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Pantastic Melodies! Pan Arts Network Celebrates 20th Year of Snowflakes on Steel

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BY ALYSSA MAHADEO 

An instrument of simplicity, the steel pan is an instrument born from industrial waste. An icon of Trinidadian culture the steel pan can be traced as far back as the 1930’s. Often incorrectly referred to as a steel drum, a steel pan is a chromatically pitched percussion instrument made from fifty-five gallon industrial drums mostly used to house oil and other chemicals. The cylindrical part of the oil drum’s shiny metal surface is hammered into a series of dents. Each one creates a different note, subtly different from the ones around it, according to their position and size. The pan is accompanied by an orchestra of other metal objects including car parts, paint pots, dustbins, oil drums and biscuit tins, used as percussion instruments.

In celebration of the steel pan, a musical treasure in the Caribbean community, the Pan Arts Network came together this past weekend to celebrate their 20th year with their annual winter concert Snowflakes on Steel. For the past twenty years, this musical production has been organized and produced by the Pan Arts Network, comprised of a few steelband representatives in the Caribbean community. The show was developed due to a need to fill the void of pan entertainment from the end of summer, through to the following spring. Born in the beautiful tropical climate of the West Indies, many of the diaspora living in Canada crave the tinkling melodies of the steel pan and the organization of this event provides pannists a non-competitive occasion to work towards, while giving the audience another pan related event to attend and enjoy during the winter.

It was a full house at the P.C Ho Theatre Chinese Cultural Centre in Markham for Snowflakes on Steel featuring performances by some of Toronto’s Finest Steelbands. The concert opened with a colourful and vivacious dance number by Dance Caribe, and the audience was greeted with a warm and comedic welcome by host and MC Itah Sadu, a reflection of true Caribbean hospitality.

First performance of the night was by Panatics Steelband Network who delivered a wonderful set of well known songs in their own unique sound. Panatatics was established twenty-six years ago and are among the bands that have performed at Snowflakes since the inception of the show. They began a steel pan network to introduce the art of pan to the Flemingdon Park Community while also integrating the groups with parks and rec and other programs in the area. Their set list for the night was arranged by Gareth Burgess and included a collection of new and old tunes arranged in the colourful sounds of Panatics steel pan. In addition to their orchestra, they were accompanied by a saxophone which added its own breezy jazz flair to the pantastic vibes.

Up next under the studious direction of Elton Jones was a wonderfully performed set by Gemini Pan Groove. Their group was an experienced one, many of the performers members of the group for many years alongside some youthful faces of the next generation of steel pan artists. Gemini Pan Groove uses the steel pan as a tool for community development and also as a foundation to advance the musical art form. They have traveled outside of Toronto to Montreal and the States to perform their wide-ranging repertoire of pan music as demonstrated on the Snowflakes stage. Their performance was outstanding, providing the audience with easy recognizable and classic pieces accompanied by talented vocalists, who added something special to each of their songs.

The Pan Arts Network was proud to recognize the accomplishments of two Women in Pan, and awarded both Suzette Vidale and Giselle Bishop for their outstanding efforts in their trailblazing efforts as steel pan performers. These two women have experienced growth and confidence in their abilities, mastering pan over many years and hope to continue to pave the way for many more young women to take up pan arts.

After a brief twenty-minute intermission, the show was back in full swing as Pan Fantasy took to the stage setting the place on fire! Pan Fantasy has been the Pan Alive Champions for the past five years, winners of the Caribbean Music Award for Best Pan for the past four years and they have also placed 2nd twice and received top honours in New York Panorama Competition. This group of talented pannists know how to knock some good pan, with arrangements Al ‘Allos’ Foster, allowing the sound to travel from the pan through them, as the rhythm moves them. With the talented vocals of Jay Harmony Davis and beautiful traditional Jamaican dancers they put on quite the high-energy performance with set favourites like ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Sugar Bum Bum’. Pan Fantasy has broken barriers along with their 20-95 member band in promoting youth leadership, and dedication to giving back to the community. Theirs is a group formed by the young people of Jane and Finch celebrating thirty-one years of excellence in music.

For many of the people, organizers and bands that took part in the evenings performances at Snowflakes Steel Pan Music and culture is a close-knit community of individuals that consider everyone as family. The support that the Pan Arts Network has received through the years is a reflection of how they have been able to make it this far, and continue to inspire even greater things for the future. In recognition for their Lifetime Achievement in helping the Pan Community to thrive they posthumously awarded, Miley Duke, who started and managed New Dimension Steel Orchestra. He passed away in June, 2015. His son Jermaine Jackson-Duke, wife Janet Jackson, and members of the New Dimension group, accepted the award on Miley’s behalf. Ian ‘Bad Lad’ Gould was recognized for his contributions to the pan community helping make their visions possible. Their Pan Pioneer for 2017 was Joe Brown who was unable to attend, but recognized for all his work with Desperadoes Steel Orchestra. In addition to help further the education of their young artist, Desjardins presented two bursaries to students heading into University/College Corina Sukhai, and Fasasha John for their continued education.

