In the hopes that someone here has kids or grand-kids, those rugrats either know about what i'm going to let you in on or it hasn't hit their school/campus yet to the point they can't socially exist without it.
Twitter will be a thing of the past soon as a new twitter-esque social network/microblogging service has emerged to a more mainstream prominence lately.
It's been around for a couple of years but 2009 is when it started coming into it's own. Check it out and play around with it.
I made mine and it's in the blogroll as "American Pirate". It's a more personal touch if you actually give a shit about what shennanigans i'm getting into next. I say that only because today is a day of "student activities" in NYC being run by SDS (tee hee!) so stay tuned....
But, mark my words, 2010 is gonna be a big year for Tumblr.
Think Iran's Twitter Revolt was impressive? Imagine if they had unlimited characters to text, ability to post photos and video on the fly, and even "geotag" where it was happening for those keeping an eye on developments.....or, I dunno, Human Rights groups needing evidence to collect about abuses....ahhh technology :-)
I recently watched this TED talk by Jill Bolte, a brain researcher who had a stroke, a massive cerebral hemorrhage in her left brain. The talk she gives is about her experience while her left brain virtually shut down.
Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.
We spent a couple of amazing days in Lilongwe, Malawi - although it was cut short because we took an emergency flight back to Canada for the funeral of Bernard's grandmother (by the time you are reading this, we are back in Africa).
We arrived after a long journey that started in Kampala, Uganda -- and there's nothing better than arriving somewhere new and having a great place to crash (at only $30 a night for a double). What makes a good hostel in Africa? If it were just the fact that it was clean and the prices fair, we would have been content with our stay at the Mufasa Lodge. Add on hot showers, friendly staff, Wifi internet, and a fun lounge bar in the back, and you have one of the best hostels we've been to so far.
After arriving we visited the Lilongwe Wildlife Centre, a project, supported by companies like the Body Shop, providing sanctuary space for the rescued, confiscated, orphaned and injured wild animals of Malawi. While touring their facility we met Kambuk (which means "leopard" in Chichewa), who was soundly sleeping in his 2,500 sq meter backyard of fenced green landscape. He was rescued by the Lilongwe Wildlife Centre after poachers shattered his knee in Nyika National Park (making it impossible for him to ever return to the wild.) As we toured the facility nearly every animal we saw - from baboons to alligators - had a similar Cinderella story of overcoming insurmountable odds to survive and, in most cases, return back to the wild.
The Center is one of the leading organizations in Malawi pushing lawmakers to enforce and enact legislation in support of wildlife conservation and environmental protection. They also develop local partnerships and training programs with the farmers and communities surrounding national parks. The struggle between protecting wildlife and agriculture is becoming especially evident as drought, conflict, and hunger continue to affect sub-Saharan Africa.
In Lilongwe, we also met with Stacia and Kristoff Nordin who showed us permaculture techniques at their home in Lilongwe. They use their garden to promote indigenous crops as a source of nutrition to the Malawians who are currently focused on growing corn, subsidized by the government.
Malawi may be best known for this so-called "Malawi Miracle." Five years ago the government decided to do something controversial-provide fertilizer subsidies to farmers to grow maize. Since then maize production has tripled and Malawi has been touted as an agricultural success story. But the way they are refining that corn, says Kristof, makes it "kind of like Wonderbread," leaving it with just two or three nutrients. Traditional varieties of corn, however, which aren't usually so highly processed, are more nutritious and don't require as much artificial fertilizer compared to hybrid varieties. According to Kristof, "48 percent of the country is still stunted with the miracle."
Stacia and Kristof use their home as a way to educate their neighbors about both permaculture and indigenous vegetables. Most Malawians think of traditional foods, such as amaranth and African eggplant, as poor people foods grown by "bad" farmers. But these crops may hold the key for solving hunger, malnutrition and poverty in Malawi. Rather than focusing on just planting maize-a crop that is not native to Africa-the Kristofs advise the farmers they work with that there is "no miracle plant, just plant them all." Maize, ironically, is least suited to this region because it's very susceptible to pests and disease. Unfortunately, the "fixation on just one crop," says Kristof, means that traditional varieties of foods are going extinct-crops that are already adapted to drought and heat, traits that become especially important as agriculture copes with climate change.
