quinta-feira, junho 29, 2006

Liverworts, Lichens, and the United Church

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See also: Hamas - National Reconciliation Document.

Sunday July 9 2006

Sid Ryan responds: Globe: Slurs will not silence us, Source.

Letters to the Globe by Alan Baker, Smadar Meiri-Ordynans, Kenneth Wiener, Arnie Aberman, Al Lando, Brian Weiner, Manuel Matas, and Ismail Zayid.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarMonday July 3 2006

An article in the Toronto Sun yesterday: Marianne Meed Ward - United, not really, Source; and this in the Globe today: Lysiane Gagnon, When talk becomes anti-Semitic, (Archive).

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarClick to Enlarge / Click para AumentarClick to Enlarge / Click para AumentarThe picture above shows (left to right) Khaled Mouammar, Frances Combs, Lawrence Pushee, and Naomi Wall. And to the left you can see what Sid Ryan looks like.

I sent a letter to the Globe, which they did not publish (as usual), but I didn't want to lose it, so:

Deciding to side with Sid

I know something about anti-semitism in the United Church. I grew up with it. Prejudice against Jews was fed to me by my mother along with the catechism. The question, "Why do some people wear those little hats?" The answer, "Because they are ashamed before God for killing Christ." Happily for me I lived it down.

Some others obviously didn't. Frances Combs and her committee in the United Church, and Sid Ryan and his committee in CUPE are natural born allies. Both operate within the ideology of bureaucracy, which knows nothing of reality nor truth but only grinds and grinds until something that looks like an answer drops out. The answer is 42 (as any reader of the Hitchhikers Guide knows).

The solution to the fifty year (and much more) internecine war in the Middle East is a lop-sided boycott in Canada? What nonsense! The notion is doomed from the outset. It cannot expect to gain wide acceptance; and even if it does will have almost no effect given the scale of Canadian/Israeli trade. A mere symbolic gesture made by some knowing very little about real violence and brutality, the pampered Canadian hot-house left.

Though they half-heartedly deny it, any reading of their rationales, available on your pages and in detail at their websites, reveals the foundation (if such a word may refer to structures as ambiguous and ill-conceived as these) of their plans to be a not-so-subtle residual bigotry they are unable to hide and unwilling to deal with.

Thursday June 29 2006

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarIn a long-planned move ostensibly to bring peace to the Middle East, Frances Combs and her United Church committee have decided to side with Sid Ryan and CUPE, and by implication Fatah and Hamas, against the Israelis. This is peacemaking? I will tell you what this is - it is a silly know-nothing left-lib cluster-fuck - and it is also closet anti-semitism.

Who are these people?

Frances Combs and Ralph Wushke are at the centre of Bathurst United Church in Toronto. These details came from their website. The picture was taken at her 70th birthday party. Ralph (not directly involved in the boycott project as far as I can see, he just happened to be in the only picture I could find of Frances) is a 'queer theory' specialist of some kind, and from the look of the rainbow on their masthead I would say they are ministering to a gay-accepting flock at the very least, which may put them on the cutting edge of correctitude in Toronto, who knows? Ad hominem right? Irrelevant innuendo? Call it what you will.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarThe committe comprises Frances Combs, Lawrence Pushee, Jean Lee, Karen Krothers, David Wurfel, Judith Wiseman, and Desmond Parsons; all of the Toronto Conference (an administrative division within the United Church); and they are apparently supported by Bruce Gregersen (left) of the UC General Council.

In a nutshell: How can you claim to be peacemaking when you are supporting one over another in a struggle which anyone knows is about equally evil on both sides? You can't. QED.

Also have to ask if a boycott is really the tactic of choice here? Does it stand a chance of having any effect whatsoever? No, and not likely. They are cooking up a petition to Harper's government to have it adopt the boycott as well. Duh? So it begins to appear to me that what they must be up to is either some wierd kind of self-promotion, a means of continuing to collect their pay and pension cheques (I presume they are being paid), or simple stupidity and incompetence unbridled.

Of course they insist that the Israelis are just, really really really bad eh? And the Palestinians are all such nice people eh? I'm not joking - I spoke to Lawrence Pushee on the telephone last night and that is basically what I got. I did hear Desmond Parsons describe the Hamas Mayor of a town in Palestine as 'a nice guy'.

The token Jew on the committee, Judith Wiseman (no doubt somewhere in the world you can find a Jew to agree with anything, not to mention a WASP, a Muslim, a Greek ... and so on) is reported in the Globe saying, "The questions you are asking can only be asked by someone who refuses to see what's going on, it's time to condemn Israel as a rogue state." Say what? It must be the great circle-jerk of conspiracy theories coming back to eat its' tail.

