The full article this is excerpted from is rather lengthy but it is very interesting (& disturbing)…and well worth the time spent reading it in full. Fair warning tho – there are some rather graphic images embedded into the original article that may not be suitable for all audiences. This was reported back in February originally…if I missed it, I am surely not the only one so I thought it was still worth sharing.
Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea, where communities are warping under the pressure of the mining boom’s unfulfilled expectations. Women are blamed, accused of sorcery and branded as witches — with horrific consequences.
Photo: VLAD SOKHIN Rasta was accused of sorcery by people in her village after the death of a young man in 2003. She was set upon by a crowd at his funeral, beaten and strangled until she escaped. She lost her hand in the attack.
Excerpts, GlobalMail - By Jo Chandler February 15, 2013
”ON FEBRUARY 7, Papua New Guineans woke to the headline “Burnt Alive!” and pictures of a large crowd, including school children, watching as flames engulfed the body of a young woman.
It happened in the busy, mercurial hub of Mount Hagen, smack in the heart of the country. A 20-year-old mother of two, Kepari Leniata, had been stripped, tortured, trussed, doused with petrol, thrown on a rubbish tip, covered with tyres and set alight.
The killing was reportedly carried out by relatives of a six-year-old boy who had just died in the local hospital. They seized a couple of women they suspected of causing the death, among them Leniata, and soon determined that she would be the scapegoat of their grief. Witnesses claimed the crowd blocked police officers and firefighters who tried to intervene.
The news provoked a statement of “deep concern” from the UN human rights office and international media coverage. PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill condemned the killing as a “despicable” and “barbaric” act. He said he had instructed police to use all available manpower to bring the killers to justice.
“It is reprehensible that women, the old, and the weak in our society, should be targeted for alleged sorcery or wrongs that they actually have nothing to do with,” said O’Neill. Similar sentiments resounded across PNG’s always animated social media scene, and included a push for a campaign to enlist Leniata’s name and legacy to rally momentum to address endemic, epidemic violence against women.
Leniata’s death and the anguish it provoked reprised a very similar scenario only two years ago, also on a rubbish tip in Mount Hagen, when an unidentified young woman — according to some reports, possibly as young as 16 — was tied at the stake and burned. But this time there were pictures. The horror of the act, and the passivity of the watching crowd, sent shockwaves across the country.
As the Post Courier’s Rheeney editorialised, the failure of witnesses to intervene, “to stop and condemn the murderers’ actions, points to a bigger danger of ordinary Papua New Guineans accepting this callous killing as normal and this methodology of dispensing justice as acceptable.”
KOB4 (Albuquerque, NM) Posted at: 04/12/2013 – “Slutwalk 2013 has a name that may grab attention, but organizers hope that the serious issue it represents will keep that attention.
Slutwalk started in Toronto in 2011 after a Canadian police officer said that if women wanted to avoid getting raped, they should stop “dressing like sluts.”
The idea was to redirect attention from victim blaming to concrete, preventative solutions.
“It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing,” organizer Bianca Villani said. “It doesn’t matter how you express your sexuality, it doesn’t matter what community you’re in, the color of your skin — nobody deserves or asks to be raped.”
CNM and UNM are jumping on board this year with a walk starting at 9 a.m. Saturday (April 13th) at the north lot of The Pit.
At 10:30 a.m. they’ll hold a community fair for people to learn about sexual assault in the community and ways to prevent sexual violence.
The event isn’t just for college students; organizers say its crucial for everyone to get involved.
“Everybody is affected by sexual violence,” Villani said. “This isn’t an isolated issue, this is something that affects men and women, children and adults, and we need to stop silencing this topic and start talking about it.”
A friend of mine recently mailed me a copy of the book, “Living Downstream” which makes repeated mention of Rachel Carson and her fascinating work in trying to expose the dangers of the toxins we release into the environment by way of pesticides. I must admit that other than occasional short, almost abstract, mentions (even by other bloggers here; see links below) that popped up in my peripheral vision the past few years, nothing fully caught my attention so I had no knowledge of Rachel Carson or just how groundbreaking and important her work really was. I cannot believe I have managed to overlook her for so long…and am even more amazed that Ms. Carson is not a more nationally recognized hero…for a heroic life is most certainly what she lead!
And tho I find myself cringing (again) at just how lousy and lacking my public edumucashion really was and how little I still really know about…everything!…I am also looking forward to delving deeper, exploring more and discovering a whole new piece of history that until now, somehow never made it into my field of vision…
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
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From RachelCarson.org - “Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.
