Some days I don't feel like writing about anything intellectually taxing.
Today is one of those days.
Instead, I shall present a collection of cliched bunny pictures. As they say, words speak a thousand pictures. And I have nothing to communicate here today. Except maybe bunnies.
Someone the other day told me he overheard some redneckers openly talk about killing all the "Abos" to get rid of the "Abo problem" (meaning: Australian indigenous aboriginal peoples).
But I guess those redneckers were just articulating subtle racism disguised as Political Correctness, in discourse about Aboriginal "welfare" (excuse my Foucauldian-ness today, I am rather discours-ed out by all the study).
So it got me thinking about why the world over, indigenous people endure an almost daily struggle against the systematic silencing of their voices, destruction of their culture, re-writing of their histories, theft of their lands and children, right down to average garden variety racism.
It occurred to me that it sucks to be born indigenous.
Well, for one thing - you have rednecks making death threats at you.
And if that wasn't enough, you get blamed for pretty much everything from the economic recession (government frittering away too much money in reparations payments) to crime rates and violence. You're probably a lot less likely to be granted name suppression in a court if you're brown than if you're white, if you were a rapper for example.
But anyway. I came across a quotation which struck me as quite refreshingly poignant after reading countless mundane journal articles written in high-brow academic language.
The Aboriginal woman writes:
Give us Christ, not crucifixion. Though baptised and blessed and Bibled We are still tabooed and libelled. You devout Salvation-sellers, Make us neighbours, not fringe-dwellers; Make us mates, not poor relations, Citizens, not serfs on stations
(Oodgeroo, 2000, p. 1, cited in Mercer, 2003)
Hmmm. Seems to me Christianity's got a lot to answer for. Surprised, much?
Today's featured hero of the day is political theorist and radical academic, Dr. Norman Finkelstein.
This is a man did not let anything or anyone get in the way of his quest to expose the lies and fake discourses of the Zionist political agenda, concealed and cloaked behind the respectability of "academic" scholarship. Finkelstein was your run-of-the-mill superstar academic, having obtained his PhD from Princeton (an Ivy League university, to the uninitiated) and having served in various academic roles at institutions of similar prestige.
He is well known within radical activist circles as a trenchant, outspoken and passionate critic of Zionism, or an international political movement towards the formation of an Israeli-controlled State within the region of Palestine (an area continuously settled by Palestinian indigenous people for centuries).
He's a non-Zionist Jewish, whose parents were both sole survivors of concentration camps in Warsaw and Auschwitz (the rest of their family having perished in the camps), and most famously rebutted students at the University of Waterloo for throwing the "Auschwitz argument" used in defence of Israeli zionism, infamously berating a student for shedding "crocodile tears" when she protested that his position was offensive to Jews and others in the audience.
So some documentarians decided to make a movie about this amazingly brilliant and brave scholar - who put his ass on the line to expose other academics for deliberately fabricating hoaxes about the Holocaust (ostensibly because these academics were being funded by Zionist backers and hence had an interest in biasing the facts). For his valiant efforts (for whom Noam Chomsky tried to warn him against), he was pretty much destroyed by the wider academic community, who tried to discredit him and got him outed from his tenure and position as a university professor.
I think that Israel clearly has a lot to answer for in the way they have oppressed, exploited and killed Palestinian people on Palestinian land. The Israeli state consistently uses "national security" (never mind that the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory being dubious at best) and so-called "anti-semitism" as to silence criics of their pre-emptive, unmeditated attacks on Palestinians and their settlements, for the forced evictions and removal of Palestinians from their own homes.
I also cannot get past how the state has constructed the whole fake discourse of "security", in constructing a "us" (the civilised Israelis) against "them" (the savage, crazed Islamist terrorists) paradigm to continue blinding the masses to the real suffering of the Palestinians as a result of Israeli occupation policies.
I think the adage one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter holds true when speaking about Palestinians taking arms against Israelis. As Dr. Finkelstein said in his introduction to this speech:
"when you cage people into a ghetto, deprive them of food, of medicine, of water, when you deprive them of work, when you then bomb them, and then incinerate them and spray neighbourhoods with white phosphorus, you really don't need Mickey Mouse to teach them to hate Israel".
So Portland's bike community comes out in full force to help a fellow cyclist move house (everything including the kitchen sink and a boat!). The entire move executed perfectly in ONLY a single trip.
It isn't as gross as it seems, to be honest. Cat poo cofee, or kopi luwak in Indonesian, is pretty much just recycled coffee salvaged from the poo of the civet cat.
Its genesis began when Indonesian coffee farmers found the best berries of their coffee crop consistently stolen and eaten by civet cats residing in the vicinity of the coffee plantations. The civet cats would then poop the beans back out intact and undigested, extracting only the berrylicious outer. In efforts to salvage the beans stolen by the civet cats, farmers would collect the poop, wash them thoroughly, roast and grind the beans for coffee, now known as cat poo coffee (selling for high as $50.00 a cup - undoubtedly due to the low yield in this coffee production method).
Ingenious bit of farming, though I can't imagine that the increase in demand from the international coffee connoisseur market would drive industrial farming and intensify the heinous exploitation of civet cats, not to mention enslaving Indonesian coffee farmers through unfair trade practices.
