land with my young daughter instead of placing signs, dropping leaflets, working booths and attending meetings. Yet I have well over a hundred people lining up to join my nonexistent new political party proposed elsewhere on this site.

Freedom is popular here in the Land of the Free.

What is not popular is knowledge of how to be more free. Many liberals call for mass bureaucracy because they know no other way to achieve freedom from the boss. If that is you, or you wish to persuade such liberals otherwise, see the red titles on the sidebar. Likewise, many environmentalists believe we have to abride economic freedom and/or our prosperous way of life in order to preserve nature. For you I have the green article series. For those of you who desire a safe and moral place to raise your children, there are the blue articles.

If you are ready to dive in and look at specific proposals, feel free to jump to the relevant article series. On the other hand, if you are a top down thinker, or a libertarian/small government conservative who has a hard time grokking the distinction between liberty and freedom, please continue with this series.

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What is Freedom? - holisticpolitics.org

The most quoted foreign policy statement in the President's speech was: "My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America." His formulation does not come as a surprise. Trump has never intended to lead the free world, and nor would the free world put him in charge. But as Trump's predecessors have learned, there is no keeping America safe or prosperous when the world is not. As a global businessman with interests on all continents, Trump's blindness to the interconnectedness entrenched by technology, the global economy, travel, trade and media is willful and worrying. On a broader level, this willful ignorance spotlights three ways in which Trump's remarks on foreign policy were alarming. First, he displayed a propensity to view the US role in international affairs almost entirely through a military lens. He has already appointed military generals to head not only the Department of Defense but also his National Security Council (twice over, including the deposed Michael Flynn and now H.R. McMaster) and the Department of Homeland Security. In his words, "To those allies who wonder what kind of friend America will be, look no further than the heroes who wear our uniform." By putting a military face on American solidarity around the world, Trump confirmed the serious concerns of diplomats and top military officials alike who have expressed worries about Trump's announcement of budget proposals that would effect a $54 billion increase in defense spending partly through drastic cuts in the budget of the State Department. More than 120 retired generals and admirals have signed a letter of protest. Meanwhile, Trump conspicuously omitted mention of economic ties or global concerns like climate change and human rights. His worldview is a more extreme version of the approach taken during the first term of the George W. Bush administration when singular emphasis on military force, or "hard power," drew the United States into draining wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, squandered the global goodwill engendered by the 9/11 attacks, caused anti-Americanism to spike and frayed American alliances. Despite an obsession with his own personal brand, Trump seems oblivious toward the brand value of what Joseph Nye has called the "soft power" that comes from projecting appealing aspects of American society and character abroad. He is also indifferent to my own concept of "smart power," or the imperative to engage a broad range of tools of statecraft, from diplomacy to aid to private sector engagement to military intervention. Trump's tunnel-vision foreign policy, centered on the military, will leave other elements of the US foreign policy toolbox idle while incurring significant expense and risk for troops pressured to become the solution to all of America's foreign policy challenges.

The second jarring aspect of Trump's foreign policy vision was the absence of any conception of the United States as a standard-bearer for freedom worldwide. While the United States has been at best an imperfect exemplar of freedom, often contradicting its own professed ideals, its self-conception as an inspiration and lifeline to democrats and dissidents around the world dates back to the Second World War at least.

In a large and growing number of countries the will of the people is not expressed through strong democratic institutions and processes. While the United States has limited influence globally and indeed must never try to dictate how other nations govern themselves, it has strived to be an ally and champion of those struggling to defend and promote freedom and democratic reforms. The support of new and emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Myanmar are among some of the United States' proudest achievements in recent decades. Trump's none-of-my-business pledge to let all nations plot their own course, coupled with the proposals he made earlier to dramatically reduce US foreign aid, offers nothing to those around the world who long for freedom and lack it.

Relying on Cabinet appointments, tax cuts and corporate subsidies to help the wealthy, Trump made clear his vision of diplomacy is not beholden to a practical, a political nor least a moral compulsion to uphold many decades of US leadership worldwide as an exemplar and defender of freedom.

