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Peacehost.net will not be cowed by the usurpation of our nation’s highest office by a bully and a cretin. We will not dignify him by naming him and certainly not by naming him in connection to that office. We stand on the side of love.
— Shakurallah Daniel Zwickel ben Avrám MacJean.
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We are a signatory to the statement by Chuzu Hamada of No Nukes Action Committee on the 70th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
PeaceHost.net is an award-winning website!
Daniel ben Avrám and PeaceHost.net are proud signatories to the Charter for Compassion, The Bay Area city Fremont is on board. Who’s next? How about a Compassionate Bay Area? |
My Family 
My immediate Webfamily The PeaceHost Family benAvrám WebDesign Clients Memorial Websites
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PeaceHost.net was established in 1999 to host websites for organizations working towards peace and social, environmental and economic justice. The PeaceHost family consists of websites I have designed &/or hosted &/or maintained. Not all are still active, such as Gaiæcology.net, which is a domain I never developed, then lost when I failed to renew it. I love the use of the Greek letter, ‘æ’ linking the two words. Most I designed from scratch; some I re-designed from the original when I was engaged to take them over. Some, in turn, were re-designed when others took over the maintenance, such as Mulukuku.org, for which I renew the domain on my own nickel, the least I can do for an organization that does so much for others. Most I did voluntarily; only a very few are commercial websites, but more and more are paying gigs. Great fun, too! Here, for your convenience, is a list, as full as I can recollect, of the PeaceHost family. All will come up in new browsers, as many are with frames, and are a tad to busy for a small window such as screens like mine afford. Enjoy!
My family: Abuela Jean, a memorial website for my mother. Prophet Abraham, for my father. David Reuben was my brother, my sole sibling. He passed two days after 9-11. A beautiful soul who contended with inner daemons, the cataclysmic tragedy may have just broken his heart. Karen Elizabeth is my niece, and does medical transcribing. This is probably the simplest website I’ve done. Megan Ashley Brown is my niece’s firstborn. I had composed three short piano pieces, inspired by our cat, Cat’s walking on the keys of the family piano. Megan’s birth was imminent, so I dedicated it to her. Mathew Brown is my niece, Karen Elizabeth’s third born, her first son. Uncle Frank is actually my biological gandfather. His sermon, “Good Men in Hell” has become known worldwide, inspiring a religion bolgger in Melbourne, Australia as recently as 2003. You may read this still relevant sermon by clicking on the title in this paragraph. My immediate Webfamily: PeaceHost.net started it all! PacifistNation is no place for wimps! Hexadec is the Playing Card for the New Millennium! Truebadour.net is the cobbler’s who gets ignored. I’m nowhere near as active a professional musician as I was for more than thirty-five years, beginning the very night I turned 21 in San Diego, but I still keep my hand in. The unorthodox spelling was the result of being told by Earthlink.net that I was the 132,438th person to request the Troubadour domain (the original was registered sometime in the 12th or 13th century.) Undaunted, I remain not a false badour, but a .... “Metanoia – a Universalist Mass” now resides at JazzSacra.com, where you may download not only mp3s, but PDFs of charts and scores and even the Finale files themselves. Experience the healing power of sacred jazz. ben Avrám WebDesign (an example, by the way, of a ‘CamelCase’ word (a customer of Abdul’s Used Camelot, offered a promotional T-shirt, was asked, “How do you like your T – one hump or two?”)) is my first commercial domain to actually pay for itself! And as I find myself doing more and more sound gigs, I have created a new site, benAvramSoundDesign, featuring JBL, Mackie and Shure industry-standard equipment. And the Bay Area peace and justice community is welcome to use the Hal Carlstad Memorial PA System, a high fidelity battery-powered self-contained system featuring a music-quality speaker system, built-in handheld wireless mic and CD player. “Legacy – I am my parents’ son” is an electronic homage to my parents. [Sorry, but this website is under reconstruction. Stories about my parents, however, may be found on www.DanielbenAvram.com.
