katlitik-blog

[katlitik-blog]

May you start your 2014 with a clear heart, understanding and forgiving spirit. May you be head over heels in love with life each day, no matter the turn life takes. #Insha'Allah I am IN LOVE with life!!!! Being an #educator, basketball #coach, #artist, #trumpeteer, #jetsetter, #confidant, and so much more is fuel for my #divine #fire. Fan the flames! #holidazzle

[katlitik-blog]

Make a point to give #thanks to the #Universe for your people. Trust that they will hear it, see it & feel it even if you never tell them directly. #DreamTeam #chicago @ankhs_arias

[katlitik-blog]

I wish more people cared about the earth as much as they cared about who they believed created it.

Unknown (via sensationalizm)

[katlitik-blog]

“Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.”

Deepak Chopra  (via khalu)

Every moment

[katlitik-blog]

[katlitik-blog]

So I'm a lesbian and my older sister is always saying that I'm not really a lesbian, I just "haven't found the right man yet." Why do you think she says that?

Ask her if she’s sexually attracted to llamas, and if she says she isn’t, tell her she just hasn’t found the right llama yet.  He’s out there, waiting.  Then bombard her with llama photos and tell her not to be such a fucking bigot.

[katlitik-blog]

By Chris McGreal at The Guardian

Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.

Leaving unmentioned Vorster’s wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster’s past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both countries, he said, faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

Vorster’s visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry’s South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.

"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.

"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."

Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.

Read full article →

See also:

Mondoweiss: "The unspoken alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa"

Mandela: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,”

Mandela: “Yasser Arafat was one of the outstanding freedom fighters of this generation,” / meet in Gaza

[katlitik-blog]

Canada has a complicated relationship to empire. On one level, Canada still maintains its formal attachment to Britain and its proximity to the US means that the country is deeply entangled in the project of American imperialism, in both its internal and external manifestations. Yet Canada is not simply a victim of US imperialism or puppet of the monarchy. Indigenous peoples rightfully speak of Canada as a colonising power. And Canada’s economic and political role in the Caribbean and its decade-long role in the war in Afghanistan recast this country as an imperial aggressor. Given its unique relationship to colonialism and colonisation, its close proximity to the world imperial centre, and its ‘quiet’ imperial designs, the stories housed within Canada offer unique insights into processes of nation-building, race, gender, class and the collision between histories of colonialism and imperialism. Yet, for many readers who live outside Canada, we suspect it is probably counterintuitive to imagine that the histories of empire, colonialism, imperialism, decolonisation, and the current ramifications of the ‘war on terror’ and the destruction of Haiti, can be found here. For that matter, many Canadians do not realise this either. Perhaps this comes from both the internal and external images that often portray Canada as neither violent nor born of violence. The self-image that the country presents to the world is of itself as a western, democratic power that does deeds of global goodness. When your neighbour is the US, it is not hard to convince yourself of such an idyll.

Scott Rutherford, Sean Mills and David Austin, “Canada: colonial amnesia and the legacy of empire” (via hagereseb)

[katlitik-blog]

You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.

Kane Bailey (via ihaateeveryone)

[katlitik-blog]

Lesbians be like, "We kissed 17 years ago. What you doing getting married to someone else?!?!?" Please family, stop trying to stake claim on other people. You don't have permanent rights to anyone's body or heart. That is all.

[katlitik-blog]

How To Know When You’ve Found “The One”

How To Know When You’ve Found “The One”

  How will you know when you’ve found “The One”? What’s the difference between someone you really like and your soul mate? Here are some clues that you’ve found “The One”:

  ·        Unexplainable feeling. We always hear people say that you just know it when you’ve found the one. When you ask someone how they knew they were with their soul mate, they’ll often respond that they can’t quite explain it but they “just knew”. You can’t put your finger on it, but there’s a feeling you get when you’ve hit the nail on the head. If you have to ask, you probably haven’t found it yet.

·        You get each other. If you and your partner just get each other, they could be the one. When you understand each other without having to work at it, you’re definitely on to something. It’s easy to be around someone who gets you and understands your personality without having to try too hard.

·        It’s easy. Some people in your life take a lot of effort to be around. Maybe you feel like you need to entertain them or work hard to make conversation. When you’ve found “The One”, it’s just easy. You can hang out and do anything and still have fun. Being together is effortless and enjoyable without either of you having to be “on”.

Read More

[katlitik-blog]

One day I’ll give birth to a tiny baby girl and when she’s born she’ll scream and I’ll tell her to never stop. I will kiss her before I lay her down at night and will tell her a story so she knows how it is and how it must be for her to survive. I’ll tell her to set things on fire and keep them burning I’ll teach her that fire will not consume her that she must use it.

Nicole Blackman, excerpt from “Daughter” (via larmoyante)

[katlitik-blog]

Natural mornings

You wake up looking like Kunta killed it. Thank the Universe for the common sense to love the natural gift of Black beauty. :sigh: goood morning!

[katlitik-blog]

Story of my life! People, please stop calling this a holiday. There is NOTHING holy about the onset of the genocide or the fact that we are still in it centuries later. That is all.

i don’t get together on thanksgiving to give thanks for the colonization of this land, the enslavement of my peoples or the genocide of many indigenous peoples. i give thanks and get together with my family for surviving another year in a nation founded on all of that.

[katlitik-blog]

Mermaid by Michael Parkes

Original oil on wood

[katlitik-blog]

Something I wrote in solidarity with NBJC - which launched the #BlackTransProud campaign for Trans Awareness Week:

I’m a woman. I’m black. I’m trans. And I’m alive. That’s a radical idea if you really think about it because trans women of color - specifically black and brown bodies - are active agents in our own survival despite unbearable statistics, lack of resources, dehumanizing media stories and exiling from many spaces.

And this notion of survival and resistance isn’t new.

We’ve always been survivors (I bow to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as I write this). For me, personally and politically, there’s no separating my womanness, my blackness, my transness from my me-ness.

I am a trans woman of color who is writing, speaking, loving, fighting, smiling, living and who honestly has no choice but to be exactly who I am and use the blessings I have been given to shed light on the struggles and triumphs of my community.

To be of service and to be fully me makes me proud.

[katlitik-blog]

lol so you don’t like Nicki MInaj cause you think she’s superficial and only raps about material things, but you can’t wait to buy Eminem’s new album. cause being a homophobic, woman abuser, who raps about raping his mother is so much better right? your mayo is showing.