FORGOTTEN AID

Published April 13, 2024 by Nan Mykel

Mary McLeod Bethune - Mary McLeod Bethune Council House ...

Mary Mcleod Bethune

“During the 19th and 20th centuries, Black women played an active role in the struggle for universal suffrage. They participated in political meetings and organized political societies. African American women attended political conventions at their local churches where they planned strategies to gain the right to vote. In the late 1800s, more Black women worked for churches, newspapers, secondary schools, and colleges, which gave them a larger platform to promote their ideas….

“But in spite of their hard work, many people didn’t listen to them. Black men and white women usually led civil rights organizations and set the agenda. They often excluded Black women from their organizations and activities. For example, the National American Woman Suffrage Association prevented Black women from attending their conventions. Black women often had to march separately from white women in suffrage parades….”

“After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, Black women voted in elections and held political offices. However, many states passed laws that discriminated against African Americans and limited their freedoms. Black women continued to fight for their rights. Educator and political advisor Mary McLeod Bethune formed the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 to pursue civil rights. Tens of thousands of African Americans worked over several decades to secure suffrage, which occurred when the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. This Act represents more than a century of work by Black women to make voting easier and more equitable.”

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WHO PUT WHAT IN THE WATER?

A Georgia politician saying the eclipse was a warning from God?

[Maybe if it hadn’t happened]

“Islam deserves to be seen as s free, happy religion that promotes love. Especially gender is a topic that left too many people in a situation of limitation, where it isn’t needed. I’m convinced of that. Read the scriptures, think about them. It gave me new perspectives on this topic. ” –A sincere believer

[Pretty is as pretty does?]

The new rage of choking during sex?

[Suffering has become fun?]

Santos wants to run for office again.

[!!!]

The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular.

[Duh.]

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IS IT JUST MY IMAGINATION?

Since September 11 was and is still such a mystery (in my opinion), as well as how Netanyahu didn’t respond to the alerts of a women’s lookout reporting mass activity in Hamas prior to the October 7 invasion, a dark side of me wonders if both the U.S. and Israel welcomed the attack to have an excuse to wage all-out war. Reading about Kennedy’s CIA meetings about Cuba gave me cause to wonder.

A member of an Israeli military unit of female soldiers that does surveillance on the Gaza side of the border with Israel told CBS News that “warning signs weren’t taken” … – YouTube-CBS Evening News

Soft on the Animals

Published December 2, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Alongside some cutthroat actions by humans upon humans, it is refreshing to hear about kindness being given to guilt-free animals. Two instances came across my desk recently: a vetrinarian caring for pets of the homeless and, earlier, a behavoral scientist teaching a migration path to birds extinct in the wild.

Dr. Kwane Stewart’s outreach on the streets started more than a decade ago as a personal mission that he kept to himself. “It was my way to heal,” said Stewart, a veterinarian whose nonprofit, Project Street Vet, provides medical care to the pets of people experiencing homelessness. “Maybe some of it was guilt. Maybe some of it was I just wanted my own little crusade.”https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/us/california-street-veterinary-medicine-pets-cnnheroes/index.html>

Separately, Johhannes Fritz, a behavioral scientist, built an aircraft and learned to fly in order to teach the bald Ibis, a bird extinct in the wild for 300 years, how to fly a 3-week migration path south from Germany through the alps by following his ultra light aircraft. Fritz founded the Waldrapp team to better understand the Ibis’s requirements, and began a bond with these species, which turned into a passion to save them. Granted, this was in 2001, but the team Fritz initiated appears to still be operative. https://www.waldrappteam.eu/en/

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THANKS!

