Culture and Media

What was incomprehensible only 20 years ago is commonplace today.

In the blink of any eye, messages, pictures, movies, everything that can be digitalized, can be sent from one corner of the earth to another. People have come to depend on the Internet and new media services to communicate with the world, from the person next door to a relative several time zones away.

An icon of Mui Wo village on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island has ‘gone to the further shore’ and his popular product, Sweet Tao Fu (J. Tofu) or Soy Custard, will be sorely missed by so many people – local and visitors alike – Mok Kau Moon, aged 79, died 11 July, 2011, after only one night in hospital.There is no one to take up his business.

In his or her “AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL MANKIND” the web host at conspoetry.com defines the conspoetry title by telling that a ”CONSPIRACY is – a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act, etc. And, that POETRY is [also] – any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling.

by Carrie Humphries

This year marks the 7th Annual Nonviolence Festival Day in the Park. I remember a few years ago going to the event (hosted by the Waterloo Region chapter of Nonviolence organization) and it poured. Yes, it rained for what seemed like forever. But it didn’t stop the day. The festival, in all its soaked glory, continued on while people danced in the rain.

Thousands of people flocked to a Washington arena Wednesday to celebrate the 76th birthday of Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who urged followers to mark the occasion by practicing compassion. “Happiness — it is not money, it is not material things, it is not power. It is (inside), full of self-confidence.”

Through authors like Rita Levi, Maturana, Piaget, Vigotsky, Husserl, Freire and, fundamentally, Silo, the Chilean teachers Rebeca Bize and Mario Aguilar have developed a solid theoretical foundation for a new humanist education in “Pedagogy of Intentionality, Educating for an Active consciousness”. The book was presented in Buenos Aires, in the National Library.

While members of the Spanish 15M Democracy Now were attempting to demonstrate at Wimbledon where their beloved tennis hero Rafael Nadal was due to play, in Glastonbury U2’s Bono (“Saint Bono”) was being given a hard time by Art Uncut for dodging taxes by moving part of his huge wealth into a tax haven used by big corporations responsible for much of the poverty he criticises.

Palestinian hip-hop group DAM took the stage at the Ramallah Cultural Palace Saturday night in front of hundreds of fans. DAM, which means blood in both Hebrew and Arabic and is short for “Da Arabian MCs,”. The show meant to bring together artists from the West Bank in the spirit of a growing youth movement, said DAM member Suhell Nafar.

It is generally thought that separation of the powers of Church and State and an independent judiciary are new considerations and the universal humanists too may think that the Law of Political Accountability is quite new – think again – and look to Africa. Bereket Alemayehu, an organiser with Convergence of Cultures on the African Continent, introduces us to the Gada system.

We present a short amazing video of a conference recently held by Julia Bacha regarding the stories that can change the so called “confirmation bias” (or previous believes) that we all have, and help us open our minds and have a new cognitive resonance or comprehension of a fact that usually we tend to look with some prejudice. Such is the case of non-violence in Palestine.