Monday 27 September 2010
Saturday 25 September 2010
Song saturday..............and a lesson in sustainability.
The information on this web site is scary……………these figures are completely unsustainable.
Then I started reading about this guy………………….
Jaime Lerner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jaime Lerner
Jaime Lerner (born December 17, 1937) was governor of the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil. He is renowned as an architect and urban planner, having been mayor of Curitiba, capital of Paraná, three times (1971–75, 1979–84 and 1989–92). In 1994, Lerner was elected governor of Paraná, and was reelected in 1998.Lerner was born to a Jewish family originally from Poland in Curitiba. He graduated from the Escola de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal do Paraná; (Architecture School of the Federal University of Paraná) in 1964. In 1965, he helped create the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (Institute of Urban Planning and Research of Curitiba, also known as IPPUC) and participated in the design of the Curitiba Master Plan.
Also one of the worlds leading environmentalists, he believes ‘the city’ can be used as a solution not a problem
Here is how he gets his message across
And on the same subject…………..another song, neither song is the greatest music in the world but the message is sound.
Thursday 23 September 2010
Teresa Lewis, 41, a grandmother with an IQ of about 70, who would be classified here as having a severe learning difficulty, is about to be exacuted in southern Virginia. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad contrasted the lack of protest over her impending execution to the "storm" surrounding a woman sentenced to be stoned in Iran. He has a point, regardless of guilt, severity of crime, method of exacution, etc.............if exacution is wrong in Iran, methinks, its got to be pretty much wrong in Virginia.
Saturday 18 September 2010
Young Women in Afghanistan...
Afghan national basketball player.
Afghan girl studying human rights and politics.
Art Sunday; Mina Sherzoy
awwsominfo | 29 December 2007
Contact info: msherzoy@gmail.com
msherzoy@awwsom.com
AWWSOM Showcases Designs in New Dehli, India on December 7, 2007
Fashion has a new meaning for Mina in Afghanistan. Fashion for Mina is a way of teaching women and their families to live again, of nursing people back to work culture and more importantly, making women economically empowered. This to Mina is the biggest fashion statement of all: Empowerment.
Over the years Mina Sherzoy has been trying to find a way to provide income for the poor and deprived widows of war. In addition to stimulating these women economically, she has helped also revive the handicrafts of Afghanistan which disappeared during the 30 years of war. AWWSOM was created as a shopping haven that reinvigorates the rich culture of Afghanistan. When you purchase from AWWSOM, you will directly empower an Afghan.
As Mina attempts to breathe life into the age-old handicrafts and embroidery; she also gives them a modern restoration.
Here is just a taste of the hundreds of unique and inspiring work of Afghan artisans.
Song Saturday; Leon Russell
Wednesday 15 September 2010
real IRA warns it will resume attacks
The Real IRA has said it will resume attacks on the UK mainland - with banks and bankers its principal targets.
Just the thought of these people resuming attacks on mainland UK fills me with dread, but as I read the article, this jumped out at me.
"The bankers grease the politicians' palms, the politicians bail out the bankers with public funds, the bankers pay themselves fat bonuses and loan the money back to the public with interest.
"It's essentially a crime spree that benefits a social elite at the expense of many millions of victims."
And, much as I despise and fear any terrorist organisation
……………I have to admit they have a point.
Some interesting figures about wealth in the UK
1% of the UK population owns 23% of the country's wealth.
read the full report here.
50% of the UK population is surviving on 1% of the wealth
Read the full report here.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=2
Now think about the severe cuts in public spending, cuts to our frontline services and cuts to our benefit system, all in the name of reducing our budget deficit. The benefit system is an easy target, its big, clumsy, sometimes difficult to understand and sometimes open to abuse. What we are NOT told is that usually the ‘abuse of the benefit system’ is a young mum claiming benefit and also working a couple of hours in a pub or café and not, as we are led to believe, huge gangs of organized criminals making a fortune out of defrauding the system. Compare the income and wealth of the young mum who claims benefit and doesn’t declare a couple of hours work with the income and wealth of the top 1% of the population. I can’t think of anything any one could contribute to society or any degree of laziness that would justify such a massive inequality in wealth distribution. With this degree of inequality ingrained into our system no amount of tinkering around the edges and cutting back on essential benefits and services is going to make things any better. Virtually ALL of the proposed cuts in public spending will affect the 50% of the population who collectively own only 1% of the wealth, and I’m pretty dam sure the budget deficit wasn’t caused by them because if it was, there wouldn’t be so many of them who are still so poor. A system which allows inequality on this scale is not an equitable or workable system and so far, no political party has had the honesty or integrity to openly admit this, in fact they all seem terrified of any one who suggests it. Could this be because there are no poor politicians?
