McDonald's Quits Iceland

This 'breaking' story caused me to remember a few hours I spent at Iceland's Keflavik International Airport, in Reykjavík, several years ago.

While I waited to board my Sabina Airlines connection to Brussels I recall seeing a sign for a butcher shop.

Why would anyone buy meat at an airport I thought?

So I moseyed over to the shop and looked around for a spell.

It seems that Iceland is one of the few, perhaps even the only, international destination where you can buy an assortment of meat like dill marinated salmon, dried cod, dried/salted shark, and frozen lamb meat, at the airport.

The butcher will package your meat parcel and you can check it in with your bags.

I imagine that flying into the US could be quite a hassle unless I am missing something.

I know they have biltong (beef jerky) sniffer dogs at JFK that check luggage arriving from South Africa. :)

AnyHowze, if you must have a Big Mac in Iceland then you may want to bring one along the next time you visit.

The same is true for Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Here in Mzansi, unlike Iceland, McDonald's seems to be thriving profitably alongside an array of local fast food joints and the consequences are quite visible.

We are distinctively a racially polarized nation with strikingly similar girth dimensions.

Mmmmmm ;)

I'm off for a few days. Later!

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Pentagon Bans Chomsky's Book

By Sherwood Ross
26 October, 2009
Countercurrents.org

The Pentagon has paid anti-war activist Noam Chomsky the highest honor any totalitarian entity can bestow upon an author: they’ve banned his book “Interventions” at Guantanamo Bay prison.

They won’t say precisely why they “honored” Chomsky, but Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt told the Miami Herald that “Interventions”(City Lights Books) might negatively “impact on (Gitmo’s) good order and discipline.”

The Pentagon, of course, insists on “good order and discipline” running its prison camp. Chomsky likes order, too. What he objects to is the Pentagon spreading disorder globally.

Instead of thanking the Pentagon for his “honor,” Chomsky, is said to be angry. The Herald quotes him as saying, “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes.”

Read the rest of the article here.

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Jansen Wants To Talk

Jonathan Jansen and his management team at the University of the Free State (UFS) are reportedly offering an "olive branch" to their critics.

Jansen has released this statement:

"All stakeholders inside and outside the UFS are invited to meet with the university management to table their concerns and to try to find consensus on a way forward."

Interesting.

So who would be the "stakeholders" then? All South Africans?

I am amused.

The selected Prince and his apartheid principality are found waffling.

And so it should be.

The victims in this case should be thinking about a law suite against Jansen and the UFS.

Such a civil suite must seek significant recompense for the added stress and humiliation brought on by Jansen and his principality.

Nothing funny about real confrontation and redress Professor Jansen.

That is the "way forward"!

Onward!

Zapiro on Jonathan Jansen

Saying more than words can!

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A Friday Smile

Mooi seems to think that our next adventure should be to Pakistan. We came close to Pakistan in 06/07 but not close enough obviously.

The pictures below are from a forward Mooi sent to me entitled "Only in Pakistan".

I can't verify anything. But I thought it might make ya smile ;)




By the way, Mooi has just published a book in which he documents much of his travel experiences as a Guru of all religions.

I'm thinking Zanzibar in December! Pakistan is not the place to be right now, sadly.

What ya say Guru? We can develop our disagreement over Sai Baba on a sunny beach.

Hell I can't resist one more pic from the forward!


Have a wonderful and peaceful Friday.

Jumua Mubarak!

John Pilger: "War Is Peace, Ignorance Is Strength"

... Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls "leadership" throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee's decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. "When Obama walks into a room," gushed George Clooney, "you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere."

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the "intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged". Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture - Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron - race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama's case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary's "historic" elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush's inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power. ...

Read the rest of this New Statesman article here

Jansen's Usual Drivel

I want to like Jonathan Jansen but he makes it almost impossible most times.

In the past I have written here that Jansen is "a prodigious kisser of white ass" only to edit those words because I worried that I was not being fair.

I guess there are times when my will to say as I please must be tempered.

But then again I have not really been one to mince words irrespective of the fallout.

Jonathan Jansen, as you know, is the first black vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State (UFS) since apartheid ideology brought it to life.

That he was chosen by the 'herrenvolk' who still run that institution is telling.

I was, therefore, not shocked to learn that he decided to drop the charges and cook up some contrived contextualization that essentially robs the black victims of a fuller redress in a criminal court.

Jansen is adept at playing racial politics to seem as if he is addressing wider concerns about fairness, equality, and justice, among other concerns.

Take for example a recent media article where he comments on skin discrimination and race essentialization in post-apartheid South Africa.

His article is entitled "Our Troubles Are Still Skin Deep" and it deals in part with a movie about a white girl who appeared coloured.

