Meet Frank Barningham, recipient of the YMCA 2008 Peace Medallion:
The NATO bombing of Kosovo got Frank Barningham started on a peace vigil that has continued weekly for nine years in Durham.
Except on occasional Saturdays when illness prevents it, Barningham, 75, spends an hour on the sidewalk wearing a placard he made in March of 1999 that reads: “War is not a solution.” He talks with anyone who’ll listen and listens to anyone who’ll talk.
Barningham’s “lifetime dedication” to peace activism earned him the 2008 YMCA Peace Medallion. Y officials presented the award to Barningham on Thursday before an audience of about 50 people at the Owen Sound Family Y boardroom. (Owen Sound Sun Times)
I can somewhat admire the dedication but does anyone else besides me find this story deeply sad?
I've always felt the key to fighting radical Islam starts at home. Despite the fact that women are largely seen as little more than chattle and objects, if women en masse began to reject the second class citizenry of Islam, perhaps we would see a gradual change from the positions it takes both in social living and in governance :
MUSLIM Australian women are starting to fight back against a repressive patriarchal system in which controversial Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali is seen as a champion of women's rights, a Melbourne University conference will hear today.
Leading Muslim spokeswoman Silma Ihram says new voices in the Muslim community, especially women, are bypassing the mosque as increasingly irrelevant — but the lack of structure also makes space for radical groups to seek recruits.
Ms Ihram, a noted educator who will present a paper to a National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies conference today, is one of several speakers about Muslim women fighting back from "second-class status".
In her paper, she defends Sheikh Hilali, who sparked outrage two years ago when he compared scantily clad women with uncovered meat, saying he is considered one of the most outspoken supporters of women's rights.
She says he was the main supporter for setting up the Muslim Women's Association despite objections from his own male-only mosque board, and is reputed to support women's choice in marriage, divorce and ethnic intermarriage.
She told The Age that the sheikh changed his message depending on the audience. "He has a conservative patriarchal community (at Sydney's Lakemba Mosque), and he's going to address them in a way they feel comfortable with.
"At the same time he has to deal with younger Australian women, whose rights he is championing. So he has this contradiction: he says one thing to one group and another to another. A lot of imams have this problem."
Of course this is an issue of Islamic integration in western civilization, since this is about women living within Muslim communities in Australia, but at least it shows the beginnings of western liberal-style thinking about the role of men and women and the social equalities we take for granted.
Much of the problem with integration of Muslims in western civilization is the notion that males must control their women in order to show piety. When women become more westernized in their views of the woman's role in society, and by this I do not mean to imply that Eastern civilizations have not ever had forms of gender equality [Iran was very progressive before the overthrow of the Shah], many men feel threatened. It isn't such a surprise. You may recall that 100 years ago Christian culture was undergoing the same kind of transformative change that vaulted it ahead as the social benefit from suffrage was immediately evident.
The frustration of Islamic women in Australia has given rise to their political movement, providing an "English-speaking" voice to the religion, as women take a role of leadership and cultivate a harmony of their culture within mainstream English-Australian culture, rather than isolate it as so many mosques have done throughout the English-speaking world.
It is interesting that in the case of fighting radical Islam, feminists may one day become the allies of the friends of liberalism.
written for the Broom, Raphael usually resides at Unambig
It's in the way you dress. The way you boogie down. The way you sign your unemployment check. You're a man who likes to do things your own way. And on those special odd-numbered Saturdays when driving is permitted, you want it in your car. It's that special feeling of a zero-emissions wind at your back and a road ahead meandering with possibilities. The kind of feeling you get behind the wheel of the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition from Congressional Motors.
All new for 2012, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is the mandatory American car so advanced it took $100 billion and an entire Congress to design it. We started with same reliable 7-way hybrid ethanol-biodeisel-electric-clean coal-wind-solar-pedal power plant behind the base model Pelosi, but packed it with extra oomph and the sassy styling pizazz that tells the world that 1974 Detroit is back again -- with a vengeance.
I caught a snippet of Michael Moore on Larry King last night and he was advocating this very thing. Barack Obama must do what Roosevelt did and take over the 'Big Three' as we are facing a national crisis. The government will be in charge. Check this if you can handle the angry spittle:
I actually agree with him on a lot of his points until he gets to the complete government takeover part.