I remember our government being pretty keen on regime change when they saw what they perceived as an unjust society……………maybe someone should look at how ‘just’ our society is.
And if you think things are bad in the West, think a little about how much worse it gets on an international scale. If the bulk of the worlds poor ever decided to fight back I think we all need be very afraid.
The richest 10% of the worlds adults accounted for 85% of assets, the report said.
By contrast, the bottom 50% of the world's adult population owned barely 1% of the world's wealth.
Read the full report here.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/28041-worlds-richest-2-own-half-the-wealth
Sunday 12 September 2010
New York Public Library archives and photos.
This link should lead you to the New York Public Library collection of historic photographs stored on their flickr site.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nypl/
It is a fascinating site with a wealth of visual information, most of which is copyright free and available to copy, download and print. These few photos are from the Ellis Island set which is a collection of photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island who arrived from all over he world at the beginning of the twentieth century. I find these photos fascinating, like something from a lost world.
Amateur photographer, Augustus Sherman, the Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk, had special access to potential subjects for his camera. It is likely that Sherman's elaborately costumed subjects were detainees, new immigrants held at Ellis Island for one reason or another. While waiting for what they needed to leave the island (an escort, or money, or travel tickets), some of these immigrants may have been persuaded to pose for Sherman's camera, donning their best holiday finery or national dress, which they had brought with them from home. Sherman's pictures were published in National Geographic in 1907 and for decades hung anonymously in the lower Manhattan headquarters of the federal Immigration Service. Incoming correspondence in the William Williams Papers suggests that the Commissioner gave copies of Sherman's haunting photographs to official Ellis Island visitors as mementos.
1, Algerian man.
Digital ID: 418036. Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis) -- Photographer. [ca. 1906-1914]
Source: William Williams papers / Photographs of immigrants
Repository: The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.
2, Algerian man.
Digital ID: 418058. Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis) -- Photographer. [ca. 1906-1914]
Source: William Williams papers / Photographs of immigrants
Repository: The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Divisio
3, Hindoo boy.
Digital ID: 418056. Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis) -- Photographer. [1911]
Notes: Indentified in Peter Mesenholler 'Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920' (c1905) p.94 from another print that bears a caption: Thumbu Sammy, aged 17, Hindoo ex SS 'Adriatic', April 14, 1911.
Source: William Williams papers / Photographs of immigrants
Repository: The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.
4, Three women from Guadeloupe.
Digital ID: 1206544. Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis) -- Photographer
Source: William Williams papers / Photographs of immigrants
Repository: The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.
5, Turkish man.
Digital ID: 1206551. Sherman, Augustus F. (Augustus Francis) -- Photographer. [1912]
Notes: Identified in Peter Mesenholler 'Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920' (c1905) p.69 from caption on back of print reproduced there: 'Turkish bank guard John Postantzis, Feb 9, 1912'.
Source: William Williams papers / Photographs of immigrants
Repository: The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.
6, Group photograph of newly-arrived immigrants in native costumes.
Digital ID: 417072. Group photograph of newly-arrived immigrants in native costumes, some with turbans, some with fezzes.. 1902-1913
Source: Photographs of Ellis Island, 1902-1913.
Repository: The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
7, A group of immigrants, most wearing fezzes, surrounding a large vessel.
Digital ID: 417073. A group of immigrants, most wearing fezzes, surrounding a large vessel which is decorated with the star and crescent symbol of the Moslem religion and the Ottoman Turks.. 1902-1913
Source: Photographs of Ellis Island, 1902-1913.
Repository: The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
My moral for the day, don't believe everything you read and check your sources. I've been caught out too often now and how ever much I would LIKE to believe something, it still needs checking. If you are a firm believer in.... for example.........''Obama is not a citizen'', everything you read on the topic will be slide into your brain as truth carved in stone. I'm as guilty as anyone, if I read something that appears to confirm a previously held belief of mine, my automatic response is a smug.............''told you so, I'm right'', and the danger is; that particular snippet of information could be false. I've been conned once too often now, first I do a search and see if I can find the same story from several different sources, then I look in urban myths and then I check out satire, The Onion etc to see if what was originally intended as a piece of fun has somehow made its way into mainstream information. And even with these precautions, I still get caught. This has happened to a friend of mine recently, and it brought home how even the nicest and most trustworthy people can be conned. Just imagine how much easier it would be if every one approached every piece of new information with an open mind. The teabaggers would be de-teaed and the muslim bashers would be de-bashed, fundamentalist Christians would be pacified and the world would be a happier place. :-) And...............now that I've got that off my chest, I'm going out to paint, have a nice Sunday every one.
