My sense of direction

We all should set a goal, reaching for peace and freedom for all.

Bizzwizz

Daily writing prompt

What gives you direction in life?

View all responses

In life, we often seek a path to follow,

A direction to guide us through the unknown.

What gives us direction, we often ponder,

And seek a purpose to call our own.

For some, it’s the values and priorities we hold,

The things we cherish, the ideals we uphold.

When we know what truly matters in our hearts,

We can make choices that lead us to our part.

Others find direction in setting goals,

Creating a plan, and moving towards their roles.

With each step taken, a purpose unfolds,

And a path to a fulfilling life, we hold.

And still, there are those who seek direction in positivity,

Seeing opportunities in every adversity.

A mindset that keeps them moving forward,

Towards a life of wonder and reward.

In conclusion, what gives us direction in life,

Is a combination…

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Lots to be said about freedom

Daily writing prompt

What does freedom mean to you?

View all responses

There is much to be said about freedom. There are also very different opinions of what freedom is or should be. Many people love to aim for the ability to live without anybody telling them what to do. Nobody loves to have chains on or be limited by others. Humans want to have no constraints, no limitations that would bother them,

It is found natural that we as human beings would be allowed to control ourselves and to be ourselves. Though, we do find lots of nations that want to restrict people in what they want to be and in what they want to do with their bodies. Even states that claim that they are for “freedom“, like the United States of America, want to tell women what they have to do with their bodies. The state wants to control them and forbids them to take certain pills, for not having (more) kids.

In this present world, it is not that we would everywhere have the choice and liberty to be ourselves.
We can not go wherever we would like. It is even not possible to dress however we want. People expect us to wear certain clothes at certain occasions, but also in certain countries, even in West Europe, women and men feel that certain dress code is not accepted by lots of people. Strangely enough also France where they insist to be so for “liberty” and “equality” we do find that Muslim women may not wear what they want. Neither may men and women have bare limbs when entering churches or religious places.

Everywhere, be it in Europe, Africa, America, or Oceania, we find certain restrictions on all sorts of levels. This would not be so annoying when those restrictions would be there to secure the freedom of others. But that is not always the case.

In this world, there are expectations to which people want us to live up to. In case we would be totally free we should not worry about that. But society shows us clearly the rules for our society. It would be nice if we all could live without rules imposed by others. Then we can speak about “Freedom”.

When we think of freedom, we have expectations to see how we as humans can be unfettered, and have free choice regarding how and where we want to live, and how to behave and dress, as well as how we may express ourselves. Freedom of thought and speech is something we want to uphold!

But left free, the nicest form of freedom is when everybody can feel united behind a similar drive to build the community of freedom into a world where everyone can also feel that freedom.

Real freedom is when we can live in a world where everyone respects the freedom of one another and does not limit that freedom or does not want to have control over the other.

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Preceding

Freedom is unthinkable without responsibility

Freedom. To dispose of what is surplus.

Your Life: Habit or Freedom?

Freedom for whom?

Freedom. To dispose of what is surplus.

Having put lives on the line to protect the freedoms that we enjoy

3 Things Black People Wish White People Understood

Doing vs. liking

Words losing their meaning

Gender, genderless, androgyny, bisexuality, cisgender and transgender

Tolerance Ends When There Is No Tolerance Shown Towards Us

Looking at an Utopism which has not ended

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Additional reading

1. If we view the whole world through a lens that is bright
2. Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
3. Judeo-Christian values and liberty
4. Two forms of Freedom
5. Walls,colours, multiculturalism, money to flow, Carson, Trump and consorts
6. United in an open society relying not on command and control but on freedom
7. Donald Trump his America
8. Blinded crying blue murder having being made afraid by a bugaboo
9. The clean sweeper of the whole caboodle
10. Hollowness of democracy
11. Stress-test for democracy #2 A coup d’etat with bloodshed
12. Those willing to tarnish
13. Religion and believers #1 Lots of groups and forms of belief to be taken interest in
14. Not trying to make the heathen live like Jews #2
15. Belgium showing signs of pre-Nazi Germany making certain people afraid to show up in public
16. A strong and ambitious counter-terrorism policy is needed for the European Union
17. Why, in Belgium, not so many youngsters are protesting these days
18. Hanukkah gathering under the light in the darkness
19. Helping against or causing more homophobia
20. Don’t Envy the World
21. If we view the whole world through a lens that is bright
22. To be chained by love for another one
23. The Spirit of God brings love, hope and freedom
24. Actions to be a reflection of openness of heart

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“Silence clipart, cartoon character illustration“/ CC0 1.0

Related

1. That is what I will be hearing all day now
2. Freedom
3. Freedom (by Rob Gardens)
4. Free-dom
5. Saving Freedom
6. Freedom Means Responsibility
7. “Uncaged”
8. Authentically Free
9. What does freedom mean to you?
10. What does freedom mean to you? – Freedom is a soaring bird that takes flight,
11. Freedom To Me Means…
12. Means Even More…
13. A talk on Freedom
14. Is there a such thing as Freedom?
15. It’s a Human Thing
16. “Liberte”
17. The Illiberal Conception of Freedom 1
18. The Liberal Conception of Freedom 2
19. Denial or freedom?
20. No Alibi but Freedom
21. Love and Freedom
22. Daily Prompt, Six – that I can follow what makes me happy
23. Writing Prompt: Freedom in submissiveness
24. Daily Prompt: 11th May 2023
25. Unmasked
26. Unspoken No’s
27. What You Can Do About the World
28. Beware of “Exceptions” to Freedom
29. We Can Have Unity Without Unanimity
30. The Basic Truths Are The Same
31. Free Yourself and Live
32. SimplyMilkoToo May 05, 2023
33. I feel that death is freeing
34. Freedom In Christ
35. “Sunday’s Best”
36. The Rabbit Hole of Purpose

White versus black in a woke world

In our ridiculous world with its changing fashion and hypes, “Woke” has become the word for a new adverse attitude.

Everything seems to have become woke. We speak about a woke class, a woke capitalism, there is even spoken about a church of woke. You can’t imagine how crazier it gets.

In Dutch for example we may not speak any more of a “blank” person (a Caucasian) but has to say a “white person”, though it is not done anymore to speak about a “black person” when talking of a brown-coloured person.

It has taken me some time before I came to understand what people really meant with Woke, because that adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination“, deemed to be used for so what everything.  Inappropriately, that word woke was used by many people in their conversations, even when they talked about cows and calves. It seemed “cool” to use that word.

A Black Lives Matter die-in over rail tracks, protesting alleged police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota (September 20, 2015)

Though the phrase stay woke had already emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans it only recently after the international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, Black Lives Matter movement, following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Pamela Turner and Rekia Boyd, among others. Very quickly the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter founds its way internationally on social media.

