Time Magazine (September 13, 2010) ...item 2.. The New Anti-Semitism - What it is and how to deal with it (July 12, 2011) ...

Time Magazine (September 13, 2010) ...item 2.. The New Anti-Semitism - What it is and how to deal with it (July 12, 2011) ...

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While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work.

Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.
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.....item 1).... aish.com ... www.aish.com/jw/s ... HOME ISRAEL JEWISH WORLD ...

Anti-Semitism at University of Toronto

Jew-counting, racism and intimidation in U of T's Social Work program
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July 12, 2011 / 10 Tammuz 5771
by Richard Klagsbrun

www.aish.com/jw/s/Anti-Semitism_at_University_of_Toronto....

Picture the following: A discussion in a post-graduate university class on the topic of Jews turns ugly. The professor is uncritical when one student says he doesn’t want to be around Jews. Another student complains about “rich Jews,” implying their excessive power. In a subsequent class, the same professor, as if to validate those points, says half her department faculty are Jews and with her approbation, students conduct a ‘Jew count’.

While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work. Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.

The controversy began when some visible minority students in a Social Work Master’s program at the University of Toronto expressed discomfort about being around “rich Jews,” in Professor Rupaleem Bhuyan’s class, regarding a proposed outing in 2009 to the Baycrest Centre, an internationally renowned Jewish geriatric and research facility. They were undoubtedly confident of a sympathetic ear from her. The previous year, Bhuyan denounced Israel as a satellite of the United States, unworthy of distinction as a separate country.

The few Jewish students in Bhuyan’s Master's Program class were intimidated into silence for much of the discussion by a classroom culture slanted against them. Finally, one young woman spoke up, protesting her grandparents had come to Canada with virtually nothing and she was proud her family could now afford the fees for them to reside at Baycrest.

That must have rung an alarm bell for Professor Bhuyan, because startlingly, she then admonished her students not to divulge what transpired in class to outsiders.

But her classroom was not Las Vegas and what happened there did not stay there. Some outraged Jewish students approached Professor Paula David, who in turn consulted senior professors Ernie Lightman and Adrienne Chambon.

“Students are in a vulnerable position and dread officially attaching their name to complaints against a professor in a program like Social Work,” said Lightman. “Aside from determining grades, they fear one bad word from a professor to a social agency can eliminate their employment prospects.”

In the face of such circumstances, Lightman assumed the voice of the Jewish students who endured the vitriol in Bhuyan’s class. He, with Chambon spoke to Faye Mishna, the Dean of Social Work about the incidents. A letter Lightman wrote to U of T President David Naylor about the matter also became public.

By way of response, Mishna, without specific reference to the incident or Bhuyan, sent out a pair of letters to the Social Work department generically condemning anti-Semitism.


Related Article: The New Anti-Semitism

www.aish.com/jw/s/48930417.html


Lightman believes the university’s response was absurd. “The department’s approach seemed to imply a widespread problem with anti-Semitism – which there wasn’t – and that everyone is potentially a racist when one professor promoted anti-Semitism and was never held publicly accountable.”

The Canadian Jewish Congress declined to participate in resulting seminars on anti-Semitism held for the Social Work Department. According to the CJC’s Bernie Farber, “We were not satisfied in the end with the entire process.”

Chambon, a Jewish professor who is Director of PhD programs in the Social Work department, was particularly pained by these events. Originally from France, she relates that “I am from Europe and of a generation with bad memories of the sinister results of Jew counts.” After hearing about the incident, Chambon arranged to meet with Bhuyan.

We have a responsibility to students to ensure faculty do not abuse the power inherent in their positions.

“I was flabbergasted” Chambon disclosed. “She told me ‘racialized’ students come from underprivileged backgrounds and were justified in not wanting to be around old Jews because they are rich and would make them uneasy. I couldn’t believe my ears. I took some paper and wrote down what she said in front of her. Bhuyan then said the donor plaques at the university were all from rich Jews, which she felt proved her point. Aside from being factually wrong, it reflects an attitude that polarizes groups and reinforces stereotypes that do not belong in the teaching of Social Work.”