Trump has been told -- but refuses to believe -- that American global leadership is not a public service to the rest of the world but rather an insurance policy for our own people, one that has kept war, plague and economic devastation mostly off-shore for many decades. Trump's disdain for the burdens and benefits of US global leadership -- so clearly articulated in his declaration that his job "is not to represent the world" -- won't simply leave a gap. The space created by the United States' withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, its equivocations on the Paris Climate pact and its insults toward the United Nations is already being filled by China, Russia and others.

By ceding the United States' global leadership role, Trump may ensure his successors cannot claim it back.

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'America First' puts freedom and leadership last (opinion ...

The ACLU is hosting a People Power action event on Saturday, when it will issue specific guidelines to activists on how they can have an impact on immigrant rights at a local level. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The American Civil Liberties Union is launching an ambitious plan to create a swath of freedom cities capable of resisting Donald Trumps immigration policies.

The civil rights organization, which has emerged as one of the Trump administrations major foes, plans to leverage individual cities local authority to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation.

The ACLU will reveal the freedom cities effort during the official launch of its new grassroots online platform, People Power, on Saturday. It will distribute a set of ordinances to activists, encouraging them to pressure local sheriffs and police commissioners to adopt more lenient policies on undocumented immigrants.

As Donald Trump does what he does, the greatest political power is in the cities and towns across America, said Faiz Shakir, the ACLUs national political director.

Because constitutionally, cities have sovereignty rights unto their own.

The ACLU is hosting a People Power action event on Saturday, when it will issue specific guidelines to activists on how they can have an impact on immigrant rights at a local level. The event will be live-streamed, and Shakir said ACLU supporters had already set up 2,300 watch parties across all 50 states.

Essentially we want people to think of their cities as cities of resistance, Shakir said. The ACLU will issue nine ordinances to activists on Saturday, and ask them to present them to their local officials.

The ordinances resemble a pledge that could be made by local sheriffs or police commissioners. They include a commitment to require a judicial warrant before detaining people at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to not authorize or engage in surveillance of a person or group based on their perceived immigration status.

We will be asking people to arrange a meeting with their sheriff or their police commissioner or their local precinct commander and raise these draft ordinances at that meeting, Shakir said. And have them discuss what their policies are with respect to immigrants. That would form the basis for follow-up meetings and follow-up policy advocacy.

Activists will be encouraged to submit details of their meeting to the People Power website, Shakir said, enabling more people to attend. The ACLU has tripled its membership since the night of the November election, according to the Washington Post, and collected more than $80m in donations.

In planning the action, Shakir said he had deviated away from the theory that [political action] needs to be simple.

Im saying, OK, people are fired up and Im going to test that and give them something a little bit difficult and hard and complex but has meaningful impact.

The freedom cities plan represents a new foray into grassroots organizing for the ACLU, which has traditionally focused more on legislative action.

Shakir, a former senior adviser to former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and former Senate minority leader Harry Reid, joined the ACLU on 20 January Trumps inauguration day to kick off the organizing effort. He has hired people who worked on Bernie Sanders campaign and for the White House under Barack Obama to work on the project.

The initial focus is on immigration, Shakir said, but the ACLU plans to expand, and have activists lobbying local officials on LGBT rights, womens equality, police surveillance and other issues.

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ACLU launching People Power to resist Trump immigration policies in 'freedom cities' - The Guardian

Guy Verhofstadt says Britons should be allowed to keep their rights as EU citizens after Brexit. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

British citizens should be able to keep various benefits of EU membership including freedom of movement after Brexit, the European parliaments chief negotiator has said.

Guy Verhofstadt said Britons could be allowed to keep certain rights if they applied for them on an individual basis. All British citizens today have also EU citizenship. That means a number of things: the possibility to participate in the European elections, the freedom of travel without problem inside the union.

We need to have an arrangement in which this arrangement can continue for those citizens who on an individual basis are requesting it.

Verhofstadt made the comments as European leaders meet in Brussels for the EU spring summit. He warned that the European parliament was committed to ensuring countries outside the union did not have a better deal than those within it, BBC 5 Live reported.

