ARAB SPRING? IN EGYPT? FOR WOMEN?

Hardly. Things will be worse for Egyptian women if the projected results of the current elections (by CBC, BBC, and Aljazeera) hold true. The Muslim Brotherhood will have the most votes (60 per cent first round vote) with the Salafists (ultra hard liners) and the Gamaa Islamiya, (more hard liners) taking most of the rest of the votes. Under these circumstances what can Egyptian women expect? Oh, the usual suspects…black robes for women, deschooling of girls and women, forced marriages of young women to old men as second, third, or fourth wives, death by stoning if women provoke jealously in their households, more honour killings. It means constant fear of men’s accusations of wrong doing, in other words, the complete captivity of women.

But wait a minute. Didn’t many young, seemingly well educated Egyptian women help start the Egyptians revolution, didn’t they work for it, risk their lives for it? Yes, and that was perfectly fine with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, and the Gamaa Islamiyas. But that was then, they seem to say, and this is now. Now that the battle is primarily won, it’s “Get back into your cages, women. And this time we will lock the gates good and tight”.

And many Islamists don’t necessarily cease to be hard line lslamists when they come to Canada. Islamic women continue to be treated as inferiors by their men in Canada in many instances. Remember the little girls in the Ontario school that holds Friday prayers for Muslims? And the young girls having their periods have to sit in the very back row away from the others? Boys in front, girls kneeling behind, then the menstruating girls, who are not fit to even kneel behind the boys in their supposed unclean condition and are delegated to the rear of the room.

What is wrong with Canada, with Ontario, to allow such a practice in public schools? Public displays of little girls being humiliated becaue of their life giving functions are akin, in a very real way, to pornography. And certainly it’s also akin to barbarism, that period of time when women were banished to special huts, away from any possible damage to men when the women were bleeding. I think Canada has gone bananas with trying to demonstrate how wonderfully political correct we are.

Enough is enough. Immigrants should adjust to Canadian society, not try to transform Canadian laws and social mores into what they left behind. The misogyny of Islam is notorious throughout the world. Why do we try to pretend that this isn’t so?
And how did Mohammad Shafia ,( Muslim from Afghanistan, making news right now for killing three of his daughters and his first wife) even get into Canada with two wives? I understand the first wife was listed as a cousin on the family’s immigration papers. How could a cousin be allowed entry into Canada when so many parents and adult children of immigrants are not allowed to be brought in with their families? Was it because Shafia is rich? Did immigration know or suspect the listed cousin was really the first wife and didn’t care because he was rich?

And how many other additional wives of rich Muslims families are allowed entry into Canada simply by being listed as cousins and aunts? This case is surely not the only one. And this case only came to light because the man killed his first wife along with his three daughters. Doesn’t Canadian immigration investigate the additional cousins and aunts that are brought in with these rich Muslim families? Especially since rich Muslim men are usually the only ones who can afford the two, three, or four wives that Islam allows. Curious minds want to know.

Borsa Italiana and Cocaine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGxN4C0PQ80

Borsa Italiana
Doesn’t that phrase just roll off your tongue? Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s the name of the Italian Stock Exchange in Milan, Italy. I was surprised to read about this stock exchange. It seems the Italian politicians are linking cocaine used by traders to wild fluctuations on the Italian stock market (Financial Post, Oct.15, 2011). Italians are in the process of “requiring stock traders to take mandatory drug tests…Italian savings may be invested by people not capable of making decisions due to drug use,” said Undersecretary Carlo Giovanardi.

Diane Francis, author of the article, goes on to tell us that “substance abuse has been cited as pandemic in London’s financial district with media reports of bars that allegedly routinely offer cocaine to clients by credit card, but describe the purchases as wine. Cocaine has been the drug of choice for well heeled financial types around the world for decades…”

Well, isn’t that interesting? Cocaine. So that’s one of the reasons the stock markets seem so wired and weird lately. When one thinks about this kind of hard drug being readily and regularly purchased by hay wire, hi wired stock traders along with the amount of uppers, downers, and pain killer prescription drugs doctors shove into people’s lives for physical and emotional pain, medical prescriptions that addicts patients as surely and soundly as crack does, and then there are the poor and homeless heroin and crack users, add this drug use to all the Ritalin and other like medications urged onto children too young to defend themselves, along with habitual pot smokers and alcoholics then what we have is a drugged nation, a drugged international community, and except for China perhaps a drugged word (I understand that treatment for drug addiction is mandatory in China and that identifiable drug pushers who prey for profit other than enough to buy their own drugs, get executed).