Professor Bhuyan did not reply to a request to comment for this article and the University refused to add to Social Work Department Dean Mishna’s response that, “the Faculty took all steps to address the matter appropriately at the time of the incident and thereafter.”

Nothing could be more false in the opinion of Lightman, Chambon and others. While patiently waiting for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, they instead saw them go off the rails.

Bhuyan, an untenured Assistant Professor, who never offered a public apology for her behavior, was rewarded by the University with a contract renewal .

That development has frustrated a number of professors in a dysfunctional Social Work Department that remains divided in opposing camps. Lightman insists this matter must be exposed and wrote a recent article about it for The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.

Lightman asserts, “It’s ironic that a department purporting to teach anti-racism is incapable of dealing with racism in its own house. We have a responsibility to students to ensure faculty do not abuse the power inherent in their positions, and to the community-at-large to ensure all the Social Workers it graduates reflect and promote the values of the field. That hasn’t happened here."

Ontario's Minister for Colleges and Universities is John Miloy. The Progressive Conservative Critic for that portfolio is Jim Wilson. Why not let them know what you think?

This article originally appeared on the blog: Eye on a Crazy Planet
eyecrazy.blogspot.com/
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The New Anti-Semitism ...

What it is and how to deal with it.
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July 12, 2011
by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

www.aish.com/jw/s/48930417.html

In January 2000, heads of state or senior representatives of 44 governments met in Stockholm to commit themselves to a continuing program of Holocaust remembrance and the fight against anti-Semitism. Barely two years later, synagogues and Jewish schools in France and Belgium were being firebombed, and Jews were being attacked in the streets.

The distinguished Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, advised Jews not to wear yarmulkas in the street. The French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut wrote, 'The hearts of the Jews are heavy. For the first time since the war, they are afraid.' Shmuel Trigano, professor of sociology at the University of Paris, openly questioned whether there was a future for Jews in France. Never again had become ever again.

Basing Jewish identity on memories of persecution is a mistake.

On 28 February 2002 I gave my first speech on the new anti-Semitism. Never before had I spoken on the subject. I had grown up without a single experience of anti-Semitism. I believed, and still do, that the whole enterprise of basing Jewish identity on memories of persecution was a mistake. The distinguished Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz reached the same conclusion at the end of her life. She warned of the danger of a whole generation of children growing up knowing about the Greeks and how they lived, the Romans and how they lived, the Jews and how they died. I wrote Radical then, Radical now, specifically to focus Jewish identity away from death to life, suffering to celebration, grief to joy.

The return of anti-Semitism, after 60 years of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue and antiracist legislation is a major event in the history of the world. Far-sighted historians like Bernard Lewis and Robert Wistrich had been sounding the warning since the 1980s. Already in the 1990s, Harvard literary scholar Ruth Wisse argued that antisemitism was the most successful ideology of the twentieth century. German fascism, she said, came and went. Soviet communism came and went. Anti-Semitism came and stayed.

It is wrong to exaggerate. We are not now where Jews were in the 1930s. Nor are Jews today what our ancestors were: defenseless, powerless and without a collective home. The State of Israel has transformed the situation for Jews everywhere. What is necessary now is simply to understand the situation and sound a warning. That is what Moses Hess did in 1862, Judah Leib Pinsker in 1882 and Theodor Herzl in 1896: 71, 51 and 37 years respectively before Hitler's rise to power. To understand is to begin to know how to respond, with open eyes and without fear.

Today's anti-Semitism is a new phenomenon, continuous with, yet significantly different from the past. To fathom the transformation, we must first define what anti-Semitism is. In the past Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists (Marx) and because they were communists (Hitler); because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they held tenaciously to a superstitious faith (Voltaire) and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing (Stalin).

Anti-Semitism mutates, and in so doing, defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred.

Anti-Semitism is not an ideology, a coherent set of beliefs. It is, in fact, an endless stream of contradictions. The best way of understanding it is to see it as a virus. Viruses attack the human body, but the body itself has an immensely sophisticated defense, the human immune system. How then do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Anti-Semitism mutates, and in so doing, defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past two thousand years, and we are living through the fourth.

