Tag: Nobel Peace Prize

17 Year Old Is Awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Peace Prize 2014: Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, Indian Kailash Satyarthi Honored For Fighting For Children’s Rights

The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to Pakistani Malala Yousafzai and Indian Kailash Satyarthi for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited,” The Norwegian Nobel Committee stated in a press release. “In the poor countries of the world, 60% of the present population is under 25 years of age. It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that the rights of children and young people be respected.”

Yousafzai, 17, was shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012 for having the temerity to seek an education. The Islamist militant group also took issue with her for publishing a blog in 2009 that promoted the right to education. [..]

Satyarthi, 60, is a children’s rights activist who has dedicated his life to helping the millions of youths in India and around the world that have been forced into slavery.

A former electrical engineer, Satyarthi has participated in countless peaceful demonstrations and protests against the exploitation of children. He has mounted raids on factories where children were forced to work, and helped free and rehabilitate thousands. Satyarthi also established Rugmark (now known as Goodweave), a group that aims to “stop child labor in the carpet industry and to replicate its market-based approach in other sectors,” and currently heads the Global March Against Child Labor, a conglomeration of 2,000 social-minded organizations and trade unions in 140 countries.

Congratulations to Ms. Yousafzai and Mr. Satyarthi for their wonderful work on behalf of children around the world.

Plant A Tree For Wangari

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Plant a Tree for Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai Dead at 71

Spiritual Environmentalism: Healing Ourselves by Replenishing the Earth

by Wangari Maathai

I didn’t think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

During my more than three decades as an environmentalist and campaigner for democratic rights, people have often asked me whether spirituality, different religious traditions, and the Bible in particular had inspired me, and influenced my activism and the work of the Green Belt Movement (GBM). Did I conceive conservation of the environment and empowerment of ordinary people as a kind of religious vocation? Were there spiritual lessons to be learned and applied to their own environmental efforts, or in their lives as a whole?

When I began this work in 1977, I wasn’t motivated by my faith or by religion in general. Instead, I was thinking literally and practically about solving problems on the ground. I wanted to help rural populations, especially women, with the basic needs they described to me during seminars and workshops. They said that they needed clean drinking water, adequate and nutritious food, income, and energy for cooking and heating. So, when I was asked these questions during the early days, I’d answer that I didn’t think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

Nobel Peace Prize Money Goes To…….

Great Choices and to orgs that won’t misuse!

Obama Donates Nobel Prize Money to 10 Charities

The White House has announced that President Obama has donated the $1.4 million given to him in conjunction with the Nobel Peace Prize to ten charities, including the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund and the United Negro College Fund.

While President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for his work toward global peace, most of the money has gone toward charities focused not on peace but on educational opportunity.

The most money — $250,000 — went to Fisher House, which provides housing for families of patients being cared for at major military and VA medical centers. >>>>>

Mark Twain on War and Peace

Mark Twain Pictures, Images and Photos

The Anti-Imperialist League was founded in 1889 as an opposition group, intended to counter what was then seen as an imperialistic approach toward Cuba and the Phillipines.  

After the Spanish-American War (April-August, 1898), the Treaty of Paris, finalized in December, 1898, granted the United States control over Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.  

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Speech in a Spiritual Context

President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Speech reads to me, in many ways, more like a sermon than a political or ideological treatise.   That those who report and announce the news are either commenting upon a very small segment on that which was said, or taking a very minor section of the speech completely out of context like the increasingly malcontent Howard Fineman is regrettably par for the course.   Nothing silences more than visionary language and far-sighted analysis, and notably none of it can be spun out into confusion by two split-screen talking heads yammering away at each other on a simultaneous satellite feed.   We do a lot of talking these days, but frequently not a lot of listening.          

Kathleen Parker and other pundits responded merely to this section, as it is the easiest to pick apart, but much like everything else in the world, full context is crucial to fullest understanding.

“For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

With those words, Obama aligned himself with conservatives, who believe in the fallibility of human nature and in an enduring moral order. At the same time, he left room for moral conundrum: the difficulty of reconciling two seemingly irreconcilable truths — “that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”

As for the former assertion, not necessarily.   As a Quaker, I daily navigate this own moral conundrum, as Parker phrased it.   No amount of eloquent justification will ever sway me from the belief that war in all forms and for all reasons is morally wrong.   Still, I do believe that while evil and good might be indebted to shades of gray, I do not believe in a hierarchy of sin and transgression.   Wrong is wrong in a moral context and I leave it purely to the law of humans in a court to determine which wrong is more offensive than the next.   Moreover, believing that human nature is inherently imperfect does not necessarily mean that we ought to wrap our arms around this fact and fail to continue working to improve conditions for our fellow person.   Though I might believe that direct revelation from the Inward Light of God is a deeply, personal individual one which may vary from being to being, I do not believe that the liberty inherent in embracing one’s own path means one also gets the right to formulate for himself or herself precisely what constitutes good or evil, divisive or unifying.   Peace, as Obama mentioned later in the speech, comes with sacrifice and sacrifice is a team sport.   We will never arrive at it as a people unless we devote as much common energy towards securing peaceful means as we do when we channel our blood lust in the direction of an enemy who has wronged us.    