Tuberculosis - get some! I seem to have hit the jack pot when I told the caring street nurse (who just seems to come to the inside shelter and never outside in the cold of the street) about some chest pains. I also had a cough, but that was from the better cigarettes I an now able to smoke. When I had a job, a house, a car, and vacations and control over the television channel, I had to smoke cheap smokes. Well, now that I have plenty of disposable income from pan handling, I get to smoke premium tobacco! So I cough. And I coughed around the street nurse who never goes out on the street. I told her I had chest pains, too. I did not want her to feel that I had nothing for her to feel white guilty about, I am homeless after all. So thats when I learnt about the tuberculosis jack pot!
The street nurse who never goes onto the street gave me a pink form. Now I get extra rations, clothing, and a brochure that explains that I should not be concerned about having a communicable disease. TB used to kill lots of people, but that was before we developed antibiotics that the germ is now resistant to because our socialist activists handed out antibiotics like candy and did not enforce the medical regimen so that underclass types developed antibiotic resistant forms. If I have this disease, I should not be concerned about social stigma. It is not my fault that I am contagious, and if anyone shows any sign of concern, well, they are racist scum and I should report them. And when I report them to the activists, be sure to wash my hands first, and wear a mask. Racism is everywhere.
I thought about this as I rode the subway back and forth between Kipling and Kennedy station. I did not want to panhandle today, instead I wanted to read a book. I have plenty of time for pleasure reading, now that I am homeless. I just sat in the warmth, coughing into a kleenex, and wiping my hands on the seat, the hand holds, and the doors. Why are people so intolerant of diversity that they show hatred towards Tuberculosis-Canadians? I got all sweaty thinking about it, and my breathing was like Darth Vader. I could taste blood in my spit. Intolerance is everywhere.
My street buddies tell me I can sell the medication for Tuberculosis. They do it all the time. This way I can keep on being on the Tuberculosis gravy train. I should know in two weeks when my appointment is with the street doctor who never goes out on the street to have counselling about the stigma of maybe having Tuberculosis. Being homeless is fun. People care about me, and I no longer feel guilty about being white. I usually sit in the first or last car on the subway during rush hour (morning and evening) reading a book and coughing into a paper towel. I am reading Daniel Defoe * . If you see me, say hi. I will not shake your hand, though. You might have the nasty intolerant racist attitudes that taxpayers carry.
I have no idea how Henry Alford survived into this century, and even less of an idea how he found his way into the New York Times. Like something out of another century or world.
So I have become more explicit in my acts of reverse etiquette. The other day I apologized to a tall, bearded man who slammed his duffel into me at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street. Then I told him, "I'm saying what you should be saying." He responded, in toto, "Oh, right."
Though this response could not be described as "blanket-like," it nevertheless gave me enough ground to see that I was on the right track. I realized that I just need to be even more explicit with people. So the other day, when a stroller-pushing mother semi-vigorously bumped into me at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street - this corner is apparently the Bermuda Triangle of manners - I expressed remorse, and added, "No one says I'm sorry anymore, so I do it for them."
"O.K.."
"My idea is that if I say I'm sorry, then at least the words have been released into the universe."
Earlier this year I commented on the long, sad decline of the Middlebrow, that aspirational class of Middle Americans that yearned for the patina of respectability conferred by a classical education. Unable to make their way into the elite colleges of New England, they settled for performances of Shakespeare in local theatres and traveling lecturers. The western canon beckoned and in book clubs and night school classes, they sort of found it. The Middlebrow is largely dead today. The elite colleges, once the bastion of the canon, have turned against it and the values of the West in general. The culture on a whole is now incredibly vulgarized. Education is seen mostly as high-end job training, acquiring the skills for a lucrative, or at least respectable, middle class existence. That hardy band of fools, still interested in studying the liberal arts, must endure the sling and arrows of French literary theorizing and modern German philosophy.
One of the great talismans of the mid-century Middlebrow was the product of two men, Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Driven by the belief that American democracy required all Americans, whatever their socio-economic background, to be given the opportunity to join what Adler called the Great Conversation of western civilization. The naivety is almost painful now, half a century after the release of the Great Books of the Western World, which is still being produced by Britannica. The series was a modest commercial success, yet even this was something of a miracle given the sets 54 volumes (later extended to 60) and its carrying the great minds of the West, from Aristotle to Newton to Darwin. The books, unfortunately, carried little in the way of explanation or integration. Despite Adler's boast about being a liberal education at a fraction of the cost, the books lacked that vital element of a classical liberal education, a good teacher.
While much can be accomplished by self-learning, it requires enormous patience and suffers from the basic disadvantage of ignorance. Donald Rumsfeld, early in his term as Secretary of Defense, was widely mocked for discussing the unknown unknowns. Rather than being baffle gaff, Rumsfeld's comments were quite astute. There are things you know you don't know, and there are the things you don't know you don't know. This is the essentially problem of self-education, you don't know what you need to know. That's the purpose of a good and even a great teacher, telling you what you need to know. The great fault of the autodidact is not their lack of knowledge, they often know more and understand better than the formally educated, it's their chaotic sense of breadth about a subject.