She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article “Undersea” (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book,Under the Sea-wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing.
She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including “Help Your Child to Wonder,” (1956) and “Our Ever-Changing Shore” (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson’s writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.
Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.
Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures.
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
Excerpt, Living Spoonful – “…It was in 1945 that Carson first encountered DDT, which the scientific community had dubbed the “insect bomb” in reference to the atomic bombs recently dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such was the utter destructiveness of the chemical spray.
Deeply troubled by the use of DDT without further research on its long term effects, Carson was one of only a few voices looking ahead to the “downstream” effects of pesticide use on land, and she was unable to find a publisher willing to take on the issue…
…In 1957, Carson became a champion in the fight against the “fire ant eradication program” – the USDA’s aerial spraying of DDT mixed with other pesticides and fuel oil, which included spraying private as well as public lands. When landowners on Long Island lost a suit to stop the USDA from aerial spraying on their own private lands, Carson was recruited by the Audubon Society to bring public attention to the issue.
It was through the research and connections she made during her work on the “fire ant” campaign that Rachel began to write Silent Spring. Evidence she gathered from her field work and from research at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, as well as from confidential information passed on to her by colleagues and friends still working as government scientists, all painted a picture of ecological damage and human sickness resulting from widespread pesticide use.
It’s a tragic irony that Carson, like so many scientists, suffered personally from her dedicated research. In 1960, Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer, which many have attributed to exposure to the very chemicals she fought to restrict. Although fighting cancer and its complications, Carson found the strength to finish writing her most impactful work.
Silent Spring was published on 27 September 1962, and immediately sparked a controversy among chemical manufacturers, the scientific community, and even the general public. Although much energy was invested into debunking Carson’s research, she was ultimately successful in defending her conclusions. As one of her last acts as a conservationist, Carson testified before President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee, which, in 1963, issued a report largely supporting the claims she made in Silent Spring.
In January 1964, Rachel Carson died of complications from breast cancer. The legacy of her work, especially the work she completed in her last years, cannot be understated. Her biographer, Mark Hamilton Lytle, credits Carson with “calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar American culture.” Many believe her work is largely responsible for inspiring the grassroots environmental and ecofeminist movements that took hold throughout the 1960s.” Full Article Here
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“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.”
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Acknowledging Critics of Carson’s Work -
I am not sure I agree with the above video but wanted to include it to show differing points of view about Carson’s work. I want to read and learn more before I decide what to fully make of her studies…no matter whether or not I end up agreeing with her assessments, I still admire those who stand up & fight for what they believe in!
“The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”
Every day now for the past several days, I’ve told myself that I would sit down, force myself to concentrate… I told me that I WOULD get a lot of reading and posting done…yes indeed…I was quite stern when I spoke to myself! Ah…but the Spring Self that is Me right now, merely giggled and ran away outside to play with the chickies and wiggle her toes in the mud as she planted more seeds…
I DID make good on my order to myself to make sure to sit down and get lots of reading done…but uh…instead of reading hundreds of blogs which is what I really meant to do, I sat outside on a bench in the sunshine & read the entire Little House On The Prairie series of books from beginning to end. I’ve not read them in since I was a kid and it was great fun reconnecting with Laura Ingalls…she always was one of my heroes and hey, whattya know…she couldn’t ever sit still and was constantly wandering off to find adventure and trouble, too!
The whole week was not one of leisure, in spite of the stolen hours of playing on the prairie…Spring Cleaning has been happening still on a large and mostly outdoor scale. Fencing has been repaired, replaced, painted & a new yard section exists where the dogs can’t trample a garden. Hundreds of veggies and wildflowers have been seeded both indoors and out…more and more sprouts peek up every day…cilantro, dill, Forget-Me-Nots, Pansies, cherry tomatoes, garlic…sproing, sproing, sproing! and new little green heads appear all the time now! My hands are happy hands right now for having helped birth so much new life along this spring!
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Radley & Boo, the chicks, are growing by leaps and bounds…literally. They need several hours of outdoor playtime every day now. Like all babies, they require lots of supervision, cleaning, feeding and soothing but that’s okay because they’ll be grown & moving outside before I know it! These moments are precious, dontcha know?! Steve always thought I was a bit off in the head when I’d talk about the way the hens I had as a kid would kick back and sit on my lap for chats all the time…until yesterday when he sat down to watch the chicks with me and they both made a perch on his leg and dozed off for naps. Did I have the camera on hand..? Pffft! Of course not!