The movie was shown on the UFS campus and the audience participated in a discussion afterward.

Jansen comments on some of the audience discussion and defies his own logic by racializing the commentators and their individual comments.

In so doing, he appears to berate black students for their 'usual' responses.

He also addresses the absence of white students at the screening by saying that they would be victimized by blacks and made to feel guilty for their parents deeds.

His reasoning betrays a nuanced understanding of post-apartheid racism.

I don't think Jansen is stupid enough not to know what he is doing. I think he is deliberate in the well worn manner that many liberals are when faced with racism.

He knows the game very well.

When it suites him he will elevate individual racism over institutional racism.

Where it does not, like in the Reitz case, he hides the complicity of four white thugs behind the issue of institutional racism.

Either way, he softens the gaze on whiteness and its excesses.

In short, I am now absolutely convinced that his political purpose can be crudely summed up by my kissing comment above.

His Reitz decision is nothing short of a betrayal.

Jansen's nonsense about a need for reconciliation at UFS merely advances his standing among his chosen volk.

Nothing can come out of denial and he must not be seen to be anything more than a selected leader who promotes the consensus that black life is worth less than white life.

If he was more than just another lackey of whiteness he would remember that the Soweto Riots of 1976 demonstrated the will of black folk not to be taught in the language of the oppressor.

The fact that he has now decided that part of his reconciliation efforts is to force Afrikaans on black students demonstrates the political substance of Jansen.

The ball is now in the court of the Minister of Higher Education, Dr. Blade Nzimande, to set aside Jansen's usual drivel.

Onward!

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UPDATE (October 20): "Jansen clarifies Reitz statement"

Seems Jansen needs to let you know that UFS is "simply" dropping its complaint against the Reitz 4 but that criminal charges and human rights charges are still pending at the Directorate of Special Prosecutions and the Human Rights Commission, respectivley.

Additionally, in a move that adds to the idiocy of doing advertisements for ABSA (the bank owned by the incalcitrant former slave trading Barclays Bank), Archbishop Tutu has come out in support of Jansen's decision.

I am starting to believe that the Arch is losing his damn mind!

Not In Obama's America

The caption to this picture from the Mail & Guardian reads: "A family who had left their village in Waziristan along the Afghan border arrive at Dera Ismail Khan on Wednesday. The military is gearing up for an offensive against Taliban strongholds in the area. (Ishtiaq Mahsud, AP)"

Barry and his family are safe and secure.

Sticks And Stones

Caption from News24 reads: "Residents of Sakhile near Standerton in Mpumalanga protest over poor service delivery and corruption. (Sapa)"

'Just another day in our post-apartheid paradise'.

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Bloggerversary

Erica reminded me a few days ago that this ol' blog is about to turn three years old.

Truth be told I could not remember if it was two or three. But yeah, tomorrow marks a brother's third year of writing here.

This is post number 623 but there are at least another fifty or so posts that have been taken down for this or that reason.

Thanks for reading me here. Thanks especially for the patience through spotty and testy times.

I said that I would write here as long as it feels right.

It still does.

Peace and struggle to youse.

Onward!

PS. The picture above was taken shortly after I started the blog in a tearoom in New Delhi called "Passion Tea" ... that green chair is the exact place where my first post came to be :)

Free State University And The "Unifinished Business" Of Racism

In early January 2008 South Africans had to confront, again, the ongoing and "unfinished business" of apartheid and its brand of racism.

Around that time a group of white Afrikaner students made a video to protest the integration of campus housing at the University of the Free State in South Africa's judicial capital, Bloemfontein.

The video was made public when the ex-girlfriend of one of the young men posted it to YouTube as a kind of revenge.

The 10 minute video makes racist fun of black workers who attend to the residences where the group of Afrikaner students lived.

One scene shows a young man urinating into a pot of food which is then given to the unsuspecting workers to eat.

The British newspaper, The Times, carried an article this past Sunday that refers to the pending criminal court case and it covers the fist public interviews with the affected workers pictured below.


Here in South Africa the case is mostly out of public view but hardly anyone who pays relative attention can forget its contents.

Our apartheid past is too close and too personal for the majority to forget.

I have written here and in my academic work about the need to confront the past and our memories.

But as I read the statements of the workers who are at the center of this case I was pressed to recognize, again, that the past is hardly in the past.

For the majority the past and the present are linked by persistent impoverishment and structural distance from what is supposed to be the new era.

As a result too many are left "invisible" in the dominant post-era narrative that seeks to chart progress.

One of the workers best describes the unavoidable tension that ensues in this way:

"I was invisible to everyone before this video happened, but after it came out politicians wanted to speak to me. I met the rector for the first time. We were given tea in his office. My family was hounded by the South African media. I am not an educated woman, but I knew I was being used. Collectively we made a decision to step away from this incident. We stayed away from the university for a short while, but we all kept our jobs, we all went back to work together, although we were moved to another hostel.

