Humanity?
Day: December 4, 2016
Torture in” democracies”
Charlotte Silver is an independent journalist in San Francisco, formerly based in the West Bank, Palestine.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest – February 18 – and the day of his death – February 23 – his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet’s Kishon interrogation facility.
Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back.
When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat – who leaves a pregnant widow and two children – died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found
Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest – February 18 – and the day of his death – February 23 – his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet’s Kishon interrogation facility.
Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back.
When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat – who leaves a pregnant widow and two children – died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found no blood clot in his heart. In fact, the autopsy concluded that Arafat, who turned 30 this year, was in fine cardiovascular health.
What the final autopsy did find, however, was that Jaradat had been pummelled by repeated blows to his chest and body and had sustained a total of six broken bones in his spine, arms and legs; his lips lacerated; his face badly bruised.
The ordeal that Arafat suffered before he died at the hands of Israel’s Shin Bet is common to many Palestinians that pass through Israel’s prisons. According to the prisoners’ rights organisation Addameer, since 1967, a total of 72 Palestinians have been killed as a result of torture and 53 due to medical neglect. Less than a month before Jaradat was killed, Ashraf Abu Dhra died while in Israeli custody in a case that Addameer argues was a direct result of medical neg
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How to look English
Ginger cat.. must be Celtic.
English style my way:make it coloured if you can.Wear a hat if bald.Wash your trousers as often as is sensible.Wash your own!It’s easy
Wash your clothes a lot but don’t iron them
Go out in only a T shirt and jeans in winter.
Old grey anoraks look good on most people,or so they seem to think
Wear skirts that show your thighs off or leggings that show everything else off or both or nothing
Do wear crop tops and low rise jeans especially when suffering from underactive thyroid disorder
Jeans with rips are perfect for old ladies.Rip it youself
Wear thick padded down coats in the summer.
Never wear a summer dress especially if you are a man
Never wear petticoats and other lingerie.Just pants and top or vest
Wear a T shirt saying:Anti-Semitic, moi? while touring Oxford looking for pubs
Wear a T shirt saying :Belgians, go back to Congo.
Wear a T shirt saying :I feel Rubbish
Wear a T shirt that says :I luv money
Wear a T shirt that says: Educated in Burton, can’t spell
Make sure your hair is exposed— both head and pubic.
I don’t understand either but they keep saying,where are you from?
I say,here,But somehow they don’t believe me.
Actually, I am mixed race.So I am only British.
Even with ethnicity we have a class system with English at the top and mixed race somewhere further down.Ancient Briton? Sorry,dear
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How to dress Hot!Wear two of everything
If you are happy to wear strange colours that most of us are not then the Sales will satisfy your lust for clothes of high quality
1.Buy a wool coat for only £79 from a top make.Why?
Because it is ORANGE!
2.Buy one ball of mohair and knit yourself a hat.Don’t make it red or it will CLASH with the orange coat.
3.Knit yourself a Mobius strip neck warmer in merino wool.I invented it but now it’s in fashion
4 Wear men’s woollen vests– a good reason to get married.Check the vest first.
5.Wear two of everything if you are thin enough not to appear gigantic
2 Vests, 2 pairs pants.2 prs tights, etc. BUT Not 2 pairs of JEANS.You won’t be able to walk.Ditto shoes
Drawback: twice as much washing.
Advantage: Save money on central heating.
6.Move to another hotter country.Remember though you will be a FOREIGNER then.
So maybe not a European country?Remember ,no NHS.
7 Wear 2 nightgowns
8 Put a fleece sleeping bag between your sheets.Leave the unzipped side on the side where you exit the bed in the middle of the night.
9 Avoid birth control devices.Get your partner to sleep in another fleece bag.That will make it hard for him to get near you.Don’t wrestle unless your bed is very big.You might fall off and what would the Fire Brigade think?
