It's been over a year since the fireworks broke up Brains."
"It's about to be the third dance competition."
"I've grown 3 cm in the last year."
"Where and what are the fireworks doing at this moment?"
"I hope I'm in the middle of writing a new song in front of the piano."
"At the end of summer I will be 17 years old"
(Voice of Hibana) "Fireworks and Hibana Rika are the same."
"Fireworks Hikari Hanabi Hikari Fireworks Hikari"
"Yes, I'm just a momentary spark of fireworks."
♪ What more can I lose my heart?
Del Norte High School Air Force Junior ROTC Cadet Branden Hussey, who has lived what he calls “a challenge-based life“, was recently featured in an inspiring article in the Albuquerque Journal. Please take a look at Branden Hussey’s story. It is a story about Branden’s overcoming of physical limitations to be an active part of Air Force Jr. ROTC and other activities. Branden says “My only drive is to show people what people like me can do“.Wishing to dive deeper into local life and to experience more than just a tourist? During travels it may not be easy to meet local people and get to know “the real life” − hence we want to open our door to visitors to spend a day at our home.
During the day you will have an opportunity to explore the surrounding nature and our friendly village, to see close by attractions, and to take part in our daily live as much as you wish.
We are a family of three living in a red wooden house in the village called Munsmo about 15 kilometers from Vaasa town. If you are looking for a truly local but at the same time global experience, you are knocking the right door! Two of us have been born in Vaasa, one in Harare, and together we have so far lived in four different countries, not to mention tens of countries we have lived and visited together or separately. English is our home language, and we are more than happy to meet different people from all over the world.
AVAILABILITY: Year around by request. Please note that maximum number of visitors is 4 people or one family and each visit can last up to 6 hours, depending on what you would like to do and how much you have time to spend.
SUITABILITY: Suitable for small groups and families traveling together. You are very welcome to come alone as well. All you need is an open and curious mind and a bit of flexibility as sometimes e.g. weather might prevent us of doing some of the activities listed above.
PRICE includes hosting, selected activities and lunch (+VAT 24 %). We are offering also a family package including 2 adults and 1 to 3 children from 7 to 17 years. Younger children are free of charge. You can also book return transport from Vaasa with additional price.The Psychology of Fear and Control: The Path...
The defining characteristics of a democratic, progressive and enlightened society are freedom of expression and the freedom to flourish in whatever capacity we choose without fear or hindrance from the state or any other party as long as in the pursuance of these activities we first do no harm. These are our inalienable, God-given rights, enshrined in our constitution and in our soul by the almighty. We do not need approval from, nor do we need to apologise to, anyone for these natural rights. This is what it means to be fully human. By these criteria Dominica is far from democratic. Dominica has the semblance and the character of a repressive and oppressive dictatorial state in which freedom of expression is maliciously trampled underfoot and the dreams and ambitions of ordinary citizens are stillborn before they can be realised by a government and its agencies of power through the diabolical methodology of fear and control, lies and damn lies.
I state from the onset, before I am branded and demonised (although I am fully aware that what follows will not stop the ignorant from doing just that), I have absolutely no affiliation to any political party or to any leader of any party. I do not subscribe to the cult of party or personality. Justice is my cause, my flag is freedom's flag and my will and passion are to endeavour to fashion a just, loving and compassionate society in which I can be completely myself, fully human. These divine attributes are my birth-right, born with me and sealed with the first breath. These God-given qualities are also etched in the soul of every individual, and lest we forsake our humanity we must rage against injustice, against those who consciously and vindictively wish to suffocate them in outstanding, respectable citizens desiring only to express their freedom and speak truth to power. These are the elected men and women, whose arrogance blind them to the reasoned plea of others, and whose sole ambition is to exploit the vulnerability and innocence of the populace, misguidedly believing that the country they were elected to govern is their personal heirloom to do as they please and to pass to their children and their children's children when they have had their bellyful of the bounty.
Darkness has descended over Dominica. The storm gathers. An ill wind blows and speaks of the tyranny that has been, and warns of the tyranny that is and yet to come and demands that the regime listen, that it desist. But the ego is too overblown with the lust for power and sinful pride to listen to its own counsel or the wise counsel of its dying conscience to take a more enlightened path. Perhaps too the conscience is already dead and silenced to all reason and the course to hell, to oppression and repression, is much too mesmerising to resist. In this land in which our forefathers were forcibly brought, their freedom bludgeoned on the altar of profit and greed, their voices throttled by injustice and a corrupt morality, their soul beaten down by tyranny on a scale unsurpassed in human history, oppression and repression reigns once more, fear and deep anxiety are all-pervasive, whilst Justice sleeps, morality is dead, freedom and innocence are persecuted and prosecuted and fated for imprisonment and perhaps even death; the ultimate aim is to create a one party state in which all oppositional voices are effectively smothered.
The covenant between the state and its citizens has irrevocably broken down as Dominica moves inexorably towards a one party state through a systematic, orchestrated attempt to crush all political opposition. The opposition party, headed by the Honourable Lennox Linton, its supporters and other dissenting voices face, to an unprecedented degree, the autocratic powers of the state designed for the sole purpose of quashing their democratic and human rights. They are relentlessly pursued, victimised and prosecuted with a degree of venom that shock even passive observers. Arrests, lawsuits-gagging orders by another name- persecution with cries of treason, labelled as traitors and terrorists and enemies of the state, death threats or fatwas and political and social ostracism are meted out to democratically elected members of parliament and other political dissidents exercising their democratic rights to dissent from the hypocritical statements dished out to a gullible public, and who dare criticise the regime and wash Dominica's "dirty laundry" in public. What is more they are denied access to certain media outlets, and blamed for all the ills of the nation.
As a result of Lennox Linton's appearance on Passports for Sale, a CBS 60 Minutes documentary, he and other members of the parliamentary opposition have been held responsible for undermining the regimes Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme and sale of diplomatic passports, recently nominated the flagship of the economy. They stand accused of being busy political beavers who have engineered an imploding economy and short sighted, ad hoc, and lifeless social policies and programmes. If this is the case then they must also be held accountable for a failed agricultural and tourism sector, unparalleled levels of business closures; unprecedented levels of unemployment, crime and violence, child abuse, abuse of women, environmental pollution, drug and alcohol abuse and a debilitated healthcare system. The parliamentary opposition are held responsible for the failings of the regime and the dire state of the economy and social order all in an effort to bamboozle a naïve, uncritical public and empower them to judge the opposition guilty to relegate them to the political graveyard and effectively silence them.
At the same time unsavoury measures contrived to suppress and silence our freedom of expression, our rights to protest and to criticise injustice and other reprehensible acts to instil fear are being enacted by the state. Those who lawfully gather to protest injustice are confronted with unwarranted levels of surveillance, whilst guns stand at the ready in the hands of jackbooted police in combat fatigue to intimidate, to brutalise and to kill if necessary.
To ensure the success of the one party state, we, the citizens of this land are denied access to free and fair elections and the electoral reform that would make this democratic right a reality. Only through the ballot box the prime minister states will he relinquish the office of the prime minister, and yet through dubious practices, free and fair elections and electoral reform are a fanciful dream. Furthermore there are persistent efforts to silence the media that does not pass fairy-tale "alternative facts" as truth whilst using the other to broadcast hateful propaganda, to become in effect the mouthpiece of the ruling party, through which they are given the authority to use defamatory and incendiary language to insult, to viciously attack and malign the character of the parliamentary opposition and other political patriots who criticise without