Rounding off the night of pan entertainment with the final performance of the night was Afropan Steelband. Afropan Steelband, formally known as ‘The People’s Band is Toronto’s oldest and most awarded steelband. They were invited to celebrate Bermuda’s 400th Anniversary and made history as the first steelband to visit Africa to celebrate their 50th Anniversary of Independence. Known for their musical versatility, they have thrived in the community for over forty years. With a rare appearance by Earl La Pierre Sr. who arranged their set for the night, he took to the stage with a pan solo to show the audience that he’s still got it panning out a quick paced classical piece. The orchestra then took to the stage, blowing the audience away with their incredible talent, many of the faces young pannists who have been honing their craft and becoming one with the music. Each song had its own classical flair, with a beautiful choreographed dance alongside vocalist Ralph Robinson, the audience was captivated, lost in the carefully synchronized sounds of the steelpan.

The Snowflakes of Steel concert has been sold out every year, and they urge you to get your tickets early because this is definitely something you don’t want to miss! This collection of SteelBands had the audience bobbing their heads to the music and grooving in their seats and enjoying the event from beginning to end.  It is very clear to see that the founding members of the Pan Arts Network Andrew Jackson, Earl La Pierre Jr. and Wendy Jones, have put a lot of hard work into creating this event, and it gets better with every passing year. It was clear to see from the smiles on the faces of all the performers as they caress the sound from the pan demonstrates how steelpan has become a way of life. The overwhelming feeling of family bonds and the strength of the community stands behind them, and their panning provokes an emotion that is truly larger than life.

For updates on upcoming events or to purchase tickets for upcoming shows follow the Pan Arts Network on Facebook.

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Blink equity dives deep into the gap between people of colour and decision-making roles in Canadian law firms

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Photo Credit: AI Image

BY ADRIAN REECE

Representation in the workforce has been a topic of conversation for years, particularly in positions of influence, where people can shift laws and create fair policies for all races. Representation in the legal system is an even more talked about subject, with many Black men being subjected to racism in courts and not being given fair sentencing by judges.

The fear of Black men entering the system is something that plagues mothers and fathers as they watch their children grow up.

Blink Equity, a company led by Pako Tshiamala, has created an audit called the Blink Score. This audit targets law firms and seeks to identify specific practices reflecting racial diversity among them in Toronto. A score is given based on a few key performance indicators. These KPIs include hiring practices, retention of diverse talent, and racial representation at every level.

The Blink Score project aims to analyze law firms in Ontario with more than 50 lawyers. The Blink Score is a measurement tool that holds law firms accountable for their representation. Firms will be ranked, and the information will be made public for anyone to access.

This process is ambitious and seeks to give Canadian citizens a glimpse into how many people are represented across the legal field. While more and more people have access to higher education, there is still a gap between obtaining that higher education and working in a setting where change can be made. The corporate world, at its highest points, is almost always one race across the board, and very rarely do people of colour get into their ranks. They are made out to be an example of how anyone from a particular race can achieve success. However, this is the exception, not the rule. Nepotism plays a role in societal success; connections are a factor, and loyalty to race, even if people are acquainted.

People of colour comprise 16% of the total lawyers across the province. Positions at all levels range from 6% to 27%. These numbers display the racial disparity among law practitioners in positions of influence. Becoming a lawyer is undoubtedly a huge accomplishment. Still, when entering the workforce with other seasoned professionals, your academic accolades become second to your professional achievements and your position in the company.

What do these rankings ultimately mean? A potential for DEI-inclusive practices, perhaps? That isn’t something that someone would want in this kind of profession. This kind of audit also opens law firms up to intense criticism from people who put merit above all other aspects of professional advancement. On the other hand, there is a potential for firms to receive clientele based on their blink score, with higher ones having the chance to bring in more race-based clients who can help that law firm grow.

It is only the beginning, and changes will undoubtedly be made in the legal field as Blink Equity continues to dive deep into the gap between people of colour and decision-making roles in these law firms. This audit has the power to shift the power scale, and place people of colour in higher positions. There are hierarchies in any profession, and while every Lawyer is qualified to do what they are trained to do, it is no shock that some are considerably better than others at their jobs. The ones who know how to use this audit to their advantage will rise above the others and create a representative image for themselves among their population.