We saw those boys in a different way to how they saw us ... I treated them like sons. I cleaned up their hostel and joked with them. I told them off if they made too much of a mess. We helped them when they first came into the hostel. They were young, nervous, we made them tea. They betrayed us. Stuck a knife into our hearts. We were not as intelligent as them, so they manipulated us. They told us they were playing a game.

I don’t have anger in my heart, but I understand injustice. I have travelled to work at that university for over 25 years. I see black students on campus. I see their hope and ambition. My own daughter aspires to go to university. But for me, the way I am treated, that hasn’t changed. My pastor told me that God wanted me to fight against injustice and that is why I became involved in this legal matter. He also asked me to forgive those boys, but it is not them I wish to forgive. It is their parents, for they made them that way.”

These words are haunting and their relevance at this historical moment should weigh heavy on our collective consciousness.

There is a lot of "unfinished business" that must be confronted.

This means that even while President Zuma, like Obama, may want to shy away from confronting race and racism, the nation simply cannot.

The stakes are too high.

Ignorance, denial, selective memory, and forgetting are not the ingredients of meaningful progress and nation-building.

We must double our efforts to confront racism and its class and gender intersections if we are to move toward collective freedom.

Onward!

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Nobel Snowbel

Desmond Tutu has congratulated President Obama on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday.

The Arch did, however, say he was surprised that Obama will receive the prize without even finishing a term in office.

Thanks for noting that Arch but you are obviously being too nice to a man who has achieved absolutely f*ck-all in the months that the world has watched him waffle over Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

That the Noble Peace Committee thinks it notable to award Obama for his 'peace' rhetoric is nothing less than appalling and a further selling out of the vision and purpose Alfred Nobel intended.

The Peace Committee says that Obama "captured the world's attention" ... ummmm and this makes him worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize?

Do these fools forget that Obama is still a war president who in his opening days of his presidency ordered drones to bomb parts of Pakistan? Scores of innocent civilians were killed as a result and the bombings continue unabated.

Have they forgotten that the US under his leadership is still murdering innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Have they also forgotten that while he was running for president he could hardly utter a word of warning toward Israel for its massacre in occupied Gaza?

They are also obviously just ignoring the manner that Obama has been fanning the flames of conflict with Iran in recent weeks.

I know that the Nobel Peace Prize is hardly what is was or what it was intended to be.

I wonder what definition they use to define peace and its advancement?

Obama is a recipient but Gandhi not! Henry Kissinger is a recipient but Vaclav Havel not!

Still, by any measure, Obama does not deserve recognition for merely being better than George W. Bush. Even on that score the jury is still out.

As it stands now, the Oprah-endorsed president is still nothing more than a platitudinal motor-mouth and ass-kissing Uncle Tom who makes white people and their agents feel better about their inbred racism.

Perhaps the Prize should be amended to say that Obama has gone a long way in helping alleviate white racist guilt and this is the reason why he is being fawned over.

I wonder if Obama will allow the Peace Committee to rub his head for luck?

Onward!

Picture Credit

P*ssing In Public And Apartheid

I was listening to a talk show on SAFM this morning that touched on a topic that causes me much irritation (well among others).

The host, Siki Mgabadeli, invited a pastor to delve into the issue of folks who p*ss in public, toss trash onto the streets, burn tyres, and generally act the destructive fool in townships across South Africa.

The pastor relayed his distress and attributed the behavior to a lack of self-respect.

He also pointed out that this destructive behavior is usual in the black townships but not so in the formerly all-white suburbs and Central Business District (CBD).

Callers mostly supported his view but a significant number also blamed apartheid.

The apartheid argument attributes the behavior to poor self-esteem and racist brainwashing.

Blacks, a few callers asserted, will not publicly urinate in the suburbs and the CBD because they still fear the white man.

One caller even argued that a strong emphasis on Biko's Black Consciousness was needed to stop blacks from p*ssing in public.

The contours of the interaction reminded me of the Booker T. Washington "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South.

Like Washington's context, the discussion evoked themes of black dysfunction, self-help, and the omnipresence of the white man (whiteness).

This is obviously a complex and mine-laden area but a few thoughts come to mind.

The first and most honest reaction is that the last time (yesterday) I saw a black man p*ssing in public and another tossing trash onto the streets there was not a white man in sight.

It seems to me that the issue of race in this case, particularly the white man as the agent of pointed black dysfunction, is a gross distortion of our current socio-political reality.

There is very little reason to conjure black offenders as subjective victims. The argument is unspecific and a cop-out.

What is missing for me is a general sense of citizenship and civility throughout South Africa.