Up to 2020 the support for the Black Lives Matter movement had grown so much it had also created a social awareness, something had to change. Black Lives Matter also voiced support for various movements and causes beyond police brutality, including LGBTQ activism, feminism, immigration reform, and economic justice and by doing so a new movement arose, being a “Woke generation”.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke as ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

Surely being alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice isn’t a bad thing? {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

Suddenly it no longer seemed appropriate to talk about men, women, homosexuals, bisexuals, sexless, and transgender people in a certain way. Asexuality being distinct from abstention from sexual activity and from celibacy, after all the pedo sex scandals there had come an “anti-paedophile activism” encompassing opposition to paedophiles, paedophile advocacy groups, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. But several people presenting too openly their sexual acts, like on Pride parades, all other people to have to accept their actions, otherwise to be labelled not only ‘conservative’ but even “anti-” when it was or is not so.

There have been incidents in which vigilantism intended to be against pedophiles has been mistakenly directed against the wrong person, including:

• A mob confusing a pediatrician with a pedophile, due to the similarities between the words.^[8]
• An incident where a man was misidentified as a pedophile because he was wearing a neck brace similar to the one a sex offender was wearing when pictured in a newspaper.^[9][10] {Wikipedia on Anti-pedophile activism}

In the same vein of misunderstanding and misinterpreting, the whole woke movement has arisen and has grown into something very annoying and discussion limiting something.

In the present time not allowed to say one can see a “community of igloos” or temporary winter homes or hunting-ground dwellings of Canadian and Greenland Inuit (Eskimos) (Illustration from Charles Francis Hall’s Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux, 1865)

In many museums in the world the curator started relabeling the historical objects and artworks, often making it they had to describe the object with several words instead of previously but now not accepted ‘one word’. As such people have become not allowed to use words like “hut” or “cabane” “or “shag” / “Shack”  you even may not say anymore “primitive dwelling” or “shanty” not allowed to say “roughly built, often ramshackle building”, “igloo“, “Eskimo“, etc.. In some museums, the labels by the works have become so full of words most visitors even do not take time any more to read them. (Proof that all that woke thing creates just the opposite and gives people even less insight into the world events and customs of many peoples. )

I do agree we may not speak about “savages” when there are those pictures of Africans who are depicted as “savages” or vicious or merciless, brutal, not domesticated or cultivated, wild people. But I think there is nothing wrong by saying those white people considered the coloured people they found in Africa, to be very wild and uneducated or regarded as primitive.

White people do have to live with the Atlantic slave trade which played an important role in spurring the Industrial Revolution in its early decades and helping to birth a new financial system. We can not ignore the shameful treatment of coloured people from that time regarded as illiterate areas.

Insofar as the trade encouraged the emergence of a new British commercial class that in turn lobbied for modernising reforms through Parliament, it may even have played a paradoxically pivotal role in the birth of modern democracy. We should never deny or downplay the dark side of Western history – nor the strangely double-edged story of Western freedom.

In concealing certain events and in not being allowed to mention them or not being allowed to use certain words, one misses the ball and is more likely not to achieve the intended goal of integration and respect.

Sherelle Jacobs writes

The evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand. Everywhere one looks there are excesses.
Take the decolonised university courses that seek to purge Dead White Men (the intellectual cousin of the Evil White Male) from the curriculum. Or the obsession with toppling statues of figures such as Cecil Rhodes. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Where she refers to the constituent college of the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, Oriel College that the majority wanted the statue to be removed and that the King Edward Street plaque should be removed. Previously in 2016, Oriel College had decided to keep the statue following a consultation, despite protests from campaigners.  Some of the university’s geography dons published a statement saying it is a “source of shame” for the city that the imperialist Cecil Rhodes was still “honoured” with a statue.

When Sherelle Jacobs attended a colourism workshop at her old university not long ago, mixed race women, including her, were prohibited from speaking on account of their “proximity to whiteness”. There you see but how that whole woke business has twisted the whole system and made many not think and act soberly anymore. Rightly she reamerks

Even worse is the trend towards barring white people from black spaces altogether. Two Canadian theatres have sparked an outcry by limiting performances to an “all black-identifying audience”. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We should know that taking away historic statues, plaques, memorials or monuments is also going to take away the remembrances to those people and events, making the next generations not even thinking any more about what happened in the past.

Wiping out the past will not correct the things that have gone wrong. By hiding what really happened, one is also clearly not taking any blame but prefers to deliberately conceal what really happened. Which I think is a much more shameful attitude.

In Monroeville, a flyspeck of a town in Alabama, Jacobs recently saw an amateur performance of To Kill A Mockingbird in which local white men in the audience were invited on stage to be part of the jury.

It really worked: residents of this Deep South town, where African-Americans can still remember being forced to sit in a separate part of the cinema, pondering their history and how it made them feel without outside judgment or virtue signalling. Sadly, Monroeville is a rare case. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes and adds

Banner at 2017 Climate March in Washington D.C.

It doesn’t help that some conservatives have reacted to all this with downright denialism. It cannot be right that, in some Deep South schools, pupils are being taught that the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We have to be very careful by taking away statues and remembrance plates. There are enough people who would love to see the terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism to disappear so that the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters would not matter anymore. In the States of America we have a beautiful example of the dangers of the denialism that is going on in this “woke world”.

In 2020, cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill described “woke capitalism” as the “dramatically intensifying” trend to include historically marginalized groups (currently primarily in terms of race, gender and religion) as mascots in advertisement with a message of empowerment to signal progressive values.

On the one hand, this creates an individualized and depoliticized idea of social justice, reducing it to an increase in self-confidence.

On the other hand, the omnipresent visibility in advertising can also amplify a backlash against the equality of precisely these minorities. These would become mascots not only of the companies using them, but of the unchallenged neoliberal economic system with its socially unjust order itself. For the economically weak, the equality of these minorities would thus become indispensable to the maintenance of this economic system; the minorities would be seen responsible for the losses of this system. {Kanai, A.; Gill, R. (October 28, 2020). “Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture”. New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics. 102 (102): 10–27. doi:10.3898/NewF:102.01.2020. ISSN 0950-2378. S2CID 234623282.}

We must always make sure that everything is kept in perspective and that the institutions will make sure that everything is neatly laid out and will not conceal anything even if it ‘discriminates’ against a certain group. We will always have to strive to expose an open honesty.

