The body politic (youngtimer edition)

Jan 12, 2023 | bourgeois culture, colonialism, media, neoliberalism, state violence, teenagers | 0 comments

7 minute read or audio version.

Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity… – Charles Eisenstein, The Coronation, 2022

Australia’s most vulnerable young people have no meaningful support. Those who find themselves in prison experience a nightmarish reality, especially since Covid. If they want to see family they have to keep lining up for jabs, which as we now know are dangerous to young people, and therefore illogical and unethical to mandate. If prisoners want to eat fresh vegetables, breathe clean air, or feel natural sunlight on their skin mediated through the shade of a tree they have Buckley’s chance and none. Anything that can help them to heal or grow is road blocked.

Bourgeois culture, which frames much of the Australian experience, clings to strawman crusades promulgated by social and legacy medias, while at the same time this dominant cultural paradigm turns a blind eye on the harsh realities and dark and complex relationships of our most at-risk youth. Judgement and punishment are metered out rather than rehabilitation, deep listening and compassion. “Compared with Australia’s 53.1 per cent, Norway’s recidivism rate after two years is 20 per cent, in Austria it is 26 per cent and in Finland, it is 36 per cent. The US state of Oregon and the Canadian province of Ontario have recidivism rates similar to Finland.” Welcome to the incarceration nation; building more private prisons and growing an internment caste system to advance another lucrative misery industry.

While we can have compassion for all young people in whatever complexes they’re moving through, we can also remain critical of the adult world hubris, double standards and doubling down that continues to harm youngtimers. Can we imagine a world where young offenders are treated with as much media compassion and attention as furries? In many other countries programmes are run to help prisoners process their grief – the grief that lead them to drugs and/or crime, the grief they hold for what they did to others, the grief of living in sterile cells exiled from community and ecology.

Our social ills often have similar root causes, it’s just the expression of them that differ, based on our personalities and life contexts.

What leads one teen to bulimia, one to furrydom and one to meth and burgs? The answer, in our view, can be found in the disconnected values and projects of neoliberalism. Drugs and crime, body image anxiety, and other kinds of dysphoria all find lucrative legal markets – private prisons, social medias and hyper medicalisation products ranging from ritalin to puberty blockers. Neoliberalism knows that unhappiness and sickness pays handsomely, it trades on it and factors it into GDP. Neoliberal institutions – universities, governments, medias, etc. – that use the forms of neoliberal economics and psychopolitics, are unwilling to self examine how they support and fuel such alienation, disconnection and social destruction.

While this website is dedicated to positive responses to the predicaments of our time, we are also committed to calling out that which stops or blocks the rebuilding of connected communities and ecological knowledges and interrelationships. One of the most profound things we can do to carry out this work is to switch off the neoliberal medias, and invest in an ecology of views, journalism and discussion that is diverse, critical and creative. Aaron Maté for your news on the Ukraine and Russian war, for example, or CJ Hopkins for your awareness of the rise of New Normal fascism, or David Holmgren on the hubris of new energy tech promises, or Vandana Shiva and Bret Weinstein on the genetically modified organism that is Covid.

Neoliberal medias hold the power for neoliberalism to flourish, for propaganda to be normalised, for dissenters and heterodox thinkers to be continually hounded, censored or labelled as misinformation spreaders. The response to any diseased and dying monoculture is for a resurgence of weed species to repopulate and prepare the trammelled ground for the regrowing of forests. The war against weeds is unwinnable, so too the war against diverse approaches to science, politics, health, young offenders and governance. The time to regrow diverse cultures of place is now, and leave behind the medias that grow alienation, fear and control.

This year we’ve made a further commitment to advancing independent voices and platforms. What reporters, social and ecological commentators, podcasters or writers are floating your boat at the moment? Who are the weeds that are nourishing you? What is the ground they are rehabilitating? As always, your comments are welcome. All power to the those who smell rats and who are acting on all their senses of knowing.