Where one can point to blacks tossing trash there would be other instances of Asians cutting into line or whites not obeying traffic rules at an intersection where pedestrians are present, for example.

Political scientists make a lot of noise about political culture and its intersection with order and civil society values.

I recognize that it is tricky to offer a formula as an assessment, or diagnosis.

Nonetheless, I am struck by the lack of civility that lives alongside our democracy.

Just yesterday a meeting of a labour union (COSATU) was disrupted when attendees started throwing bottles at each other.

Last week a meeting of athletes gathered to discuss the Caster Semenya debacle and the response by Athletics South Africa (ASA) was disrupted when members of ASA allegedly showed up drunk and disrupted the meeting.

We need more honesty in the debate about our post-apartheid condition. 15 plus years after apartheid it is no longer persuasive to center our condition(s) on victimization.

Post-apartheid racism is a reality and a problem that requires nuanced confrontation.

But can we really in all honesty declare the unruly and uncivil behavior of some of our citizens in the townships and beyond on apartheid?

I don't think so.

We need to look deeper. Perhaps the pastor's diagnosis of a lack of respect is a good place to start.

Onward!

Earplugs

I can't live without earplugs. A soft pair of throwaway earplugs is all I need to hold onto my version of sanity.

When I left the US two or so years ago I packed a huge container of earplugs just in case.

It was a wise move.

Earplugs of the throwaway kind are not readily available here in Mzansi.

I know because I always look to see wherever I shop.

But last week I came across a shop called "Crazy Store" or sumthen that has packs of eight soft earplugs for sale.

My heart skipped several beats. My journey to find throwaway earplugs here in the land of the overpriced everything was over.

It was a religious moment. Kinda like that time in late 2007 when I stood close to the spot in Lumbini where Buddha is said to have been born.

As I caught my breath it occurred to me that I did not need more earplugs. My stash is still huge.

So I looked at the price instead. It was expensive. Too expensive. A lot more than fifty earplugs would cost at Costco or Target in Portland.

I don't think anyone here will buy them. I won't but that won't stop me from looking in on the stocks over the weeks and months to come.

Something about knowing that there are earplugs available just up the street from where I sleep at night makes me feel comforted.

So just in case my house is burgled and the thieves make off with my sanity devices, I know where to find an emergency stash ... even if it is costly.

Yep I can't live without earplugs. In fact, I'm rolling home now to watch the SABC evening news with a pair firmly pressed against my inner conscience.

Not having to listen to the usual drivel is my resistance.

Perhaps I should bring a few pairs to work tomorrow.

Onward!

Image Credit

Typhoon Ketsana

Caption from the Mail & Guardian reads:

"A man jumps off a float in the waterlogged town of Taytay, Philippines, on Wednesday. Several towns are still under water more than a week after typhoon Ketsana ripped through the area, leaving hundreds of people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. (Aaron Favila, AP)"

Paying My Employer To Do My Job

This morning I was greeted with a note from the university that employs me that has everything to do with counting beans and nothing to do with advancing the agenda of higher education.

The note is from the IT department and its says that for the second month I have exceeded my internet quota of 30mb.

Read that again!

Yep, I said 30mb and not 30gigs.

According to them I owe the university in excess of a couple of hundred rand despite the fact that I use the connection mostly for work related stuff like updating several teaching blogs for students who have to access reading material from the web because the sh*t is not in the library.

See my political theory blog for example.

So, if I understand it all right then it seems that my employer now expects me to pay them to do my job.

This in addition to the stationery and other work related stuff I bought at the store because almost nothing is made available.

So what does higher education without pens, books, paper, and the internet look like?

My head hurts just trying to come to terms. I have a grand strategy for overall survival but it is failing me this very moment.

Believe me I am not in a bad mood. I am not even mad at being cooped-up in a time long gone where students are fed bullsh*t for the sole purpose of passing exams.

I am just beside myself thinking about the idiot mentality behind the decision to charge faculty for being connected to the web.

Oh yeah, students have it hard too, even harder is my understanding. Several have complained to me that they must pay each time they connect to the web and this is in addition to the standard tuition and fees.

So what to do? Should I get students to buy non-existent text books or Xerox mine and break copyright laws?

Or, should I send them back to the library to browse the yellowing pages of books that are hardly relevant?

The situation is frustrating. How can anyone in the brains trust that runs this country expect to produce students (they call 'em "learners" for some bullsh*t reason) who are critical thinkers?

Something needs to give. Something more than the development fixation on hosting the World Cup 2010.

What about developing education beyond the usual rhetoric?

As for me paying that little receipt the IT folks sent .... my check is in their email!

Unlike Raphael's Plato I have my middle finger raised in absolute defiance.

Onward!