They'll know an awful lot about the intrigues in the court of Elizabeth I, but not so much about how court and crown fit into the overall context of late sixteenth century English society. Much about Shakespeare, not enough about Elizabethan theater. This may, for some, be a moot point. There isn't much liberal education going on in the universities anyway, so the errors and sins of the self-taught should be overlooked. In Adler's time the issue was less that of elite schools, including his own University of Chicago, in revolt against the West, it was the great number of people bright and eager, but too poor to enjoy a good traditional education in the liberal arts. The nobility of the effort shouldn't obscure its inherent impracticality. The vast majority of these sets gathered dust in suburban or small town living rooms and dens.
This NYT piece cites a recent book condemning Adler's project as dull and uninspiring, highly unlikely to galvanize millions of readers to study the best of the West. Dull or not, the 443 works compiled in the Great Books series make a forbidding climb. Much of it is only of interest to academic specialists. There are lengthy passages from Newton's Principia Mathematica, scarcely bedtime reading and not the best introduction to modern physics. The book is today mostly read by Newton enthusiasts and students of scientific history. Even Newton's methods of mathematical notation, which he used in his calculus equations, are not used today, having been quickly supplanted by Leibnitz's easier to use alternatives. Perhaps the only bit of ancient science or math in the series to be of modern relevance is Euclid. The gem of the sets, however, was its impressive list of philosophical works, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Locke and Descartes to name only a few. Yet reading philosophy in the "raw" can be dangerous and frustrating.
There's little in the way of context to explain the debates between Plato and his most famous pupil on metaphysics and epistemology, something which a good history of philosophy (like Bertrand Russell's, which was released a few years earlier) would help to frame. Much of the material, then, would seem very obscure or pointless. The untutored student either must resort to additional references - if he knows where to find them - to gloss the text, or slog through and memorize what he can. Adler was careful to select readable passages from the works, but the editions are simply not scholarly (due to commercial limitations) or provided with solid introductions. It was all like an anatomy class where a cadaver is given to students who have little idea of basic biology.
The death of the middlebrow, and the ultimate failure of the Adler project, marked a grave inflection point in modern history. For generations only an elite could be educated, the 20th century provided the resources to educate virtually anyone who wanted to receive that education. In those long-centuries before the 1960s a culture of aspiration developed, that was the birth of the idea of the Middlebrow. The revolt of the intellectuals did much to kill off their bourgeois imitators, and admirers, and their dreams of the best of West. But perhaps not quite so much as the public funding of post-secondary education. Just as the welfare state promised to protect people from cradle to grave, so public funding of the universities extended that promise into higher education. The welfare state breed welfare junkies, those who learned to game the system to their material advantage but long-term spiritual crippling. What we don't earn, we don't value. The free ride of high school, and its subsidized version through the colleges and universities, created a sense of entitlement. Education became first an economic right, very soon after it became almost a human right, whether the student had the brains or the drive to achieve it. A century ago few would have regarded the sciences as all that much more demanding that the humanities. But this changed after Second World War.
The sciences became tougher, reflecting the triumph of higher mathematics in these fields. The humanities, after some feeble efforts to adopt - foolishly - mathematics to their fields, succumb to the demands of university administrators, now little more than tenured bureaucrats. If education was a right, you can't fail someone and prevent them from obtaining that right. The dumbing down of the curriculum is the result. The results of unqualified engineers being unleashed onto society are obvious enough, even to the bureaucratic mentality. The sciences were, thus, kept relatively safe from this process. Few, however, grasped the dangers of unqualified history and political science majors unleashed onto unsuspecting world. These became the lawyers, teachers, politicians journalists and the bureaucrats who now govern our society. The word people, whose influence though seemingly ephemeral is decisive in the long run. The Middlebrow applauded this process, his children now entered the halls of academia. Little did he understand he was helping to commit cultural suicide.
Here in Ontario, the beating heart of Canada, there is an unexpected layer of snow this morning. Global Warming seems to rather silly to all those souls out shovelling. But they are not thinking about the scam that was Global Warming. No, on this morning they are wondering which homeless shelter they will be living in, now that the economy has up and died.
