April 27, 2008 archive

Crossposted just for fun, from WWL

Today, I want to open by honoring my favorite Deity.

When the Flying Spaghetti Monster makes Rolling Stone Magazine for the Second Time, you have to know there is intelligent life on Earth. (Images from their site, please visit there!)

Is it any wonder when Jimmy Buffett moved from Alabama (a place with notoriously low emissions) he quit singing about Pirates?

In fact, a move to high carbon emission Florida got Buffett singing about Volcanoes. Coincidence? I think not.

…and I quote Pastafarian scripture:

“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.”

Sunday Morning Over Easy music choice below the fold.

I know what nobody knows

Where it comes and where it goes

I know its everybodys sin

You got to lose to know how to win

Sunday’s Headlines: Letters Give C.I.A. Tactics a Legal Rationale: If Clinton can’t run campaign, can she run White House?: Hizbollah builds up covert army for a new assault against Israel: The Iraqi teenage girl killed for loving a British soldier: How do you like your eggs? Read our undercover investigation into Britain’s battery farming: City boy’s survival guide to the gulag: Kim Jong-il builds ‘Thunderbirds’ runway for war in North Korea: Karzai unhurt after parade attack: In Zimbabwe jail: A reporter’s ordeal: Tribesman tells of risks he took as a translator in Darfur: Massive gunbattles break out in Tijuana; 13 dead, 9 wounded

The New Economics of Hunger

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most.

The globe’s worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America’s great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.

In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect — one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam’s Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

From the NY Times: Letters Give C.I.A. Tactics a Legal Rationale: In response to a congressional request, the Department of Justice has written a letter claiming that it is sometimes legal to torture. Well, the NY Times hesitates to use the actual word T.O.R.T.U.R.E. Here’s how they say it, you know, in language that befits the grey lady. Ahem.

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

“Otherwise be prohibited under international law.” Translation: Illegal.

“Mr. Cobb, how are you doing?” I asked James Cobb, a lawyer in New Orleans, Louisiana.

“It depends on what you mean,” Mr. Cobb answered. “If you mean how am I doing after losing my house and every fucking thing in it, and after being forced to live in a two-bedroom shithole with my wife and two kids and being told how lucky I am to get it, and after being fucked — and I mean absolutely fucked — by my insurance company and by the United States government (and by the way, just so you know, if anybody from New Orleans, Louisiana, tells you that they’re not getting fucked by their insurance company and by the United States government, they’re fucking lying, all right?) . . . if you mean, how am I doing after all that is factored in: Well, I guess the answer is that I’m doing fine. Now, how can I help you?”

Jim Cobb and I had never spoken before.

From the remarkable article, The Loved Ones, by Tom Junod, Esquire Magazine, September 2007.

I try not to be too cynical about government.  But I have to ask, at what point do all these cumulative failures become evidence of the inability of it to not fail?

A wise young woman whom I’ve never met, spoken with, or corresponded with, but whom I feel like I know, once said: “All you have to do to qualify for human rights is be human.” In those 13 words, she elegantly summed up both the ultimate meaning of the claim for human rights and the origin of their breach. The very articulation of human rights traces their prior transgression. Without humans wronged, there is no need for a claim of human rights

The claim for human rights is a simple proposition: “I am human.” But this claim depends upon recognition and accord. The one who violates the rights of the other does so precisely because this claim of humanity is not recognized or falls on deaf ears.

Thus the paradox of human rights: There where they need to be asserted, they are precisely denied. When I most need to say “I am human,” I cannot. I need you to say my I, the I that is being violated, negated, erased.