Mattel, the famed creator of Barbie has recently come out with something innovative for kids to play with. Their new doll can be a boy, a girl, no gender specification, or both. They have come out with the world’s first gender-neutral doll to redefine which gender gets to play with girl or boy labeled toys, completely eradicating traditional taboos children have been used to growing up with.

Senior Vice President of Mattel Fashion Doll Design, Kim Culmone said: “Toys are a reflection of culture and as the world continues to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity, we felt it was time to create a doll line free of labels.”

These versatile dolls can be found with different types of skin tones. They can be dressed up and styled with long hair wigs, skirts, shorts or pants and three different pairs of shoes and other accessories. Time Magazine commented that these 11-inch dolls’ “lips are not too full, the eyelashes not too long and fluttery, the jaw not too wide. There are no Barbie-like breasts or broad, Ken-like shoulders.”

In recent years, millennial parents have tried to go against gender stereotypes when it comes to their children’s toys, and this time, major companies have listened. Their buying power has already convinced Disney to eradicate boy-girl labels from their children’s costumes, making girl costumes for Captain America and boy costumes for Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

In 2018, Mattel also let go of differentiating toy divisions and replaced them with non-gendered sections, like for example – cars or dolls.

These new Barbies will sell at $29.99 along with a slogan that says: “A doll line designed to keep labels out and invite everyone in.”

With this new move of theirs, they know that they will be alienating a huge percentage of this previous buyers. According to a survey completed by Pew Research, 76% of the public support parents that allow their daughters to play with toys traditionally associated with boys, while only 64% of the public endorse boys to actively play with girl-associated toys.

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It’s been said that within weakness and vulnerability, lies beauty – but more often than not, inequality just brings people sorrow. Domestic violence is a worldwide problem that up until just recently, has been unspoken about and taboo.

An artist in Turkey felt this tragedy to be a heartbreaking and important matter that he wanted to spread awareness to his countrymen by beautifully commemorating all those that became victims of this criminal act, so justice can be served to them even through a different medium. 440 pairs of women’s heels were displayed and hung up on an exterior wall of a building in Istanbul, Turkey for all those that fell victim to domestic violence.

Women from all over the world have experienced violence in their own homes, by people who are closest to them – in fact this is one of the most common reasons of violent deaths in women.

40% of women in Turkey have suffered from cases of domestic violence, with some having tragic endings that can never be changed. To bring awareness to this recurring problem, local artist and graphic designer Vahit Tuna came up with a monumental idea that would attract the interest of the Turkish people.

440 women in the country were murdered by their own husbands just in last year, hence the same numbers of shoes in display to commemorate each of these women that has recently passed.

Tuna said that his inspiration to create something as a protest to this came from all the messages and posts he saw about the growing problem through social media. He then noticed that these stories would disappear as quickly as they were presented to the public eye, that he realized he needed to make a reminder about it so that people could take more notice and action.

The artist chose to use high heels, and not any other type of shoes as his medium of art to represent the symbol of feminine power and independence he wishes all the women in this world to have. These high heels did not belong to the slain victims, but are a cultural gesture for their representation. He feels that these heels show an aesthetically direct message to femininity.

He also feels that these shoes are a symbol of women having been employed, which represents independence from their partners.

In some Turkish regions, it is often tradition to display a person’s shoes outside their homes when they pass. It becomes a symbol of mourning.

Tuna believes that having knowledge is power and therefore he feels it is important for everybody to be aware of the problem, in order to solve it as an individual. Every person has to do their part to create a movement from within and change the system. Tuna’s other projects also concentrate and represent socio-economic issues his country is struggling to solve.

This art installation is found in the center of Istanbul and will be on public display until March 2020.

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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign called for a large fortified border wall on the Mexico-US border. Amidst a lot of controversy and dissention from Congress, and the majority of the US population, the Trump Wall has been started using steel beams with openings in between beams so that border agents could see through it.

In protest, 2 California professors, Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, associate professor at San Jose State, came up with an ingenious way of mocking the barrier. They utilized the spaces in between beams to place several seesaws so that kids from both sides could play with each other and enjoy. “Sube y Baja” (go up and go down) became the attraction of the border wall, dividing Mexico from the US in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, that not only attracted kids, but adults as well.

“The wall became a literal fulcrum for US-Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides, with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side,” Rael was quoted as he expressed excitement and joy while watching kids and adults from both sides play together on the seesaws.

Even as the controversy still continues, especially with regards to funding (billions of dollars), environmental damage, and habitat destruction, at least citizens from both nations can have fun and enjoy at the Trump wall. Videos and photos taken showing kids and adults from both sides laughing and waving, makes you wonder if it’s because they are having fun…or are laughing at a special someone…

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On June 12, 2019, cages depicting a guerrilla art installation with ‘children’ locked inside appeared all over Manhattan NYC, wanting to make known the real situation of immigrant children that are currently living this reality in detention centers along the southern border of the United States. 24 sculptures were carefully distributed in the city that symbolized a young child, under a foil blanket on the floor inside a tiny cage, along with real audio being played of crying children that are being separated from their families. This disturbing sound was recorded live by news outlets. 