In his new book Colonialism, Nigel Biggar points out that the British Empire did some good, establishing peace in warring societies, alleviating rural poverty and building infrastructure. Some routinely use facts such as these flippantly to claim that the Empire definitively did more good than bad. But, as Biggar himself observes, the positives and negatives are incommensurable: “How much racism is worth immunisation against disease?” {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

According to Jacobs it would be far more constructive if conservatives focused on challenging the toxic Evil White Male reading of history. She writes

For one thing, it distracts us from the truth of our past: namely, that it was driven not so much by a cabal of racist megalomaniacs but by inescapable ideas in which we are all still, to this day, complicit. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Forever, certain groups of people will have to face their past. It does no good, on the contrary, to cover up the past by bringing up all kinds of newer concepts and naming things differently. By honestly stating what those ancestors were doing, future generations will be able to get a fair picture of what was done, which cannot be reversed anyway.

Every generation has flaws and in every demographic one can find people who do not want to face the truth of the times at the time when bad things are happening before their eyes. A great example of this are the young people today who all want the hottest phone but don’t want to think about how several children have been exploited for it.

How different are the hypocrisies of our ancestors from our own? {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

asks Jacobs, who does not see people smashing their smartphones in protest at the Congolese children who have died mining the rare cobalt that is crucial to powering their gadgets.

Fixating on a few Evil White Males is a convenient excuse not to face up to such things. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes.

And the Evil White Male view of history is feeding Western declinism. Some activists have taken to linking certain values or trends with empire and slavery in order to discredit them. People are, in turn, reluctant to challenge these spurious views for fear of being labelled a sympathiser with the Evil White Male of history – or even worse, compared to them.  {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Jacobs asks us to

Consider also the post-modernist academics who denounce “objective, rational linear thinking” as Western-centric (as if the idea that words and language are fundamental expressions of an external reality can be simply waved away as a “white cultural trope”).

If societies attitudes’ to their past shape their future, then we should be concerned indeed. Unless the West can shake off some of this racialised self-loathing, its decline seems guaranteed.   {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

It is much too easy to blame racism. With the killing of Tyre Nichols, lots of people shouted “racism”, not seeing that it where five “black” cops that went mad at one of their own folks. Those coloured police officers showed the world how American police is not trained enough and have a superior feeling, wanting to show their power over others, be they white or black persons. Too often we can hear the language of such officers, shouting words which should not be allowed to be said by people of the law. We also should recognise in what happened, how education but also social, institutional, and cultural systems play a significant role in shaping people their behaviour and how their formation and culture may contribute to negative outcomes.

Let us be aware

There are also many people who use ‘woke’ as a pejorative in an attempt to silence those who protest against bigotry. It’s often a word that racists, misogynists and others attempt to hide behind. Ed, Portsmouth {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

So using ‘woke’ as name-calling has become the default for the oafish who hate people daring to challenge their rather one-sided mindset. Unfortunately, ‘woke’ has become a blanket term that is used by those who don’t want to have their views challenged. Matthew, Birmingham {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

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Interesting to read:

1. The actual behaviour of big business continues to confound its stated wishes
2. The Telegraph Frontpage for 2022 November 08
3. The Telegraph for Monday 21 November 2022
4. The Telegraph Frontpage for Friday 2022 November 25
5. Green lending tops fossil fuel for first time
6. Anglo-Saxon era church bringing the church into disrepute
7. New term names at London School of Economics
8. Not to tell people that God loves them
9. Evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand

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Related

1. Martyr by cop
2. ‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’
3. A breakfast restaurant called “Woke” opened in Conn
4. Connecticut breakfast restaurant called Woke sparks political debate
5. S3: E4 – Wokeback Mountain
6. ‘You People’ Review: Everything Wrong with the Modern Comedy
7. It Depends on What The Means
8. 85 ”The Funeral of a Great Myth,” or Evolution and Hegelian Optimism
9. European ‘Christian state’ faces criticism for banning woke lessons, immigration laws: ‘Will of the people’
10. Blind logic, arrogant conclusions
11. How Wokeism Works | Theo Von – YouTube
12. The problem with Atiku is he thinks Buhari just woke up to get 12m votes because of ethnicity—Keyamo
13. Freedom is …
14. Woke culture threatens academic freedom in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam
15. “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” – A New Documentary on Gender and Sexual Ideology Politics and Disney Going Woke & Broke
16. Not Woke Up: Breakfast Cafe Name Sparks US Conservative Rage | Connecticut
17. Go Woke, Go Broke: Paperchase Goes Into Administration
18. Technological Innovations – Episode 1
19. De omgekeerde wereld
20. Wakker of Woke! Lezing door Simon van Groningen.
21. ‘Wakker of Woke?’ Lezing voor Stichting Sense
22. Wokeness is een groot probleem aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, mede omdat ervoor wordt weggekeken
23. De zwarte gemeenschap zou excuses van Rutte voor slavernij niet moeten accepteren
24. Biologische studies naar gender laten minder maakbaarheid zien dan de progressieve pers graag zou willen
25. Hoe links mij tot zondebok maakte als klokkenluider van woke extremisme

To Taboo Or Not To

Freeman Poet

Election denying is taboo,
holocaust denying too.

Antisemitism is taboo,
nazi sympathizing too.

Neo-fascism is taboo,
christian nationalism too.

White supremacy is taboo,
minority discrimination too.

Belonging to a cult is taboo,
supporting dark mega too.

Gangster rap is taboo,
gangster capitalism too.

Public intoxication is taboo,
drug paraphernalia too.

Public indecency is taboo,
immoral behavior too.

There’s a reason why these are taboo,
it’s so that you don’t forget
what a decent society expects from you.

Didn’t your mother teach you:
if you don’t have anything nice to say,
don’t say anything at all?

By: ElRoyPoet © 2022

See Power of Positive Words Experiment video

“Rejecting ideals is a fair first amendment right, but purposely using language that is seen as outdated and offensive towards already marginalized groups is socially not appropriate.
Professionalism is important and standards exist equally amongst all sides, and these standards exist for a reason…

View original post 613 more words

What 2022 brought to us and looking forward to 2023

Liberation

Lots of people thought 2022 would be the year of liberating us from that terrible virus which got the world in its grip. Though not a liberation became several people on their part, an even more senseless killing ‘disease’ came unto Europe.

The leader of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, who would love to find a renewed Soviet Union, said at the beginning of the year he would bring liberation to the Ukrainians. Instead, his “bloodstained” tyranny plunged Europe into the war on a scale not seen since 1945 as Russian troops advanced on Kyiv on Thursday night, February 24th.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is shocking and disgraceful. It is the latest terrible aggression by the Putin regime and the latest damaging conflict in our world, with so many people being killed or injured, losing loved ones and seeing their homes destroyed.

2022 has been a tough year to navigate, with a series of political and economic crises that continue to shape our world.