Verhofstadt has previously said the EU needs to be open and generous to individual UK citizens and said politicians were considering how to allow them to maintain their ties to the continent.

He told an audience at Chatham House in January: We are scrutinising, thinking, debating how we could achieve that that individual UK citizens would think their links with Europe are not broken.

Link:

Let Britons keep freedom of movement, says EU's Brexit negotiator - The Guardian

Come over to Revs. Ron and Karen Flessners home in Logan on Wednesday nights and you can be sure to experience a hearty dinner, followed by song, prayer and Bible study.

Its all part of Freedom Christian Fellowship, a multicultural, multi-ethnic, non-denominational effort by the native midwestern couple.

Our mission is to love God with all of our heart, soul and strength, said Karen Flessner, co-founder, executive director and associate pastor of the fellowship.

Story continues below video

Freedom Christian Fellowship welcomes anyone in the Cache Valley community, but places emphasis on international students from Utah State University.

That emphasis is reflected in the Flessners basement, where worship takes place every week. Small flags from different countries sit on a table. Framed pictures of past congregations from places like Africa and South Korea hang on the walls.

That is who we are, that is what we are, said Karen Flessner as she gave a tour around the basement.

Ron and Karen Flessners lives and their spiritual evolution are part of the story of how Freedom Christian Fellowship came to be.

Ron was born and raised in Illinois. His father was a pastor, but Ron claimed he really didnt believe the gospel until he was 16 years old.

It was one summer during the middle of his teenage tears when he found God, after he participated in a tent meeting service in central Illinois. Ron received his master of divinity degree in his native state, and began serving a mission in Illinois and Michigan in 1980.

Karen was born and raised in a Muslim country where her family practiced Taoism and Buddhism. She left her home country in 1995 to come study at Western Michigan University. Describing herself as a first generational curse breaker in her family, she converted to Christianity the same year. Karen became a professional minister and clinical Christian counselor.

Ron and Karen first met in February 1998 at a campus ministry retreat in Michigan. The following November, they were married.

The Flessners came to Logan in 2006 to start Freedom Christian Fellowship.

This came about through prayer, Karen Flessner said. The Lord called us.

Flessner said the goal of Freedom Christian Fellowship is not to entertain, despite the fact that on most Bible study nights, the family might break out the guitar or bongos to accompany their singing.

We are here for God, Karen Flessner said. We are dependent on God to lead us. We dont do anything on our own.

Get along with each other

Ron talked about the importance of bringing international students into Freedom Christian Fellowship.

God our creator loves us no matter the color, ethnicity or nationality, he wrote in an email to The Herald Journal. While here in Logan, Utah, we need to learn how and to practice how to understand and get along with each other.

But having international students over for dinner and worship goes beyond learning and understanding the Bible or God, Ron Flessner said.

When someone is new in town, especially in a new culture, that person needs to learn how to play by the new rules and how to be successful in their new daily lives, he wrote.

The Flessners expressed their support for the international students in their congregation.

We believe international students, scholars and their families should not feel alone or left out while they are in Logan, Ron Flessner wrote. If permitted, we would like to be their friend and family away from family. We would like them to feel at home, while away from their home.

Jinsu Choi, a USU graduate student majoring in civil environmental engineering, hails from South Korea.

Its been a big transition. I couldnt speak English at all when I first came here, Choi said. Ron and Karen gave me a lot of help.

Back home, when he was growing up, Chois family would attend church, but he did not.

I came here with a lot of challenges and maybe thats why I became a Christian, Choi said. Ron and Karen gave me a lot of opportunities.

He said got involved in the Freedom Christian Fellowship when he started playing guitar for the Flessners in their weekly Bible studies.

I started to read the Bible and I pray before eating. I go to church every Sunday, Choi said. Previously, my friends were any people, but today my friends are people in a church.

Samuel Serrano, a sophomore majoring in graphic design, came to Logan last year from Colombia. He heard about the Freedom Christian Fellowship through a fair on campus, where he met Ron Flessner.

I was looking for a Christian church because Ive been Christian my whole life, Serrano said. There are a million Mormon ones and a couple Christian ones.

He said joining Freedom Christian Fellowship has been a great experience.