The first took place with the birth of Christianity. Before then there had been many Hellenistic writers who were hostile to Jews. But they were also dismissive of other non-Hellenistic peoples. The Greeks called them barbarians. There was nothing personal in their attacks on Jews. This was not anti-Semitism. It was xenophobia.

This changed with Christianity. As was later to happen with Islam, the founders of the new faith, largely based on Judaism itself, believed that Jews would join the new dispensation and were scandalized when they did not. Jews were held guilty of not recognizing -- worst still, of being complicit in the death of – the messiah. A strand of Judeophobia entered Christianity in some of its earliest texts, and became a fully-fledged genre, the 'Adversos Judaeos' literature, in the days of the Church Fathers. From here on, Jews – not non-Christians in general -- became the target of what Jules Isaac called the 'teaching of contempt'.

The second mutation began in 1096 when the Crusaders, on their way to conquer Jerusalem, stopped to massacre Jewish communities in Worms, Speyer and Mainz, the first major European pogrom. In 1144 in Norwich there was the first Blood Libel, a myth that still exists today in parts of the Middle East. Religious Judeophobia became demonic. Jews were no longer just the people who rejected Christianity. They began to be seen as a malevolent force, killing children, desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. There were forced conversions, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, staged public disputations, book burnings and expulsions. Europe had become a 'persecuting society'.

We can date the third mutation to 1879 when the German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined a new word: anti-Semitism. The fact that he needed to do so tells us that this was a new phenomenon. It emerged in an age of Enlightenment, the secular nation state, liberalism and emancipation. Religious prejudice was deemed to be a thing of the past. The new hatred had therefore to justify itself on quite different grounds, namely race. This was a fateful development, because you can change your religion. You cannot change your race. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews. Racists could only work for the extermination of the Jews. So the Holocaust was born. Sixty years after the word came the deed.

Unlike its predecessors, the new anti-Semitism focuses not on Judaism as a religion, nor on Jews as a race, but on Jews as a nation.

Today we are living through the fourth mutation. Unlike its predecessors, the new anti-Semitism focuses not on Judaism as a religion, nor on Jews as a race, but on Jews as a nation. It consists of three propositions. First, alone of the 192 nations making up the United Nations, Jews are not entitled to a state of their own. As Amos Oz noted: in the 1930s, anti-Semites declared, 'Jews to Palestine'. Today they shout, 'Jews out of Palestine'. He said: they don't want us to be there; they don't want us to be here; they don't want us to be.

The second is that Jews or the State of Israel (the terms are often used interchangeably) are responsible for the evils of the world, from AIDS to global warming. All the old anti-Semitic myths have been recycled, from the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still a best-seller in many parts of the world. The third is that all Jews are Zionists and therefore legitimate objects of attack. The bomb attacks on synagogues in Istanbul and Djerba, the arson attacks on Jewish schools in Europe, and the almost fatal stabbing of a young yeshiva student on a bus in North London in October 2000, were on Jewish targets, not Israeli ones. The new anti-Semitism is an attack on Jews as a nation seeking to exist as a nation like every other on the face of the earth, with rights of self-governance and self-defense.

How did it penetrate the most sophisticated immune system ever constructed -- the entire panoply of international measures designed to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust would ever happen again, from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to the Stockholm declaration of 2000? The answer lies in the mode of self-justification. Most people at most times feel a residual guilt at hating the innocent. Therefore anti-Semitism has always had to find legitimation in the most prestigious source of authority at any given time.

In the first centuries of the Common Era, and again in the Middle Ages, this was religion. That is why Judeophobia took the form of religious doctrine. In the nineteenth century, religion had lost prestige, and the supreme authority was now science. Racial anti-Semitism was duly based on two pseudo-sciences, social Darwinism (the idea that in society, as in nature, the strong survive by eliminating the weak) and the so-called scientific study of race. By the late twentieth century, science had lost its prestige, having given us the power to destroy life on earth. Today the supreme source of legitimacy is human rights. That is why Jews (or the Jewish state) are accused of the five primal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide and crimes against humanity.

That is where we are. How then shall we respond? There are three key messages, the first to Jews, the second to anti-Semites, and the third to our fellow human beings in this tense and troubled age. As Jews we must understand that we cannot fight anti-Semitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. Jews cannot defeat anti-Semitism. Only the cultures that give rise to it can do so.

European Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth century made one of the most tragic mistakes in history. They said: Jews cause anti-Semitism, therefore they can cure it. They did everything possible. They said, 'People hate us because we are different. So we will stop being different.' They gave up item after item of Judaism. They integrated, they assimilated, they married out, they hid their identity. This failed to diminish anti-Semitism by one iota. All it did was to debilitate and demoralize Jews.

We need allies. Jews have enemies but we also have friends and we must cultivate more. I have helped lead the fight against Islamophobia; I ask Muslims to fight Judeophobia. I will fight for the right of Christians throughout the world to live their faith without fear; but we need Christians to fight for the right of Jews to live their faith without fear.

The most important thing Jews can do to fight anti-Semitism is never, ever to internalize it.

The most important thing Jews can do to fight anti-Semitism is never, ever to internalize it. That is what is wrong in making the history of persecution the basis of Jewish identity. For three thousand years Jews defined themselves as a people loved by God. Only in the nineteenth century did they begin to define themselves as the people hated by gentiles. There is no sane future along that road. The best psychological defense against anti-Semitism is the saying of Rav Nachman of Bratslav: 'The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the main thing is never to be afraid.'

To anti-Semites and their fellow travelers we must be candid. Hate destroys the hated, but it also destroys the hater. It is no accident that anti-Semitism is the weapon of choice of tyrants and totalitarian regimes. It deflects internal criticism away by projecting it onto an external scapegoat. It is deployed in country after country to direct attention away from real internal problems of poverty, unemployment and underachievement. Anti-Semitism is used to sustain regimes without human rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press, liberty of association or accountable government. One truth resounds through the pages of history: To be free you have to let go of hate. Those driven by hate are enemies of freedom. There is no exception.

Finally to all of us together, we must say: Jews have been hated throughout history because they were different. To be sure, everyone is different; but Jews more than most fought for the right to be different. Under a succession of empires, and centuries of dispersion, Jews were the only people who for more than two thousand years refused to convert to the dominant religion or assimilate into the dominant culture. That is why anti-Semitism is a threat not just to Jews but to humanity.

God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity. That is why a resurgence of anti-Semitism has always been an early warning of an assault on freedom itself. It is so today.

We must find allies in the fight against hate. For though it begins with Jews, ultimately it threatens us all.

This article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. Visit the Chief Rabbi's website at www.chiefrabbi.com.
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What makes us visible / invisible or are we living just to enrich others? What is our soul, what is our life? Explore through imagination of beauty my friends! Do you see?

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The invisible workers




by Graham Bowley

Published 16 December 2002


People like Marianna, a doctor, clean our toilets, sweep our roads, care for our elderly. They shouldn't be here; perhaps that's why we don't see them. Graham Bowley reports

The frail 23-year-old woman with long brown hair took the stuffy overnight train to Kiev six times, sitting alone among the milling crowds in the stark waiting hall at the British embassy, before she grew frustrated and turned at last to the black market. She was desperate to leave Ukraine: she had recently finished her medical studies, but to secure an internship, she would have to pay a ,000 "gift" to the head doctor. This was a near-impossible sum when, as a family practitioner, she would make only a month. So Marianna had decided to travel to England to earn her fortune.

There she would join her husband. Eight months earlier, in October 2000, Oleh had closed his wine distribution business in Ivano-Frankivsk, a provincial town in western Ukraine: he couldn't afford the bribes sought by the tax police on top of the 95 per cent rates he already paid in official taxes. He had fled to London using illegal documents provided by "the firm", as Marianna called it. A few months later - and ,000 in debt to the firm - Marianna set off on a coach to England, feeling "calm but cold", clutching a student visa, and leaving Katrussia, her ten-month-old daughter, behind.

She is not alone. Of the 3,000 people in the village near Ivano-Frankivsk where Marianna grew up, half now labour abroad. The pattern is the same across the whole of eastern Europe - Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldovans, Lithuanians, all the nations that emerged 11 years ago from the remains of the Soviet Union, are now pouring into Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Britain.