In a world of misinformation, censorship and propaganda, here are our go-to media and thinkers

Sep 23, 2022 | by Dr Patrick Jones, media, our thoughtsmiths, politics | 27 comments

Because we do not trust government-funded or corporate media – our trust of mainstream media (MSM) was broken long before, though significantly amplified by, Covid – we thought it might be useful to share links of the broad range of media and commentary we subscribe to, which we cross-reference on a regular (if not daily) basis to help build an understanding of where we are now.

While, as neopeasants, our focus is mostly in the realm of the local – relationships with neighbours, nearby community and friends, trees, bees, goats, sheep, chickens, soils, rocks, birdsong, hills, oldtimer and weedy biota, mycelium, creeks, weather and seasonal patterns, in essence Djaara Mother Country – we are also critically aware of what is occurring in ‘the world’ of globalised humans. Those either behaving poorly or uncommonly courageously.

As we’ve witnessed over the past 3 years, pop-fascism – a term I coined nearly two decades ago – is radically expanding its sphere of influence. To fight the mis- and disinformation of the state-corporate nexus that together has created pop-fascism (also known as corporatism) we need to be ever more vigilant and critical. Not in total, because obsessing over politics and world affairs can make us sick or boring or unhinged, especially if these things are all we reduce ourselves to, like Twitter-junkies. Rather, we give about an hour a day – that is a one-in-24 attention span – to such abstraction, which helps us to plan, act and engage in our more rooted realms.

We don’t believe the state-corporate nexus comes from an evil cabal or there is some overarching global conspiracy. Mainly because elites and political power-mongers are by nature way too back-stabbing and competitive to hold one unified narrative together for very long. Rather, the corruption is grown systemically out of wrong relationship, which has steadily expanded and merged the two great colonial-evangelical forces – state and corporate power – into the dangerous nexus it has become.

Undemocratic pop-fascist organisations who increasingly rule over our lives, like the WHO (World Health Organisation) and WEF (World Economic Forum), are the embodiment of such colonial fundamentalism rebranded as ‘global development’. Rather than distributed, grass roots, local organisation combining the most meritorious of regional, western, eastern and Indigenous thought and cosmologies – these paternalistic institutions and the governments and ‘experts’ that serve them, believe the only way to save ‘the world’ is via a top-down approach where big industry radically profits through triumphant saviourism – because how else can the world be ‘saved’?

Over the past several decades western governments and corporates have used pop PR strategies (now merged into Behavioural Insights) to increase their power and control over populations. But this power over creep of pop-fascism – a fascism that creeps quietly into place – is now shifting up some gears. Protesting is becoming increasingly dangerous as governments become ever more militaristic and hard-lined, state and corporate surveillance of people is aggregating, dissenting or alternative views are being increasingly attacked and censored, income earning in many workplaces is now dependent on taking novel industrial injections, young people are being colonised and permanently harmed by posthumanist medicine under the ideological guise of gender liberty, and democracy, which has long been an impoverished social form, is now riddled with cancer.

If we continue to give our attention to state-, corporate- or billionaire-influenced medias (MSM) then we are simply giving these captured outlets power over us. By instead giving our attention to a wide range of independent outlets and thinkers, we not only get broader, more diverse discourse in our inbox, we are also not reliant on media that has been filtered through nudge units or virtue warriors who believe they can speak for others.

That’s why we love Michael Leunig, who last year was stepped down from his Monday spot in The Age for posting on his own website the below cartoon, after The Age rejected it for publication. At a time when the state government of Victoria (the bogus colonial state where both Leunig and we live) were literally pointing weapons at those of us who were critical of the medical fascism taking place, he acted critically, courageously and creatively.

We don’t blindly go along with the thoughts and opinions in the articles and posts we read in the below news sites, websites and Substack pages, but we offer the links below as a way for you to see what a diverse and at times (necessarily) paradoxical information ecology looks like.

All the bigotry we’ve had to endure over the past few years has stemmed from people who only refer to MSM. MSM use major events, stories and campaigns to place people into either the correct or incorrect team, while ignoring the most important issues affecting local peoples around the world. Such has been the reduction of discourse and nuanced debate in MSM, and as a result the blossoming of new medias and journalistic approaches.