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Aside from all of the outdoor fun, I have finally been able to fling the doors and windows wide open…which means that I was also able to finally start to work refinishing and painting the gorgeous old door I salvaged for $20 over the winter. It had the most gorgeous carved flowers and for months now, I’ve had to look at them plain and bland and WHITE…all the while, I’ve plotted the colors to use and waited impatiently to splash some color on the poor old door. I was less than an hour from being done with the project on Thursday when hubby wanders in and makes some off-the-cuff comment about how it would look neater if I framed the flowers in and gave it all the appearance of stained glass.
Crap. I wanted to hurry through the project but he was right…frickinfrackinfuckinRAWR! So…the ‘few little flowers’ I originally was going paint have morphed into a project requiring that I paint the ENTIRE door. Since the door was old and worn, none of the lines are sanded smooth anymore but my eye demands perfectly straight and unwarbled lines so I’m now 48 hours into working on it and hopefully can have it done by tonight or tomorrow morning depending on how long my hands hold out. I am naming this door, “Steve’s Revenge” and figure his idea for how to improve the door is revenge for all of the cockamamie ideas for projects that I’ve hit him with and the work I’ve caused him over the years!
“Steve’s Revenge”…nowhere near complete but shaping up nicely!
So now I’m off to frolic, paint and cluck around the yard with the chickies. Tomorrow starts a whole new week and maybe, just maybe, I can be stern enough with myself to sit down and catch up on all of the posts and news that I’ve missed…but no promises shall be made because I know if a good patch of sunshine calls me, I will have no choice but to answer!
ONE IN THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET WILL BE RAPED OR BEATEN IN HER LIFETIME.
ONE BILLION WOMEN VIOLATED IS AN ATROCITY
ONE BILLION WOMEN DANCING IS A REVOLUTION
On V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, 14 February 2013, we are inviting ONE BILLION women and those who love them to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to this violence. ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.
What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.
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When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness. Dancing insists we take up space. It has no set direction but we go there together. It’s dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive. It breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere at anytime with anyone and everyone. It’s free. No corporation can control it. It joins us and pushes us to go further. It’s contagious and it spreads quickly. It’s of the body. It’s transcendent…
By being a part of One Billion Rising we will all discover our solidarity and the scope of this issue. We will come to know that ending violence against women is as important as ending poverty, or Aids or global warming. We will come to see that it is not a local issue or particular to any culture or religion or village or age. We will come to see what is possible. When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness…
This past week was a long and trying one in our home. My teen daughter has decided that she would be happier if she moved in with her dad. Aside from the fact that, like any parent, I want my kids here with me…I know that her choice is going to take her back near a darkness that is unhealthy. Letting her go…watching her walk out the door…setting out on a path that is going to be one covered in thorns and brambles and all sorts of things that could scratch her and tear at her…I just want to grab her up and run a million miles away in order to protect her.
The more rational part of me knows that I have to stand aside; to let her fight her way down this path regardless of what I feel & think and in spite of the hard times I see coming straight at her. I believe we are all here to learn and I know that sometimes trying to protect people we love can actually interfere in their ability to learn the spiritual lessons they need to grow.
I hope that I am wrong…I hope that my beautiful Motorcycle Girl manages to accomplish what she is setting out to do and that she will never feel an ounce of pain or a moment of sadness.
And if she does get hurt, I hope she remembers how to find her way back to me…to Point B…
It’s been a long, weird and emotional week here on the home-front and I’ve not been able to concentrate long enough to go seeking out any headlines or news events today. So…I’m *cheating* on this post tonight as I try to relax, take a breath and gather my wits about me. My folks lived in Saudi Arabia before I was born; even though I was not there with them, they had several albums of Arabic music that were played often throughout my childhood and to this day, it is still something I enjoy tremendously. The music in this video brings back tons of memories and the performance is breathtaking – Enjoy!
Seriously. I would love to just fly away this morning…and the 50+mph winds that are howling outside, rattling my windows and causing a near total brown-out (think dirt blizzard) would make it easy enough to catch a breeze – okay, ride a viscous gust – right on out of town if one had a cape, carpet or umbrella…
Ah…but my cape is at the tailor’s after that barbed wire incident…and my umbrella is still all smashed up from the last time I tried to “Mary Poppins” my way down from a really high place (the ankle has healed nicely though)…oh, and the Magic Carpet is at the cleaner’s after the great chihuahua fiasco…hrm.
