The G-d Theorem

If it is a given that

a) G-d is everything (in Hebrew ayn od milvado)

and

b) that G-d is good (Ayl rachum vechanun, olam shel chesedyibaneh)

the it follows that every thing that appears to me to be "bad" - for example

sex trafficking
domestic violence
child neglect
cancer and various degenerative diseases
debeaked chickens kept in A4 sized cages in which they cannot move
the human capacity for indifference and disassociation
song birds caught in traps
the Holocauast and prior (the Armenian) and subsequent genocides

is not ultimately bad, and not ultimately real, because they too are are a manifestation of G-d, so in some way they are His/Her angels, His/Her messengers. And the message I must suppose they bring ultimately is no matter how fiercely I cling to my name and form, to tidying up my bedroom, as Mooji puts it, in the end I will be pried loose by chesed to realise that I am that all encompassing being that does not die and is not born.

Essence of Adolescence: At The Rugby Game

Click on the images to enlarge

In The Production Office

For those who have worked in what insiders refer to as "the industry" (said in a knowing and sophisticated insiderish tone of simultaneous deprecation and yet enormous we=know-how-special-we are) here is a small attempt at humour

Muddy(ing the) Waters

Why doesn't Mr Roger Waters take on a more difficult and intractable assignments like Darfur, like the Congo, like Chechnya, like Tibet where Han Chinese have displaced and replaced Tibetans, or Xinjiang province where the same thing is happening with Uighurs, or perhaps become a spokesperson for the Kurds struggle for autonomy, ...all of these protracted issues have quantitatively involved far greater loss of life and liberty than in the disputed territories...is it because Israel is a soft and easy target, and you're guaranteed an instant crowd, or is it because Waters was raised and lives and breaths in a cultural milieu where Jews are always guilty of something, and if no crime of suitable proportions can readily be found then one must be manufactured?

I think Israelis and Palestinians have a better chance of reaching an enduring compromise without Mr Rogers muddying the waters...and that a brave new world can not be built on the mother of all prejudices

It's not every day that a supermodel takes on a rock legend. But today, Bar Refaeli told Roger Waters if he's going to boycott Israel, he'd better take her picture out of his concert art. http://htz.li/19JkaWL

______________

Erdogan's Song:

"How can I stop them looking at me
how can I get away from accountability
how can I distract from my own country's inequity
I need someone to blame
I need someone to shame
quick: call out a name...
Israel:

26 Palestinian Freedom Fighters released

The 26 include Abu-Musa Salam Ali Atia of Fatah, who murdered Holocaust survivor Isaac Rotenberg in a Petah Tikvah construction site in 1994. Rotenberg’s family perished in the Sobibor extermination camp during World War II. Rotenberg escaped and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. He arrived in Israel in 1947, joined the IDF and fought in Israel’s Independence War on the Lebanese front.

A plasterer by trade, Rotenberg was attacked by Abu Musa and an accomplice at a construction site where all three men worked in March 1994. He sustained repeated blows to the neck with axes. His wounds induced a coma, and he died two days after the attack. He was survived by his brother and sister, who were also survivors of Sobibor, and by a wife and two children. Rotenberg was 67 when he died.

Rotenberg wasn’t the oldest victim of the prisoners who made it onto the list Sunday. Fatah member Ra’ai Ibrahim Salam Ali was jailed in 1994 for the murder of 79-year-old Moris Eisenstatt. Eisenstatt was killed with ax blows to the head while he sat on a public Kfar Saba bench reading a book.

Israelis hold up pictures of their children killed by Palestinians released between 13-15 August 2013. A letter issued by the Palestinian foreign ministry urged Palestinian ambassadors to stress among international diplomats that the long-serving prisoners were not terrorists, but “freedom fighters.”

Another prisoner, Salah Ibrahim Ahmad Mugdad, also of Fatah, was imprisoned in 1993 for killing 72-year-old Sirens Hotel security guard Israel Tenenbaum by beating him in the head with a steel rod.

According to Almagor, the Poland-born Tenenbaum had immigrated to Israel in 1957, at age 36, and settled in Moshav Ein Vered. He was an agricultural worker on the moshav, but was working as a night watchman at the hotel in 1993. Tenenbaum was 72 at the time of his death. He was survived by a wife, two children and four grandchildren.

Two of the prisoners, Abu Satta Ahmad Sa’id Aladdin and Abu Sita Talab Mahmad Ayman, were imprisoned in 1994 for the murder of David Dadi and Haim Weizman. After killing Dadi and Weizman as they slept in Weizman’s apartment, the attackers cut off their ears as proof of the killing.

Abdel Aal Sa’id Ouda Yusef was imprisoned in 1994 to a 22-year sentence for several grenade attacks, and for his part as an accomplice in the murder of Ian Sean Feinberg and the murder of Sami Ramadan.

Feinberg, a 30-year-old father of three, was a proponent of Palestinian economic development. He was killed by gunmen who stormed a business meeting in Gaza City which he attended in April 1993.

Also on the list was Kour Matwah Hamad Faiz of Fatah, imprisoned in 1985 after he was convicted of killing Menahem Dadon and Salomon Abukasis in 1983 and planning to murder then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Another two prisoners to be released, Fatah members Sualha Fazah Ahmed Husseini and Sualha Bad Almajed Mahmed Mahmed, were imprisoned for a stabbing attack on a crowded Ramat Gan bus, on the 66 line, in 1990. The two, together with a third accomplice, stabbed wildly at passengers, killing 24-year-old Baruch Heizler and wounding three young women. Heizler was named after his grandfather, who was killed during the Jordanian bombardment of the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem during the 1948 Independence War.