Each sculpture shows a sign explaining the works and providing information about the campaign called ‘No Kids in Cages,’ which is run by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, otherwise known as RAICES. 

They created this artwork as a “protest to the more than 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border. This is not history. This is happening now. #NoKidsInCages is about the children. We cannot be a nation that separates families.” RAICES posted on their official Twitter account. 

Naturally, these installations quickly went viral on different social media outlets, especially when the NYPD officers began impounding the artworks in different locations, which were carefully thought out and installed across major new organizations and media companies like the offices of CNN, NBC and Buzzfeed. They were also installed across known tourist destinations like the American Museum of Natural History and Union Square. 

The demonstration was one solution to aim for Congress to pass the HR541, Keep Families Together Bill. 

To make a bigger impact at getting their message across, RAICES partnered up with ad agency Badger & Winters, which the firm did pro bono. This partnership resulted in a part advocacy, part guerrilla ad, part art installation. 

Madonna Badger, CCO and founder of Badger & Winters told artnet News that: “We were all really outraged when [family separation and the detention of children] first happened, but in this 24/7 news cycle it’s hard to hold on to that, because it seems like there’s something outrageous happening every single day. We wanted to do something that would stand out, to help save these kids.”

There were various concepts that were discussed for action but Badger felt that the cafe sculptures showcased with the recordings of the immigrant children crying was the most powerful and simplest message to get across, which also reflected the true conditions that RAICES had seen in border detention facilities. 

“They don’t let you take out any photographs, and they don’t let you take any videos. The only thing [news outlets] could sneak out was the cries of the children.” Badger added.

The installations itself were designed by Square Design Inc., a Brooklyn-based design firm, assisted by ten street artists. One artist that was in charge of the installations, who prefers to be anonymous said: “We did it very early in the morning so that people would see them when they came out of the subway. If you’re conspicuous enough, people will assume that you’re supposed to be doing whatever you’re doing. We knew they wouldn’t last long out on the street, because no business or residence wants to be fined for sidewalk obstruction.”

True enough, within that morning, most installations had already been removed from the streets. In Midtown, almost a dozen policemen were outside the FOX News studios to disassemble one of the sculptures, according to NBC. 

“It’s funny that they’re so efficient about taking something off the street that’s political,” said the anonymous artist. “If it was a couch or a baby carriage out on the street, it would take forever.”

There are no plans in claiming the artworks that were impounded, but Badger wants to create the same message-sending project in another city, possibly Washington D.C. “Our goal is to be able to bring this to more and more people’s attention,” she said. “Within a few hours, it was up to like 12 million impressions.”

And while setting up street art would be an unlikely reason to change the course of the decision-making of the House of Representatives, Badger hopes it will encourage the public to lobby for the HR541 and get things moving to help these immigrant children that were taken away from their families. 

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Most music buffs know Pink Floyd as an iconic British band in the rock genre. Famous were their progressive and psychedelic music.  The albums The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall of the 70’s era became two of the best selling albums of all time. However, maybe only the true fans of the band would know guitarist David Gilmour…until now.

David Gilmour was inspired and stirred by the message of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, and wanted to help make a difference to improve world conditions, particularly climate change.

So he did what he believed was the only course of action that he could. He auctioned off his guitars, including the black Fender Stratocaster that helped create The Dark Side of the Moon and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The 12-string Martin also went…all in all, he raised $21.5 million. It’s the most valuable auction of musical instruments in history.

More surprising was that he donated all the proceeds to charity! The charity ClientEarth takes legal steps to combat climate change.”The global climate crisis is the greatest challenge that humanity will ever face,” he tweeted.

His unbelievable grand gesture which was applauded worldwide may have a larger impact…maybe persuading others to exchange their mementos, collectibles, for cash to help solve the worldwide emergency brought about by climate change. “We need a civilised world that goes on for all our grandchildren and beyond in which these guitars can be played and songs can be sung,” he continued…and in a video, strummed a placid instrumental.

Hopefully Mother Earth will benefit from this act of charity and others to come…after all, it’s the only home we have.

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Worldwide bee populations in recent years have seen a sharp decline, a lot of them dying-off at very concerning rates. In 2016 alone, close to half, or roughly 44% of the bee colonies in the United States have succumbed to the effects of pesticides, burned fuel, and corporate farming practices, causing environmental groups to sound the alarm. The EPA warns that if bee numbers don’t recover to what they were 10 years ago, the world could be facing a food crisis unlike anyone has ever seen before. 