Many thanks to friend Sallie for directing me to the following related to Christians for Judaism, discussed in my Nov. 30 post. You can check it out, but here ‘s part of it, from Wikipedia via Google:

Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant — the eschatological “Gathering of Israel” — is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.^[1]^[2] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.^[3]^[4]

Advocacy on the part of Christians for a Jewish restoration grew after the Reformation, and is rooted in 17th-century England.^[1] Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England’s Zionist evangelical Christians “passed this notion on to Jewish circles” around the 1840s,^[5] while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews.^[6]

Christian pro-Zionist ideals have generally been common among Protestants since the Reformation. While supporting a mass Jewish return to the Land of Israel, Christian Zionism asserts a parallel idea that the returnees ought to be encouraged to reject Judaism and adopt Christianity as a means of fulfilling biblical prophecies.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] Polling has suggested a trend of widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of evangelical Christians.^[11]

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GRIM

“My favorite ‘Twilight Zone’episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — ‘To Serve Man’ — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.

“But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.

“That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.”…. much more

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SOMETIMES

I wonder, did I write my life?

If so, I was clever and did

A good job. So many dear things

Were included. Best of all was a

Sterling sense of humor. I laugh

At myself for spilling my soup

Or getting into the wrong car

(That was a hoot) or taking a

Year of French but not learning the

Word for potty when needed in

Calais. The black and yellow writing

Spiders at the farm, the fig tree,

Even the scupernong arbor, too.

Red tomatoes warm from the sun–

Patrol girl in the sixth grade and

Best of all, a grandmother with

a soft lap and dimpled elbows.

A Near Miss and a Recommendation

Published December 2, 2023 by Nan Mykel

A questionable serendipity at the library brought me in contact with Naomi Wolf’s first big seller, but just to be sure I Googled her and had to back off. (Maybe I’ve learned my lesson? About time!)

What I did stumble across possibly makes a lot of sense. Read this and tell me what you think:

By Thomas L. Friedman

The reason the Hamas-Israel war can be hard for outsiders to understand is that three wars are going on at the same time: a war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group, a war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future and a war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies.

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Very accidentally I came across a post that said climate change will wipe us out and nothing can help, so we’d best give up our efforts. I surmise that that: 1.the author is sadistic 2.the author is backed by the fossil fuel industry 3.the author is dangerously depressed or 4.the author is correct. At any rate, I’m not referring him to you.

A New Day

Published November 30, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Deep breath. Tryin’ to do better.

Frustrated that some of the Times’ columns are off limits to non-subscribers. I’ll test the waters for education’s sake:

“In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.

I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should.”

From Frank Bruni’s opinion column in the New York Times today.

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I’m still trying to find out why George W. Bush signed into law a bill requiring the State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism and rate countries annually on their treatment of Jews, over the US State Department’s opposition, saying it was unnecessary as the department already compiles such information in its annual reports on human rights and religious freedom. True, Bush announced this when he addressed a crowd in the battleground state of Florida, which has the world’s largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and New York, [Rense.com] so maybe it was just to get the Jewish vote. The rapidity with which we backed the current Israeli war made me wonder some more. Was it oil? A friend suggested it was due to guilt, because the U.S. had turned away a boatload of refugees from Hitler times, but I read up on that and that situation was unclear.

I’m not truly superstitious, but I used to buy books in thrift shops in order to open myself to serendipitous unread books. Now my serendipity with books is limited to the overflow book shelves in the public library. My last visit to the library matched me with Diane Ravitch’s 2020 Slaying Goliath (The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools) and Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy 2006. (I follow Ravitch’s blog but don’t reblog it ’cause I suspect she doesn’t like to be re-blogged. (I love it!).

Re Phillips’ book, it made me wonder if our favoritism could be that “U.S. Protestant theology has now refocused itself on the biblical holy lands as a battlefield is just another of the extraordinary transformations taking place on account of the influence of religion on American politics and war.” Christian Nationalism sprang forth after the book was published, I figure, because it is not listed in his large Index.

Phillips writes that “many in the Christian Right appear to have a larger purpose, perhaps related to preparation for the rapture, the tribulation, and Armageddon. Some 40 percent of Americans…believe that the antichrist is alive and already on the earth.” He refers to Paul Boyer, who dates evangelical preoccupation with the Middle East back half a century, stirred by the creation of Israel in 1948, then by the expansion of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, all key end times signs. “Islam’s evil role, says Boyer, is an ancient view in Christian eschatology.”