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

Again, I disagree with the President.   But to return to conundrums and paradoxes, in this instance I recall the 1927 film version of the famous anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.   The original novel portrays Quakers in heroic terms, eager to put their very lives on the line by actively transporting slaves by way of the Underground Railroad to Canada.   One of the main characters, Eliza, miraculously makes her way across a frozen river into the North, pursued by dogs, and carrying her child with her.   After being rescued by a kindly man from an adjacent farm, she finds a settlement of Friends who agree to send her towards freedom.   She and her young son eventually escape slavery and settle beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required even Northerners to return runaway slaves under penalty of law.  

The movie version, however, modifies the original plot considerably.   Eliza makes her way across the frozen river as before, but is this time rescued from the ice and the damp by a particularly dexterous Quaker man.   He and his wife eagerly agree to give both Eliza and her child a place to stay for a while, but notably do not stand up to an armed slave catcher by the name of Loker when he knocks at their door the next day.   Full of good intentions, naive, utterly helpless to resist, and wholly powerless in the end is this version’s portrayal of Quakers and non-violent resistance.   Both renderings have their own bias and both border on propaganda at times.   Both, it must also be pointed out, have a degree of truth to them as well.        

That aside, to me, the very heart of the speech lay in this passage.


As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are, to understand that we all basically want the same things, that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.

And yet, given the dizzying pace of globalization, and the cultural leveling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities:  their race, their tribe and, perhaps most powerfully, their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict.  At times, it even feels like we are moving backwards.  We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden.  We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.

This passage challenges me to examine again my own goals and intents.   The urge to surrender our individual identities on behalf of progress or perceived progress can sometimes be believed as doing away altogether with the depth and breadth of religious expression.  While this is a fear of conservative people of faith more so than their brethren on the left, even I am gripped at times by a similar anxiety.   In a desire to keep alive the rich uniqueness of my own faith group, I do not wish to see it incrementally reduced to nothing in the process.  In that spirit, I push hard that we Friends might never forget the biblical underpinnings that inspire what we believe and which led to the formation of our Testimonies.   Average Americans already, if a relatively recent survey is to be believed, selectively choose the precepts they incorporate into their own individual canon from a variety of religions.

By a three to one margin (71 percent to 26 percent), Americans say they are more likely to personally develop their own set of religious beliefs than accept a comprehensive set of beliefs taught by a church or denomination, a Barna study, released Monday, shows.

Born-again Christians were among the groups least likely to adopt an a la carte approach to religious beliefs, but even most in this group say they have mixed their set of beliefs (61 percent).

In other words, the Barna survey’s findings show that people no longer look to denominations or churches for a complete set of theological views. Rather, combining beliefs from different denominations, and even religions, is becoming the norm.

While tribalism and factionalism, particularly along religious lines has done much to set us apart from each other and has even compelled us to kill others in times of war, I find nothing wrong with separate identities, provided they do not separate us in the process.   The Esperanto movement in linguistics, for example, sought to provide a international secondary language.   The concept was predicated on the belief that the human race was needlessly divided by language barriers and that men and women could use Esperanto as a lingua franca to be used in conversation with those of other nationalities or those who spoke a different primary tongue.  The intent was never that Esperanto would replace one’s native language, merely that it would facilitate diplomacy.

If this process were merely the latest evolutionary step, I would not have reason to be afraid, but I sometimes worry that we are jettisoning not just our religious identities, but our shared sense of purpose and love for our fellow being.   The post-modernist believes that all we are these days is that which we ourselves have created and that we are only as deep as our own constructed reality.   What a sterile world that would be, were it to be true!   Let us not make idols of our own cynicism, too.

One must not forget the paradoxical story of the Tower of Babel as found in Genesis.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved toward the east, they found a plain in Shinar [Babylonia] and settled there…They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”  But the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower the people were building.

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”  So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.  That is why it was called Babel–because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

At face value, one would assume that God’s purpose in this act was to keep people divided, else they find more value within themselves than devotion to a God.   In accordance with a literal interpretation, God is a jealous deity who desires no rivals and quickly strikes back against the idea that humanity through collective action might eventually believe  that it feels it no longer has no use for God.   Perhaps it speaks to the very idea of faith, as well, and with it the assertion that human endeavoring and human construction can never fully explain the divine or rationalize away the need for a higher power.   Some interpretations over the years have seen the building of the Tower as a contemptuous and rebellious act toward God himself, in effect declaring war on God’s supreme authority.   God does work in mysterious ways, after all.      