And indigenous crops can be an important source of income for farmers. Rather than importing things like amaranth, sorghum, spices, tamarinds and other products from India, South Africa, and other countries, the Nordins are helping farmers find ways to market seeds, as well as value added products, from local resources. These efforts not only provide income and nutrition, but fight the "stigma that anything Malawian isn't good enough," says Kristof. "A lot of solutions," he says, "are literally staring us in the face." And as I walked around seeing-and tasting- the various crops at the Nordins' home, it's obvious that maize is not Malawi's only miracle.
As an aside, the toilet at Stacia and Kristoff Nordin's house was so environmentally sustainable, you almost felt like you were doing a heroic act for the garden just by going to the bathroom. The vegetables and fruits they're growing, thrive off human manure and the water to wash your hands comes from captured rainfall.
One other thing we ought to mention is that Malawi is surprisingly expensive, or maybe we continue to feel firsthand the decline of the value of the American dollar. We found good value for lodging, but the food (maybe because all the fields were converted to Maize) was very expensive. People are suffering here from malnutrition and hunger, and we found it hard to maintain a varied diet at a reasonable price. Good vegetarian food would have been very difficult in Lilongwe if it weren't for the local Chinese restaurant near the hostel.
Richard Haigh runs Enaleni Farm outside Durban, South Africa, raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Check out this video from my conversation with Richard about his sheep, his garden, and the meaning behind the name of his farm:
Anyone looking around the United States for signs of unrepentant racism should forget about over-privileged American hustlers like Skip Gates, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama, and take a walk through the Pentagon, where our next murderous "operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are planned, or the Congress, where endless billions are effortlessly appropriated for mass murder of Asian non-persons, even after nine long years of destruction and futility, or the White House, where a nauseating con-man and his tools promulgate ludicrous apologetics for racism and genocide.
And what does it mean that the trendiest, most up-to-the-minute excuse for the murderous and illegal American occupation of Afghanistan is now... "saving" Afghan women from the Taliban, which is exactly the same as "saving" Afghan women from Afghan men of any description whatsoever, since the only discriminator between an ordinary male citizen of Afghanistan and a Taliban militant is that whatever US soldiers kill is Taliban, and before US soldiers created the latest dead "insurgent," he looked exactly like any other male citizen.
But we have an excuse for all that killing, we stupid fucking Americans who don't speak any of the many languages of Afghanistan or understand fuck-all about any aspect of life in Afghanistan, and never took any interest in Afghanistan whatsoever until we needed a patsy for 9/11.
We have a wonderful excuse for mass murder in Afghanistan!
We're "protecting" brown women from brown men.
You might think that this pathetic and obscene racist propaganda was first dreamed up by Laura Bush or Barack Obama or some other goddamned political trash, but you would be mistaken.
In September 2002 the Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod published a terribly prophetic article in American Anthropologist about a species of racist propaganda which had already served as an excuse for imperialist aggression all around the third world, way back in the glory days of so many European empires.
Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others
As Laura Bush said, "Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment... The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
"The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
You heard it from Laura Bush, and would Laura Bush bullshit you? She used to be a librarian! She helped little girls check out books! (Before she became a mostly silent partner in top-down class war and genocide.)
But Professor Abu-Lughod had heard it all before.
These words have haunting resonance for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the "woman question" in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify colonial rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men.
The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East. In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed called "colonial feminism" was hard at work. This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression.
No one doubts that very bad things have happened to women in India and Egypt and Afghanistan, and every example of brutality in Afghanistan for the last 30 years has been carefully catalogued by apologists for our senseless invasion and murderous occupation, and sanctimoniously attributed to the contemptible medieval theology of the Taliban and traditional Islam in general...
As if the glorious lifestyle which apologists for mass murder intend to share with the women of Afghanistan didn't imply a few risks of its own.
For example, HIV.
While Americans are cursing the Taliban's evil brand of Islam, and attributing every abuse of every woman who was ever abused in Afghanistan to the Taliban, suppose the Taliban turned the tables and attributed every gruesome case of HIV in the United States to the evil American brand of "secular humanism" or "Christian capitalism" or whatever other name you may assign to the mélange of greed, stupidity, and sanctimoniousness that passes for American culture.
