First off, for information about the struggle of the Tibetan people and the worldwide effort against the Chinese occupation and of Tibet in exile, check out Students for a Free Tibet, an international, widespread organization started by students in 1994 and dedicated to the cause of the Tibetan people ever since.
This short clip from YouTube was put up by Aljazeera’s news network, based out of Qatar. It’s dated March 15th and shows a bit of the riots that have been going down in Tibet.
A group of “freedom-loving” Lakota activists announced a plan Wednesday for their people to withdraw from treaties their forefathers signed with the U.S. government.
Headed by leaders of the American Indian Movement, including activist, actor and Porcupine resident Russell Means, the group dropped in on the State Department and the embassies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and South Africa this week seeking recognition for their effort to form a free and independent Lakota nation. The group plans to visit more embassies in the coming months.
The new nation is needed because Indians have been “dismissed” by the United States and are tired of living under a colonial apartheid system, Means said during a news conference held at Plymouth Congregational Church in northeast Washington.
As a white American whose family are very recent arrivals to this continent (just one generation), I’m sort of withholding judgment on this one. It’s not my place to weigh the legitimacy of this effort, and I’ll admit I don’t understand the context of this — according to the article there is some significant dissent among the Lakota community. So I don’t know whether this is just a fringe group or the real deal or both or what.
But, in light of the innumerable contract the US government has broken with Native Americans, and in light of the still-unacknowledged genocides committed by the United States, my first response is: fuck yeah.
My final paper for Encounter with the Divine Feminine is on a topic near and dear to my heart and, I imagine, to the hearts of anyone who would care to read this blog. It is a discussion of how capitalism and colonialism created climate change, and what we must do if we are to survive it.
The prompt was “Is the divine feminine relevant today? How?” My thesis is that the divine feminine is not just relevant but critically necessary to the survival of our species. I defined divine feminine as “the body of qualities the current system subjugates” — the feminine, the natural, the indigenous; everything that gets othered — and reasoned that the current system made climate change, which nowthreatens our survival. Only by embracing the antithesis of the establishment can we escape and undo it; the “divine feminine” is necessary to overcoming global warming. In many ways it is the continuation of the ideas I started exploring here. I stuck to capitalism and colonialist white supremacy, but I think it could easily be extended to racism more generally, the patriarchy, and other systems.
Here it is:
In our increasingly integrated world, there exists a global system of power. The system is actually systems: multiple ideologies interacting and collaborating to create a pervasive dominant paradigm. Despite great cultural variations and significant dissenting factions, the system remains largely intact and functional.
All the subsystems of the establishment have something critical in common. Each is built upon a series of fundamental dichotomies, in which one quality is considered good, right, and desirable, and the other bad, wrong, and despicable. This has created a collection of almost universally denigrated qualities. The sum of these qualities forms my vision of the divine feminine.
Recently, an important new development has come to light — the very consequences of this dominant system may now be its undoing. Global climate change poses an enormous threat to the continued survival of our species, and is the product of the status quo. I will explore how two subsystems of the dominant paradigm — imperialist white supremacy and capitalism — lead directly to the climate crisis.
The divine feminine is the opposite of the current world order and the cure to the crisis at hand. The contemporary role of the divine feminine, should we choose to embrace it, is to enable a radical shift to sustainability, equality, and survival. Read the rest of this entry »
I wanted to fast today, but I agreed not to because my mother is getting our entire holiday meal locally, turkey included. So. Score points in the sustainable column, lose points in the anti-colonialism column.
Now, on to the more interesting holiday.
I’m going to participate in Buy Nothing Day tomorrow. I hope you will too. Take a hint from Reverend Billy: protest consumerism by refusing to participate in the unsustainable over-consumption known as the holiday season.
If you do want to give presents for Christmas or Festivas or Hanukkah, make something interesting for each of your favorite people using materials you already have. If you prefer to buy, buy ethically — Treehugger’s enormous 2007 gift guide is an excellent place to start.
So I’m only fifty pages in to Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, but I’ve already put it on our reading list. I’m sure that’s the fastest any book has ever made it on there.
Especially if you are living in the US, but also if you are a human at all, you should read it. And you should tell your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances to read it. As soon as possible.
What conclusions can we draw about the correlation between the political culture of torture currently employed by the United States government (targeting “enemies” both abroad and at home) and the glamorization and sexing-up of torture used to advertise and sell women’s hair products?
The Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) is proposing we build a lunar “ark,” filled with all of Earthlings’ favorite things, to keep on the moon for preservation in case of disasters on Earth like nuclear war or asteroid hits.
Burke, once a project manager on some of the earliest American lunar landings, now heads an ISU study on surviving a collision with a near-Earth object.
An impact of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs hasn’t happened since long before the rise of humans, he pointed out.
Yet scientists’ expanding knowledge of asteroids and craters left throughout the solar system has created a consensus that Earth remains vulnerable to a civilization-crushing collision.
This calls for the creation of a space age Noah’s ark, Burke said.
Of course, this is my favorite part:
Laying the foundation for “rebuilding the terrestrial Internet, plus an Earth-moon extension of it, should be a priority,” Burke said.
The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agreed that extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following “nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions.”
The ark would also hold information about various Earth cultures, art, history, seeds, etc. But then Burke gets a little carried away.
If the international lunar outpost of the 2020s expands into a colony and then a city, “it is possible that a whole new phase in civilization may develop—the branching of history into one stream on Earth and another on the moon,” ISU’s Burke added. (Read: “NASA Aims to Open Moon for Business” [July 25, 2006].)
This “dual-world expansion” could be within reach by the end of this century, he said.
Anne Becker, anthropologist, claims that there wasn’t disordered eating on the island of Sigatoka, in Fiji, before 1995 (save for the very, very rare case). That, and their culture appreciated large-bodied people.
But then they acquired access to television. It was only three years before 11% of the girls on the island developed eating disorders and new insecurities about their bodies.
The majority, 83 percent of the girls, blamed their change in attitude on the media.
“Now we are feeling, we feel that it is bad to have this huge body,” one 16-year-old Fijian told Becker.
Why?
Assimilation. As the U.S. continues to assert its superpower status, developing countries get our exports — including eating disorders.
This is not an isolated incidence. Read more about it here.