Saturday 11 September 2010
More Song saturday, lou Reed
Art Sunday; Fatana Baktash Arifi
http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/07.16.2007newsarifi.html
http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/07.06.2007newsartist.html
''Arifi, who prefers not to give her age, grew up in a Kabul that was vastly different from the war-torn capital that suffered under an oppressive Islamic regime.
In the 1970s, the city was a cosmopolitan metropolis with bustling cafes and lush gardens. Many women eschewed the restrictive burqa, moving around the city bare-headed.
Arifi's father, Mohammad, was an animal-skin trader and progressive thinker who encouraged all his six children to attend school. He especially nurtured their artistic talents, providing Arifi with rolls of paper and other art supplies.
Then came the Soviet invasion in 1979.
"The tragedy begins from there," Arifi recalled. "For three nights there were helicopters and planes, strange noises in the sky."
She said she will never forget the look on her neighbors' faces. "It was like somebody had died," Arifi said. "All the happiness gone from their mouths."
Although many of her countrymen fled, her family persevered during several more years of fighting, a period during which she studied for her master's degree in fine arts from Kabul University while bomb blasts shook the classrooms.
When a Stinger missile landed near their house one day in 1994, the family finally decided to leave, abandoning everything.
Arifi wrapped up a few possessions in a cloth, including a pen-and-ink drawing of Abraham Lincoln she did as a schoolgirl, and the family escaped on foot over the mountains into Pakistan.''
The Terror faced by Arabs and Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11
http://www.alternet.org/world/148115/
The Terror Faced by Arabs and Muslims in the Aftermath of 9/11
In an excerpt from
"A Country Called Amreeka,"
by Alia Malek.
a priest takes heart when a piece of history emerges from the rubble.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Monsignor Ignace Sadek was where he always was on Tuesday mornings: in the rectory of Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Cathedral in Brooklyn, New York. He was in his quiet office buried within the recesses of the church, preparing his homily for the midday mass.
Around 10:00 a.m., he decided to check on the young gardener tending to the grounds that surrounded Our Lady of Lebanon on its shaded block at the corner of Henry and Remsen Streets in Brooklyn Heights, separated from Manhattan by the East River. As he came out into the daylight, he noticed that the sky had changed -- no longer was it the clear blue day that he remembered; instead, it had become clouded by debris.
In front of the church he bumped into a parishioner, a gentleman his age from Lebanon, who anxiously asked him in Arabic, “Did you not hear? Are you a stranger to Jerusalem?”
Ignace explained he had been at work in his office, away from the radio and television.
“Two airplanes have hit the Twin Towers, and they are falling down!” the parishioner exclaimed.
Ignace had been to the towers just two weeks before, when his friend, a bishop, had come to visit him. He often took visitors to the Twin Towers for their views, so high in the heavens that people below were rendered the size of ants. They had waited nearly two hours on line to ascend to the top.
Ignace began to shake.
What can I do? he asked himself. I am a priest, I have to do something!
His seventy-one-year-old legs began to move quickly, and he almost ran toward the Promenade, a scenic overlook on the East River with views of lower Manhattan and its skyline dominated by the Twin Towers. When Ignace arrived, he could not see a thing. He could not see whether the towers had truly fallen or whether they were hidden behind the curtain created by the wind chasing debris across the river.
As he stood on the edge of Brooklyn, the waters of the East River obscured but restless below him, the black suit he had worn since he was twenty and his own signature black beret which he had worn since he was twenty-five turned the color of the white collar he wore around his neck.
***
In the airplanes, in the field in Pennsylvania, in the towers, Our Lady of Lebanon in Brooklyn lost eight souls on September 11, 2001. They were Robert Dirani, Catherine Gorayb, Peter Hashim, Mark Hindy, Walid Iskandar, Jude Moussa, Jude Safi, and Jacqueline Sayegh.
Ignace presided over no funerals for the eight that died because there were no bodies to be buried. Instead he said a memorial service for those whose families requested it.
Some of the victims were part of the larger community of the church; others, Ignace knew quite well personally.
He had baptized Catherine’s infant daughter just two Sundays before. During the baptism, he had noticed that Catherine had cried through the entire ceremony. He had wondered why then, and after she died, he said to himself that she must have been touched by a prophecy that she would soon lose sight of her daughter.
Jude had been raised in the Brooklyn church. Though his mother was Druze, he was a dedicated and joyful member of the congregation, who always had a hug and a kiss to share.
