Father's Day.

and ...    Brown-skinned girls in jeopardy.

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NEXT SUNDAY - An IMPORTANT event in Toronto. See also: Eco Sanity, GreenHeart Education, Compassionate Climate Action, & Bill McKibben. Max Yasgur, 1919-1973: Simon Charlie, 1918-2005: I met him in 1974 at 'Simon Charlie's Festival of the Sun' in Duncan BC. Afterwards we stayed on with Crowbird to clean up the site. Simon asked us not to let the girls wander around naked, especially in groups; he was trying to keep peace with the band council - land tenure is complicated on reserves. (As if our 'let' had to do with anything.) One of the mothers read Tolkein's trilogy out loud to her son every evening as a bed-time story. We all listened. She got all the way through before we were done cleaning up (as I remember it). Obama lives in a house where he gets dunned to lift the lid too (I guess). Now that I'm an 'old woman' sorta guy who sits down because it's tiring to stand up dribbling, and messy ... but there are no women living with me so it wouldn't be an issue anyway, even if it wasn't. Still ... fathers worry about their daughters differently than they worry about their sons (neither more nor less just differently); it's basic equipment; and about other daughters as well, young women in general ... all part of the OEM spec (if there were one). Brown-skinned girls in jeopardy: Boko Haram do not (apparently) rape bodies - although their position on cutting off sexual parts is unclear. Comparing this with raping minds is of course mere left-lib baffle-gab eh? D'you think? The gut appeal of this story is (sadly) obvious. Meanwhile, in Brasil, in the town of Jacareacanga in Pará state, the Mundurukú (children, women and men, all of them) are getting brutal payback for their courageous confrontations at Belo Monte last year. The immediate flash point is the cancellation of some 70 contracts with the people who teach in their schools - not so physically brutal, but effective. Henzanani Merakini, Dakatcha Kenya: Does it matter that these particular victims are brown skinned? Does it matter that they are women? Is that it? [A photograph of two young girls, children, hanging from a tree in Lucknow India; days before it's a young woman beaten to death not far from the court in Lahore Pakistan while her husband struggles to save her; a month before that it's a girl raped and killed on a bus in Delhi. (Worse is the statistical descent into trivializing chaos: so many thousands of rapes per month, per year; so many deaths from war, Aids, starvation.) Is it sexual? Is it (two questions) males against females or men against women? Is it ... accidental? If not how not? When one is really interested only in one's own complicity. (Eh?) ]   For 'Temporary Foreign Workers' read 'slaves'. Two thoughts on Boko Haram which seem to me to merit archiving:         'Dear world, your hashtags won't #BringBackOurGirls' by Jumoke Balogun; and,         #BringBackOurGirls and the trouble with hashtag diplomacy by Simon Allison. And three reports (which I will discuss next time):         Cooperation Framework to support 'NAFSN' in Senegal;         2014 Feed the Future Progress Report; and,         The Great Land Heist: How the world is paving the way for corporate land grabs.

 
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