10 Do a lot of cleaning and vacuuming instead of watching TV.. it gets one warm and the room clean too.
11 Go for a run.
12 Stay in bed for 3 months till meteorological spring arrives.
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This variegated colour
In between the blackest and the bright, Graded shades of grey and lilac lie. These variegated colours give delight. And from my soul, I hear a gentle sigh. As we live, we dwell in mysteries; Must take decisions based on various views. And unknown memories from our history Bring out the old , so misperceive the new. For true perception, we must humble be. Not for moral reasons but for sight. The emptiness lets flood creative seas. And allows in rays of guiding golden light. We need to know we do not know at all. And, trembling, hold the doors of vision wide. So gentle should be judgements when we fail. Then errors we’ll appreciate, not hide. We will deal with life unknown, unclear; Perception is a better guide than fear
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The rage of living
The point of living is to feel alive Not caged by too high walls or steely fence We want to love,be taken by surprise. Our wounded mangled self we can’t deride, Recalling fights and struggles lived through once. The point of living is to feel alive. We dither to and fro in puzzled ways We feel the anguish, still and quite intent. We want to love,be wakened by surprise. The self’s spontaneous, not a thing contrived; Formed with love and hate,with all intense. The rage of living is to be alive. When washed away by feelings glad,immense That cross our borders without our lament The hope,the need of living is our life We want to give and take yet fear surprise
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Beneath the surface,force and fierceness thrive.
How softly sweetly,gently flowers pose
Carnation,orchid ,daffodil and rose.
For their intricate petals form a shield
Yet bees with striped force shall make them yield.
Appearances,both natural and contrived,
Mixed with the wiles of human nature, thrive.
As knowing not, we pluck the apple rare
And bite its flesh,with teeth we love to bare.
We too deceive the innocent who pass
Not seeing watchers hid behind the glass.
The windows break,the deep earth quakes;
Seized is the maiden ,he her virtue takes.
Beneath the surface,force and fierceness thrive.
What fearsome, burning God enjoys our live
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St Maximilian Kolbe
When a prisoner escaped late in July of that year 1941, ten men from his barracks were picked to suffer death by starvation as both punishment and deterrent. Fr. Maximilian offered to take the place of one of the men; Franciszek Gajowniczek had let out a cry of pain for his family and this holy priest volunteered to take his place.
Maximilian has a statue at Westminster Abbey.
St. Maximilian Kolbe is among twenty modern martyrs from across the globe who have been honored with a statue on the façade of Westminster Abbey. This priest who had no greater love than to lay down his life can be seen above the west door of the abbey, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and seventeen others.
The prisoner whom St. Maximilian saved attended his canonization.
There was one extraordinary man in attendance at St. Maximilian’s canonization: Franciszek Gajowniczek. Though spared the torture of the starvation bunker, Gajowniczek had still suffered greatly. He was in Auschwitz for over five years and his sons did not live to see the day of his release. Those prisoners who had grown so fond of Fr. Kolbe were particularly cruel to Gajowniczek, as they blamed him for the loss of their beloved friend and priest. But he received consolation in 1982, in St. Peter’s Square, when the man who offered his life for Franciszek’s was declared a saint.
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Your silence helped Hitler
EXCERPT
Nazi Survivor to the World: Your Silence Helped Hitler
Moris Scheyer’s vivid account of successfully evading the Nazis is finally being published, and the decades have not blunted his anger at those who accommodated the Fuhrer.
As arts editor for one of Vienna’s principal newspapers, Moriz Scheyer knew many of the city’s foremost artists and was an important literary journalist. With the advent of the Nazis, he was forced from both job and home. In 1943, in hiding in France, Scheyer began drafting what was to become Asylum: A Survivor’s Flight From Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France. Tracing events from the Anschluss in Vienna, through life in Paris and unoccupied France, including a period in a French concentration camp, contact with the Resistance, and clandestine life in a convent caring for mentally disabled women, he gives an extraordinarily vivid account of the events and experience of persecution.