Cars do not seem all that bad this cold, Global not-Warming day. Turns out all that stuff about cars being evil, killing baby dolphins, making you fat, and lynching N-people, was, well, a bunch of lies. Cars are not all that bad. They, like the Apis bull of the ancient Egyptians, created jobs and wealth. And this is now apparent to those suckers now out shovelling out the snow that the Global Warming con artists promised would not come this morning.
Now that the tricksters have done their job, convincing you all that eating vegetarian grass was better than, well, food, now you have to eat grass. Nobody buying cars means nobody making cars, selling cars, fixing cars, putting gas in cars, financing cars, or making a wage doing something related to cars. And with those people not with money, well they don't spend it on a whole bunch of stuff, like whatever it is you are dependent on. Yep, without a job, it is off to the homeless shelter. But the Global Warming people who told you that snow was never coming again, like this morning, have made sure their friends and relatives have good secure jobs staffing the homeless shelters. They will give you a small towel and a small bar of soap when you line up for the shower, and the bed you sleep in will reak of bedbug killing disinfectant. You got the economy they sold you. Great, is it not, comrade? And the CBC is blaring on the televison all night, and you get a free copy of the Toronto Star with your instant coffee and bran muffin in the morning!
That Leave it to Beaver culture does not seem so bad now, does it? Everyone in the Global Warming racket used to make fun of it. Having a job, and being a square was square, man. And that square, Beaver, all he wanted to do was grow up and have a car. He was a square, he scoffed at Global Warming, he did his homework, and he aspired to heteronormative sexual relations with women. And now, as the homeless shelter thinking proletariat (what a silly term we now realize!) shovels the snow that the Global Warming con artists told us would never come again, having a Leave it to Beaver world would be alot nicer than the cold socialist paradise they tricked us into having.
Remember the bad old days when the Christians ran things? It was terrible back then, you felt a little guilty when you did not go to church on Sunday. Well, now you cannot go to church on Sunday, because you need to line up to get into the homeless shelter. Things are so much better, except for the snow that should not be, and the economy that went away. But think of how happy the prancing dolphins will be!
Myself, as I type this in the public library, and watch the time so I can shuffle my way to the homeless shelter, I take refuge in the reparations for past injustices. Sure, as a homeless guy I have better access to health care. They bring a doctor and nurse right to the shelter on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I get free dental care, where before I had a job, a house, vacations, and control of the television channel I wanted to watch. I get to go to a free legal clinic, too. Which is good, because in keeping with my cultural traditions, I, like my illustrious activist ancestor William Wallace, am going to take one of the fatherless Bolshies who killed the Apis bull with me. As I push my thumb into his eyes (er, eye, because I do it one at a time), I think about how life was really much better being a square in a square economy. Having access to a safe injection sites, whores who can get complementary abortions, and condoms for buggery, was not really a good trade for a job, a home, and apple pie. But I am homeless, a victim, and the activist judiciary will shed a tear at the horrific Jack the Ripper adventures I intend to enjoy as a way of striking back for the cause of freedom. I will roam the snowy streets, hunting the con men of Global Warming, and take them, eye by eye. Something to look forward too.
One of my old employees dropped in today. I'm a little jealous... Seems the old bastard got himself a fancy new digital camera this summer and captured himself some of the best wolf pics I've ever seen! I got his permission to share them here.
They were taken last Sept in the Whiteshell, in the Lone Island Lake area. A pack of at least 7 were investigating a logging area. Good thing he had a good zoom lens on the camera.
A young wolf, maybe a year old? Looks like he could be eating an energy or candy bar of some sort, perhaps discarded by a logger at the site.
There are few American cities that receive a greater drubbing that Buffalo, N.Y. As a Torontonian by birth and upbringing I was taught to have an instinctive contempt for the place, ranking it somewhat below Hamilton but above Rochester in our version of Dante's rungs of hell. The city's geography, the source of its long-ago prosperity, has been especially cruel to a town that calls itself, without irony, the Queen City. Located at the eastern end of Lake Erie, and a short distance from Niagara Falls, it seems to have an almost magnetic ability to attract powerful blizzards. Storm systems that barely dust Toronto bury Buffalo in feet of snow. Yet the place is an architectural marvel. It's bleak distinction as being the only major American city whose population was higher in 1900 than in 2000, has proven a boon of late. Poverty, as this NYT article suggests, does a lot to save old buildings from demolition. Growing to wealth and prominence as the terminus of the Erie Canal, and later as a grain transhipment point for rail and lake freighters, by the early 20th century Buffalo boasted buildings designed by the likes of Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The city is a vast museum piece slowly crumbling in the cold of the eastern Great Lakes. Whether the city's notoriously incompetent politicians have the wits to make anything of Buffalo's remarkable history remains to be seen.