But how could losing a creature so tiny affect us in such a profound way you ask? Well, these tiny workers help pollinate up to 80% of the agricultural crops that we enjoy. If we lose them, we lose the ability to grow the plants that provide us with the food we eat. To help them recover their numbers, people and organizations are now moving towards saving the bees, providing them with safe places to proliferate and reproduce.

Some McDonald’s stores in Sweden, for example, have set up beehives on their rooftops. Others have also planted flowering plants in efforts to make their surroundings bee-friendly. But their efforts don’t stop there. 

To pay tribute to the efforts in helping bees recover their numbers, the food chain hired an expert to create their smallest store ever, a fully-functioning beehive that looks like a miniature McDonald’s restaurant complete with the Golden Arches, a drive-through, and an al-fresco dining area.

The European Union has recently inked an accord to fully-outlaw the use of bee-killing neonicotinoids being used by commercial farms to help prevent the killing-off of bees. However, the opposite is happening in the USA. The current administration recently approved the dumping of pesticides on large swathes of land in order to save cotton crops. While this may have helped in the short-term, it isn’t difficult to guess how it would affect the environment in the long-run. 

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Country superstar and staunch marijuana activist, Willie Nelson may be 86-years-old but he is far from being old news. The American singer, songwriter, and producer is once again making headlines, this time for his love of horses.

It was discovered that Nelson’s fondness for horses, a passion that runs in the family, even led him to rescue a stable of horses bound for the kill-house, adopting them and bringing them home to his sprawling, 700-acre ranch in Texas.

Nelson’s ranch, known as Luck Ranch, is now home to the 70 horses that he saved, its name aptly-suited as the horses should really consider themselves as the luckiest in the world.

“My horses are probably the luckiest horses in the world. They get hand-fed twice a day, and they were just ready to go to slaughter is probably the last thing they remembered, so they’re happy horses,” says Nelson in an interview.

The musician’s romance with horses isn’t too hard to notice, in fact, songs about the beautiful beasts have been part of his long list of country hits, with tunes like Ride Me Back Home and The Love of Horses being some of the more recent ones to hit the airwaves.

The video to his song, The Love of Horses, shows Nelson working with a group called Habitats for Horses, an organization working to ban the slaughter of horses.

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Many of us think we couldn’t live without money but Irishman Mark Boyle has a different belief about the best things in life. Here’s how he finds life without spending, with no income and zero bank balance.

“If someone told me seven years ago, in my final year of a business and economics degree, that I’d now be living without money, I’d have probably choked on my microwaved ready meal.”

According to Boyle, the plan back then was to ‘get a good job’, make as much money as possible, and buy the stuff that would show society he was successful.

Like most individuals raised in a consumer-driven society, he never second guessed those goals. For a while he had a fantastic job managing a big organic food company and even had a yacht in the harbor. If it hadn’t have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi, he’d still be pursuing the same life.

“I’d still be doing it today. Instead, for the last fifteen months, I haven’t spent or received a single penny. Zilch”.

The change in life path came one evening on the yacht while philosophizing with a friend over a glass of Merlot. “Whilst I had been significantly influenced by Mahatma’s quote “be the change you want to see in the world”, I had no idea what that change was up until then.”

The two friends began talking about all the major issues in the world – environmental destruction, resource wars, factory farms, sweatshop labor – and wondered which of the issues they could best devote their time to. Mark didn’t feel he could really make any difference, however “being two small drops in a highly polluted ocean”.

That evening, though, a revelation came through: “These issues weren’t as unrelated as I had previously thought – they had a common root cause. I believe the fact that we no longer see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment, and animals they affect is the factor that unites these problems.”

Boyle believes that the degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that it now means most people are completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the ‘stuff’ they buy.

It can be agreed that few people actually want to cause suffering to others; most just don’t have any idea that they directly are. The tool that has enabled this separation is money, especially in its globalized format.

“If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it today” is one of Mark’s examples as to why it’s important a reconnection with natural/source living is established. “If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior décor. If we had to clean our own water, we probably wouldn’t shit in it”.

The above arguments all honestly assess the undervalue most objects now have. With convenience at our fingertips, most don’t consider where their trash product or unwanted items go.

Deciding to be the change, this then spurred Mark to fully dive into his new viewpoint and give up money, which he only planned on doing for a year. “I made a list of the basics I’d need to survive. I adore food, so it was at the top. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering and using waste grub, of which there are far more”.

On his first day, he fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. For himself, however, he ate his own crops and waste only made up about 5% of his diet. “I cooked outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove”.

The next concern was shelter. He found himself a caravan from Freecycle, parked it on an organic farm he volunteered with, and renovated it out to be off the electricity grid. I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode in a wood burner made from an old gas bottle, and I had a compost loo to make ‘humanure’ for my veggies”. Up front and to the point, Boyle clearly understood the necessity of using every available resource to be most sustainable.