One powerful man

Who could have ever imagined that one man, from up north, would single-handedly turn the world upside down? However, he has succeeded very well in not only bringing black snow over several people, and literally turning the landscape blood-red, he has severely disrupted economic life in several countries.

Following two long pandemic years – with many still experiencing the effects – we’ve witnessed the outbreak of war in Ukraine and could feel in our purse how it affects us also in our region. We cannot ignore this war that has affected many citizens. At our new WordPress Site “Some View on the World” we have given a voice to those suffering in the conflict as well as reporting the situation on the ground and providing the expertise needed to understand geopolitics.

Picturing what is happening in the world

As best we can, we try to give a picture of what is happening in the world on the continuation of “Our World“. 2022 was another year of figuring out how we would be able to keep up with bringing political and religious news alongside our other spiritual websites. We hope to find that balance further in 2023.

By nature, I am not an easy person and have dared to clash several times by speaking my mind outright. Even in the articles, I publish here and on my other websites, my thinking is based on my personal opinion. One can agree or disagree with that view. I, therefore, appreciate that people also dare to express their opinions. But in general, there is a little reaction in that area. Still, I hope the articles brought, can make people think. For instance, I was happy to find that my op-eds on Christmas in the Daily Telegraph were able to bring a debate after all.

Hoping to expose wrongdoings

With the news we place at Some View on the World we do hope we also could be able to expose the mistreatment and deaths of migrant workers in Qatar for almost a decade as well as other wrong attitudes towards people as well as animals and plants. At my personal site and this site as well, in particular on “Some View on the World” we continue to bear witness to the climate crisis as it destroys lives, uproots whole communities and changes the course of our shared future. We hope for 2023 to be able to bring regular news about our environment.

The fallout from the January 6 hearings and Donald Trump’s presidency could get our attention, and we hold our hearts for the intentions of Mr Trump, wanting to come back as president of the U.S.A..

Independence of my websites

For all the reporting we do here, and on my other websites, I would like to remind you, readers, that there is no financial support from companies anywhere and that all reporting is based on personal and independent reporting, where I keep searching for this site among texts that appear on the net what could possibly be fascinating for you to read as well, and thus to reblog them here.

2022 could bring lots of blogs on the net of which we presented some selections over here too. At Firefox several could find their way into ‘Pocket’, like: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, How to Want Less, A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory, Why You Should Really Stop Charging Your Phone Overnight, A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything, a.o. most read.

Uncovering and unravelling

Whether on social, political or religious issues, we are eager to seek the truth and expose false reports. Exposing wariness is not always appreciated, but is very important in our view. To do that, we can count on several investigative journalists and some newspapers to join in the pursuit of that muddle, so that together we can make certain things known to the world while others would rather see them covered up.

At Some View on the World we have maintained round-the-clock coverage from several places, not always bringing nice news, like mass graves of Bucha, Izium and many war crimes.

The war accelerated a global economic slump, sending costs soaring, throttling energy supplies and raising the spectre of blackouts, malnutrition and a winter of discontent across dozens of countries. As global food supplies fluctuated, we reported on the hunger gripping the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan. In 2022, it became impossible to ignore those victims in poorer countries. But sadly, we had to observe how little the public cared about those people living far from their homes. And closer, many did not wish to have refugees, so we could speak of a refugee crisis again this year.

Here in Belgium, the influx of refugees seems completely uncontrollable and many, even with small children, shamefully had to sleep outside several nights through rain and wind. This while in Great Britain, the reception was also not going smoothly and people started looking for a housing solution in Rwanda, and proceeded to deportations.

Condition of mother earth

A lot of people do not want to realise that things are very bad for Mother Earth. To this, in 2022, several scientists again tried to make it clear to the world that we need to think seriously about this and take action. We were confronted with UK’s hottest summer, a very early and long great Summer in Belgium, drought in Europe, and the accompanying fires.

Heating the houses became for many difficult to keep in the household budget. It looked like mother nature felt the pressure on the energy market, as well. Everywhere in Europe, we had extremely high temperatures for the time of year. In Belgium 2022 became the warmest year since measurements.

The climate emergency ran as a constant thread through much of our Some View on the World journalism in 2022.

While many European countries were suffering from a shortage of water, they had it in other countries, like Pakistan, too much. Devastating floods in Pakistan, encountering one of its worst natural catastrophes, Sydney’s wettest year on record, ferocious heatwaves in the US southwest and the costliest Atlantic hurricane for years, could catch our attention.

At Cop27 in Egypt, the Guardian asked the tough questions. Though, we did not give so much attention to the changing tactics of activists, now more likely to throw soup at a painting as they are to glue themselves to a public highway.

Uprising

In my view, many other protests could get our attention earlier, as they were carried out in a more correct way. Coming from a not expected corner, sparked by the death in custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini.

Once again, we were able to conclude in Afghanistan and Iran that there is no improvement in human rights yet. The Iranian authorities tightly control reporting inside the country, so we counted on the teams of the Guardian to redouble efforts to reach protagonists to tell their stories. Social media remained also important for this, so it was satisfying to see the Guardian Instagram video on why Iranians are risking everything for change reach more than 2 million viewers.

It is impossible for me to have news sources everywhere, which is why we must also call on professional companies, for which we must also pay. Financial aid is therefore very welcome to cover these expenses. Nevertheless, we try to be as aware as possible of the general events, for which we also make further use of the known news channels and reliable TV channels and newspapers.

United States debacle

In terms of exposure, it was imperative to look at the Trumpists who still claim high and low that the US elections were forged.

The country which was formed on the idea that it could be a free world where everybody could express himself freely and would not be bounded by limitations through a government, in 2022 came to see deep political divisions, caused by a man who as 45th president of the U.S.A. did mutiny on that state and brought democracy in danger. His party made the ongoing climate crisis and racial, economic and health inequalities worsened. It was impossible to ignore the fallout from the January 6 hearings and Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as his willingness to come back as president.

The repeal of Roe v Wade provided a divisive backdrop to the November midterm elections. The conservative, or better said, the extremist Christians in the U.S., made it possible that women lost even the right to their own bodies. They also did not want to give an eye for mother nature nor for all those poor Americans who have no house or anywhere to live except on the streets, where many in the last weeks of the year found their dead by Winter storm Elliott. Buffalo got the worst hit by that bomb cyclone.

Political storms

In 2022 there were more significant elections in America which caught our attention. In Brazil, there were an anxious few weeks as Jair Bolsonaro wanted to do like his friend Trump, saying the votes were falsified. Finally, he suffered a chastening defeat by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who completed a comeback from prison to the presidential palace.