The point of this analogy is... that's how the Taliban see themselves, as protecting women against aspects of "modernity" like sexual promiscuity, and their "superstitious and primitive" religion may even inspire them to believe that sexual promiscuity may cause some godawful plague (like HIV) to descend upon the population!
So while "secular humanists" are bemoaning abuses in Afghanistan, the Taliban could just as well demand an answer to their questions, like...
How many lives has "secular humanism" sacrificed on the altar of "sexual freedom?"
In 2007, the CDC estimated that 583,298 people had died of AIDS so far, including 557,902 adults and adolescents, and 4,891 children.
And it's just as accurate (and includes just as much context) to claim that all those lives were sacrificed on the altar of sexual promiscuity by "secular humanism," as attributing every instance of abuse of every woman who was ever abused in Afghanistan to "primitive" Islam.
And yet this imperialist dogma excuses everything, and every time some lunatic in Afghanistan mutilates a woman, and every time Afghan children are murdered by American bombs and rockets and artillery, shit apologists for our murderous occupation smile their superior smiles and congratulate themselves for "saving" brown women from brown men.
But if you want to know what "colonial feminism" really means for the women of Afghanistan...
Note: Although I wouldn't expect shit-head apologists for genocide to comprehend simple maps and statistics which illustrate the differential prevalance of HIV in Islamic and non-Islamic countries in the third world, other readers are referred to my diary on this subject, which I posted in December, 2009.
Richard Haigh doesn't look like your typical African pastoralist. Unlike many Africans who grew up tending cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, Richard started his farm in 2007 at the age of 40. He quit his 9-5 job at a nongovernmental organization and bought 23 acres of land outside Durban, South Africa.
He wanted to totally change his life.
Today, he runs Enaleni Farm (enaleni means "abundance" in Zulu), raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Richard is cultivating GMO-free soya, as well as traditional maize varieties. "All the maize tells a story," he says. Like the sheep and cattle, many maize varieties are resistant to drought, climate change, and diseases, making them a smart choice for farmers all over Africa.
This sort of mixed-crop livestock system is becoming increasingly rare in South Africa, according to Richard, because of commercial farms that rely on monoculture crops rather than on diverse agricultural systems.
Richard likes to say that his farm isn't organic, but rather an example of how agro-ecological methods can work. He practices push-pull agriculture, which uses alternating intercropping of plants that repel pests (pushing them away from the harvest) and ones that attract pests (pulling them away from the harvest) to increase yields. He also uses animal manure and compost for fertilizer.
But perhaps the most important thing Richard is doing at Enaleni doesn't have to do with the various agricultural methods and practices he's using. It's about the "stories" he's telling on the farm. By showing local people the tremendous benefits that indigenous cattle and sheep breeds, and sustainably grown crops, can have for the environment and livelihoods, he's putting both an ecological and economic value on something that's been neglected. "Local people don't value what they have," says Richard, because extension agents have tended to promote exotic livestock and expensive inputs.
In addition, Richard asks himself "what can we do that is specific to where we live?" In other words, how can we promote local sources of agricultural diversity that are good for the land and for people?
Richard is also helping document the diversity on his farm. He's been sending blood samples to the South African National Research Foundation to help them build a DNA "hoof print" of what makes up a Zulu sheep. This sort of research is important not only for conserving the sheep, but for helping to increase local knowledge about the breeds that people have been raising for generations.
As a result of his conservation work, Richard and Enaleni Farm have been recognized by Slow Food International, which wants to work with the farm and local communities to find ways to ensure that the Zulu sheep don't disappear.
Richard hopes to share his knowledge about agriculture with local farmers, teaching them how to spot and prevent disease in indigenous sheep, as well as explaining agro-ecological methods of raising food.
(Note: I used to think that Chile, despite some problems, was a fairly stable nation. Fortunately, various members of "Pray for Chile" Facebook groups have shown me otherwise...)
Philanthropic Facebook users have once again sprung into action. With the earthquake in Chile, thousands of warmhearted social networking folks are able to prove their warmheartedness by joining one of many "Pray for Chile" groups. These groups are a lot like the "Pray for Haiti" groups, but with more Chile, less Haiti, and an even greater difficulty in locating this month's devastated country on a map.
