Bird’s Eye: Three meditative sites. Calm offers you natural views/sounds of the world (with or without music and guided meditation. Recommendation: without.) Infinite Painting gives you a canvas and an always changing paintbrush and palette, which turns out to be surprisingly involving. (Two hints: clicking makes the brush larger, and screen capture is the only way I found to save the results.) Enjoy.
* Calm (takes a few seconds to load)
* No Link
“Developing our reverence for mystery as we explore and map the universe, inside and outside, is the best safeguard against fanaticism and totalitarianism.” Alan Clements
Bird’s Eye: She’s been teaching us for millennia: as ye sow, so ye shall reap. Fracking produces earthquakes; giant dams redistribute weight, and then things shift; warmer weather produces changing weather patterns. There’s a lesson here, though I don’t suppose we’ll be quick to learn it without some more of Her exemplary grandmotherly kindness.
* Earthquakes Linked To Oil And Gas Extraction, Studies Show Toronto Star
If you prod Mother Earth, she’s likely to shake you up, a new U.S. study has found. It builds on earlier studies – some performed in Canada – that draw links between small earthquakes and a gas production technique known as “fracking,” or breaking up underground shale to release natural gas.
A study by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey says that a “remarkable” increase in the number of small quakes in the middle of the U.S. is “almost certainly manmade.” The frequency of quakes recorded in 2011 was six times anything recorded before 2000, the study found. “A naturally occurring rate of change of this magnitude is unprecedented outside volcanic settings or in the absence of a main shock, of which there were neither in this region,” the abstract says.
* Three Gorges Forces Further Displacement China Digital Times
Twenty years ago this month, the Chinese government, amid great controversy but with the blessing of a Canadian government report, authorized construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.The critics said the dam would be an environmental and economic nightmare that would flood millions of people off their land, induce landslides and earthquakes, cripple navigation and produce unaffordable electricity.
Twenty years later, the critics have been proven right on all counts. The arguments in favour of the dam were always thin gruel, without scientific depth or credibility, repeated ad nauseam in the form of propaganda, while the arguments against the dam were extensive and detailed and, as we now know, accurate.
About one year ago, Beijing officially acknowledged the negative social and environmental impact of the project. So far, over a million people have been forced to relocate as the waters of the Yangtze consumed their homes and farmland, and more may soon be forced to move due to related geological changes. The Washington Post reports: Another 100,000 people may have to move away from China’s Three Gorges Dam due to the risk of disastrous landslides and bank collapses around the reservoir of the world’s biggest hydroelectric facility, state media said Wednesday.
* Global Warming is Affecting Weather
Global warming is making hot days hotter, rainfall and flooding heavier, hurricanes stronger and droughts more severe.
This intensification of weather and climate extremes will be the most visible impact of global warming in our everyday lives. People who have the least ability to cope with these changes–the poor, very old, very young, or sick–are the most vulnerable.
Study is not the goal, doing is.
Do not mistake “talk” for “action”
Pity fills no stomach.
Compassion builds no house.
Understanding is not yet justice
Whoever multiplies words causes confusion.
The truth that can be spoken
is not the Ultimate Truth.
Ultimate Truth is wordless,
the silence within the silence.
More than the absence of speech,
More than the absence of words,
Ultimate Truth is the seamless being-in-place
that comes with attending to Reality.
Shimon ben Gamliel, Pirke Avot, Talmud, I:17 (roughly 30 CE)
Bird’s Eye: Back when I taught World Religions, my students always had one key question: which major religion has the most holidays? But in a week when Passover and Easter were both celebrated (though usually by different people) we offer both some traditional enjoyable photos…after some untraditionally challenging thoughts. The heartwrenching David Sylvester piece is a must read.
* Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth? Haaretz
We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt – the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact – yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation.