White Star Press is really family. It is my mother’s book on Puerto Rican independence. As you will read in “Legacy”, my mother, Jean, a case could be made for her being, perhaps the most prominent Anglo in the movement’s history. (Her son would, of course, say that. But I would submit, as evidence, her very strong hand in the nonviolent liberation of the island of Vieques from US Navy occupation. So there! BenefitHaiti.com is a domain I’m just waiting to find a good use for. Meanwhile, it is a good tutorial on Haiti. Gaiæcology.net was a brilliant idea of a domain, but like an idiot I let the registration lapse. It is probably the cleverest domain name I’ve though of. Undeveloped, it’s remains, alas, are but a dream. It’s the Water, Stupid is a website I set up to let people know about water. Check it out. Issues abound, many of them absolutely critical, others, plainly criminal. The PeaceHost Family: Ecumenical Peace Institute / Clergy & Laity Concerned is my favorite child, I suppose. It is one of the first websites I designed, maintain and host, and a great organization. ¡Abrazos! is, too, really. I set it up when Dorothy Granada, a nurse from Santa Cruz was being persecuted by the Nicaraguan government for helping the women of Nicaragua with a clinic she started, Mulukukú’s Maria Luisa Ortiz Cooperative and Women’s Clinic. While in hiding, my website was very effective in letting people know the news as it was happening. Ultimately, her persecutor, former president Arnoldo Alemàn was found guilty of violating her civil rights in a dramatic case that went all the way to the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. I had the good fortune of being in the hall where she was to speak (the EPI’s annual Fall Dinner) when she came in, excitedly announcing her victory, that very day! I no longer maintain the website, which another person designed (more business-like, I must admit), but I continue to host it. The link at the beginning of this paragraph is to the site as I last worked it, the design I created. It automatically forwards to their current website. The Crosses of Lafayette, a hillside memorial to our solders killed in Iraq, updated weekly, opens with on of the most moving videos you will ever encounter, featuring the stunning song, Memorial Day, by Lafayette songwriter Laura Zucker. This is a must-see website. |
Guatemala News & Information Bureau, (GNIB) in one for whom I designed and briefly maintained a website, although they hosted it on a different server. But, darn, I’ve searched and searched, and I cannot find my original website design. The link above is current, though. Two great websites I am proud to host are PeaceChurch, which challenges Christians who view Christ as a warrior who will smite the infidels (unbelievers) to examine their beliefs, and Christian CO, an invaluable resource which has he procedures for a soldier to leave the military as a conscientious objector. Daniel Shubin is a formidable writer and scholar, much worth checking out. SoldierSayNo! is a great site for solders considering conscientious objection which became a sort of stepping stone for the excellent blog Gerry Condon now runs, one of the very best in the field. War and Law League (WALL) is a San Francisco-based organization focusing on peace and international law. I did not design this website, but I do maintain it. United for Healthcare Justice is a local (Concord, California) organization. Check out the tunes: the theme to ER and a great tune by a Northwest family band, Wickline. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is alive and well in Northern California, at local (Pleasant Hill, California) Community College Diablo Valley College (DVC). Hail Bob Dylan! benAvrám WebDesign Clients: National Network to End the War Against Iraq (NNEWAI) was my very first client, though I ended up as a volunteer as I refused the second half of my contract check (ouch!) because that spawn-of-the-devil software FrontPage was wasting so much of my time I had little for content. Their website is no longer operable, but here is a home page I have on my PeaceHost server: NNEWAI Diablo Dance Theater is my friend, Lois Flood, a leading authority on Isadora Duncan and a marvelous dancer. FinnLabor.net is my friend, Harry Siitonen. Dig the great Finnish fiddle group, Frigg! Central Core Restoration Corporation (CCRCorp) is headed by a friend of mine, Todd Williams. Unfortunately, after extensive and dramatic (and paid for, thankfully) revision of their original website, the Board has not gotten back to me for over a year. I dunno, I like the site. Initiatives for Democratic Change keeps me busier than any other client. We are now, after a year-and-a-half of development, open for business! David and John are brilliant thinkers, researchers and writers with a unique and practical plan for restoring democracy. Visit us! The New Mecca Café is not a client, really, but I have been its owner, Guillermo Muñiz’s guitarist and music director since 1979. It was a joyous labor of love for a Pittsburg institution. Bay Point Chamber of Commerce is one of my most ardent and enthusiastic clients (only Lois gives them competition in that department.) They liked the demo website I showed them that they asked me to be on their Board of Directors. At the first meeting (truth, I swear) I said something like, “In the interest of full disclosure I must state that I am, and have always been, a registered member of the Democratic Party.” Only those who lived through McCarthyism will fully appreciate that bon mot. The Bay Point Garden Club is a lovely place to visit. The challenge was to create a virtually maintenance-free webpage. All the active pages are Yahoo group pages administered by the indefatigable Mike Kerr, one of the finest community activists I have had the pleasure of knowing. K&S Towing and Transport is a member of the Bay Point Chamber, my first spin-off from them. Right now you see the old website, before I worked it over. Check it out after the middle of September, and as soon as Ramadan is over (in a few days, as of this writing) we’ll get down to business. JCamille.net is not really a client, either. I just set up a résumé webpage for my friend, and I like the look of it. Cherubini Coffee House is a modest one-pager for a wonderful coffee shop in Alamo, California. It features a slideshow using a shareware program I found online. Center for Global Peace and Democracy and the Alameda Public Affairs Forum are two brainchildren of one of the great old-school minds of the Left, journalist and writer and you’ll have to read his bio to get all the rest. Janet Gibson for School Board fared about as well as her candidacy. Too bad. She’s a great, civic minded educator and former Alameda School Board member. Ah, politics .... Bill Balderston was the Green Party candidate for California State Insurance Commissioner in 2010. Well fought, guy! Cynthia Johnson won one of the nine hotly contested seats on the KPFA (Berkeley, California) Pacifica Board, a devoted peace worker whose focus is on cooperation in a oft times brutal organizational environment. Here are a few ‘spec’ websites for prospective clients: Bay Point Historical Society – I used the Bay Point Chamber website as a template, even using their GoDaddy domain to host it, and giving it ‘Under Construction’, temporary webpages, and a secondary menu linking to three client websites. Not much, and will certainly be drastically re-designed if I ever get hired. But it shows how things get started. Barry M. Schutz, Visiting Scholar in African Studies, Stanford University. I just love this one. I believe it is one of my favorites, whether or not I get the gig. It is really more about the school and the department than about Professor Schutz, and that will certainly be remedied. But, first off, there’s the wonderful slide show which I re-created which, in turn, suggested the Paul Simon tune, performed by some great South African musicians! Yo, Paul, World Music incarnate! Hal Carlstadt (& the Hal Carlstadt Memorial Sound System and yes, I have him twice, but it’s a great PA!) |
When Daniel and the World were young ....
[Photo by David Lawrence, ca. 1977]