In memoriam

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By Jeffrey from Christchurch, New Zealand
[See the full post at: In memoriam]

13 users thanked author for this post.

Lori, Spiral, PhotM, MikeFromMarkham, Great Lake Bunyip, SueW, OscarCP, Kirsty, Elly, Fred, Joulia.S, AJNorth, Myst

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Thank you, Boss.

I was able to speak with my friends who live on the outskirts of Christchurch at 0330 (US Pacific).  Their three children had been in the city participating in the environmental rally (> 2k young people attended), and had just returned home safely.

The mind boggles and the heart breaks.

 

In the words of the poet:

Loss, and Possession, Death and Life are one.

There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

— From Hilaire Belloc:  On a Sundial  (1938)

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PhotM, woody, Kirsty, Elly, Joulia.S, Myst

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? says:

(opinion)

violence never “solves,” anything. it just adds to the long, long list of human suffering inflicted on innocent people by people who refuse to put others before themselves.

my thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and families of this travesty.

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AJNorth, woody, Elly, Joulia.S, Myst

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New Zealand’s Prime Minister: “They are us”.

https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c966094wvmqt/christchurch-mosque-shootings

The world is getting darker, so we all must shine our lights.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Great Lake Bunyip, Myst, woody, Elly, AJNorth

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Stand strong, Christchurch – Kia Kaha

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OscarCP, Great Lake Bunyip, Myst, b, woody, Elly, AJNorth

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I love all my Muslim friends and co-workers. So many truly good people.  I’ll never understand how anyone could look at them and believe that they don’t belong in this world along with the rest of us.

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Great Lake Bunyip, Myst, woody, Elly, OscarCP, AJNorth

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Please do not suggest a group describes an individual; that every individual in a group is the same. Or that each individual properly represents an entire group. This is the same logical error suffered by the perpetrator of this horrible event.

You see a few good and think all must be good. Where the shooter sees a few bad and thinks all must be bad. If we present that only one of these two conditions is true, we will never heal. We must admit that individuals can do wrong things. And that the individual is responsible for their choice and their action; no matter what group they claim led them to their choice.

I hope this individual is prosecuted to the full extent of New Zealand law. Exactly that far, and no further.

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Lugh, Great Lake Bunyip, Myst, wdburt1, Elly, woody

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I was speaking solely and specifically about the 15 or so Muslims I know, not the 1.6 billion that I don’t.  I thought this was abundantly clear from the wording I chose, but apparently not….

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OscarCP, Myst, b

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Sincerest apologies. [edited re Lounge rules] Your comment appeared to mean you were extrapolating an evil man’s actions as a comment on your personal friends. Sorry for my mistake.

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Some useful media links:

 

Radio New Zealand:  https://www.radionz.co.nz/

New Zealand Herald:  https://www.nzherald.co.nz/

BBC:  https://www.bbc.com/

BBC World Service:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio

Australian Broadcasting Corporation:  https://www.abc.net.au/

ABC Radio National:  https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/

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Great Lake Bunyip, OscarCP, Myst, woody, Elly

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I asked my Kiwi friends for worthy charity recommendations:

Victim Support seems to be on top of everyone’s minds as a long-standing NZ charitable organization with a sterling record. They have a donation page at givealittle.co.nz, but it appears to be overwhelmed at the moment. As soon as I can get in, that’s where I’ll be donating.

The Salvation Army also comes highly recommended, in New Zealand, as well as elsewhere around the world.

As some of you know, I was President of the Rotary Club in Phuket after the tsunami, and saw first hand how donations to local Rotary Clubs go straight to the places that need help. All volunteer, no overhead. At this point, I don’t see a specific page for donations to the Rotary Club of Christchurch, but I assume it’ll appear shortly.

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AJNorth, OscarCP, Great Lake Bunyip, Myst, Kirsty, Elly

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St. John’s Ambulances provided the fleet of first responders I think we all saw in the news coverage. They are a registered charitable organisation, not fully government- or user-funded.

Their press release has Donate links on their page; although not a specific appeal for this event, there is a space for donors to add a message to indicate support is for the Christchurch event:
https://www.stjohn.org.nz/News–Info/News-Articles/update—firearms-incident-in-central-christchurch/

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AJNorth, Elly, Myst

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My son has just returned to the UK from an 8 week break staying with friends in New Zealand, and he had such a wonderful time there being especially admiring of the calm atmosphere and relaxed culture so evident in the people and their pace of life. That it should all be so violated by this despicable and evil act is sickening, and my heart goes out to all those affected by it.

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AJNorth, OscarCP, Myst, Elly, Kirsty

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It only takes a few cancer cells to affect the body, and sometimes to do it in. It doesn’t take a miracle to solve the illness that is manifested; but it would be nice to have one. Instead, it takes a clear recognition that the illness is ongoing; and a conscious and effortful dedication to ensuring that the infection/contamination and its effects are made clear and purposeful for the body politic. And therefore, the resolve to fight the infection, to conquer the aberration, and to return the body to health must be the single most important medicine that can be applied.

That metaphor may suck, but it’s the closest thing I can think of to a raison d’etre for these kinds of occurrences. And to what might be the solution.

Own up, speak up, and rise up when necessary.

jimzdoats

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Elly

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New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush has just concluded an update with the latest information on the Christchurch mosque shootings; the death toll is now fifty.

There are no words.

 

https://www.radionz.co.nz/

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Myst, Elly

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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: The Sunday Edition for March 17, 2019

What it’s like to be Muslim in a time of growing right-wing extremism

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-march-17-2019-1.5048483/what-it-s-like-to-be-muslim-in-a-time-of-growing-right-wing-extremism-1.5057892

 

New Zealand has been ‘naïve’ about right-wing extremism, says researcher

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-march-17-2019-1.5048483/new-zealand-has-been-na%C3%AFve-about-right-wing-extremism-says-researcher-1.5058345

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Thank you Woody for this post.

I live in Christchurch and I read AskWoody. It is a dark time for all of us in this city. We all feel a deep sense of grief. I live only minutes away from Al Noor mosque and have visited it. But in response to this terrible event, I would like to get to know my Muslim friends much better.

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Steve, AJNorth, Myst

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A slightly satirical take on the sad state of our divisive social attitudes.
https://outabouter.com/2019/03/16/anti-immigrant-politicians-cant-understand-where-anti-immigrant-violence-coming-from/

cheers, Paul

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NZ’s CERT is having to warn of fundraising scams following the Christchurch attack last week – it’s good that Woody ensured the links provided were genuine!

 

Christchurch tragedy-related scams and attacks
https://www.cert.govt.nz/businesses-and-individuals/recent-threats/christchurch-tragedy-related-scams-and-attacks/
2:15PM, 18 Mar 2019

CERT NZ has received reports of different opportunistic online scams and attacks in the wake of the tragic events in Christchurch last week.

These reports include:

online donation fraud
malware embedded in video files
defacement of NZ websites, and
denial-of-service.
…

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Elly, AJNorth

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The Ascent of Man is a landmark thirteen-part documentary series of fifty-minute episodes produced for television by the BBC and Time-Life Films.  It was written and presented by Dr. Jacob Bronowski, a polymath who, during World War II, contributed to the Manhattan Project, finally living his last years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.  The series was first broadcast in 1973 (the year before Bronowski’s death).

Conceived in form similar to Lord Kenneth Clark’s series Civilization (1969), Bronowski takes the viewer around the world to follow the development of human societies by way of their understanding of science, with great eloquence through his unscripted monologues and extensive location shoots.  (The title alludes to The Descent of Man, the second book on evolution by Charles Darwin.)

Episode 11, “Knowledge or Certainty,” artfully – and very powerfully – raises questions about the search for absolute knowledge.  From the episode:

“One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.  All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.  That’s the human condition, and that’s what quantum physics says; I mean that literally.”

After introducing the viewer to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Bronowski continues:

“Yet, the Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance.  First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world.

All knowledge, all information, between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that’s whether it’s is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It’s a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930’s, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it: the ascent of man against the throwback of despotic belief that they have absolute certainty.”

As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (“Reason in Common Sense,” p. 284, volume 1 of “The Life of Reason,” 1905.)

And so we are.  Again.

The full episode is well worth watching; it can be viewed at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20ohne .

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Steve

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https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-atta-elayyans-family

https://twitter.com/MVPAward/status/1107100476699492352

 

I just recently found out that a fellow geek, and someone who is a Microsoft MVP, and who would normally be up in Redmond this week for their annual geek fest/MVP summit was one of the victims of the tragedy.

There are no words to express how wrong the world is right now.  We need to do better.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Steve, Elly, AJNorth, OscarCP

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