To our annoyance, we in northern Europe had to observe an inverse movement towards South America. The far right in Sweden, Italy and Israel, could get most seats in parliament. Despite her political prowess, the 45-year-old from Rome, whose strong will and determination has drawn comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, Giorgia Meloni has spent three decades fighting her way to the top of Italian politics. She is clear evidence that go-getters win. In October last year, after Brothers of Italy managed to draw votes away from the Northern League in its northern strongholds in local elections, a secret recording revealed Matteo Salvini hitting out at Meloni, calling her a “pain in the ass”.

In Belgium, too, the newspapers disguised several polls, clearly showing that the right is making a strong rise and where voices can already be heard that NVA will have to make the choice to form a majority coalition with Vlaams Belang.

As for British politics, prime ministers came and went with alarming regularity and the nation buried the pound, Queen Elizabeth and its global standing in quick succession. For 10 days in September, the future of the monarchy dominated the newsroom. The crazy game of the English conservatives who wanted their leader to put his capsones under the benches and to ask the people to stay at home because of Corona and not to have parties seemed to think it normal that their leader could do that and lie about it too. The whole world could laugh at the blunders of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, while the British citizen seemed not to mind. In any case, they did not demand new elections and left it to the Tory members to elect the new prime minister.

In Australia Labour could note a historic federal election victory.

Economical storms

The struggle between Russia and Ukraine is also a struggle between the Putin regime and Western Europe.

The war accelerated a global economic slump, sending costs soaring, throttling energy supplies and raising the spectre of blackouts, malnutrition and a winter of discontent across dozens of countries. But we also noticed that certain companies were abusing the war in Ukraine to raise their prices.

Cereals and gas were not released enough by blockades from the Russians, which caused major food problems, especially in Africa. In Western Europe we felt our energy prices skyrocket due to the pressure on the export and import markets. In Belgium, it took forever for the government to take measures to mitigate the costs of its citizens. After several months of calls by the Labour Party PvdA/PtB to reduce VAT to 6% and by their appeals to the public to put pressure on the government, things finally came to a head.

Health matters

2022 received big leaps forward for Alzheimer’s treatments, bowel cancer prevention and understanding depression.

In several countries there was joy that people could come together again to party and that the elderly should no longer be separated from their children and grandchildren. The lockdown had made it very clear how important personal contact is. It was striking how in 2022 teenagers and twens still had many psychological difficulties, which were not resolved. Bad enough, many could not be admitted in time, causing unnecessarily too many young people to die, while this could have been avoided.

Post-pandemic in Europe in danger

For months Europe tried to combat Covid-19. We started the annual overview with the relaxation of the Corona measures. But at the end of December, they now appear to be endangered because Europe does not want to take strict measures for the Chinese who are now allowed by their government to travel outside China again, which will allow them to spread the increased disease further outside China. With the coming Chinese New Year, they could start a new pandemic as in Belgium, it started in Antwerp.

For much of the world, a sort of post-pandemic normality has resumed – with one striking exception: the country where it all began. Chinese leaders faced a rapid spread of public anger caused by their draconian Covid lockdown policy. Only after some activists could ignite a revolt against the lockdown and more people joined them on the streets, even coming to shout to get rid of the Chinese leader and communist party, the government got seriously afraid and eased the lockdown measures. After they had done that another hell broke down, the virus rapidly spreading and killing so many people the mortuaries could not handle it anymore.

While the Chinese seem to be in the first Corona wave, as it were, the rest of the world has gotten out over time and everyone is now looking forward to a shock-free 2023.

We too look forward to an ending of the war in Ukraine and to a peaceful solution between Kosovo and Serbia.

At Some View of the World and at my other personal Space, we shall try to bring you up-to-date news of the happenings in the world, and here on this website, we hope we shall still be able to offer you and share with you, some worthwhile articles to read in this coming New Year.

 

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A sincere thank you to our readers and supporters – wherever you are in the world,
we wish you a wonderful end to 2022 and an optimistic 2023.

°°°

In case you like our work,
do not forget that we always can use your support.

To help us defray the costs
any gift is welcome at
Bankaccount: Giro: BE37 9730 6618 2528
BIC: ARSPBE22
With mention: support websites

For which we thank you wholeheartedly

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Additional reading

1. G7 agreed to ban or phase out Russian oil and gas imports
2. 2022 the year of fearing some wars

To be Thankful for the improbable bubble of peace and prosperity in which we have randomly landed

For most of us, we should be thankful
for the improbable bubble of peace and prosperity
in which we have randomly landed.

I add, it’s all relative, but in broad terms, it’s so.
Let’s pause and take a breath and, maybe tomorrow, (let’s say, Monday,) keep up the good work. For those of you who are the ones responsible in some way for the peace and prosperity of your community, family and various other controlling factors, we are thankful for you, as well.

~From Maudlin Ruminations Regarding the Holiday by Blogorahmah

Ecogreen Christmas ideas for gifts

Although Christmas is a pagan festival that is also anchored in many Christian communities, this period is also a time of cosy togetherness that no one can be against.

In these dark days, many families make time for socialising as well as giving presents and wishing each other all the best for the coming year.

It’s not a bad idea to think about these gifts and how to make them as pleasant as possible for those around us.

THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS

Do you really want to save the planet and the lives of your children and grandchildren?
Then buy gifts that don't destroy nature.
Make the right choice.

Here are 10 supportive and sustainable gift ideas:

Books printed on recycled paper, notebooks and diaries made from recycled paper.

Gift voucher from an NGO or a non-profit organization.

Gift certificate from WWF, Greenpeace or SeaShepherd.

Give a tree.

Fair trade products.

Cosmetics not tested on animals
Sustainable and natural clothing.

Today more than ever it is important to choose consciously because our choices as consumers are the only possible tool to be able to really change things. Unfortunately we tend to forget it (me first of all) and let ourselves be carried away by compulsive buying, but we must learn more and more to ask ourselves questions when we buy goods or services, because only in this way can we hope to…

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The growth of Wikipedia

Words and data to look for

For some years now, voluntary writers make the effort to provide enough serious information for all people to find for free on the net.

We have hardback copies and a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica and provide links to it on our articles so that people also can find more information on subjects. Some of our writers also contribute to articles on the multilingual free online encyclopedia (or encyclopaedia) Wikipedia, started in 2001, to which our readers also can find additional links. It is a fantastic enterprise, that operates under an open-source management style and allows everyone to find sufficient background information on multiple topics.

Nupedia, the beginning of a free online English-language encyclopaedia

Screenshot from the Wayback Machine Nupedia 2003

Homepage of Wikipedia, which runs on MediaWiki, one of the most popular wiki software packages

Perhaps inspired by objectivist “openness,” Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, founded a free online English-language encyclopaedia called Nupedia, which sought free contributions from scholars and other experts and subjected them to an intensive peer-review process. Frustrated by the slow progress of this project, Wales and Nupedia’s editor in chief, Larry Sanger, in 2001 turned to a new technology, a type of software called wiki, created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham, to create Wikipedia, a companion encyclopaedia site that anyone could contribute to and edit.

