Excellence is in the Asterisk

Have a look at the Art Gallery of Mississauga's main events page outlining their current programs:

Contemplative Design: Speaking to Ancestors through Sacred Object Creation | Thursday, May 10, 5:30 - 8:30 PM | Glass Pavilion | REGISTRATION

Using a process that we call Contemplative Design*, together we connect through ceremony. Facilitated by MeLisa (Jet Feather) Moore and nisha of SOMA Ayurveda + Integrative Wellness, participants will be guided on an energetic journey of time travel, meditative creation process, and opportunities for intentional connection to ancestors and ancestral lands through the process of designing a sacred healing object.

The asterisk (which I have magnified) is an important indication that a more expanded piece of information or an explanation of some kind is available where the reference to the asterix is located. I.e.: What is Contemplative Design?

This paragraph is actually a truncated version of a much fuller piece on the Eventbrite: "One platform to help you build, manage, and grow your events," which identifies the added information indicated by the asterisk. (Read the full message here or below.)

How can such a crucial piece of information go unnoticed and uncorrected on a city's main art gallery's website? The AGM has posted a collection of staff on its "about us" page. How could no-one pick up on the error?

Actually there is a better question: How can whoever was writing and editing this page make such a "small" but important informational mistake?

It makes me wonder about the other errors that abound in the AGM's full and large, Canadian government funded repertoire.

---

Here is the full message on Eventbrite:

Holistic Design Village presents:

Contemplative Design: Speaking to Ancestors through Sacred Object Creation
Using a process that we call Contemplative Design*, together we connect through ceremony. Participants will be guided on an energetic journey of time travel, meditative creation process, and opportunities for intentional connection to ancestors and ancestral lands through the process of designing a sacred healing object.

Together we will cultivate sacred space, share ancestral wisdom through the power of object, and use our sacred healing objects as a tool to lovingly communicate with the ancestors of our past, in order to support our experiences in the present. We will also collectively create a time capsule filled with sacred healing objects that participants create along with messages to communicate with our future selves and future generations. We close the ceremony with planting the time capsule and a short sacred sound session. Collectively dreaming through heart + spirit.

*Contemplative Design process and term created by MeLisa Moore of HDV/SOMA. Holistic Design Village is a segment of SOMA Ayurveda + Integrative Wellness

5:30 PM registration and refreshments
6:00 PM to 8:30 PM workshop
Please note event location: Glass Pavilion, Mississauga Celebration Square
Facilitator Bios
MeLisa (Jet Feather) Moore is the co-founder and co-director of Soma Ayurveda and Integrative Wellness. She is an integrative health and wellness practitioner, Earth-based medicine woman, facilitator, writer, multi-disciplinary designer/inventor and sacred sound musician. Her work is rooted in the intersectionality of spirituality, futurism, synergetics, traditional healing practices, racial-economic equity and unity, and Transpersonal + Buddhist Psychology. She is also a researcher/designer of alternative education and economic models and loves using design and STEM for social entrepreneurship development. Her life, root Tibetan master guides, Peruvian Elders, her West African + Cherokee ancestors, Mother Earth, animal allies, main collaborator nisha ahuja, and former classroom students, along with many others, have been invaluable supports in her journey and development. She loves to support people in going deep in their healing and spiritual journeys along with re-uniting people with their gifts and personal power. She does this through Deep Racial Healing Coaching, Spiritual Healing Guidance, Earth-based Energy Work, Therapeutic Sound, Creative Coaching, and Shamanic Healing. MeLisa (Jet) is author of Love Notes to Everyone: Healing Contemplations for Deeper Living, Loving, and Liberation and children’s book Adventures of Bun Bun: Design, Play, Meditate.

nisha has supported hundreds with Ayurvedic Medicine + Bodywork, Therapuetic Yoga, Attmic Energy Healing + Reiki, Sound Healing, ancestral healing, creative movement + theatre creation, and a range of wellness and equity-centered workshops. nisha is co-director of Soma Ayurveda + Integrative Wellness, a social enterprise for wellness, education + equity, co-founded alongside MeLisa (Jet) Moore who has contributed to nisha’s spiritual journey and understandings of social equity immensely. nisha is graduate of the Centre for Ayurveda and Indian Systems of Healing (Toronto) and York University Theatre and International Development (Toronto), and has trained in a Reiki (Master Level) with Varsha & Ravi Hooja (Bombay), Attmic Healing with Manav Ji Sahaj (India), and Yogic Medicine at Swami Vivekanada Ashram (Bangalore India). As a theatre artist nisha has worked internationally and her plays include Yoga Cannibal, Un-Settling (Canadian Theatre Review, January 2016), Cycle of a Sari (excerpt in Refractions: Solo, Playwright Canada Press, 2014), and 30 People Watching co-written with Amelia Sargisson (ReView: an anthology of plays committed to social justice, 2016). nisha’s practice is dedicated to dissolving the boundaries between art, traditional medicines, ceremony and spirituality, and social equity and believes healing practices are revolutionary and fundamental to our collective liberation.