And Jacqueline had contacted him Friday evening just before that horrible Tuesday, telling Ignace that she was engaged! She had asked him to prepare a copy of her baptismal certificate, which was required so that she could marry her fiancé in his church. She had told Ignace that she would come by on Monday morning to pick up the paper; when she didn’t, he had told himself she would be by on Tuesday. Now, he didn’t know what to do with the envelope, so he left it where it had been waiting for her, in the sacristy where the priests vest.
Just beyond the church’s doors, all of America was reeling as well, and some New Yorkers sought scapegoats among themselves in Brooklyn. On the other side of Atlantic Avenue, the executive director of the Arab American Family Support Center had quickly yanked the group’s name off the front door right after the attacks; she had bolted all the doors that led to her office, barricading herself inside with a legal pad and telephone. She fielded two sorts of calls -- threats of violence from outside the community and desperate pleas for help from within.
At the Dawood Mosque on Atlantic Avenue, people spat and cursed at members. The Brooklyn Islamic Center was the target of a firebombing attempt. Someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at a mosque in Bensonhurst, while pork chops were flung over the back fence of the Al-Noor Muslim School in Sunset Park. In Park Slope, a motorist blocked the path of a cab driver, yelling “Get out of the car, Arab,” pounding on the hood as he shouted, “You are going to die, you Muslim.”
And a Bangladeshi mail sorter coming home to Brooklyn on the subway was knocked to the train floor and kicked and punched repeatedly by anonymous men.
New York police officers were soon standing sentry outside many of the city’s mosques, and Atlantic Avenue and Steinway Street in Astoria -- a Queens neighborhood also home to many Arab Americans -- were both lined with police. A man stood outside a Steinway Street mosque holding a homemade placard that read “get out of our country.”
Outside New York, the trauma played out similarly. A mosque in suburban Dallas had its windows shattered by gunshots; in San Francisco, a mosque found on its doorsteps a bag of what appeared to be blood; in Virginia, a vandal threw two bricks through the windows of an Islamic bookstore with threatening notes attached; and in Chicago, a mob of hundreds set upon a mosque shouting “Kill the Arabs,” while an Assyrian church on the north side and an Arab community center on the southwest side were damaged by arson. Women reported having their head scarves yanked off or being spit at, businesses were vandalized, employees were suddenly fired or demoted, and children were bullied by classmates and teachers alike.
In some cases, individual Arab and Muslim Americans responded by taking off their hijabs, keeping the kids home from school, displaying the American flag everywhere, and changing their names to something a little less “foreign.” Institutionally, every major Arab and Muslim organization immediately denounced the attacks; national leaders who had gathered in D.C. to prepare for a meeting with President Bush the afternoon of September 11 refocused their efforts on releasing such a statement the same day. Other Americans -- neighbors, friends, colleagues, classmates, lovers -- reached out in solidarity.
The federal government quickly released statements warning that any violence or discrimination against Arab or Muslim Americans or anyone perceived to be so were wrong, un-American, and unlawful. Within one week, nearly a thousand incidents of hate and bias were reported; several Sikhs -- non-Arab and non-Muslim South Asians who wear turbans -- were murdered or attacked. Investigations and prosecutions quickly followed.
But while one government hand had given, another was taking. Immediately following the attacks, over 1,200 resident aliens in the United States from Arab and Muslim countries who were not named or charged with crimes disappeared without notice to anyone into undisclosed detention centers.
Suggestions were made that camps be established for U.S. citizens from the Arab- and Muslim-American communities, while the denaturalization of naturalized citizens from these groups was also considered.
Arab and Muslim Americans and legal residents were pulled off planes in front of other passengers and subjected to interrogation; some were allowed to board eventually, many weren’t. Polls in September found that a majority of Americans favored the profiling of Arabs, including those who were American citizens, and subjecting them to special security checks before boarding planes.
The attorney general -- who earlier in the fall had attended a Ramadan Iftar -- ordered the “voluntary” interviewing of 5,000 legal residents from Arab and Muslim countries and singled out for arrest another 5,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants who did not leave the country after being ordered deported, though they represented only a fraction of the 320,000 people of all backgrounds who violated deportation orders. The issuing of visas to people coming to America for business, school, and tourism ground to a halt.
Fearing that harm could come to his parishioners, Ignace decided to hang the American flag outside Our Lady of Lebanon. He also cautioned his flock not to speak Arabic audibly outside the safety of the church.