Wiki software and Wikipedia

As a feature of Nupedia.com Wikipedia entered the world of the internet on January 15, 2001, but, following objections from the advisory board, got relaunched as an independent Web site a few days later. The Wiki engines allowed content to be written using a simplified markup language, sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described wiki as

“the simplest online database that could possibly work”

It was incredible to see how many enthusiastic writers from all over the world could bring some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto its first year. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into the non-profit effort Wikipedia.

By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than one million articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed 3.5 million.

The only regret we have to note is that too many readers insist that Wikipedia tells THE truth and that everything it says would really be so. They don’t realise that over the years certain writers have repeatedly taken advantage of it, to sell disinformation or totally untrue matters as well-founded. Luckily, several writer-readers are willing to invest their time to control the added articles so that individuals who will maliciously attempt to thwart the open-source website Wikipedia by introducing false or misleading content, shall be unmasked and excluded from the system. Rather than worrying about every user’s actions and intentions, proponents of wiki software rely on their community of users to edit and correct what are perceived to be errors or biases. The good thing about having continuous writers make additions and corrections is that the encyclopaedia can be kept very up-to-date. Very quickly, necessary background information can thus be delivered to the inquisitive public. Although such a system is certainly far from foolproof, wikis stand as an example of the origin of an Internet counterculture that has a basic assumption of the goodness of people.

The website’s coverage of the events of the day and controversial topics such as American politics and major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has received substantial media attention and has exposed weaknesses as the system’s strengths.

Wikipedia pages on female and minority scientists and engineers

It is incredible how many people use Wikipedia and trust it for its information. But one must realise that it is not an all-explanatory work that also does not reflect all information correctly balanced all the time.

Jessica Wade in 2017

Jess Wade a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. noticed she could not find any information on Wikipedia about some very important people.

In 2017 after meeting American climatologist and professor Kim Cobb she wanted to know more about her and went on Wikipedia to be astonished not to find an entry on that very young but also a good professor and publisher with over 100 peer-reviewed publications in major journals.

Having the idea that Wikipedia is “used by pretty much everyone,” Wade realised that

“despite it being this incredibly important resource, it was suffering from a lack of content, particularly about women, but also about people of color.”

Since then, Wade has completed more than 1,750 pages for female and minority scientists and engineers, she often spends her evenings reading journals, scientific papers, archived documents, and social media to find potential subjects. It takes Wade a few hours to write each Wikipedia entry, but she’s not doing it all alone — she also teaches others how to research and put together pages during training workshops. Wade describes herself as a

“tiny fish in a massive sea,”

but she’ll

“keep doing everything I can to make science a more accessible and inclusive place to be.”

It is with people like her that Wikipedia is in a position to grow further into a place where people can easily go and look something up to find further more information about someone or about something.

Climate justice & Rich people who do not want to share

2022 came to show once again what a huge gap there is between people who have next to nothing and people swimming in money. The latter have seen their wealth grow exceptionally this year as their energy shares soared.

This year, we could see how warfare brought a lot of damage to people and nature. Our earth also had a lot to endure because man did not do much to stop global warming.

Climate justice is about creating a better future for all of us. It’s about giving everyone the ability to live a life of dignity, joy and safety. This better world is possible, but only if we all fight for it.

We have to recognise that there is a very small percentage of extremely rich people whose interests side with and profit from our collective destruction. The fossil fuel execs, the billionaires, the Rishi Sunaks only make up an absolutely tiny percentage of the population. We cannot let them dictate whether we live or die. We cannot let them force millions of us in the UK and billions of us all over the world into struggle, multiple crises and instability just so they can continue to be outrageously rich as a result of the work being done by the many. We outnumber them.

We have to fight back and demand more. We have to support unions striking for better conditions for all of us.
The fight against the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis has to be connected. We have a whole world to win if we come together rather than letting those who don’t have our interests at heart divide us.

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Enough is Enough is a campaign to fight the cost of living crisis.

We were founded by trade unions and community organisations determined to push back against the misery forced on millions by rising bills, low wages, food poverty, shoddy housing – and a society run only for a wealthy elite.

We can’t rely on the establishment to solve our problems. It’s up to us in every workplace and every community.

 

You can join the Enough Is Enough campaign here

You can find mutual aid groups to support here

A guide to finding a climate group here

A guide on why we need unions is here 

The scariest part of fall

It is very important that the American people come to see that their democracy is in great danger. There are several politicians and (so-called) Christian organisations who are undermining democratic principles and the necessity to tell the truth.

Jewish Young Professional

isn’t Halloween but election season -  
silk-voiced vampires masquerading as politicians,
 
politicians shuffling their constituents and dealing them 
like playing cards, smoking their principles like tobacco.
 
This country I call home feels ripped from its foundation
by an evil crow and I feel powerless.

From The Sunday Muse

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dVerse, Shay’s Word Garden Word List, The Sunday Muse, TMP

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Build bridges not walls

poorman'sdreams

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A wall is made for breaking down

A brickyard’s tears, a stony frown

Ventless, relentless, in the past

America, Berlin, Belfast

Partition found on world renown.

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A bridge is made to bring together

A culture crossing, a road for better

Far-reaching, for teaching

The human condition’s seeking

Each step across is a t_read letter.

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The walls you put up within your heart

Deny a chance for love to start

Foreboding, eroding

Bitterness, self-loathing

Constant reminder – lasting (land)mark.

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The bridge you build will bolster new

Strengthens souls and spirits too

Co-operation, exaltation

Meeting in the middle; combination

Helps humanity by uniting you.

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America’s current belief system has eroded her foundation

”Just as water rapidly eroded the banks of the mighty Colorado River
and created a vast Grand Canyon,
America’s current belief system (relativism) has eroded her foundation and created a moral void.
~ Shane Idleman in America Needs to Turn Back to God.”

 

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Find also to read:

1. How many innocent people have still to be killed before Americans are going to restrict the purchase of weapons through rules
2. Let’s Think About Bullets: Bipartisan Legislation to Stop Gun Violence in America
3. Rightwing MAGA Brooks gives us the real reason they’re so obsessed with guns
4. Does America need to turn back to God
5. Dan Foster on what he finds the Stupidest solution to school shootings presented by a Christian Pastor
6. An answer to gun violence according two American pastors

One-Liner Wednesday — On Bad Terms

This, That, and the Other

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.”

Hannah Arendt, political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor

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Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt.