It’s not the right time to haul out my broomstick (she gets grouchy & flies crooked when I bring her out in the off-season)…so…what to do, what to do..?
Then it hits me…use music to lift you and fly you out of here, dummy!
And so I did. Take a break and enjoy the flight with me…
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I know that video cuts out short but there is no better recording of that performance that I can find – and Russell’s performance on the ring is just too incredible not to share…but I am sorry for that abrupt, WTF??? ending. Here is a full version of Rising Appalachia performing I’ll Fly Away that is not as visually stimulating but is both outstanding…and fully complete!
I wonder if or when humankind will finally rise high enough to step across all of the Great Divides that have been created around us?
Not crazy about the imagery in the video but it was the best I could find. The words to this song never fail to move me…
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While politicians lie and cheat to get to higher ground, we follow them like sheep and salute them as we drown…
And you whose silence costs your soul Learn to speak or dig your hole Tomorrow’s here and it won’t wait No time to hesitate…
Come good people and gather here You who still hold freedom dear Step across the waters Bring your sons and daughters Some will sink and some will swim Some will walk on the water again Some will rise and some will fall Each one will hear the call…
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Seven years ago Diana and Michael Lorence moved to a 12-foot-square home without electricity in the coastal mountains of Northern California. They’re not back-to-the-land types- they’re not growing their own food, nor raising animals-, but, like Thoreau, they were looking for a place where they could get away from the noise of society and focus on their inner lives…
If I had a boat I’d go out on the ocean And if I had a pony I’d ride him on my boat
~ Lyle Lovett ~
Heather Wilcoxon bought her current home, a turn-of-the-century vessel in 1986 and she’s been remodeling it ever since. The Delta Queen was once a cook house barge in the Sacramento River Delta, but in the seventies it earned a permanent berth in the San Francisco Bay…
This little boy is beyond amazing…please take the time to visit the website and read more about Tripp, his devastating disease and the inspirational joy of finding pleasure in spite of the unfathomable pain he endures.
Click Here To Meet Tripp
Tripp was born on May 14, 2009. He was diagnosed with a rare genetic skin disease called “EB.” Any type of friction on his skin or mucous membranes causes blisters. They told us he would not live to be a year old…
When I heard the recent news that the USDA agreed to lift regulations that would restrict the planting of GM crops, and gave the “green light” to Monsanto to now also plant GM alfalfa (a super-pollenator), while the FDA insists, against all evidence to the contrary, that genetically modified foods are “safe”, I was so inspired I just had to express my joy and appreciation, as an American, at being hung out to dry once again!! SusanShann
I truly admire Pink’s attitude. She lives as she pleases and to hell with the world. So many people are so afraid to step out of themselves and what society deems ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ that it is sad to watch the look-alike hordes and masses of colorless people.
It’s easier for a lot of people to walk through life & miss out on so much by bending to all of the unspoken and accepted rules that other people try to place on us. Why should I live MY life walking around worrying about other people’s mental comfort zones? What does it gain me to let my hair be drab brown if my Spirit and my mood want to brighten up the world with purple, blue or…
Amelia was probably my biggest childhood hero; she made it okay to be a tomboy, to not be ‘girly’ and to do outrageous, bold and courageous things. For all of the *Barbie* culture and pressure on little girls, having books about women like Amelia made childhood tolerable for me – and I am sure for many other girls who found lace itchy and preferred skinned knees to properly styled hair.
Even though her life was cut short, Amelia’s impact has not faded away. She remains an inspiration and her life’s work and words still echo with truth across the generations…
Born in Atchison, KS, Amelia was named, according to family custom, after her two grandmothers (Amelia Josephine Harres and Mary Wells Patton). Her upbringing was unconventional since her mother did not believe in molding her children into “nice little girls.” Meanwhile her maternal grandmother disapproved of the “bloomers” worn by Amelia and her sister. Earhart liked the freedom they provided, she was aware other girls in the neighborhood did not wear them.
Although this love of the outdoors and “rough-and-tumble” play was common to many youngsters, some biographers have characterized the young Earhart as a tomboy. In 1904, with the help of her uncle, she cobbled together a home-made ramp fashioned after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis and secured the ramp to the roof of the family tool shed. Earhart’s well-documented first flight ended dramatically. She emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled with a bruised lip, torn dress and she exclaimed, “Oh, it’s just like flying!”
Fresh Oil is a secret place that is continuously being filled by the spirit of God. Fresh Oil will stay purpose driven to deliver compelling writings related to social injustice and spiritually rich revelations.