Please be aware: nearly every one of the following people or websites have had hit pieces crafted against them by MSM and their ‘Fact Checking’ propaganda units. If you read these hit pieces and let them influence you before deeply diving into the work, ideas, commentary and arguments held in the links below, then the state-corporate nexus has already assumed power over you.

Independent Websites
The Grayzone
The Brownstone Institute
Consortium News
Zero Sum
The Automatic Earth
Jacobin
World Council for Health
Unherd
Off-Guardian
The Exposé
Common Sense News
Reclaim the Net
Common Dreams
Children’s Health Defence
Great Barrington Declaration

Individuals we follow
Bari Weiss – former NYT reporter
Tyson Yunkaporta
Bret Weinstein
Vandana Shiva
Dr John Campbell
Iain McGilchrist
Robert Malone
Russell Brand
Geert Vanden Bossche
David Holmgren
John Vervaeke
John Michael Greer
Dr Martin Kulldorff

Cartoonists
Michael Leunig
Bob Moran
Anne Gibbons

Substack writers
– health
A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie – former WHO consultant
Eugyppius: a plague chronicle
Unreported Truths (Alex Berenson) – former NYT reporter
Maryanne Demasi, reports – former ABC science reporter
Unacceptable Jessica (Jessica Rose)
Dystopian Down Under (Rebekah Barnett)
Dead Man Talking (Joel Smalley)
Mattias Desmet
– critical-cultural
Edward Snowden – CIA whistleblower
Trish Wood is Critical
Radical Media – by Maajid Nawaz
CJ Hopkins’ Consent Factory
From The Forests of Arduinna (Rhyd Wildermuth)
Natural Selections (Heather Heying)
Glenn Greenwald – former Guardian journalist
Kathleen Stock
John Waters Unchained
Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf
The Chris Hedges Report
Post-Woke (Mickey Z)
Charles Eisenstein
The Abbey of Misrule (Paul Kingsnorth)

Laptop class journalism and discourse have limits, and these writers are only some of our human reference points. There are crossovers here with our community of thoughtsmiths, which we reference on our Resources page. But most of our significant teachers and thinkers are not human – they are places in country, in grief, in night sky, in mushrooms, in plants and in animals.

Writers who, like us, shovel shit as part of their daily lifeway and economy, such as Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, David Holmgren and John Berger, tend to have a more significant impact on us than food-already-in-the-fridge writers who generally find it more difficult to see outside of an anthropocentric lens. And yes, we occasionally visit MSM sites, which gives us perspective on the deepening state-corporate propaganda crisis.

We hope this list is useful to you. It is by no means static for us, and we invite you, Dear Reader, to recommend your go-to writers and websites in the comments.

Creatures of place

Jun 27, 2018 | film, Happen Films, house and garden tours, media, story | 4 comments

In March of this year, Jordan and Antoinette from Happen Films came and spent a few days with us to talk ideas, share food and labours, and film us going about our daily makings. The result is this beautiful short video, Creatures of Place.

If you are reading this in your inbox, you will need to click through to our blog to view it. And if you haven’t seen their films, we highly recommend you check them out.

***

In other news:

* For those interested in seeing up close how we live you can now book for one of our spring house and garden tours.

*And for those wanting to hear the audio version of Patrick’s re:)Fermenting culture you can now listen by clicking on the ‘pop out’ on the sidebar, or listen to it on our YouTube channel.

*Thanks to everybody who applied for our first three Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We received over 50 applications, which were all inspiring to read. This has made selecting just 9 people (for the three courses) very challenging. We’ll introduce them to you after the winter break.

Under the sunshine of the day

Feb 1, 2015 | bicycle activism, dehydrator, edible gardens, fermenting, Fukushima, Hepburn Relocalisation Network, media, preserving, TV, Yae Fujimoto | 4 comments

We haven’t stopped riding, of course. We rode several kms out of town to go and camp with our friends Fe and Ant and their little sproglets Luna and Fabrizio.

We walked across the road to join more friends for a BBQ and raid their vertical berry patch. Thanks Luke and Kate!

For Meg’s birthday we rode out to her sister Kate’s family farm for a delicious dinner of home-made pasta and babka birthday cake. The best!

We went to Melbourne to tell our story to national breakfast TV.

They wanted to know what challenges we faced and what it was like to eat roadkill.

Back at home we wanted to know what living in Japan was like post Fukushima. Yae Fujimoto, Rick Tanaka and Hiro Fujimoto gave us an insight into the reality of living with nuclear reactors. Thanks HRN for organising this event.

From our own region’s non-radioactive orchards we collected more apples. Some for juice, some for stew, some for cider, some for drying and some more for the chooks.

We’ve also been busy preserving, dehydrating, brewing and fermenting various stores for winter.

Meg and Woody experimented with flaxseed crackers,

in the dehydrator. Pretty bloody good!

Zeph and Jasper got the old billycart back up and running,

before Zeph took himself off to religio-military school.

Wide lawns, narrow minds, as one Australian artist recently exhibited. Please keep hold of yourself Zeph, as you venture into this experiment with patriarchal institutionalisation.

Zeph spent his last weeks of home-education hanging out with friends, helping with the gardening, being a big brother and working on his bike.

Then it was time for our first Critical Mass ride for the year.

Followed by a small intimate gig at the Albert Street community garden with this guy,

and his partner Hayley Egan. We archived excerpts from the ride and the gig into this little vid:

We’ve also been pickling walnuts that we gleaned green from street and backyard trees,

and sowing companion plants, carrots and alliums, in a new raised bed made specifically for winter crops.

Whatever you’re making, Dear Reader, we hope it is bringing you nourishment and fulfilment, that you’re not working too hard and you have days in your week to lounge and muse and make love under the sunshine of the day.

Darumbal food sense and other adventures (our week in Rockhampton)

Jul 19, 2014 | ABC, bush food, community gardens, Darumbal, grass tree, Harrisia cactus, John Pilger, media, poem, poetry, Rockhampton, Torres Straight Islanders, water lily | 0 comments

We spent the week resting, washing clothes, making bike repairs,

and getting to know a little about Rockhampton.

We visited the Wandal Community Garden,

and discovered a model for community food and wellbeing. Several neighbouring properties had been purchased together and their back fences dismantled to create a lovely large open common area.

Our friend from home, fellow community gardener and accessibility advocate, Fe Porter, would have been delighted to witness this garden. We were also inspired and we talked with some of the workers of the garden including Nick, a permaculturalist and disabilities worker,

and the garden’s manager, Tony, who’s been with the project since its inception five years ago, about the its evident success.

The garden features various annual vegetables, perennial fruits and a chook run, which doubles as a compost factory. People of all abilities work in the garden and steward its wellbeing. There is nothing like a garden to bring joy.

And we learned that now, in mid-winter, is the peak growing season for the mostly non-Indigenous foods grown there. There is talk to create a bush tucker garden at Wandal, which would no doubt extend the productivity of food to year-round. We left uplifted with loved food in our bellies.

Another place in Rocky we visited was the Dreamtime Cultural Centre.

Here we discovered an incredible diagram representing the traditional seasonal foods of the Darumbal people. This is such a fine understanding of the interrelationships between ecology, seasonality, biology, climate, diversity of species and nutrition.

Picture courtesy of the Dreamtime Cultural Centre

We learned that water lilies are a significant food and a sacred plant of the Darumbal.

Picture courtesy of the Dreamtime Cultural Centre

In the bush food garden we read that the white part at the base of the leaves of grass trees (Xanthorrhoea australis),

were chewed to quench thrist. We tried it and didn’t find the same juiciness we’ve found in lomandra and pandanus leaves, but nonetheless as we’re about to ride 300 km to Mackay with only the capacity to carry 5 litres of water, we duly noted this plant fact in case we don’t spy a tap.

