Dominatio Per Malum

Too Little, Too Late

nevinyrral — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:28:28 +0000

SINGAPORE: Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said his insistence on bilingualism in the early years of education policy was “wrong”. Instead it caused generations of students to be put off the Chinese language.

It was the official opening of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language and in a speech delivered in Mandarin and English, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave a blunt assessment of Singapore’s bilingual policy.

He said: “We started the wrong way. We insisted on ting xie (listening), mo xie (dictation) - madness! We had teachers who were teaching in completely-Chinese schools. And they did not want to use any English to teach English-speaking children Chinese and that turned them off completely.”

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question

nevinyrral — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:32:52 +0000

New York Times

The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain. And in addressing issues at the heart of Jewish identity, it has exposed bitter divisions in Britain’s community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another.

“This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community’s modern history,” said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper here. “It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates.”

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS. Founded in 1732 as the Jews’ Free School, it is a centerpiece of North London’s Jewish community. It has around 1,900 students, but it gets far more applicants than it accepts.

Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority.

By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application.

That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

White/Blue

nevinyrral — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:09:00 +0000

I am Blue/White
Take The Magic Dual Colour Test - Beta today!
Created with Rum and Monkey’s Personality Test Generator.

I’m both orderly and rational. I value control, information, and order. I love structure and hierarchy, and will actively use whatever power or knowledge I have to maintain it. At best, I am lawful and insightful; at worst, I am bureaucratic and tyrannical.

The Iron Curtain

nevinyrral — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:34:38 +0000

The Iron Curtain
Marie Howe

And the nun asked us– were we seven?–what we would do if the
Communists
stormed our houses and bound our parents and threatened to kill
them. Would you
renounce Jesus in order to save your mother from being murdered?
We knew what the true answer was–
and what was the right one.

My mother stood, cooking a dozen pork chops in the two big frying
pans, when I told her
that I’d said that I’d let her die before
I turned my back on Jesus.
And my mother said that that was all right; she understood.

When the wall came down I was distracted. By what? A man I loved
and longed for?
A self integrating so slowly most days I hardly knew who I was?

Brick by brick. Some men pushed it with what looked like
long pillars.
Some kids sat on top, waving.

We’d been told families had been divided–crossing the city to work or
shop–
caught on the wrong side when the wall went up. And that was that.
People
lived and died, and married.

How strange to see them walking, on TV, through the empty air–
what had been solid–stupefied, astonished…

How they touched the faces of their loved ones
and ran their hands over their heads and hair.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

nevinyrral — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:28:35 +0000

The New York Times has an excellent retrospective on the fall of the Berlin Wall, some 20 years ago to this day. It was a moment of historical purport, made all so fascinating because it was partly caused by Bureaucratic confusion over travel regulations. It marked a watershed moment in history and changed forever the dynamics of international power balance. Now 20 years later, that euphoric moment where freedom triumph over repression is captured beguilingly by the first person anecdotes, pictorial juxtaposition and nostalgic accounts of a time where, to borrow the lyrics of Scorpions, we were all “Listening to the wind of change.”

In particular, i liked the collection of poetry commemorating this date.

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of change

The world closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close,like brothers
The future’s in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
–”The Wind of Change”, by The Scorpions

Chow Yun Fat Double Bill

nevinyrral — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:15:18 +0000

So, i recently watched 2 classic Chow Yun Fat movies. They don’t make movies like they used to.

City on Fire (1987) 6/10

Long before Infernal Affairs, Chow Yun Fat played the conflicted undercover agent with his charismatic comedic wit. Although the film feels dated and the plotline is fairly predictable, with cartoonish villians, it is still a guilty pleasure. Notable for the “brotherhood” bond between good guy Chow Yun Fat and bad guy Danny Lee, which would be reversed in The Killer, where Danny Lee plays the good cop trying to capture Chow Yun Fat the assasin.

The Killer (1989) 7/10

Chow Yun Fat as the assassin with the kind heart, Danny Lee as the good guy catching the bad guy and Sally Yeh as token female flower vase? All these and more, replete with gratuitous shots of white pigeons that has been the trademark of John Woo. Its predictable and a tad tacky, but the bromantic film is classic 80s HK and a whole lot of fun. This was back when John Woo was actually a good director.

Modern Humans Are Still Evolving

nevinyrral — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:47:35 +0000

TIME

Modern Homo sapiens is still evolving. Despite the long-held view that natural selection has ceased to affect humans because almost everybody now lives long enough to have children, a new study of a contemporary Massachusetts population offers evidence of evolution still in action.

A team of scientists led by Yale University evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns suggests that if the natural selection of fitter traits is no longer driven by survival, perhaps it owes to differences in women’s fertility. “Variations in reproductive success still exist among humans, and therefore some traits related to fertility continue to be shaped by natural selection,” Stearns says. That is, women who have more children are more likely to pass on certain traits to their progeny.

Salute All Cars, Kids. It’s a Law in China.

nevinyrral — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:46:55 +0000

New York Times

All the students at Luolang Elementary School, a yellow-and-orange concrete structure off a winding mountain road in southern China, know the key rules: Do not run in the halls. Take your seat before the bell rings. Raise your hand to ask a question.

And oh, yes: Salute every passing car on your way to and from school.

Education officials promoted the saluting edict to reduce traffic accidents and teach children courtesy. Critics, who have posted thousands of negative comments about the policy on China’s electronic bulletin boards, beg to differ. “This is just pitiful,” wrote one in a post last year. Only inept officials would burden children with such a requirement rather than install speed bumps, others insisted.

Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches

nevinyrral — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:15:24 +0000

Los Angeles Times

The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria’s 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire.

Nigeria is one of the heartlands of abuse, but hardly the only one: the United Nations Children’s Fund says tens of thousands of children have been targeted throughout Africa.

Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.

“Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets.

“Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road.

“Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.

It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.

WTF! It appalls me that this is still happening in 2009!!!

Antichrist (2009)

nevinyrral — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:17:27 +0000

Antichrist (2009) 3/10

Antichrist will polarize audiences. You either love it or hate it. In my case, i hated it. It was a dull, pretentious and needlessly graphic film which made the film experience as enjoyable as a lobotomy. But it one respect it did succeed marvelously in that it managed to evoke despair in the hearts of the audience. Antichrist is bookended by moments of brilliance. The prologue opens in a hauntingly gorgeous black and white sequence while the epilogue finishes with a mind-scratching sequence. But the core of the film is relentlessly bleak, starting out as an exercise in psychological spooks before degenerating into mindless gratuitous torture. This is one film that i won’t watch again. While i am a fan of how director Lars Von Triers pushes the envelope of cinema, this is one film i would classify as a provocative failure. The film plays out like a lucid, psychotic nightmare and the allusions it draws about the fundamental essence of human nature is as haunting as it is repulsive. The leads, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are fearless in their performance but the limited and unfathomable script lets them down.

“A fever dream of the twisted, depraved and unnerving, it’s quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. And quite unlike anything the right-minded may want to see again.”- David Edwards

“I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that.”- Roger Ebert