Occupy Vancouver had a number of addicts in the camp, three overdosed and one died. That’s about par for the course in the general population. However, because these incidents were so visible, and were suffered by people who were either homeless, or aimless, they provoked disdain and even disgust from some members of the public. But don’t look away, my friends, or you will see yourself, or a member of your family, or one of your dearest friends, or someone you admire, or work with, or are falling in love with, someone who is either beginning, coming out of, or presently enduring a similar nightmare of some kind of drug addiction.

But I, too, felt extreme disappointment when so much of Occupy Vancouver came to be about drugs in the public’s minds. On Oct. 15 there were four thousand people there in front of the Art Gallery. The issues that brought that many people out are still there and we can’t be frightened away by a problem that is pervasive and deep seated in all aspects of our society. We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened away from something that is only beginning, and has the potential power to bring a new, more equitable order to the earth. An order that Gaia will accept.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGxN4C0PQ80

Gaia and the Mother Principal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tobCjOoafEk

Yes, we are. We’re all in the belly of the beast of a crumbling economic system along with its tattered institutions collapsing around it. Meanwhile, some of us try not to notice the gasping breaths of Gaia (Mother Earth) who is choking and gagging on what humans are discharging into her environs. Gaia seems to be turning to her own medicine chest in attempts to cure her fever and she may shake off much of what she has built up over the eons. So we are experiencing the ice melts, earthquakes, tsunamis’, floods, hurricanes, famines and threatened volcano eruptions that in turn threaten all life forms. Unfortunately, the same people in charge of our economic systems are also under the illusion they can manage Gaia’s systems. Because they are control freaks, they can’t believe Gaia has the power to enforce her own laws.

These people are the 1%. And they are tearing up the house we live in. They have become so used to manipulating nature they think a fish that has the genes of other animals sliced into it is a perfectly fine thing, as is a deforested world. Ditto the mortgage they are leaving us. This 1% is leaving us a mortgage for a torn up house that none of us in the 99%, or our children, or grandchildren will ever be able to pay.

For my part I say let the capitalist system fall, it was a rigged game to start with. Capitalism could never, and has never, produced equality. Capitalism thrives on inequality. It thrives on most people in the world losing, so some can gain. This imbalance is an insult to Gaia, to the mother principal, the principal that strives for balance. What human mother of several children would favor one above the others, and praise and reward the favored one for being selfish and greedy while the others go hungry? Especially when the favored one is destroying not only the family house but the yard and fields and streams and threatening all living things with his consummate grasping for more, more, all the time more? A mother who would do such a thing would be completely deranged.

And Gaia is not deranged. However, on the whole, she is very slow. She has a tendency to give species lots of chances, sometimes millions of year’s worth, before she wipes them out if they are not doing well. If a species is okay with the way they are, like earthworms, and are beneficial to the earth house, she lets them be. With other species who like to experiment with gradual change Gaia may even help them along with a mutation or two. But Gaia’s basic rules do not change. Ever. She controls this earth and its systems and either we work with her within this system or we die.
Corporate greed of the 1 % (there are no other words for this) has forced Gaia’s hand. The banking-corporate world with its attendant need to strip Gaia of the careful natural balance she has built up over millions of years has given her a dangerous fever.

But Gaia knows how to cure herself. She will cough up the irritants, the bacterium and viruses of the uncontrolled logging, mining, and stripping and oiling of the oceans, along with all the toxic chemicals, including the genetically modified foods and the FrankenFish being so carefully guarded in West Vancouver. Gaia will spit it all out, clear her throat and start over. She’s had to do it before.
Occupy Wall Street (all the Occupies) is an expression of how human consciousness is trying to change in the face of Gaia’s impending implosion. Yes, there have been problems with the Occupy camps, and there will be more problems with the Occupy camps. But there will be other camps because Occupy is more than a camp, it’s an idea. It’s an intuition. It’s a dream. Occupy represents respect for the earth and the mother principal (men also have this). We can consciously choose to be part of Gaia’s recovery by mitigating our own actions, or she will make us a big part of her own self remedy. It is our choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tobCjOoafEk