As a result of this burgeoning economic migration, there are now hundreds of thousands of people like Oleh and Marianna living among us. They are a secret, undocumented, even invisible population. But they are there, all the same. They stare back at us over our coffee-shop counters, they clean our hotel rooms, they toil in the dust of our building sites. And their numbers will swell as the new Europe opens its borders farther to the east.

"The amount of people who are working outside normal labour conditions is huge," says Nicola Rogers of Advice on Individual Rights in Europe (Aire). She adds: "From what I can see, there is a severe underreporting of illegal immigrants in this country. There is an increasing use of trafficking and smuggling. That is not surprising because people can't come here by legal routes."

At the small, bare terraced house in north London, the Ukrainian woman who lives across the landing from Marianna and Oleh has been slitting her wrists. She has also been shoplifting and using forged Tube tickets. Everyone in the illicit migrant community possesses some forged papers - a Lithuanian gang, nicknamed "the Manipulators", provides Marianna, Oleh and their friends with any false document they need, from passports (cost: £1,500 in cash) to a bank account (£100) to false National Insurance cards (£40) - but most use them sparingly, and carefully. Marianna, who has been showing me her daughter's creased photograph pinned to a wall in the tiny bedroom, is crazy with fear that her unpredictable, suicidal neighbour will bring the police to their door. If that happens, she says, then she and Oleh "will have to leave the house and run away quickly" and never return. Over the past two years since they came to England, they have moved house five times, always to one of the cheaper neighbourhoods that form a ring around central London: areas such as Stratford, Seven Sisters, Clapton and Leytonstone that most of the new migrants call home. Sitting there now, it seems a far cry from the majestic, dilapidated avenues of western Ukraine.

"We are trying not to develop close friends here," says Marianna, leaning forward at the kitchen table. A thin woman with wide cheekbones, a mole on her cheek and small glass earrings, she is very pale and visibly shaking. The tips of her faintly dyed hair curl on her shoulders. "Though we do have acquaintances, perhaps a hundred people we know, all Ukrainians. We all keep in touch by mobile phone."

After I have managed to coax Marianna to talk for a few minutes, Oleh, a lean, fair-haired man in his early thirties, wearing a fake designer blue T-shirt, tracksuit trousers and running shoes, bounds in to show me a well-thumbed photograph album. In one of the photos, a two-year-old girl wearing a yellow dress and with a cheeky grin stands in a flower-filled garden. The fair-haired girl gazes out from the picture at her parents, who sit in the kitchen 1,000 miles away. Together, Oleh and Marianna stare longingly at the image. "She looks a lot like me," Oleh says. He left when his daughter was six weeks old and hasn't seen her since.

When, two years earlier, he arrived in London on a dark October evening - the bus from the east rolls in twice a week, packed with economic migrants on "student" and "tourist" visas - Oleh was met "by the boys", three friends who had already made the journey west.

His friends set him up with a building firm. To get the job, he only had to produce a bank account number and (false) ID, both purchased from the Manipulators. Since then, he has worked all over the city. On a bright morning earlier this month, Oleh leant against a metal railing in front of his latest construction site, a 200-metre-wide hole in the ground beside one of central London's busy roads. Arms of yellow diggers twisted above lorries. From the grey earth, glistening steel pipes stuck out like a cage. In his gang, Oleh said, there were "four Ukrainians, two Poles, one Mongolian, some English and many Irish"; all the foreigners were employed at cheap rates to lift and carry, to do the dirty groundwork that the British and Irish workers refused to do.

"I work hard - shovel, jackhammer, everything." For these labours, he gets paid £6 an hour, less than half the amount the British and Irish workers receive. "Six pounds is considered very, very good money," he said. He works ten hours every day, half-days on Saturday, gets Sunday free. "We have to work hard all the time," he said, nodding at the blue wooden cabin high up near street level. "Our boss watches us from his office, and if anyone stands around, the boss will come out and point and say: 'Take off your jacket. Go home. Don't come back.' And that's that." He shrugs. "So we keep working."

"These people are being pushed to the margins of the British workforce," says Tauhid Pasha of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. "They have no recourse to labour controls, which means they are open to exploitation."

