Listen/download: Cali Fresh by Lady Remedy ft DJ BATTLECAT prod by GEOH
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Arabic proverb (via arabswagger)
“Free things can be very expensive.”
— Zuky proverb
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Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, p. 5 (via so-treu)
(via educationforliberation)
Plants can communicate the onset of an attack from aphids by making use of an underground network of fungi, researchers have found. Instances of plant communication through the air have been documented, in which chemicals emitted by a damaged plant can be picked up by a neighbour. But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.
(Source: , via cleanerlight)
i feel my american-bred sense of entitlement the most when i get annoyed that the ‘united states’ is sorted in alphabetical order on a drop down menu and not just listed at the top
(via loveyourchaos)
Beth Richie is professor of African American Studies, criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of the university’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.
One of the most cited scholars on the intersection of race, gender and prisons, Richie also has a long and illustrious history as a feminist activist and was a co-founder of INCITE!, a national organization of activist women of color working on violence.
Her new book, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York University Press, 2012), is a critical examination and re-examination of several of the issues Richie has been writing about and working on for many years: prisons, the criminal legal/justice system, and the particular vulnerabilities of women and African-American women in particular as they operate at the intersection of what Richie and many other scholars point to as a profoundly racist and misogynistic system.
Richie cut her activist teeth within the anti-violence movement, where LGBTQ and feminist activists (often the same people) have found a place to both articulate and resist the violence done to them. So, it might surprise many that her latest work is critical of the anti-violence movement for two main reasons: the fact that it contributes to what Richie calls “the prison nation” by uncritically invoking and strengthening a law-and-order system that expands incarceration, and its inability to consider both gender and race inequality. At the same time, Richie contends, Black mainstream political figures and organizations ignore those whose bodies and lives fall outside the neat categories of race and gender.
As an example, Richie considers, among others, the case of the New Jersey 4 (also known as the NJ4). Seven Black lesbian young women were walking in Greenwich Village one evening in 2006 when they were attacked by a man who began abusing them verbally and threatening them physically,while hurling anti-gay epithets. In the confrontation that followed, one of the women used a knife on the man, who was hospitalized with a lacerated liver. The resulting trial, where the women claimed self-defense, became a media sensation with the press using terms such as “lesbian wolf-pack” to describe them. Out of all the women, Patreese Johnson is the last one remaining in prison. According to Richie and many other commentators, the only people who eventually came to the women’s aid, organizing funds and support, was a nationwide network of queer radical grassroots activists.
Richie spoke to Windy City Times in her Hyde Park home about the complex underpinnings of the NJ4 case, what it revealed about race, sexuality and gentrification, women and prison, her own history in the anti-violence movement and why she felt compelled to turn a critical eye upon it.
but really the whole thing
Israel & Mexico swap notes on abusing rights
May 22, 2013Earlier this month, Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca, Mexico’s newly-appointed secretary of public security in Chiapas, announced that discussions had taken place between his office and the Israeli defense ministry. The two countries talked about security coordination at the level of police, prisons and effective use of technology (“Israeli military will train Chiapas police,” Excelsior, 8 May [Spanish]).
Chiapas is home to the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), a mostly indigenous Maya liberation movement that has enjoyed global grassroots support since it rose up against the Mexican government in 1994. The Zapatistas took back large tracts of land on which they have since built subsistence cooperatives, autonomous schools, collectivized clinics and other democratic community structures.
In the twenty years since the uprising, the Mexican government has not ceased its counterinsurgency programs in Chiapas. When Llaven Abarca was announced as security head in December, human rights organizations voiced concerns that the violence would escalate, pointing to his history of arbitrary detentions, use of public force, criminal preventive detentions, death threats and torture (“Concern about the appointment of Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca as Secretary of Public Security in Chiapas,” Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Frayba) Center for Human Rights,14 December 2012 [PDF, Spanish]).
Aptly, his recent contacts with Israeli personnel were “aimed at sharing experiences,” Abarca has claimed. This may be the first time the Mexican government has gone public about military coordination with Israelis in Chiapas. Yet the agreement is only the latest in Israel’s longer history of military exports to the region, an industry spawned from experiences in the conquest and pacification of Palestine.
Weapons sales escalate
The first Zionist militias (Bar Giora and HaShomer) were formed to advance the settlement of Palestinian land. Another Zionist militia, the Haganah — the precursor to the Israeli army and the successor of HaShomer — began importing and producing arms in 1920.
Israeli firms began exporting weapons in the 1950s to Latin America, including to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic under the Somoza and Trujillo dictatorships. Massive government investment in the arms industry followed the 1967 War and the ensuing French arms embargo. Israeli arms, police, military training and equipment have now been sent to at least 140 countries, including to Guatemala in the 1980s under Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator recently convicted of genocide against the Maya.
Mexico began receiving Israeli weaponry in 1973 with the sale of five Arava planes fromIsrael Aerospace Industries. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, infrequent exports continued to the country in the form of small arms, mortars and electronic fences. Sales escalated in the early 2000s, according to research that we have undertaken.
In 2003, Mexico bought helicopters formerly belonging to the Israeli army and Israel Aerospace Industries’ Gabriel missiles. Another Israeli security firm, Magal Security Systems, received one of several contracts for surveillance systems “to protect sensitive installations in Mexico” that same year, The Jerusalem Post reported.
In 2004, Israel Shipyards sold missile boats, and later both Aeronautics Defense Systems and Elbit Systems won contracts from the federal police and armed forces for drones for border and domestic surveillance (“UAV maker Aeronautics to supply Mexican police,”Globes, 15 February 2009). Verint Systems, a technology firm founded by former Israeli army personnel, has won several US-sponsored contracts since 2006 for the mass wiretapping of Mexican telecommunications, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly.
Trained by Israel
According to declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents [PDF] obtained via a freedom of information request, Israeli personnel were discreetly sent into Chiapas in response to the 1994 Zapatista uprising for the purpose of “providing training to Mexican military and police forces.”
The Mexican government also made use of the Arava aircraft to deploy its Airborne Special Forces Group (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or GAFE). GAFE commandos were themselves trained by Israel and the US. Several would later desert the GAFE and go on to create “Los Zetas,” currently Mexico’s most powerful and violent drug cartel (“Los Zetas and Mexico’s Transnational Drug War,” World Politics Review, 25 December 2009).
Mexico was surprised by the Zapatistas, who rose up the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. The Mexican government found itself needing to respond to the dictates of foreign investors, as a famously-leaked Chase-Manhattan Bank memo revealed: “While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy.”
the point must be underlined that wherever it reads “Israel,” you may read “The USA.” so the USA is not only providing police and military training and gear to help repress the People of México via Plan Mérida (aka “Drug War” violence)—namely the least advantaged and the ones the elites wish would go away and give up the damn land and resources carte blanche already—the USA is also, by its beloved Israeli Puppetmask, squashing the indigenous of the Americas. still.
give land back to the indigenous of the north? you must be joking, UN. the genocide project rolls on, unchecked. From sea to shining sea.
Name one group of oppressed people who were able to end mass genocide and institutional and systemic oppression by being nice.
show your work
(via ynannarising)