No surprise that Pushee told me Margaret Wente was lying in her column and misrepresenting and distorting what took place at the news conference. Anything is possible I guess.

Here are some references:
TC/UC: Seeking Peace Through Justice, (Archive).
Globe, June 29: The shame of the United Church, (Archive).
Globe, June 29: CUPE and Israel, (Archive).
Star, June 28: Toronto's United Church to boycott Israeli goods, (Archive).
Globe, 2002: The left must confront its anti-Semitism, (Archive).
The United Church replies:
UC: News - Ethical Investment for Peace in Palestine and Israel.
UC: Detailed proposal on Ethical Investment for Peace in Palestine (pdf).

I have been a member of the United Church all my life. At one time I was second-in-command of the nursery at a big church. I couldn't be 'in charge' of course, that was a job for a woman eh? But I was able to quiet one particular colicky baby boy on a regular basis over a few months until he got over it - his mother was open-mouthed amazed the first time she came in to pick him up after the service and found him asleep in my arms. I did my shift. He's grown up by now.

I made it through the ructions in the 80s and 90s over gay ordination. My objection was to homosexuals being ordained because they were homosexuals. I eventually convinced myself that that was not what they were up to. I think now that I was mistaken, but that's another story.

I was not so easy with calling Denmark racist during the great Mohammedan cartoon fracas a few months ago, since the Danes, uniquely in Hitler's Europe saved virtually every single last one of their Jewish citizens from the ovens; nor with a presentation I attended on the Israeli/Palestine issue given by Desmond Parsons mentioned above, from which I came away thinking that the United Church was turning anti-semitic. Since then I find that I can no longer attend and worship with them.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarClick to Enlarge / Click para AumentarLiverworts (Hepatic Bryophytes) are flexible when it comes to reproduction; they have three modes: sexual; asexual, and fragmentation. When I was at university I did well one year in Botany - I got interested in Lichens and Liverworts and I actually dreamed of going on to do original research and documentation of their remarkable habits. There were two professors for the course, a tall skinny German fellow, and a short plump Jewish one. They were enthusiastic teachers and taught us how to smuggle specimens back from foreign places (in a plastic bag inside a coffee thermos in your hand luggage, with coffee, cold of course) as well as making the material interesting ... well, here I am more than 40 years later still smiling to think of them.

When it came to the Liverworts the lights began to come on for me. They can reproduce with spores generated sexually, with 'propagules' generated asexually, and by simply fragmenting - a process our prof called 'death from behind', if you look at the photographs you can see it in action; the centre rots, freeing the pieces to move away and form new colonies. Maybe later on I will look for some pictures of spore cases and propagules.

Lichens also propagate by 'death from behind'; like the liverworts, they are 'flexible' (check out Leonard Cohen's song Be For Real when he says, "If it's a thrill you're looking for, Honey, I'm flexible. Oh, yeah."). They are also remarkable because an individual consists of two and often three separate species (a fungus, an algae and a bacteria) living mutually.

Lessons in the lives of these plants for Hamas, for the United Church of Canada, but most of all tonight, for me. Esteja bem / be well.

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Down, Thread Down: Climbing down Pisgah.

quarta-feira, junho 28, 2006

Sisters

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Up, Down.

Ejegayehu and Tirunesh Dibaba, track stars from Ethiopia:
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Cindy, Ada, Dina, Rita, Irene (mother), and Linda Maxwell, (Archive), Canadian Harvard graduates:
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Tirunesh Dibaba, Ethiopia, BeijingTirunesh Dibaba wins women's 10,000m, Fri 15 Aug 2008.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Ethiopia's world champion Tirunesh Dibaba won the first track gold medal of the Beijing Olympics in the women's 10,000 metres final on Friday.

From when the 23-year-old hit the front with 300 metres to go, her victory was never in doubt and she crossed the line in 29 minutes 54.66 seconds, an Olympic record.

Ethiopian-born Elvan Abeylegesse, who had led for much of the latter part of the race, ran home in second to claim a first Olympic medal in athletics for a Turkish woman in 29.56.34. American Shalane Flanagan took bronze in 30.22.22.

Dibaba and Abeylegesse were only the second and third women to run under 30 minutes for the 10,000 after Chinese world record holder Wang Junxia, who set her mark in Beijing in 1993.)

Down.

Climbing down Pisgah

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Next, Back, Thread Ahead: Liverworts, Lichens, and the United Church, Thread Back: What has truth?.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarPisgah, Mount Nebo, Ras Siyagha, Mukhayyet/Mukhayyat: In Jordan at the north-eastern end of the Dead Sea; 800 metres/2,600 feet. Of course there are lots of other ones in America; North Carolina, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Utah ... There are some good photographs of the original at Franciscan friars of the Holy Land and Malta.