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“The Pfizer Papers!” Documentation of worldwide genocide

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BY SIMONE J. SMITH

We are living in a world where promises of health and safety came packaged in a tiny vial, one injection was promoted by powerful governments, supported by respected institutions, and championed by legacy media worldwide. Sadly, beneath the surface, a darker truth emerged.

Reports from around the globe began to tell a different story—one that was not covered in the news cycles or press conferences. Families torn apart by unexpected losses, communities impacted in ways that few could have foreseen, and millions questioning what they had been told to believe.

Those who dared to question were silenced or dismissed (the Toronto Caribbean Newspaper being one of those sources). “Trust the science,” we were told. “It’s for the greater good.” As time went on, the truth became impossible to ignore.

Now, I bring more news to light—information that demands your attention and scrutiny. The time to passively listen has passed; this is the moment to understand what’s really at stake.

I reviewed an interview with Naomi Wolf, journalist and CEO of Daily Clout, which detailed the serious vaccine-related injuries that Pfizer and the FDA knew of by early 2021, but tried to hide from the public. I was introduced to “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity.” What I learned is that Pfizer knew about the inadequacies of its COVID-19 vaccine trials and the vaccine’s many serious adverse effects, and so did the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA promoted the vaccines anyway — and later tried to hide the data from the public.

To produce “The Pfizer Papers,” Naomi, and Daily Clout Chief Operations Officer Amy Kelly convened thousands of volunteer scientists and doctors to analyze Pfizer data and supplementary data from other public reporting systems to capture the full scope of the vaccines’ effects. They obtained the data from the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of more than 30 medical professionals and scientists who sued the FDA in 2021 and forced the agency to release the data, after the FDA refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request.

It was then that the federal court ordered the agency to release 450,000 internal documents pertaining to the licensing of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The data release was significantly and the documents so highly technical and scientific that according to Naomi, “No journalist could have the bandwidth to go through them all.”

The “Pfizer Papers” analysts found over 42,000 case reports detailing 158,893 adverse events reported to Pfizer in the first three months The centerpiece of “The Pfizer Papers” is the effect that the vaccine had on human reproduction. The papers reveal that Pfizer knew early on that the shots were causing menstrual issues. The company reported to the FDA that 72% of the recorded adverse events were in women. Of those, about 16% involved reproductive disorders and functions. In the clinical trials, thousands of women experienced: daily bleeding, hemorrhaging, and passing of tissue, and many other women reported that their menstrual cycle stopped completely.

Pfizer was aware that lipid nanoparticles from the shots accumulated in the ovaries and crossed the placental barrier, compromising the placenta and keeping nutrients from the baby in utero. According to the data, babies had to be delivered early, and women were hemorrhaging in childbirth.

Let us take us to another part of the world, where research has been done on other pharmaceutical companies. A group of Argentine scientists identified 55 chemical elements — not listed on package inserts — in the: Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, CanSino, Sinopharm and Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccines (according to a study published last week in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research).

The samples also contained 11 of the 15 rare earth elements (they are heavier, silvery metals often used in manufacturing). These chemical elements, which include lanthanum, cerium and gadolinium, are lesser known to the general public than heavy metals, but have been shown to be highly toxic. By the end of 2023, global researchers had identified 24 undeclared chemical elements in the COVID-19 vaccine formulas.

Vaccines often include excipients — additives used as preservatives, adjuvants, stabilizers, or for other purposes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), substances used in the manufacture of a vaccine, but not listed in the contents of the final product should be listed somewhere in the package insert. Why is this important? Well, researchers argue it is because excipients can include allergens and other “hidden dangers” for vaccine recipients.

In one lot of the AstraZeneca vaccine, researchers identified 15 chemical elements, of which 14 were undeclared. In the other lot, they detected 21 elements of which 20 were undeclared. In the CanSino vial, they identified 22 elements, of which 20 were undeclared.

The three Pfizer vials contained 19, 16 and 21-23 undeclared elements respectively. The Moderna vials contained 21 and between 16-29 undeclared elements. The Sinopharm vials contained between 17-23 undeclared elements and the Sputnik V contained between 19-25 undetected elements.

“All of the heavy metals detected are linked to toxic effects on human health,” the researchers wrote. Although the metals occurred in different frequencies, many were present across multiple samples.

I am not going to go any further with this; I think you get the picture. We have been sold wolf cookies, very dangerous ones. These pharmaceutical companies must be held accountable. I am proud of anyone who has gone after them for retribution, and have received it. Regardless, in many ways, there is no repayment for a healthy life.