So are we meant to be divided, else total unity rip our moral fabric and station to shreds?   Is division just a part of life that serves as a deterrent, else we get too big for our britches?   If one is a Christian, one believes that we are all a part of the metaphorical Body of Christ.   Some faith groups or denominations have sought to define it different ways, but the concept itself is more or less the same.   Though often used to reinforce this belief in shared Christian fellowship, St. Paul’s words in his first letter to the Corinthians can be read to go beyond just devotion to a particular religion or a particular cause.

Now, dear brothers and sisters, regarding your question about the special abilities the Spirit gives us…There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.  There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.  God works in different ways, but it is the same God who does the work in all of us.  A spiritual gift is given to each of us so we can help each other.  To one person the Spirit gives the ability to give wise advice; to another the same Spirit gives a message of special knowledge, to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, He gives one person the power to perform miracles, and another the ability to prophesy.

He gives someone else the ability to discern whether a message is from the Spirit of God or from another spirit. Still another person is given the ability to speak in unknown languages, while another is given the ability to interpret what is being said.  It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts. He alone decides which gift each person should have.  For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.

President Obama concluded his speech this way, saying,

Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The nonviolence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith – if we dismiss it as silly or naive, if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace – then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Amen.

These fuck-ups on CNN have walked all over the Nobel Prize.

The bloviators walked all over the ceremony, the king’s speech, world class entertainent, etc.

Christiane Amapour, David Gergen, and Craphole Crowley’s opinions exceed world opinion.

Regardless, Obama is going balls to the wall “War is Peace!”

Fuck you, Bro’.

BrokenRoots: SF’s Project Homeless Connect



The day breaks sunny and nippy in San Francisco and the wind is already whipping around Polk Street, in front of City Hall and down past the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium as the first Project Homeless Connect volunteer coordinators enter the auditorium prior to 7 AM. Just before midnight, the news is that some 2200 homeless showed up for services today. Final tallies are not yet published.

The mission of Project Homeless ConnectTM (PHC) is to connect San Francisco’s homeless with the system of care that will help them move off the streets and into housing.


Bring our troops home from Afghanistan

President Obama will soon decide whether to send as many as 60,000 additional U.S. soldiers to the war in Afghanistan. [1]

Let's urge Obama to live up to his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Tell him to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — not send more.

The U.S. military has been in Afghanistan for more than 8 years. Enough is enough.

It's no surprise that 59% of Americans now oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan. [2]

We need to remind Obama that Lyndon Johnson's choice to escalate the Vietnam War doomed his domestic agenda to failure.

Tell President Obama today to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan.

 

Notes:

(1) Peter Spiegel and Yochi Dreazen, “Top Troop Request Exceeds 60,000.” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2009.

(2) Paul Steinhauser, “CNN Poll: Will Afghanistan Turn Into Another Vietnam?” CNN, October 19, 2009.

 

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – The Last Edition

Crossposted at Daily Kos.  Look in the Comments Section of Daily Kos for more cartoons on the economy and sports.  Somehow, I couldn’t fit them in the main text of the diary.

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Glenn Beck’s Fear and Paranoia



Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com

BrokenRoots Sunday: Art & HPRP & Homeless in America

US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama last winter signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, appropriating $1.5 billion for a Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP). These monies are being distributed via a formula used for the Emergency Shelter Grant (ESG).

HUD, oversees the funding and serves as the hub for information on the program, And the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) is working alongside to ensure the successful implementation of HPRP.

This Sunday, BrokenRoots shines a light on HPRP: How’s it doing so far? What are its guidelines and philosophy? Who’s eligible and how is HPRP  defining homelessness? And, perhaps more significantly, as the days grow shorter and the temps drop, what are YOU doing about the homeless crisis in your own backyard? We’ll provide a few suggestions and solicit some ideas.

If it’s Sunday, It’s ‘Homeless in America”

Some of Obama’s “common challenges of the 21st century”

President Obama Will Accept Nobel Peace Prize as a Call to Action

“I will accept this award as a call to action —

a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.

. . . we must all do our part to resolve those conflicts

that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years . . .”

– President Barack Obama

United States Mission to the United Nations

What are some of those “common challenges of the 21st century”?

The US government hosted UN link above, identifies some of these global issues:

Peace & Security

Nonproliferation & Disarmament

Poverty & Development

Climate Change

Human Rights & Democracy

United Nations Reform

Michael Steele: “Where’s Bush’s Nobel Prize?”

Cross posted at Daily Kos

In an hastily-arranged press conference which just ended at the National Press Club, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele condemned the Nobel Committee for awarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama of the United States.

Steele offered the following remarks



Hajo de Reijger, Politicalcartoons.com (The Netherlands)

:: ::

“The Nobel Committee has done a great injustice to all peace-loving people around the world by prematurely awarding this prestigious award to someone who is totally undeserving of it.  In fact, the person who is a deserving recipient was the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.  Remember him?  His vision, governing philosophy, and far-reaching efforts to promote peace and cooperation amongst various nations should have resulted in him, and not Barack Obama, being selected for this international honor.”

More of Chairman Steele’s expanded remarks below the fold.

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