Sha’at Azat Shaban Ata was imprisoned in 1993 for helping to orchestrate the murder of 51-year-old Simcha Levi, a woman who made her living transporting Palestinian day laborers to work in Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. In March 1993, three of the women laborers were disguised male attackers, who beat and stabbed her to death.

Maslah Abdullah Salama Salma, a Hamas member likely to be sent to the Gaza Strip after his release, was imprisoned in 1993 for the brutal murder of Petah Tikvah convenience store owner Reuven David. Abdallah, together with an accomplice, entered David’s convenience store on May 20, 1991, bound David’s arms and legs and beat him to death, before locking the store and fleeing the scene. Born in Iraq in 1932, David was 59 at the time of his death, and was survived by a wife, three children and multiple grandchildren.

Tokenism, due process, appearance and substance

It is important to be strong
but not strong smelling
it is important to be succesful
but not a successful criminal
it is important to be generous
but not to give everything away
it is important to work hard
but not to become hardened
it is important to be adequate
but not so adequate you never afford anyone the opportunity to do something for you
_______
tokenism in police process....
the phenomenon where police are notoriously reluctant
to reopen a case even when it becomes abundantlt clear that the wrong person was put behind bars
a fake resolution is as important as a real one, as psychologically compelling...as long as we've put someone in jail
_____
foundations and tokenism
______
atomisation

________

tokenism in faith communities

______________

tokenism in compliance legislation in the workplace
__________

tokenism in education - my counselling degree and collaboration to beat the system...

_____

asylum seekers must write an exam in advanced hypocrisy before they can be eligible for Australian citizenship...
________

PSA - the Australian coat of arms.
FX rifle shots. The kangeroo keels over. A joey emerges from its pocket and is clubbed to death, as per the guidelines...see this review of current legislation
then the kangeroo is stuffed, and glassy eyed, propped back up again next to the national coat of arms...

how to promote, suport and sustain ongoing integration in afractured world where contradiction seems to be built into the fabric itself?

Can "morality" exist apart from our daily habits of production, consumption and disposal?

It seems to me that in my particular faith community notions of morality and doing "the right thing" are always discussed in a disembodied way, and not grounded in the daily realities of our production, consumption and disposal of resources. As such talk of "tikkun olam" - fixing /healing the world - is rendered vitality-less, becomes self indulgent, "let's-try-and-feel-good-about-ourselves" (which anyway doesn't work) instead of a transformational empowerment to shape our reality in kepping with our deepest intuitions.

No matter how worthy the cause is - be it mosquito nets for Africa or  protesting coal reef terminals being built on the barrier reef or donating to some heart or cancer research  - when these activities are done as marginal activities, as  "guilt offerings" which then "allow" us to carry on with our daily lives which perpetuate all kinds of systemic imbalances - then 

we are somehow missing the mark, and the unattended business grows like a tumour in the dark, festering and manifesting as ever bigger dysfunction.

A conversation I really really want to have with others is how to bring the focus from "out there" to to the daily acts of shopping, eating, driving, working, travelling to and from the places we want or need to go, the way we move resources around, warming or cooling ourselves, the attire we wear, the ways we communicate and the devices we use (Facebook, computer, coal fired power statiosn, high voltage power cables across the landscape, open face coal mining), the size of the houses we live in and what they are made from, the way the items we consume are packaged and what is done with that packaging and our unwanted items...

The real battle lines, if you like, are where human convenience (and sometimes short term human survival) encounters the collective good, and this is perhaps the place hardest to look into. From the moment we were born or begin to think of ourselves as embodied, we begin a war for survival with other embodied beings, and the enhancement and perpetuation of our name and form often depend upon the destruction of the form of the other. (How many cows are raised and killed to feed the muscled bulk of all the Super 14 rugby teams...? And how were those animals reared and slaughtered? How were they transported and what was done with their excrement?). 

What happens when the world, arranged for our convenience, begins to backfire? When monoculture allows one species of so called "pest" to destroy an entire nation's food supply? When introduced species in Australia, such as foxes, camels, the cane toad cats and dogs decimate populations of indigenous animals, or others such as cattle prove unsustainable in this landscape ( with its droughts and floods, its sparse fodder and the salination of the soil from irrigated crops, some of which are grown as cattle feed). When the hypersterilty of unnecessary home cleaners cause new allergies? When refined foods suddenly produce things like Crones disease in populations which never evidenced this disease when they ate a simpler and less processsed diet? When our addiction to plastic packaging endangers sea life and creates a seemingly insoluble land fill problem? 

Historically wherever the needs of human convenience have encountered the "need" or desire to maintain bio-diversity, human convenience has almost always won out and bio-diversity has collapsed.

So I'm advocating for a kind of spiritualised environmentally aware neo-Marxism, but without the mistakes Marx seems to have made in his understanding of human psychology and what ultimately motivates and mobilises human beings... Human beings cannot be preached to, and every legislated change tends to create an equal and opposite anti...

The million dollar (or million tree) question is how to overcome the "out of sight out of mind" principle as applied to factory farming, plastic bags, air conditioning, single driver car usage, and all the other aspects of daily life which middle class entitlement has led us to assume are a birthright...I really really want this conversation to be had in my immediate community, but seem to / am afraid of encountering resistance when I introduce it, because it touches so personally on the questioning and modification of our daily habits, and I expect to encounter defensiveness and hostility when it is broached. Of course, I know that any sanctimoniousness I have when voicing this will not help, so a good starting place is to loose any judgements and see what becomes possible then...