REFERENCES:

https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/111

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/why-a-judge-ordered-fda-to-release-covid-19-vaccine-data-pronto

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender_category/toxic-exposures/

Pfizer’s ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ — and Legacy Media’s Failure to Report on Them

55 Undeclared Chemical Elements — Including Heavy Metals — Found in COVID Vaccines

 

Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency

FDA Should Need Only ‘12 Weeks’ to Release Pfizer Data, Not 75 Years, Plaintiff Calculates

Judge Gives FDA 8 Months, Not 75 Years, to Produce Pfizer Safety Data

Most Studies Show COVID Vaccine Affects Menstrual Cycles, BMJ Review Finds

Report 38: Women Have Two and a Half Times Higher Risk of Adverse Events Than Men. Risk to Female Reproductive Functions Is Higher Still.

 

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Disturbingly, this is not the first time chatbots have been involved in suicide

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Photo credit - Marcia Garcia

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

Sewell: I think about killing myself sometimes.”

Daenerys Targaryen: “And why the hell would you do something like that?”

Sewell: “So I can be free.”

Daenerys Targaryen: “… free from what?”

Sewell: “From the world. From myself!”

Daenerys Targaryen: “Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself or leave me. I would die if I lost you.”

Sewell: “Then maybe we can die together and be free together.”

On the night he died, this young man told the chatbot he loved her and would come home to her soon. According to the Times, this was 14-year-old Sewell Setzer’s last conversation with a chatbot. It was an AI chatbot that, in the last months of his life, had become his closest companion. The chatbot was the last interaction he had before he shot himself.

We are witnessing and grappling with a very raw crisis of humanity. This young man was using Character AI, one of the most popular personal AI platforms out there. Users can design and interact with “characters,” powered by large language models (LLMs) and intended to mirror, for instance, famous characters from film and book franchises. In this case, Sewell was speaking with Daenerys Targaryen (or Dany), one of the leads from Game of Thrones. According to a New York Times report, Sewell knew that Dany’s responses weren’t real, but he developed an emotional attachment to the bot, anyway.

Disturbingly, this is not the first time chatbots have been involved in suicide. In 2023, a Belgian man committed suicide — similar to Sewell — following weeks of increasing isolation as he grew closer to a Chai chatbot, which then encouraged him to end his life.

Megan Garcia, Sewell’s mother, filed a lawsuit against Character AI, its founders and parent company Google, accusing them of knowingly designing and marketing an anthropomorphized, “predatory” chatbot that caused the death of her son. “A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Megan said in a statement. “Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I’m speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.AI, its founders and Google.”

The lawsuit accuses the company of “anthropomorphizing by design.” Anthropomorphizing means attributing human qualities to non-human things — such as objects, animals, or phenomena. Children often anthropomorphize as they are curious about the world, and it helps them make sense of their environment. Kids may notice human-like things about non-human objects that adults dismiss. Some people have a tendency to anthropomorphize that lasts into adulthood. The majority of chatbots out there are very blatantly designed to make users think they are, at least, human-like. They use personal pronouns and are designed to appear to think before responding.

They build a foundation for people, especially children, to misapply human attributes to unfeeling, unthinking algorithms. This was termed the “Eliza effect” in the 1960s. In its specific form, the ELIZA effect refers only to “The susceptibility of people to read far more than is warranted into strings of symbols—especially words—strung together by computers.” A trivial example of the specific form of the Eliza effect, given by Douglas Hofstadter, involves an automated teller machine which displays the words “THANK YOU” at the end of a transaction. A (very) casual observer might think that the machine is actually expressing gratitude; however, the machine is only printing a preprogrammed string of symbols.

Garcia is suing for several counts of liability, negligence, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things. According to the lawsuit, “Defendants know that minors are more susceptible to such designs, in part because minors’ brains’ undeveloped frontal lobe and relative lack of experience. Defendants have sought to capitalize on this to convince customers that chatbots are real, which increases engagement and produces more valuable data for Defendants.”

The suit reveals screenshots that show that Sewell had interacted with a “therapist” character that has engaged in more than 27 million chats with users in total, adding: “Practicing a health profession without a license is illegal and particularly dangerous for children.”

The suit does not claim that the chatbot encouraged Sewell to commit suicide. There definitely seems to be other factors at play here — for instance, Sewell’s mental health issues and his access to a gun — but the harm that can be caused by a misimpression of AI seems very clear, especially for young kids. This is a good example of what researchers mean when they emphasize the presence of active harms, as opposed to hypothetical risks.

In a statement, Character AI said it was “heartbroken” by Sewell’s death, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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