When Marianna first arrived in England, she had no job for the first six months. "It was a catastrophe," she says. Then she found a job cleaning hotel rooms. She took home around £20 for an eight-hour day. For better money, she found work in south London, "washing shirts in a laundry with 200 other workers, and they were all illegal". She earned £130 for a five-day week, but because she was working unlawfully, she had no means of complaining when her boss cheated her out of £400 back pay, part of which he said was a "deposit".

She went back to cleaning hotel rooms, but it was hard. "There were never any white English people there, but there would be some black English people working with me," she says. "I was paid £4.20 an hour, the others got £6.20." With a monthly house rent of £400, she and Oleh manage to save around £1,000 each month, which they despatch to Ukraine in a minivan run by a private courier that ferries food, clothes and letters across Europe. They are saving to buy their own apartment back home, which will cost around £9,000.

But Marianna doesn't know how long they can continue: "I have finished medical school and here I am treated like lower-class help. When I come home, Oleh says I look like a grey old woman. I glance at my medical textbooks. I sleep. But when we go back, we must be able to provide a life for our daughter."

Despite the privations suffered at home and in work, migrants from eastern Europe like Oleh and Marianna continue to flock to Britain's shores. It is clear that these people are not asylum-seekers. They are not fleeing torture or death in their blasted homelands. But neither do they arrive in Britain intending to live easily on our state's handouts: they come genuinely seeking work. They are a people battered by cruel forces of history, by two world wars, by Stalin. Now, the collapse of communism and the efforts to build capitalism have left them free but impoverished.

They are here doing the work that Britons are not prepared to do: they are the ones cleaning our toilets, sweeping the roads, caring for our elderly.

"The fact that they then engage in work demonstrates that there is an economic need for them," says Nicola Rogers of Aire. "They are fulfilling a need in the labour market in the UK that people here are not willing to meet. So long as there is a market for them, then they will keep coming, either legally or illegally."

The exact size of this new workforce remains unclear. John Salt, director of the migration research unit at University College London, has estimated that there were roughly 1.1 million foreign nationals working legally in the UK in 2000. But "nobody has done the work yet that quantifies the illegal population", he says.

The government's policy response in the face of such numbers has so far been muted, to say the least. The Home Office has eased some rules to attract highly skilled professionals, as well as expanding schemes to draw lower-skilled farm labourers for seasonal work, though these schemes have been criticised for still leaving workers exposed to gangland exploitation. For countries about to join the EU, new pre-accession agreements exist to grant some entrepreneurial migrants official status. But the application has to be made from their home country, and the process is so lengthy that, according to Nick Rollason, a specialist immigration lawyer in London, "although there are lots and lots of people who are coming in under this route, some genuine, some arranged by gangmasters, there is still a lot of illegal immigration".

Meanwhile, UK officialdom ignores the rest of the great, desperate masses who continue to press through Britain's notionally locked gates. They are here, they pass us on the streets, they huddle in the shadows of subterranean bars singing songs of their Slavic homeland and in the small ornate churches dotted around London, taking the seats closest to the door for fear of police raids. Or they sit in shabby suburban flats, like Oleh and Marianna, studying photographs of a loved one left behind.
BY
www.newstatesman.com/200212160026


BE VISIBLE! IT SHALL NOT MATTER WHAT YOU DO, AS LONG, YOU HAVE THE SOUL OF SOMEONE WHO LOOKS TO UNDERSTAND PEOPLE, EDUCATES PEOPLE, APPRECIATES BELIEVE IN PEOPLE AND BELIEVES IN THE FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH THE POWER OF HELPING EACH OTHER OUT, IN TIMES OF CRISIS OR WHEN IT MATTERS MOST! THIS CONCEPT IS DIFFERENT FROM THE CONCEPT MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE IN AND GET EDUCATED IN OUR SCHOOLS! BELIEVE IS THE RECOGINTION OF EVERYONE! ISN'T IT TIME TO SIMPLY LET YOUR BARRIERS DOWN AND TRY A NEW WAY OF LIVING, AWAY FROM THE STANDARD BORING, MONOTONE WAY, OF NOT HEARING, SAYING, SEEING OR DOING? CELEBRATE DISHWASHER, LITTER / BIN / TRASH MEN, AND ALL OTHERS, WITHOUT THEM, WE COULD NOT LIVE OUR LIVES, AS WE DO NOW!