“I bathed in a river, and for toothpaste I used washed up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan. For loo I’d relieve the local newsagent of its papers (Once I wiped my arse with a story about myself); it wasn’t double quilted but it quickly became normal”. For transportation, Mark used his bike and trailer, using the 55 km commute to the city as an alternative solution for the gym. Beeswax candles served as his lighting.

Humorously inspiring to some, deluded and anti-capitalist to others, Mark had this to say about his radical lifestyle: “Many people label me as anti-capitalist. Whilst I do believe capitalism is fundamentally flawed, requiring infinite growth on a finite planet, I am not anti anything.” More than anything, Boyle claims to be pro-nature, pro-community, and pro-happiness. How often is that a city dweller’s life philosophy?

“And that’s the thing I don’t get – if all this consumerism and environmental destruction brought happiness, it would make some sense. But all the key indicators of unhappiness – depression, crime, mental illness, obesity, suicide and so on are on the increase.” More money, it seems, does not equate to more happiness. (See Documentary: Happy)

Another positive effect of Mark’s unique lifestyle is the joy he has created for himself. “Ironically, I have found this year to be the happiest of my life. I’ve more friends in my community than ever, I haven’t been ill since I began, and I’ve never been fitter. I’ve found that friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is spiritual, and that independence is really interdependent.”

Mark’s example certainly stands as inspiration for those seeking freedom from the fast-paced modern age; most alternative media sources would agree that the more one reconnects to nature, the better their mental, physical, and spiritual health is. However, could everyone live like this? According to Mark, no.

“It would be a catastrophe, we are too addicted to both it and cheap energy, and have managed to build an entire global infrastructure around the abundance of both.”

The prospect of gradually transitioning to re-localized, small communities is a possibility, though. With greener energy sources and healthier communities being implemented at a growing rate, natural living is already a reality, but may be made much more mainstream in the future to come.

“For over 90 percent of our time on the planet, a period when we lived much more ecologically, we lived without money. Now we are the only species to use it, probably because we are the species most out of touch with nature.”

Asked what was missing from his old world of lucre and business, Mark replied “Stress. Traffic-jams. Bank statements. Utility bills. Oh yeah, and the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down at the local”.

It just goes to show, if you are passionate about anything, you can be that change you’d like to see in the world.

Sources:

World Observer

The Guardian

This article (The Man Who Lives Without Money) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.

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Jaimie Wilson knew from the time that he was five years old that he was always meant to be a boy. He may have been born a girl, even eventually growing up to have long, flowing blonde hair and womanly curves to boot, but deep down inside he always identified himself as a male. When the time came that Jaimie finally felt the need to be his true self, his family and friends couldn’t come to terms with it. But even losing his loved ones wouldn’t stop him from becoming the man he always knew he was, nor would it stop him from living his life the way he wanted to.

See how he made an incredible transformation for female to male, and doesn’t regret a thing.

Jaimie Wilson, The Only Daughter In The Family

Jaimie Wilson grew up in an incredibly conservative community in Livingston County, Michigan. As the fourth child, and only girl, in the family, Jaimie seemingly knew from a young age that he was no girl, no matter what kind of body he was born into.

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With Idaho and Utah passing bills legalizing breastfeeding in their respective jurisdictions, the natural act of providing sustenance by a mother to her own child outside the confines of her home or away from the general population has only now, in 2018, been accepted by all 50 states.

Over the years, acceptance for the practice has been divided, with half of the public viewing breastfeeding in public as taboo, and law enforcement, on some occasions, citing mothers for public indecency when called in on a complaint. With this new development being most welcome, its approval did not come without resistance.

In Utah, Republican Congressman Curt Webb protested during a hearing that the exposure could lead to immodesty. “This seems to say you don’t have to cover up at all,” the representative told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I’m not comfortable with that, I’m just not.” 

Part of the reason why it took so long to legalize breastfeeding in public is the lack of representatives in state legislature who understand and sympathize with its importance to the welfare of mothers: women. 

Although state legislature being dominated by men all these years has made the journey to legalization a lengthy one, not all men in congress are unsympathetic to the plight of mothers, as exemplified by Idaho Republican Rep. and bill sponsor Paul Amador who is a father to a 5-month-old son.

“Personally, I find it disappointing that we’re in 2018 and we still haven’t passed this law in Idaho. I think we can take a proactive stance here through legislation to promote the natural bond and health benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child. I also believe the health and nutritional choices of our families are best left as decisions for our families, not our government.”

Numerous research material suggest that fear of judgment discourages mothers from breastfeeding in public places thus, with this legislative milestone protecting the right of women to feed her infant formalized, the benefits of breastfeeding on infant health and nutrition  can now be secured.

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