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Trivia: Native American Right to Vote

Gifford MacShane, Author

#trivia #NativeAmerican #boardingschool #votingrights

The U. S. Department of the Interior just released a study of the almost 500 “Indian Boarding Schools” that operated from 1819 to 1969, including the Carlisle Indian Industry School here in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Over 7,000 children attended this school; its most famous student was Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympic games.

Most of the reporters I’ve heard have also mentioned how long it took for Native Americans to be able to vote. Most of them have also given their readers/viewers incomplete information.

So I’ve got atrivia question for you:

Who was President of the United States when all Native Americans were allowed to vote?

A.) Dwight D. Eisenhower

B.) Theodore Roosevelt

C.) Richard M. Nixon

D.) Calvin Coolidge

No peeking now—just give it your best shot! C’mon, you…

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From the old box: The case for Black English

How many times did not change the impact of a word used. One time you had to use a word because a previous word was considered not right. But later than new word or other words became also considered wrong. As such in our lifetime we had to change already four times the word to talk about coloured people with a brown skin.

The case for Black English

Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker, 15 May 2017

The most energetic but also the most frustrating section of ‘Talking Back’ is a short treatise on the word ‘nigga.’ McWhorter takes the customary care in distinguishing the word from its uglier, older cousin, ‘nigger,’ but he pushes the distinction further than most: for McWhorter, these are not simply two separate English words, let alone two pronunciations of the same word; they are, rather, words that belong to two different dialects. ‘Nigger is Standard English and nigga is Black English,’ he writes, matter-of-factly. ‘Nigga means ‘You’re one of us.’ Nigger doesn’t.’

This interpretation helps to explain the odd power that ‘nigga’ wields over blacks and whites alike when said aloud. Richard Pryor’s use of it in his standup act in the seventies was radical not simply because street lingo had made its way onto the stage: Pryor had swung open the door between alternate cultural dimensions. Blacks suddenly felt at home – ’up in the comedy club,’ somebody might have said – and whites relished the brief peek into a room they rarely saw. Something similar happened, and keeps on happening, with hip-hop, many of whose practitioners use the N-word as a kind of challenge to white enthusiasts. It’s become a familiar joke: when the music’s loud, and emotions are high, who dares recite, in full, the lyric that eventually alights on ‘nigga’?

That ‘nigga’ is not only one of our most controversial words but also one of our funniest is revealing, and worth puzzling over. McWhorter doesn’t allow himself the pleasure. The word’s power – and therefore its coherence, its licitness as language – is impossible to understand without a glance at the history of race-rooted subjugation in America. The emergence of Black English is owed in part to straightforwardly linguistic factors: McWhorter convincingly cites the phenomenon of recently enslaved adults straining to learn a new language, plus a syncretistic importation of vocal gestures picked up along the trail of forced migration. But it also developed as a covert, often defiant response to the surveillance state of slavery. Grammatical nuance, new vocabulary, subtleties of tone – these were verbal expressions of racism’s mind-splitting crucible, what WEB Du Bois called ‘double consciousness.’ As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written, black vernacular is a literary development as well as a linguistic one. ‘The black tradition’ – from ring shouts to Ralph Ellison – ‘is double-voiced,’ Gates writes, in the introduction to his seminal study, ‘The Signifying Monkey,’ echoing Du Bois. The humor associated with black language play – with jokers like Pryor and Bernie Mac – directly descends from this multivocal tradition, and from the trouble that made it necessary.

From the old box: Free Speech, but Not for All?

Free Speech, but Not for All?

By Ted Gup

Just over a century ago, the president of a distinguished college barred the suffragette and human-rights activist Jane Addams from speaking on campus, and suspended a student named Inez Milholland for organizing others in support of women’s rights. Milholland would go on to become influential in the women’s movement, and the college president, James Monroe Taylor, would become yet another example of an overly protective and historically myopic educator. He believed that women should be “not leaders, but good wives and mothers” — the prevailing view of the day.

Ulrich Baer cites the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who “shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good.

Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.”

…

Baer suggests that denying controversial speakers a forum still leaves them with the internet, disregarding that the internet also provides a powerful forum for groups whose voices were long suppressed. The internet and social media have removed many of the barriers to entry and provided accessibility to even the most splintered and historically marginalized of groups. To ignore this or to suggest otherwise is to infantilize such groups or imply that their messages are not competitive or compelling in the marketplace of ideas. To shield minorities from such speech is to disrespect them and assign them a fragility that many would not welcome.

“To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong,”

said Betty Friedan.

..
Abolitionists, gay and lesbian people, civil-rights activists, feminists, and others on the cutting edge of social change were all, in their day, barred from one university podium or another. Educators argued that their remarks might cause a disturbance, might undermine moral teachings, discomfort students, and offend the wider community.

…

Baer suggests that the free-speech argument is overly simplistic and static

“The parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing,”

he says. Yet the idea of an organic and flexible standard of free speech, appealing as it may be, would strip it of the consistency that is the bulwark that stands between all controversial speakers and the despots who would silence them. It is not difficult in some far-left and far-right schemes to imagine the likes of Professor Baer himself being silenced. And his advocacy of a dynamic line between protected and unprotected speech grants a license to those in power to smother dissent of all sorts, particularly that of minorities and outliers.

The absolutist approach to free speech, to be sure, has its flaws. But for all its offenses, for all the broken china, for all the divisiveness and trauma it has caused, it remains the best and only instrument for insuring a free intellect and a more just society. It is not a matter of equality versus liberty, but as Owen Fiss, the Yale scholar of the First Amendment and outspoken champion of free speech, has argued, equality through liberty. Fiss observes that when speech has been curtailed, it has historically been the unheard, the underrepresented, and the deprived who have paid the steepest price. The lesson then is not to turn the quest for equality into a cudgel to be wielded against those whose values or positions one does not share.

…

Free speech is the greatest single ally of social justice and, even at its most noxious and repulsive, is often a catalyst for reflection and remediation. It is easy to mistake it for a tool of repression when, in fact, it is the antidote. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism do not respond to verbal anodynes. They must be addressed at their roots. Argument, reason, confrontation, and direct exposure to the psyche of bigotry remain the best hope.

P5 The Empire we’re in: Individualism & Consumerism

In the previous weeks, the government had made sure that the anti-vaxxers had no reason to demonstrate and/or smash things up.

12-storey floor of retail area inside of Berjaya Times Square shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Mainstream churches have also opened their doors to the general public, but as before, the Corona Crisis, the huge shopping centra are and remain the main ‘worship temples’. There, in those shopping malls, people feel most at ease and satisfied that they can buy anything they want to own again.
For them, the big shopping mall is a sacred place to pay homage to their god (Mammon), money.

Consumerism has gone so far that lots of people when they buy something are even not interested in what the ecological footprint might be of what they buy.