…It is hard to believe that 600,000 families (which would mean about two million people) crossed the entire Sinai without leaving one shard of pottery (the archeologist’s best friend) with Hebrew writing on it. It is remarkable that Egyptian records make no mention of the sudden migration of what would have been nearly a quarter of their population, nor has any evidence been found for any of the expected effects of such an exodus; such as economic downturn or labor shortages. Furthermore, there is no evidence in Israel that shows a sudden influx of people from another culture at that time. No rapid departure from traditional pottery has been seen, no record or story of a surge in population.
*Some Thoughts on Passover 5772 Rabbi Brant Shalom Rav
This Pesach I’m thinking about exceedingly radical message at the heart of the story we’ll retell around the seder table tonight. I’m thinking in particular about what the story tells us about power, about the ways the powerful wield their power against the less powerful, and about the inevitability of corrupt power’s eventual fall. And I’m thinking about what is possibly the most radical message of all: that there is a Power greater, yes even greater than human power.
…There’s no getting around the fact that our seder story is not a neat, tidy or particularly pleasant story. That’s because – as we all know too well – the powerful never give up their power without a fight. No one ever made this point better or more eloquently than Frederick Douglass when he said in 1857….
* No More Cheap and Easy Easters David Sylvester Tikkun Daily Blog
Perhaps you think I exaggerate when I say that we live suspended over this abyss of horror every day of our lives, an abyss that can crack open at any second during the most mundane moments of our lives?
Katleen Ping fell into the abyss last Monday at 10:30 a.m. Was she talking on the telephone, as she worked at the front desk, perhaps tossing a post-it note into the trash by her desk, wondering what the noise was outside her door? Did she experience a moment of peace when she faced her Good Friday? What will Easter mean to her four-year-old son? Or Grace Kim, a 23-year-old nursing student….These are two of the seven people who were murdered this Tuesday at Oikos University in Oakland, the sister campus of a school in Mountain View where I teach English as a second language. Many people at my school knew Katleen and Grace. Two of my former Mountain View students attend Oikos. (One escaped, the other mercifully absent on Monday.)
Suddenly, the tiniest, most anonymous school in the Bay Area was emblazoned across the front pages of newspapers around the world. As you probably know, a former student entered the classroom, ordered his classmates to line up and executed seven and wounded three with a semi-automatic handgun. On Tuesday, the next morning, my students and I passed around the front pages of the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. Students read them over, gazed away, shook their heads and looked up at me, the teacher….
* Easter and Holy Week The Big Picture
* Easter Eggs TotallyCoolPix
Did you know that Easter eggs came in all shapes and sizes? If so, you’re wrong. Easter eggs only come in one shape: ovoid. They do come in all sizes and colours though, and we have the pictures to prove it.
Bird’s Eye: I was asked by a Tikkunista reader where the Talmudic quote at the bottom comes from, and the search led me to the pirke avot, a section of the Talmud (where I learned that Rabbi Tarfon said it, II:20). But it also led to many other lovely discoveries including this, which was too fine to abridge.
“It is not within our grasp to explain
the prosperity of the wicked
or the suffering of the righteous.
All we are called upon to do
is to act justly ourselves.
Reality is more complex than we would like.
If we insist upon it making sense,
we will find ourselves despairing.
Reality cannot be neatly packaged,
bound with the ribbon of morality.
Reality is greater than our ideas of good and evil
Reality is beyond our right and wrong.
Reality is all that is, and this is often at odds
with what we imagine it should be.
Where we can stand up for justice, let us act.
Where we are confounded by Truth,
let us keep silent.”
Rabbi Yannai Pirke Avot, Talmud
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
Bird’s Eye: Two superb Jewish musicians have new albums out, and you’re urged to take a listen. Daniel Kahn (and the Painted Bird) is the only musician I know of who has rabbis writing about his lyrics, but “Inner Emigration”, (a term originally used for Germans who opposed Hitler, but stayed in Germany), has the most interesting lyrics of any song I’ve heard this millennium. The Guardian interviews Leonard Cohen about his new album, “Old Ideas”, while in “Old Friends, Old Ideas”, I contrast Cohen’s new work to Paul Simon’s “Afterlife” and recent Bob Dylan.