Youre building your relationship with God the more you know about him, the better it makes you as a person, Serrano said.

Bible study with the congregation is great, he said, but the weekly dinners and togetherness with the Flessners is something else.

I feel like Im part of the family, he said.

See the rest here:

Home away from home: Freedom Christian Fellowship hosts international students - The Herald Journal

Were handing the baton over to the future leaders Kiddus I. Photograph: Bernard Benant

To hear one of the best roots reggae albums to come out of Kingston, Jamaica, this spring, you have to drive a long way from Trench Town. In fact, you have to leave the city altogether and head up high into the mountains that surround it.

Not every taxi is keen on making the trip, so you might want to enlist a locals help and hope their cars suspension can take it (the vehicle I find myself in seems to have given up on the concept of suspension long ago, the undercarriage cracking as we bounce along the potholes). As you climb, you watch Kingston unfurl below, eventually arriving not at a recording studio, but a house hidden in the hills. And on the balcony, overlooking the rolling lush greenery of the Blue Mountains, is where some of reggae musics biggest legends from the Congos Cedric Myton to Ken Boothe have congregated to record alongside talents from the younger generation.

Were handing the baton over to the future leaders, says Kiddus I, a 72-year-old Rastafarian who has been recording reggae music since the beginning of the 1970s and is rarely, if ever, seen without a spliff dangling from his lips. And if theyre properly inspired, then we know that the fire keeps burning.

The fruits of these sessions can be heard on Soul of Jamaica, a new album released through French label Chapter 2. Its part of its Inna de Yard series, which aims to capture the sound of reggae as it used to be by recording acoustically, outside. As Myton puts it: We went yard to yard in those days, so from 1965 we have been doing these things. And now it goes on again great chanting, great music, great culture.

Inside the house where the Soul of Jamaica sessions took place, stacks of vintage vinyl fill the front room, along with various pieces of art and the odd discarded instrument. On the sofa, a somewhat stoned Neville Ingram of the Viceroys has passed out, while outside on the terrace, his two bandmates are brewing coffee with Kiddus I. An audience with the latter is quite an experience. Fondling an impressively fragrant marijuana branch, he rhapsodises about the history of Jamaican music, breaking off into poetic ruminations on the nature of life and, occasionally, heading down extremely tangential alleyways. Over the course of an hour, he tells me about the time an acid trip gave him x-ray vision (I could look through me to my bone, everything in life living inside of me), recalls the time he saw a spaceship in the Cherry Gardens area of Kingston (It was there for five hours) and recounts a version of The Well to Hell hoax in which Siberian oil miners were alleged to have drilled down into hell as stone cold fact. Fresh off a long-haul flight from the UK, its amusingly tricky to keep up.

Yet his focus always returns to the music. He says that the bulk of Soul of Jamaica is made up of reworked old songs because some of them didnt get the proper treatment first time around. Yet these arent simple rehashes. Rather, the acoustic arrangements make use of subtle, organic arrangements and nyabinghi drums gentle, meditative rhythms brought to Jamaica by African slaves. Its a traditional rhythm, says one of the younger artists, Derajah, thumping his chest symbolically to show the link between life, nature and music that infuses the project.

The album is, in some small part, a reaction to the digitally enhanced and sexually charged dancehall and hip-hop that makes up much of Jamaicas current musical output. Kiddus I has a theory that digital music short-circuits a listeners electromagnetic system, thereby weakening them. He says you can test it by sticking out your arm and letting someone press down on it while listening to the two forms of music: With analogue you dont lose your strength, he says. But your resistance is weaker with digital music.

Before we have time to test his theory, Kiddus I is invited to step on to the balcony and sing. Today, he is recording a version of Edith Piafs Hymne lAmour Chapter 2s French influence making its way into the music which pianist Robbie Lynn begins gently before raising the tempo and hitting offbeat chords for added Jamaican flavour.

Out on the terrace, where we are served delicious food a Rastafarian vegan diet I chat to Myton about the project. An upbeat personality, with a high-pitched laugh and thick white dreads, he sees the sessions as helping to provide an uplifting voice in a world of turbulence: The people have to come to the realisation that what we have been taught from childhood days is a big brainwashing, he says. My old dream was that things have to be better, and that is my thing now.