Even though most people have become slaves to money, and therefore slaves to their employers, it is up to the Church to make those people realise how they have gone off the rails with their way of life and money-making.

It is up to the believer in the One True God to show people that there are much better ways than the worship of money, by which people are chained.

After the war in the Middle East seemed to have come to an end there was again a new war, the Russians invading Ukraine, we can see that Gog stood up and tries to go south to enlarge its world to get back a Great Russia or USSR. Others wonder who or what that “One World Government” seeking world domination might be.

Many do not want to know about God and His commandments and laugh at the idea of one world government or theocracy. The idea of living in the last days seems for many ridiculous whilst others think we can clearly see the signs indicating we are close to the times of the return of Christ, of experiencing the end of the world, there was something dramatic, inspiring, exciting about it all.

 

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Preceding

Material gain to honour God

Your position about materialistic desires having conquered the world

Looking for the consummation of presents

The Proper Place of Excess

Earth’s pandemic and T-shirts for young people

The meaning of life – Finding purpose

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Additional reading

1. Looking at an era of international “youth culture”
2. Looking on what is going on and not being of it
3. Not everything has to be reciprocated with money
4. An other trait for faith in Jesus and his God
5. Good to make sure that you haven’t lost the things money can’t buy
6. Hamas the modern Philistines
7. The post-Christian world
8. Today’s Thought “Flee these things” (May 24)
9. Today’s Thought “Keep your life free from … ” (June 06)
10. Today’s thought “Flee these things. Pursue …” (November 23)
11. Mark 10 – The Nazarene’s Commentary: Mark 10:23-31 – The Difficulty of Money
12. Not created to be on our own (Our world) = Not created to be on our own (Some View on the World)
13. Missionary action paradigm for all endeavours of the church
14. True riches
15. Count your blessings
16. Sign of the Times and the Last Days #1 The Son of man revealing
17. Sign of the Times and the Last Days #2 Wars, natural disasters, famine and false Messiahs
18. Last days and destruction of the flesh
19. Hope For, But Not In, Evangelicalism

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Related

1. P1 This might not be the End, but it sure feels like it / A.J. Hendry
2. What Does Larry Cohen’s THE STUFF Say About How Easily We Are Manipulated and Our Weaknesses Exploited?
3. America’s Shopping Addiction
4. The case against consumerism: Part 1 – The real cost of our everyday purchases
5. Extreme individualism is on the rise
6. Individualism and Individuation
7. Individualism in the Age of Social Media
8. Covid Evidence: Supply Vs Demand Shock
9. Community or Consumption: Social Ecology in Greater Manchester
10. Consumerism’s Effect on Creating an Addictive Society – Pt. 3
11. Time for a radical farewell to overconsumption
12. Is sustainable consumption fundamentally an issue of inequality?
13. The Money Problem
14. The control of money is where the true power lies – but only because of the way we think
15. On conspiracies, apocalyptic Christian nationalism, and how bad eschatology is ruining the world / Michael Frost
16. Tightened Covid curbs spark protests, riots across Europe
17. Be prepared – last-days spiritual warfare is intense
18. Is this how the End of the World begins?
19. What Shall Be The Sign Of Thy Coming? And Of The End Of The World?
20. Food For Thought
21. A Gate out of hell
22. In the Miso Soup
23. Quote of the day (20-Apr-2022)
24. Make more pies
25. Which attitude is better for our society?
26. The importance of the individual and the individual vs the group
27. Relationships help with resilience, not individualism
28. 4/1/22 – Individually Individual
29. Buying Stuff for Stuff
30. Dang, I shopped.
31. The Free Gift!!
32. Green Consumerism: Who Cares About The Environment?
33. faith in Christ for each other
34. A Saviour for the world, the Samaritans, and our individualistic selves (Growing Deeper with John 4:27-42)
35. Saved from what? (And For what?) [Sermon]
36. Breaking free
37. How to Buy Less and Buy Better with the Less But Better Method
38. J.B Mackinnon’s The Day the World Stops Shopping: Book Review

When Lambs Are Silent

This is part 5 in a series where we will be exploring and imagining how faith communities, and our community in general, may need to evolve in order to adapt to our changing times. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

In our last piece we discussed how our society, though regarded as secular, is very much shaped by its own God’s that demand allegiance and require our worship and sacrifice. We named these as Individualism, Consumerism and White Supremacy. In our last piece we dealt with the latter, in this article we will be talking about the former two.

Throughout the lockdown there has been calls to open various shopping centres, lament’s that we have not been free to shop, to browse and buy. And in Auckland last week, as Covid restrictions began to ease, the great Temples of this age…

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A Friend Like You

In a time when many have to seek refuge, crawl unexpectedly under the table or seek refuge at the alarm signals, friendship is one of the most special necessities to keep each other straight.

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Preceding

No Friendship is an accident

Friendship born

The one who knows who you are and where you have been

Someone needs …

One of the tasks of true friendship

. . . he who plants kindness gathers love.

What are friends and friendship

A true friend is like the air…

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Additional reading

1. Offering words of hope
2. Gandhi’s Prayer for Peace
3. The Golden rule not always as easy as its sounds
4. Alternative four letter words
5. Friendship and Offer for the cause of democracy
6. Subcutaneous power for humanity 3 Facing changing attitudes
7. Subcutaneous power for humanity 4 Not crossing borders of friendship
8. Subcutaneous power for humanity 5 Loneliness, Virtual and real friends

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Related

1. Companion
2. Broken bonds
3. So let’s talk about anxiety…
4. Of Love: Space
5. Sidelined
6. Friendship Breakups Don’t Get Any Easier in Our 50s
7. My Most Treasured Things / Mis Cosas Más Preciadas
8. The man who had a pair of pliers in his back pocket
9. The Little Things
10. Summary of the essay of friendship by Francis Bacon

Purplerays

.

A Friend Like You

There’s lots of things
With which I’m blessed,
Tho’ my life’s been both Sunny and Blue,
But of all my blessings,
This one’s the best:
To have a friend like you.

In times of trouble
Friends will say,
“Just ask… I’ll help you through it.”
But you don’t wait for me to ask,
You just get up
And you do it!

And I can think
Of nothing in life
That I could more wisely do,
Than know a friend,
And be a friend,
And love a friend… like you.

By Anon.

Artist Inge Look.

Text and image source: Snowwolfs Woodland Nook https://www.facebook.com/531188960392510/posts/2082553225256068/

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They want us to be afraid 🇺🇦🌻🇺🇦❤️🇺🇦🌻🇺🇦

Purplerays

.

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate ‘the other’.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t…

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Wanted: Russian revolution to topple tyrant

” Wanted: Russian revolution to topple tyrant.
Internal applicants welcome.”
Simon Tisdall.