I’ve mentioned my lack of some important education in the past, and this is where I am ignorant, also. I’m not sure how merging Christian Evangelism with the Jewish holy land go together. If I’m missing something obvious, please tell me.

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ASHAMED….

to be an American? I never thought I would be, but how else can I respond to the huge Republican push to re-elect such a man? I have no words for any justification. I won’t think further on it, but there it is.

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QUOTATION

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” —Oscar Wilde via Google

Arms for Human Rights Violators?

Published October 21, 2023 by Nan Mykel

State Department Official Resigns Over Arms Transfers to Israel

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/state-department-official-resigns-israel-arms.html>

This is just a portion of the ny times article by John Ismay about Josh Paul’s State Department resignation:

Mr. Paul, whose resignation was reported earlier by HuffPost, said that he had seen the U.S. government approve numerous sales or shipments of matériel to other Middle Eastern countries, even when he believed federal law should have prevented them from going forward.

“On all of them there’s a moment where you can say, OK, well, you know, it’s out of my hands, but I know Congress is going to push back,” he said, by issuing a hold on the transfer or grilling officials in hearings at the Capitol. “But in this instance, there isn’t any significant pushback likely from Congress, there isn’t any other oversight mechanism, there isn’t any other forum for debate, and that’s part of what got into my decision making.”

Continuing to give Israel what he described as carte blanche to kill a generation of enemies, only to create a new one, does not ultimately serve the United States’ interests, Mr. Paul said.

“What it leads to is this desire to sort of impose security at any cost, including in cost to the Palestinian civilian population,” he said. “And that doesn’t ultimately lead to security.”

“This administration, I think, knows better and understands some of the complexity but brought very little of that nuance to the policy decisions that are being made.”

Another Donner Pass?

Published October 20, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Here are the latest casualty figures as of October 16, 2:00pm local time (12:00 GMT):

Gaza

Killed: At least 2,808
Injured: At least 10,859

Occupied West Bank

Killed: At least 57
Injured: At least 1,200

Israel

Killed: At least 1,400
Injured: At least 3,400

From < https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker>

Surely others in the United States are torn regarding the current situation abroad. I’m speaking of the Israel Hamas situation.

I’m reminded of the snow-trapped anguish of the victims and the survivors of the Donner Pass in a 1846 Sierra Nevada snowstorm:

On December 16 a party of 10 men and 5 women set out to cross the mountains on improvised snowshoes. During a month’s harrowing, often overwhelming hardships from cold, storms, deep snow, and inadequate food, they struggled on. Eight of the men died, and the bodies of some of these were eaten by the others. Two men and all the women got through to the Sacramento Valley.

The settlers of California organized a relief party which left Fort Sutter (Sacramento) on January 31, 1847. Heroically struggling through the deep snow, seven men reached the lake camp on February 18. They then took 23 of the starving emigrants, including 17 children, back to the settlements; several deaths occurred on the way. Other relief parties followed, but, because of illness and injuries, it was impossible to remove everyone.

After dogs and cowhides had been devoured, many deaths occurred, and the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism of the dead bodies. The last survivor, Lewis Keseberg, who had supported himself during the last weeks by cannibalism, did not leave camp until April 21. Five of the emigrants died before reaching the mountain camps, 34 at the camps or on the mountains while attempting to cross, and one just after reaching the settlements. Two men who had joined the party at the lake also died. The total of deaths was thus 42, with 47 survivors.

After examining remains from the Alder Creek campsite, researchers in 2010 announced that they had been unable to find any human bones or other physical evidence of cannibalism. The researchers themselves clarified, however, that the absence of archaeological evidence did not rule out the possibility that cannibalism had occurred, especially given the extensive contemporary accounts by members of the rescue parties and the survivors themselves.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Michael Ray.

(The difference in numbers apparently reflects the many deaths, many changes in paths chosen and leaders of what is apparently referred to as the “party.”)

The current situation abroad, with its many conflicting aspects and difficulties, and stark reality, is what reminded me of the tug of emotions and “facts” involved, in addition to the truth of my ignorance of the situation to date.