On Soul Of Jamaica, Myton reworks the 1979 Congos track Youth Man and is proud that his old music endures. Heart of the Congos, our first album, is an antique for life, he says proudly. When we were doing it, we never really know that it would be so powerful.

He says its important for the younger generation to hear these songs afresh and that generation includes musicians such as Kevor Var Williams, a rootsy, soulful singer in the five-piece band the Pentateuch Movement. Softly spoken and wearing desert boots with red, gold and green socks, Var grew up singing in church while being schooled in Marcus Garvey and black history. For Soul of Jamaica, he has reworked one of his bands songs, Crime, and says that recording with the older generation has been eye-opening. Everyday I learn something by just observing, he says. This morning I was watching uncle Winston [McAnuff] just singing its recording, but its also a performance, its a live show. The moment you get a chance to sing you have to sing right from the soul.

Later on I see him put those words into practice, delivering a passionate performance that continues into the night as sound engineer Laurent Jais tries to capture the perfect version on his laptop. At one point Jais thinks hes got it, before a dog interrupts. Over here we can just ignore the dogs, he says, cackling, but back in Paris the dogs will be very much there.

Jais has a wild-eyed intensity and workaholic tendencies. I watch him complete a 12-hour shift with barely a toilet break, and he admits that his two-week stay on the island has passed without him having had a proper shower. But Var is hitting a sweet spot and he doesnt want to miss it, so rather than call it a day the sessions simply turn into a party, with musicians inside the main room dancing as huge water pipes are passed around.

The next day I go to Trench Town with Kiddus I and Winston McAnuff. Like Kiddus I, the 59-year-old McAnuff is undergoing a late career renaissance, thanks in part to his unlikely collaborations with French accordionist Fixi. He takes us to a tiny bar that someone promptly opens up to serve us Dragon Stout in the baking heat. There is no room to stand because the floor is taken up by several gigantic speakers from which the barman blasts out a reggae cover version of Hey Jude. Apparently, its McAnuffs latest single.

Its here in the yards of Trench Town that the musical culture Inna de Yard intends to capture was born a few blocks away is the government yard that Bob Marley once called home. Later that day, when I visit Ken Boothe at his grand blue and white house, he tells me it was a piano at the Boystown school in Trench Town that first forged his musical interest. Every day I would mess around on it, he says.

As Boothes grandchildren run around our feet, he shows us around his homemade museum, a room stuffed with posters, pictures and framed vinyl that document Jamaican musical history and therefore his own he first toured the UK in the mid 60s and was one of the first reggae musicians to have a major hit here thanks to his version of Everything I Own. Recording for Inna de Yard, he says, reminds him of those early days, when he was known as Mr Rock Steady.

Back when I recorded with Sir Coxsone and Duke Reid, there were just two tracks so everybody had to record at the same time, he says. If we made a mistake, we had to do it all again.

Half a century on, Boothe is still recording, and for Soul of Jamaica he reworked his own track Artibella, a song he loves so much his granddaughters all have variations of the name (Gabrella, Sabella and Abrella). This version is quieter and more subtle, because of the nyabinghi, he explains. But wherever I play it, the crowds ignite fire!

We retire outside to sit in the sun, chew moringa seeds and drink rosemary tea in Boothes yard. Appreciating the beauty and calm of such surroundings is perhaps key to understanding the appeal of Soul of Jamaica. While it would be easy to dismiss the project as backward-looking or disconnected from some of the grittier day-to-day life in Kingston, that would be to ignore the bigger ecological message that the record hopes to send out. After all, what is Soul of Jamaica if not an example of how human beings can work in harmony with the natural world?

As Var puts it: Previously, maybe some people dont want to hear a bird pass in the recording. But the view of the mountains, the vibe just right this is what freedom is.

The Soul of Jamaica: Inna de Yard is released on Chapter 2 on 17 March.

See the article here:

Reggae legends on their Soul of Jamaica album: 'This is what freedom is' - The Guardian