***
In early 2002, Ignace received a call from Bovis Lend Lease, the construction company that was clearing the World Trade Center site. They had been told by the chaplain of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, near the foot of the towers, to contact him. Workers had come across something in the wreckage of stone and steel that might interest him.
As soon as Ignace fully grasped the meaning of the chaplain’s words, he responded, “I’m leaving immediately!”
The destruction of the towers had unearthed the cornerstone of St. Joseph’s Maronite Church, the original parish from whose rib Our Lady of Lebanon had been founded.
With the help of four men, Ignace transported the 400-pound cornerstone across the East River to his church in Brooklyn, making the same journey most of the inhabitants of Little Syria had made a hundred years before.
The bruised cornerstone was placed in the church’s vestibule on a marble pedestal made by a parish member. A survivor of the attacks, its engraved testament reads for anyone to see: SANCTI JOSEPHI, ECCLESIA MARONITA, ROMANA CATHOLICA.
*****************************************************
Alia Malek has written for Salon, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The New York Times. She is currently editing the next volume in the Voice of Witness series, a collection of first person oral histories from communities impacted by post 9/11 backlash.
Her website is
Friday 10 September 2010
Song saturday; van Morrison, Mystic
Song Saturday; Van Morrison,Ballerina
Wednesday 8 September 2010
think I want to live in a mud house
I want to live in a mud house, maybe I could even build my own.............how good would that be ? :-)
Tuesday 7 September 2010
RAIN..................
paintings by
Spyros Vassiliou, born 1903
in Galaxidi, a village in Central Greece
A poem;
Rain by Shel Silverstein
I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And flowed into my brain,
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.
I step very softly,
I walk very slow,
I can't do a handstand--
I might overflow,
So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said--
I'm just not the same since there's rain in my head.
Monday 6 September 2010
Carlos Santana
Sometimes, it all gets too much,
I feel like...''stop the world I want to get off''
There seems to be so much bad out there and I need to not think about it, ................
This helps......................
Sunday 5 September 2010
That time of year again; free fruit and jam making.
The wild berries are abundant this year.
The Rowanberries are full and plump very early. Last years Rowanberry and Apple Marmalade is marked October 09, and here we are, at the start of September and already the Rowanberries are ripe.
I had my two grandchildren staying with my and they were happy to help.
Later that evening, after tea, wicked granny that I am, I sent my grandson up the ladder to pick as many of the tiny crab apples from my garden tree as he could reach.
It’s always the same, the nicest ones stayed on the tree right at the top out of reach.
These little apples are not good enough to eat but they add a fantastic flavour and good setting quality to preserves.
And this weekend I’ve had my other granddaughter staying. I explained to her that I wanted to attempt rosehip syrup for the first time this year.
She picked as many Rosehips as she could and I’m pretty sure I can make a batch of syrup from them.
Once I had a bag full of Rosehips we wandered along by the burn picking the ripe Blackberries, and this afternoon she has gone home proudly clutching her jar of Blackberry and Apple jam. Can’t get a lot fresher than that, this time yesterday they were on the bush, teatime today the jam will be on her toast.
Art Sunday; Sir james Guthrie
Sir James Guthrie (June 10, 1859 – September 6, 1930) was a Scottish painter.
He was best known in his own lifetime as a portrait painter, although today he is more generally known as a painter of Scottish Realism.
He was born in Greenock, the son of a clergyman, he originally enrolled at Glasgow University to study law, but abandoned this in favour of painting in 1877.
(below; Pastures new)
Unlike many contemporary painters he did not study in Paris, he was mostly self-taught, although he was mentored for a short time by James Drummond in Glasgow and then John Pettie in London.
(below; the highland funeral)
He lived most of his life in the Scottish Borders, most notably in Cockburnspath, Berwickshire, where he painted some of his most important works, including A Hind's Daughter 1883 (my personal favourite, just love that little girl in the cabbage patch), and Schoolmates. He was strongly influenced by the French Realists, but is remembered as one of the painters in the Glasgow movement.
(below; The Hinds daughter, my personal favourite)
Guthrie embraced the establishment, being the first of the 'Glasgow Boys' to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy (1888). He was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1888, and a full member in 1892. In 1902 he succeeded Sir George Reid as RSA president in 1902, and he was knighted the following year.
(below; reading the morning paper)
Guthrie became one of the most progressive of Scottish 19th century painters. He chose his subjects from everyday life; A Highland Funeral (1881) was widely regarded as a master-piece and is today held by Glasgow Art Gallery. This is a wonderfully atmospheric painting and showers his remarkable skills, but as I said, my own particular favourite is the Hinds Daughter.
(below; The summerhouse)