Have questions about Contemplative Design: Speaking to Ancestors through Sacred Object Creation ? Contact Art Gallery of Mississauga

The Deterioration of the Anti-Semitic Website Alternative Right

The new logo for the Alternative Right website is a simplified black and white text. The original imagery was much better: gold and black text with a forest as the background suggesting the writers' attempts to guide us, its readers, out of the maze of trees and branches.

The founder of the original site, Richard Spencer, wrote that he wanted an aesthetically superior quality to his website. For a while, he delivered this aesthetic and intellectual vision. Then, it deteriorated (see article below).



This new stark black and white logo emphasizes the dripping blood that had always been part of the logo. Is this racial blood? Blood of the ancestors? Blood that will get spilt?



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I continue to research group blogs and websites. A while ago, I used to read a blog that rose quickly and gained prominence called Alternative Right. I then got disillusioned by its far-right homosexual contributor Jack Donovan (I wrote about him here and here), and a Canadian woman who stresses her Russian background although she had left Russia as a young teen-ager. A writer who was clearly a white supremacy supporter, Alex Kurtagic (he has his own website here, and his book is advertised at a Nazi site, I**r**o**n**s**k**y**p**u**b**l**i**s**h**i**n**g - I'm writing it this way so that I don't get unwanted emails from that group to my site. Remove the asterixes, and search for the three-word title in google to find the site), was also one of the authors. At some point, Richard Spencer, the site's founder, began to make it clear that he doesn't like Jews. In fact, here is commentary on him at Larry Auster's site, where I sent in my skepticism about the site, and specifically about the "Russian-Canadian" contributor Nina Kouprianova, who also happens to be Spencer's wife (these are no real conservatives, or right-wingers. They populate the usual liberal world of wives keeping their own names, and husbands insipidly standing by).
The discussion at the View From the Right under "Richard Spencer and the Eternal Jenin" revealed the anti-semitism of the site:

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

I may be reading this wrong, but here is a writer at Alt-Right, who presents herself as “a proud Muscovite” via Canada, who is promoting a fellow-Russian’s Armageddon view of the imminent collapse of America. Every time I read Alternative Right (hardly at all these days), there is nothing traditional (radical or not) or Western about their thoughts. What an odd site.
To link this with this entry, I think anti-Israelism is anti-Americanism at its core.

LA replies:

I think you’re onto something. Let’s look at this way. What are the two main targets of the Muslims? Israel (the Little Satan) and America (the Great Satan). And what are the two main targets of the international left? Israel and America. And what are the two main targets of the paleocons/Alt-Rightists? Israel and America. At this moment The American Conservative and Alternative Right are effectively supporting Hamas against Israel. As I said in another current entry, at a certain point many of the anti-Israel paleocons are going to realize their identity with Hamas and the international left, and consciously embrace it.

Richard Spencer has disappeared from the face of the internet world. The hundreds of articles and posts published at the original site have also disappeared. Some form of an Alternative Right site still continues, but is being run by other members, and has had a considerable make-over. It has been chiseled down to a bare minimum, and few of the original writers remain. A dubious, far-right sympathizer Alex Kurtagic is still there. And there's a recent article up titled "A Tale of Two Bitches" by Andy Nowicki, which leaves me wondering who would read such an article (I read the first lines, and it appears to be about feminists), and who would continue to read a website after such an article appears in its pages. Not me.

Richard Spencer and his Canadian-Russian wife have disappeared from the social commentary scene. But I suspect the ever-renewing Spencer will reappear in some other guise (an author?). His wife continues with her original field of expertise, graphic design. She has put up a site, with her full (Russian name) on display.

I think that "hate" sites exhaust their readers and their writers. The many (too many) fund raising drives that Spencer undertook at the original Alternative Right never helped to materialize it into a long-term project.

But, I don't think it is simple financial losses that caused this abandonment. Spencer gambled with his ugly beliefs, and as they started to come to the surface, his readers, and writers, eventually left. I wrote in 2010:

If [the Alternative Right] keeps this up, the magazine will be confined to a narrow (and ugly) niche - like Stormfront.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat