Wool and Cotton

in the U.S. it has become extremely hard to find merino wool sweater or even good lambswool sweaters and I often wonder why they have practically disappeared off the shelves here. In every shop i go into now i only find cashmere sweaters (of a very poor quality) made in China. For me there is nothing like a nice pair of merino socks or a merino sweater. And the benefits of wool bed covers are well known and are particularly beneficial for babies. Here is a link to a site in Wales for those who would like to know more www.kushtush.com
and another link to New Zealnd who along with Austrlia is the biggest producer of wool.
www.nznature.co.nz/mshop/spi/3_mer_3087

Natural cotton comes from the most pesticide-intense agricultural process in the world. One T-shirt (the one you are wearing) takes 1/3lb pesticides and fertilizers. Please look at alternatives such as organic cotton, bamboo fiber, merino wool, hemp, Model and Lyocell.
www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/green-basics-organic-cotton.php

The latter two items are made from beech wood pulp, are incredible soft, breathable, and pliant. They are a good replacement for the polyester and rayon (which we should not be buying) without taking the toll on environment which rayon and polyester does.

Same old or CHANGE! - Updated

The Speech.
Everytime Obama is attacked I am more and more impressed with him. I thought this speech was perhaps his crowning achievement for it was incredible, not to mention truthful and to the point. I do hope he becomes our President for we would at last have someone that we can be proud of. Here is the link to the speech. A speech that should be listened to by all not just now but many times over our lives.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23695322#23695322

This is a link to a funny video.
http://www.dipdive.com/dip-politics/ywc/


For anyone who has not taken the opportunity to go to a Barack Obama rally, visit his website and listen to what he has to say; feel inspired and move forward for the status quo is no longer acceptable.
www.barackobama.com

America can only be great and achieve great things when all its' citizens participate and everyone is doing well. For we cannot be well if our neighbor is not, Boston cannot be well if New Orleans is not, and America cannot be well if Mexico is not. We are all integrated in this new global economy and decisions that America makes affects people far and wide. There is no longer "us" and "them" but only humanity.

Now I know that many say Obama does not have the experience and I was in that camp for a while too but then I stopped to think "where has experience got us so far?" Because of fear we allowed the govenment to go into Iraq without anyone questioning the data. Because of fear we abandonded the citizens of New Orleans. I say "we" because we get the government we deserve, we elect our officials and we pay for them. If they do something that you don't like or agree with you should be banging on their door, or at the very least calling your senator every week to get your point across. Based on the passed six years I want my money back and I definately don't want to see any "insider" in power from any party and that includes Bill Clinton who I voted for twice.

In that vein please read this piece written sometime ago by the editor and founder of the Resurgence magazine, Satish Kumar, a sane voice in an otherwise insane world. It is worth keeping as unfortunately you will refer to it time and time again. And as you read it please think 'do you want the same old same old or will you have the courage to vote for change!!. Sign up for the Barack Obama Avalanche and do some phone calling for the campaign. I haven't yet but I made my first donaton ever to a political party today and I just signed up to make a difference in this race. I don't want to see the Clinton political machine steal the vote, what happened once has set a precedence and it is for us all to ensure it never happens again.

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Fear seems to rule our life. We are afraid of terrorism, afraid of death, afraid of old age, of loneliness, of illness, of being attacked. We build nuclear weapons and than bunkers. We are afraid that we will run out of “stuff” and so we insist that success measured by constant growth and yet growth creates global warming. To save ourselves from global warming we want to cover the earth with wind turbines, nuclear power stations, or corn fields for ethanol which takes land away from food growth and this in turns produces the actual scarcity that that started this revolving door in the first place.

Fear is the cause of our environmental problems which cannot be solved by fear of a global catastrophe. Telling our children to “be environmentally friendly or civilization will come to an end” is the wrong message. We should not be protecting the earth because we are afraid of its demise but because we love Mother Earth. We should promote living in harmony with the Earth, being sustainable, frugal, simple and compassionate to all beings – humans and otherwise. A culture of non violence, respect and reverence for life has to become part of our psychological make up. Even if there was no global warming or oil shortages we should not be destroying life, because life is sacred.
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Osman Hamdi Bey

In 1860, Osman Hamdi Bey went to Paris to study law but ended up studying art instead. In 1891 he became the director of the Imperial Museum of Antiquities. In 1910 he died. The painting to the left is a wonderful self portrait by thr master himself.

In Osman Hamdi Bey's short life time he redefined westerners’ notions of the east that had been formed from the Crusades to Islamic Spain. Hamdi Bey portrayed mainly intellectual activities and domestic visions of the orient and denounced the erotic version of the orient saying that nude images of concubines were a disgrace to women I thought however, that his images of women at home looked very European. They were not well received in Europe because they did not portray the “exciting and lustful” vision of women that westerners were use to seeing and thus expecting.



However, as I started looking at nineteenth century painters of the orient I realized that neither the French painters nor Hamdi Bey were reflecting reality. They were all living out their dreams and desires through their art. This was rather a shook, as I initially believed that Hamdi Bey's painting reflected the “real” Turkey because of how different his scenes were to his French counterparts. The fact is that Hamdi was living in a dream world too, that of Turkey’s glorious past – the Golden era of Turkey and so I had to ask what timeframe and which Golden era? His paintings express a deep sense of loss, while not calling for a return to the past. One gets the feeling that he realized that modernity comes with ambiguity.

I came to this conclusion because if you look at his paintings his figures are never dressed in modern oriental clothing but rather costumes and fabrics that depict medieval time which was the time of Islamic Spain and the Crusades. The settings of his paintings are also late medieval/early Ottoman times. His visual reconstruction of late Ottoman period also coincided with historical novels that had similar themes and were immensely popular with the general public. This was also a time of great upheaval in Turkey as they were going through huge changes and thus there was a sentiment of the loss of the glorious past.

Just like Gauguin, he had a huge collection of old photographs that he utilized in imagining the backgrounds in his paintings and many of them are just “make believe native” settings. The Janissaries (a Turkish infantryman in the Sultan’s guard) belonged to the medieval period and are incorporated in several of his paintings.

His painting of the 15th century green mosque in Bursa has different geographies put together: note the Syrian fabrics on the figures. This ties in with the growing interest in cross cultural studies in Europe where he trained as a painter. The Conversing Scholar picture which shows three scholars in traditional clothes, are in fact all pictures of him self.


In many of his pictures the onlookers are not asked to associate with the people in the pictures thus establishing a sense of detachment and distance.

Hamdi Bey's engagement with history and his position in Ottoman society was on a higher level and his main themes or points seemed to be inspired by literary works such as Byron and One Thousand and One Arabian Nights whose stories are partly traced back to medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Osman Hamid kept most of his paintings for himself, he didn’t sell them. When he died the state museum and private collectors along with the Ottoman Painters Society bought them.

What is important about his paintings are not how they were received at the time but how they relate to Turkey’s past.