From the Fifth Book of Moses, Deuteronomy in Chapter 3:

Get thee up into the top of Pisgah,  and lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward,  and behold it with thine eyes:  for thou shalt not go over this Jordan.  But charge Joshua, and encourage him, and strengthen him:  for he shall go over before this people,  and he shall cause them to inherit the land which thou shalt see.

and in Chapter 34:

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho.  And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.  And the Lord said unto him,  This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed:  I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.  So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarOur reach exceeds our grasp as they say, even for Moses.

D.H. Lawrence wrote an essay in 1924, 'Climbing down Pisgah', nowhere available on-line, more on this later ...

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarClick to Enlarge / Click para AumentarClick to Enlarge / Click para AumentarAnother of the 5th century mosaics from Church of Saint George; the spiral motif is often seen on the columns of mosques, sometimes turning to the left, sometimes right, sometimes both, but this is the first time I have seen it on a cross.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarI can't remember anymore exactly what Lawrence is on about in this essay - I read it and we discussed it in an english lecture back in the 60s. There is an ambivalence in Moses' state of mind, no doubt; after a spectacular life in the presence, the Shekinah (aka Shekinah, Shechinah, Shekina, Shechina, Schechinah; dragging in the feminine side, Shakti, the Tabernacle), he will see the Promised Land only from this distance.

In this engraving (cribbed from Gutenberg) he appears reconciled, with an air of equanimity and resignation - yet still, one hand almost makes a fist, the other open in a gesture I don't quite understand.

My thought is simple - maybe Moses is a model for the graceful acceptance of age and death. I have ordered a copy of Lawrence's essay, originally published in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (* nope, sorry about that, never in that book at all) and re-printed in Selected Critical Writings. When it gets here maybe I will have more to say.

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segunda-feira, junho 26, 2006

Darfur is about Water

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Next, Back, Thread Ahead: Forget Darfur ... ?, Thread Back: Dithering in Darfur.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarDarfur is about water, or the lack of it - Darfur is about Global Warming.

Lake Chad and Sub-Saharan Africa generally dries up because North Americans and Europeans are wasteful, complacent and thoughtless; and social balances in Darfur are upset entirely. Anarchic tribalism, which has its good points, turns into industrialized anarchy which has none and everybody suffers, greatly - except for the North Americans and Europeans that is, but it won't be long till they do.

What goes around, comes around.

See if they take it with as much grace as this woman and her child - I doubt it, but I could be wrong.


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Even beneath the basic minimum to live on the planet, say, 1 US $ a day, is the absolute requirement for water.
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Robert Zoellick appears on the field for a quick inning, and scurries off to make a fortune on Wall Street. I can imagine the conversation:
Bush: Oh say Bob, on your way out could you stop in Abuja for a few days and fix Africa?
Bob: Sure George, I have a few days before I have to turn up at Goldman Sachs.

Reminds me of a poem by Leonard Cohen; he says,
    "as a five-year-old scientist
     leaves the room
     where he has dissected an alarm clock"

The whole poem is apropos; unfortunately there is no copy to be had on-line and I no longer have the book on my shelf.

Maybe this is where Bashir gets the notion that it is a Jewish conspiracy.

Mr. Kofi Annan is stepping down soon too - he and his family, particularly his son I gather, are provided for. His replacement, next in line, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, says, 'maybe next year': "A six month timeline between the decision to deploy and the deployment is a more practical timeline especially if you think of the logistical conditions in Darfur, January 2007 is a much more realistic date."

Canadians in the loop, Lewis MacKenzie and Alan Rock, tell us perfection is not to be dreamed of.

No idea yeat what Alpha Oumar Konare, the AU chairman thinks, later.

Omar Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir kicks out the United nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) 'planning team' for some cockamamie charge, any excuse, UNICEF can stay, for a while. Then he relents - just so we know who is in charge. He 'da man! (IRIN - June 27, Gov’t lifts ban on UN Darfur operations, I guess something they did, worked: IRIN - June 26, UN tries to resolve Darfur suspension).

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References:
Darfur and United Nations bits & pieces (Archive).
    June 19, Globe, China's Wen kicks off African charm offensive in Egypt,
    June 20, Globe, Sudan's president rejects UN peacekeepers in Darfur,
    June 20, NYT, No. 2 State Dept Official to Join Wall Street Firm,
    June 20, Globe, Goldman grabs Washington insider,
    June 24, Globe, Patience and persistence trump perfection, Allan Rock,
    June 26, Globe, Forget a UN army, Lewis MacKenzie,
    June 26, Globe, Sudan accuses world body of aiding rebel leader,
    June 26, Chron, Sudan Lifts Suspension of U.N.'s Work.

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