And we found this sneaky newcomer in the garden, the moonlight or snake cactus (Harrisia spp.), which bears a red fruit that splits open when ripe.

We were escorted through the various parts of the cultural centre by our guide Wayne who explained that it was the women who provided much of the food within the tribe and were the ones who experimented with plants and mushrooms to find out whether a certain species was poisonous or not, and whether a poisonous plant can be made edible through various techniques and processes.

Earlier in the week we had come across this publication, Notes on Some of the Roots, Tubers, Bulbs and Fruits Used as Vegetable Food by the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland, published in Rockhampton in 1866 and housed in the State Library of Victoria’s online database.

While at the Dreamtime Cultural Centre we met the delightful Grace who gave us a presentation on Torres Strait Island life, which by her account has not suffered the interventions, genocides and appalling control by the state that Aboriginal people have on the mainland. She told us that more or less traditional island life remains in tact and so too islander health as their traditional foods still constitute their main diet.

We asked Grace what she felt was the biggest threat Torres Strait Islanders faced and she replied, ‘western technology and food’. In everything Artist as Family attempts to do the problem of western technology and food is at the centre. How do we re-establish or re-model the grounds on which sensible cultures of place can once again be performed, where the food we eat and how it is obtained belies cultures of low damage?

Picture courtesy of Dreamtime Cultural Centre

While we stayed in Rockhampton we were interviewed by local ABC breakfast radio host, Jacquie Mackay, about our travel and the intention behind it. You can listen to the interview here.

For the week we spent at our dog-friendly solar-powered motel,

we were neighbours to George and Nita Corderoy, who were visiting family from Sydney. George is a descendant of the Darumbal people and grew up in Rockhampton. European colonisation all but destroyed George’s ancestors’ culture but growing up he and family would go out hunting and fishing for traditional foods. Nita’s people were from near Charters Towers but she was taken from them as a child and put in a church orphanage just outside Rocky as part of government policy that produced The Stolen Generations.

With free wifi in our room we were finally able to watch John Pilger’s recent film Utopia, which illustrates how the genocide of Aboriginal people continues today and reveals how Aboriginal babies are still being taken away from their mothers and families. Pilger’s film and getting to know George and Nita’s stories, inspired Patrick to write a new poem this week, which we’ll leave with you. See you in Mackay.

Australia

Is it possible
to see
to handle
cup close
and breathe in
the aggregating suffering
and sickness
manifest
from the first
great
frontier lie ––
a deceit
that forms
the very borders
of a country
spiritually adrift
where land
and its communities
are gunned over
by institutions
who perpetuate the injustice
of the entire invention
Terra nullius?

Is it possible to live
upon the thefts
and massacres
on top of the poverties
and apacing policies
that enact genocide?

What makes a nation?

Can anything good
be built upon such foundations?

Will spear
and dilly bag
filled with fruit
and root medicines
ever again walk free
across fenceless country?

What romance
what act of love
what sacred fire
and quiet kinship
can we commit now?

Is there anything salvageable
from such monumental lies
spun even larger by big miners
and their politicians
to call home?

Is not our compliance
our complicity
with this wealth
damage?

Australia?

Local, slow and youth: recent AaF media

Jul 13, 2014 | Gladstone Observer, media, News, Slow Magazine, story, unleash magazine, Zephyr | 2 comments

We stopped in Calliope to look at a local bat population when Nicky Moffat, a young Gladstone Observer journalist, pulled over and asked what we were up to. This is her/our story:

A little while ago Greg Foyster wrote a story on our food-cycling expedition and published it in Slow Magazine. No online version is available, but the magazine can be found fairly easily in Australian newsagencies.

Thanks Ian Robertson for taking this picture.

And back a few months NSW’s Youth Action invited Zeph to tell our story from his perspective in their online rag unleash magazine. What resulted is Zeph’s first published article. Go Zeph!

Read the whole unleash issue. Zeph’s article can be found on page 14 of the PDF.

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