EXCERPT
Nazi Survivor to the World: Your Silence Helped Hitler
Moris Scheyer’s vivid account of successfully evading the Nazis is finally being published, and the decades have not blunted his anger at those who accommodated the Fuhrer.
As arts editor for one of Vienna’s principal newspapers, Moriz Scheyer knew many of the city’s foremost artists and was an important literary journalist. With the advent of the Nazis, he was forced from both job and home. In 1943, in hiding in France, Scheyer began drafting what was to become Asylum: A Survivor’s Flight From Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France. Tracing events from the Anschluss in Vienna, through life in Paris and unoccupied France, including a period in a French concentration camp, contact with the Resistance, and clandestine life in a convent caring for mentally disabled women, he gives an extraordinarily vivid account of the events and experience of persecution.
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Pride, the deadly sin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Pride
Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour”.
Pride
Main article: Pride
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This secion contains too many or too-lengthy quotations for an encyclopedic entry. (May 2016) |
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Building the Tower of Babel was, for Dante, an example of pride. Painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
The negative version of pride (Latin, superbia) is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the perversion of the faculties that make humans more like God—dignity and holiness. It is also thought to be the source of the other capital sins. Also known as hubris (from ancient Greek ὕβρις),or futility, it is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of people.
In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially forgetting one’s own lack of divinity, and refusing to acknowledge one’s own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).
What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 203.
As pride has been labelled the father of all sins, it has been deemed the devil’s most prominent trait. C.S. Lewis writes, in Mere Christianity, that pride is the “anti-God” state, the position in which the ego and the self are directly opposed to God: “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”[39] Pride is understood to sever the soul from God, as well as His life-and-grace-giving Presence.[5]
One can be prideful for different reasons. Author Ichabod Spencer states that “[s]piritual pride is the worst kind of pride, if not worst snare of the devil. The heart is particularly deceitful on this one thing.”[40] Jonathan Edwards said “[r]emember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul’s peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan’s whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.”[41]
In Ancient Athens, hubris was considered one of the greatest crimes and was used to refer to insolent contempt that can cause one to use violence to shame the victim (this sense of hubris could also characterize rape [1]). Aristotle defined hubris as shaming the victim, not because of anything that happened to the committer or might happen to the committer, but merely for the committer’s own gratification.[42][43][44] The word’s connotation changed somewhat over time, with some additional emphasis towards a gross over-estimation of one’s abilities.
The term has been used to analyse and make sense of the actions of contemporary heads of government by Ian Kershaw (1998), Peter Beinart (2010) and in a much more physiological manner by David Owen (2012). In this context the term has been used to describe how certain leaders, when put to positions of immense power, seem to become irrationally self-confident in their own abilities, increasingly reluctant to listen to the advice of others and progressively more impulsive in their actions.[45]
Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour”.
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His speech is very rude
My husband is naughty a very naughty man He throws down the newspaper on top of his beer can He buys himself a sandwich in a cardboard box And puts it in the laundry with his woollen socks. He takes off his pyjamas and chucks them on the floor He uses hankies frequently, so I have to buy some more. He wants to have thick sauces on top of all his food. And when he has a hypo his speech is very rude. I gave him such a shock when I learned to curse and swear But we really need to,as “eff off “is everywhere. Why, even in the Bible there are some wicked words I’ve not read it all yet, except Psalm 23rd. I mean to finish reading it and then when I must die, I’ll come onto a cloud and shout,Oh pi is in the sky. For transcendental numbers give a hint divine. Although you can get it better with a glass of dry, white wine. My husband drinks draught guinness and then he fall asleep He hollers and curses when the oven timer bleeps. He eats a piece of kipper and cried out,Oh,dear God! Nobody caught this b*gger with a fishing rod He wants to move to Whitby and walk upon the sands Sit in the audience and hear the big brass bands. He wants to see the sun rise and to see it set… So please send God some gelatine in case the air’s too wet!
How my heart sings 