* March of The Jobless Corps Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird YouTube
From Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird’s album “Lost Causes”. Original Yiddish song by Mordechai Gebirtig, written ca. 1930 in Krakow.
* (Read Lyrics to) Daniel Kahn On “Inner Emigration” Rabbi Brant Rosen Shalom Rav
I’ve sung the praises of Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird before; my favorite “Punk Cabaret, Radical Yiddish, Gothic, American Folk, Klezmer Danse Macabre” band. Been listening a lot to their latest album, “Lost Causes” – particularly a brilliant ditty called “Inner Emigration.” This song is simultaneously a meditation on identity politics, a treatise on the absurd reality of national borders, but ultimately, I think, a blistering diatribe against the way we all assent to our own inner/outer oppression. It’s also catchy as hell.
* (Hear song halfway down page) Daniel Kahn and the Relevance of Yiddish Protest Songs – The Arty Semite – The Jewish Daily Forward
The sentiments of these Yiddish songs and the intimations of their contemporary relevance come to a crescendo in the album’s centerpiece, “Inner Emigration.” It is Kahn’s own song that tells a tale of withdrawal from surrounding society, tuning out its problems and suppressing their effect on one’s spirit. One verse is about a German Jewish woman who chose to stay in late 1930s Germany because of her cabaret career; another verse is about a Ukrainian Jew who let go of his aspirations in the face of danger: “What’s the bother finding a new nation? A border isn’t art, it’s just a frame / Just make a secret inner emigration. / The holy land and exile are the same.” Yet another verse is about an Israeli woman married to a Palestinian refugee: “She and he comprise a kind of nation, the kind we build inside when we’re alone. / But if they just make Inner Emigrations, / then they’ll only have a home when they’re at home.”
* Leonard Cohen: ‘All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience’ The Guardian
Leonard Cohen: ‘All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience’ Sombre prophet, mordant wisecracker, repentant cad: On Leonard Cohen’s gruelling 1972 world tour, captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire, an interviewer asked the singer to define success. Cohen, who at 37 knew a bit about failure and the kind of acclaim that doesn’t pay the bills, frowned at the question and replied: “Success is survival.” By that reckoning, Cohen has been far more of a success than he could have predicted….
These days, Cohen rations his one-on-one interviews with the utmost austerity, hence this press conference to promote his 12th album, Old Ideas, a characteristically intimate reflection on love, death, suffering and forgiveness. After the playback he answers questions. He was always funnier than he was given credit for; now he has honed his deadpan to such perfection that every questioner becomes the straight man in a double act. Claudia from Portugal wants him to explain the humour behind his image as a lady’s man. “Well, for me to be a lady’s man at this point requires a great deal of humour,” he replies.
* Old Ideas, and Old Friends Peter Marmorek
And what of Cohen? He starts with “Going Home” a song from the point of view of God, who is musing about Leonard Cohen. (You can hear it here). God says, “I love to speak with Leonard/ He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/ He’s a lazy bastard/ Living in a suit.” I sympathize with God; I’ve often felt that way about Leonard Cohen. I’ve enjoyed, and sometimes loved, much of his work since discovering his first poetry in the mid sixties. But I’ve been painfully aware of the extent to which almost all his work follows the same structural pattern: an assertion of the magnificence of love or passion of a transcendent nature, followed by an elegant apology for the impossibility of maintaining that stance. It has felt like watching a great actor whose career has been built upon variations of a single character. As opposed to say, Randy Newman, (a sixty-eight year old Jewish singer and songwriter) whose characters are anyone but himself, one always feels that Cohen is singing about being Leonard Cohen, or of wearing the mask of Leonard Cohen.
