Down the rabbit-hole

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.

Now go away. Shoo!

Being born indigenous is actually bad for you

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?

Hero of the Day: Dr. Norman Finkelstein

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".

Good man. My hero of the day.


OK, rant over - better get back to study!

Have bike, will move house!

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.

Can it get any better than this?

Cat Poo Coffee for the Snob Coffee Connoisseur

Cat Poo Coffee
Uploaded by DiagonalView. - Explore other animal videos.

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.

Food for thought. The evolution of from our violent history to non-violent times.

According to this academic/writer/linguist, we are actually living in more peaceful times. He shatters the "myth" where early primitive cultures were thought to be more peaceful when in actual fact, early tribal cultures were a lot more violent and lifespans were a lot shorter.

More shit slinging fun courtesy of your Malaysian Parliament and elected representatives! LOL

ROTFL.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the sordid state that the parliamentary debates have become. It would be terribly comical and funny, if it had not been so tragic!


This is how real parliamentary debates ought to look like:

**More women in parliament, please! Good ol' Mags, wotta trooper**


Politicians have a DUTY to their constituents to know exactly the issues which concern their constituents and be well-prepared to debate issues in a constructive manner. The Malaysian Parliament's shit slinging and name calling is childish and alarming -- it highlights the gross incompetency of Malaysian MPs.

Malaysia is a country led by a parliament largely composed of incompetent individuals posessing of no standards whatsoever. Uncivilised, uneducated and uncouth.

The ability to respond to insults and deflect negative attention in a graceful way is the hallmark of a great statesman, the existence of which happens to be a factual impossibility in the Malaysian Parliament. Search at the end of a rainbow you just might find him/her behind a pot of gold.

What has become of the democratic processes so fundamental to a sovereign, self-governing nation that exists by the mandate of the people? The answer is undoubtedly dismal. We shall all languish in the abysmal pit of institutional inertia, unable to move backward, paralysed from moving forward -- a country whose elected representatives repeatedly disappoint, and let down their constituents.

Politicians forget that they only exist for the benefit of their electorate. Tragically, most often end up pursuing their own interests or the perceived interests of their electorate, which are often horribly maligned and skewed from reality.

A healthy democratic parliament ought to be in agreement on at least the most basic and fundamental constitutional principles that underpin the very nation itself.

This means that fundamental constitutional issues such as human rights, judicial independence and government accountability -- which are absolute and cannot be compromised -- are not to be sidelined in the interests of debating and ocassionally cat-fighting over the divisive "race" issue.

The divisive "race issue" is a problem that parliament has created for itself. The Reid Commission only recommended a social contract with a recommendation for a limitation period of 15 years whereupon such a contract will be up for review. (NB: I've used parliament here -- but more appropriately this is because of the parliamentary majority -- the government/ruling party effectively exercises the legislative functions anyway).

Having allowed the problem to fester for more than 3 generations, parliament has created a mess that if left unchecked, will surely cripple the nation in the next decade or so. The lacklustre economy, and the increasing inability of the country to catch up with industrialised peers like South Korea, and the rapidly developing Taiwan, Thailand and the Phillippines are all proof of the inability of the country to attract and retain talent for the development of the knowledge industries required to elevate Malaysia from a third-world developing nation to that of an industrialised nation.

Clearly we are far from achieving that goal.

We should all drink deeply from the cup of nihilism and surrender to the inevitable.