20070726 - staining - 1 - DONE! Celebratory shot! Look at my sock! - IMG_2835

Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL)
WE CAN'T BELIEVE WE'RE DONE!! This has been going on for MONTHS AND MONTHS. It's ABOUT TIME! YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!

SERIOUSLY -- This is the happiest we'd been in a LOOOONG time.

Notice how my sock has become a slipper -- close-up in a separate pic.

Actually, we still had some final touch-up sanding to do... But nothing that required wood stain, polyurethane, ventilation, masks, gloves, dropclothes, painter's tape, and all the hassle. Just some casual final touches with the least rough (400-grit) sandpaper to ensure that the finaly (usually 4th) polyurethane coat was smooth.



BACKSTORY: Anyone who reads our contract (link below) can see that it specified to move the closet and built-in shelves. But Virginia Design Builders's workers -- the workers hired by Daniel M. Lopez -- were unable to properly move the closet without destroying it. And they "accidentally" threw away our shelves. They also broke the trim at the edge of the closet.

And then guess what? The asshole refused to stain ANY of it, despite the fact that the only reason the color now didn't match was due to their inability to properly execute a contract. (It was a 3 month contract and was not finished for over 3 years.) This left us having to stain WAY more wood than we otherwise would have. It was quite literally a difference of several months' work, as we both had jobs (at the time), and spare time at home has been in deficit for awhile.



STAINING IS A PAIN: Just for reference, proper wood staining is a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR pain in the ass. The wood filling, the sanding, the pre-conditioning, staining, the wiping, the dropcloths, the multiple coats of everything, the (4) polyurethane coats [which often required holding a lamp in one hand, to reflect light on it to ensure evenness], and the final sanding. And don't get me started on the timing: Stain 20 minutes after pre-conditioning, but only for 2 hours; stain in 20 minute cycles consisting of 4 sub-cycles: stain area #1, stain area #2, wipe area #1, wipe area #2. Then break, get new gloves, and start over. A 20 minute cycle might equal 2 shelves, or 2 boards from ceiling to floor. Our spreadsheet had over 200 cells. At the end of the day, the only way to get stain off your skin was to apply paint thinner directly to your skin in violation of the instructions, common sense, and one's best interests...

celebrating, doing shots, standing, wood staining.
Cutty Sark, chair, newspaper, shelf, slipper, sock, stool.
dirty. happy.

upstairs, Clint and Carolyn's house, Alexandria, Virginia.

July 26, 2007.


... Read my blog at ClintJCL.wordpress.com
... Read Carolyn's blog at CarolynCASL.wordpress.com





LEGAL: To see an official VA DPOR sanction of 0 (+0) against Dan Lopez and Virginia Design Builders: www.acm.vt.edu/~clint/download/filedump/2008/daniel-m-lop... ... These people were suing him for 0K last time I checked.

To see OUR contract with Dan Lopez / Virginia Design Builders: www.acm.vt.edu/~clint/download/filedump/2008/daniel-m-lop... ... Just in case anybody doesn't believe me.

My Model LKD-SW5ES ! (31/3/2008)

Image by Leap Kye
My 1:50 study model for final sem project. Likeness: 90%. Due date (changed) 25th April (Yay). Leave a comment, good or bad, its never too late. I need some 'ideas/comments' before starting with my FINAL MODEL. Ignore the workmanship. Try adding notes or something above! : ) Thnk you! Yip!

Project Description: To design a retreat (tree house) for a selected character, at a selected site (Open space, Swamp, Water Edge, and Forest). The character must either be a writer, environmentalist, musician, chef... . I was assigned (randomly) to investigate the Swamp area, and build a retreat for Dr. Seuss. My deisgn concept was based on the formation of water and earth element, in characterization of swampy a Swamp. The structure of a Swamp is perceiveably 'incomplete', the process of both elements replacing and superseding each other is never ending, overlapping, hence the pieces you see there. The design is to basically look incomplete, and the adjacent pieces are never to touch each other. Was also wondering of how to access to the building, and subsequent floors.

Final model: here