Perhaps that is what makes “Going Home” so powerful. The chorus, sung by an ethereal choir (Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters) anticipates a time when he can lay that style aside and go home (“Going home/ Without my burden/ Going home / Behind the curtain/ Going home/ Without the costume/ That I wore”). After God saying how much He loves to speak with Cohen, the second song, “Amen” offers us Cohen begging God to speak to him, to tell him he is wanted. It’s a powerful and dramatic confrontation of two songs. (Listen to “Amen” here.) In the song, Cohen itemizes the horrors of the world, begging to hear God’s voice “when I’m clean and I’m sober” to reassure him he is loved.
Bird’s Eye: Well, we don’t have Kodachrome to shoot any more, but with digital cameras (and the saturation filter) those colours are as bright as ever, or maybe even brighter. Holi has to be any photographer’s favourite festival.
* The Colors of Holi 2012 In Focus – The Atlantic
* Lathmar Holi festival The Big Picture
A few overlaps with In Focus, but some lovely different shots too.
* The Maasai Cricket Warriors In Focus – The Atlantic
* 8 Oddly Colored Creatures Buzzfeed
Bird’s Eye: While Tikkunista is often, usually, always critical of the Stephen Harper Reform party that currently forms the Canadian government, we are hugely supportive and admiring of many wonderful things about Canada. Front and centre is our tolerance from others, which this week got proven to be second to none. Two follow up stories of note follow….
* Canada #1: Tolerance Of Minorities Is Highest In Canada Gallup
Canada was the most tolerant country regarding average community acceptance of the minority groups. Australia, New Zealand and the United States tended to be relatively tolerant as well. The Nordic countries were dispersed throughout the top half of the OECD. The less tolerant end was dominated by southern and eastern European countries and the OECD Asian members.
* ‘What if my daughter is afraid of her?’ The Gazette (Thanks, Ronit!)
Not too long ago, if I saw a woman walking down the street with her face covered by a niqab, I would feel it was my duty to glare. As a non-religious feminist, I had decided that a woman who covers her face is oppressed – that she is uneducated, and that her husband is making her cover up because he’s crazy and/or jealous.
OK, I’m exaggerating a little, but you get the point.
And yet until two months ago, I didn’t even really know a single Muslim. I went to high school in an Ottawa suburb, where I was baptized a Catholic so that I could qualify for schooling in the Catholic school system, which was considered better than the more open public system.
We had one year of religious education that gave us a glimpse of world religions. But I’m pretty sure my education about Islam came mainly from CNN, or Fox. I went to university in a small town in Ontario. I didn’t meet any Muslims there, either.
My real education about Islam came very recently, courtesy of a Montreal daycare.
* OUT OF CORDOBA Beit Zeitoun
(612 Markham St., Toronto: 7–9:30 Saturday, 3/3/12)
OUT OF CORDOBA is a documentary film about the legacy of the city of Cordoba in Moorish Spain and its meaning for our times. Directed by Jacob Bender the film explores the dramatic biographies of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) the Muslim, and Rabbi Moses Maimonides (The Rambam) the Jew. The two were the leading personalities of medieval Islamic Spain and its heritage of “convivencia” (religious coexistence).
Filmed in the USA, Spain, Morocco, France, Italy, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, and ten years in the making, the film also explores contemporary relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the battle against religious extremism and xenophobia, and the revolts for democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and for peace and justice in Occupied Palestine.
A discussion with director Jacob Bender will follow the screening.
Bird’s Eye: This week marked the start of Lenten penitence, which meant that last week was the occasion for a spate of carnivals world wide. We start with a single photo from the most bizarre and pointless carnival custom you may have ever seen, in that centre of world carnival madness, Warwickshire. Then we go into two In Focus Carnival features (the first is mostly Brazil; the second is mostly not.) Big Picture’s Carnival feature has a few overlaps, but also some glorious different shots. (None of Quebec anywhere, Bonhomme was sad to note.)
* Warwickshire, UK Eyewitness
* Carnival 2012 In Focus
* More From Carnival 2012 In Focus
* Carnival 2012 The Big Picture