And Chile certainly needs the well wishes of American internet addicts. Santiago, capital city of Chile, is, of course, a glorified shantytown of ramshackle houses, raw sewage, and South Americans, as Facebook informed us. But hey, Chile isn't America, nor is it a country in Western Europe, so it's probably just like Africa, only with less black people. (According to many Facebook groups, Africa is also a country in desperate need of Facebook groups; several Facebook users are hoping for an earthquake or two in Africa, because "Pray for Africa" groups show everyone how much the Facebook user in question cares for the less fortunate.)
Lib Porn contacted a few Facebookers who were some of the first warmhearted Samaritans to send relief to Chile via prayer, group membership, and, in some cases, Twitter updates. These users had just looked up the term infrastructure on Wikipedia and, after they found the term confusing and complicated, concluded that Chile had none. The seemed to think General Pinochet was kind of a dick, though. One Facebooker promptly created a group to urge Congress to intervene on behalf of the Chileans and remove this vicious dictator from office.
Lib Porn, after extensive Facebook searching, have discovered that Chile is indeed a squalid mess. While we unfortunately believed, prior to the spontaneous outburst of "Pray for Chile" groups, that Chile was actually a well-developed country and economic power in South America, thousands of Facebookers provided us the knowledge that Chile is little more than an open sewer full of MS-13 gangbangers and leftist death squads, much like the rest of South America, Africa, and certain neighborhoods in East LA.
Yet we can't help but think that we American Facebookers must do more for poor, impoverished, third world Chile. Certainly, we must post even more well wishes for the social and economically backward Chileans. It's a known fact on Facebook that American prayers and social networking groups have three times the positive impact on third world natural disaster victims than any other white country, and certainly more impact than those of piss poor South Americans (few of whom have ever heard of electricity, nor do they have power outlets in their shantytowns and, thus, they can't register on Facebook).
I play around with conspiracy theories sometimes. So what? It's fun and interesting. In fact, I mostly do current events, and most importantly, innovative policy and voting/election "theory." I feel these things are very important. I try to point out the traps involved in "IRV." I try to promote approval with runoff voting. It's the ONLY way to end the absurd two/three party system. I promote an equitarian society!!!
PIIGS is an unfortunate acronym for the relatively poor countries in the EU (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), but the real pigs in Europe are now and forever the Germans.
The top German pigs have been imposing a reasonable facsimile of the neo-con agenda on their unwary population for about a decade of stagnant wages and increasing job-insecurity...
Especially over the past decade, German manufacturers -- already juggernauts of industry -- became some of the most globally competitive companies. Just as American firms did, they turned to outsourcing and overseas production hubs. They kept salaries down at home, with average wages stagnating in Germany for a decade. Germany still has no uniform minimum wage, and aggressive cost-cutting has resulted in more and more Germans laboring in temporary or contract jobs with lower pay and less job security.
German consumers responded by saving their pfennigs, and German domestic consumption crashed while exports ballooned to a trade surplus of $184.9 billion, second only to Saudi Arabia.
So the benefits of neo-Reaganism in Germany accrued almost entirely to bankers and other billionaires, while the rank-and-file repaired their old cars and appliances, and patched up their pitiful overcoats.
Harharharhar!!!
Even in prosperous countries, almost everybody gets screwed!
Meanwhile the PIIGS used their brand new credit in the Eurozone to borrow piles of money, expand government services, and increase public-sector salaries.
But according to the dogma of globalization, neo-Reaganism's Democratic twin, all that debt would eventually be repaid by the rising tide of global prosperity, which lifts all boats, turns slumdogs into millionaires, and...
Harharharhar!!!
It never happened! Globalization was bullshit and top-down predation, and while Germany exported BMW's, Greece exported olives, and went broke.
Now Greek government bonds are about to turn into junk-bonds, and that would set off a godawful chain-reaction, because the forward-thinking Eurozone is about to disallow junk-bonds (rated less than A2) as loan collateral, and German banks are holding a heck of a lot of Greek sovereign debt.
That's the Trojan Horse in Berlin.
If the Greeks default (and junk-bond status for their bonds would push interest rates so high that default would be more or less inevitable), then German banks (and others) are faced with ugly write-downs, and aren't you glad to know that this alarming possibility has produced a booming market in credit default swaps!
Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin, Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash report in The New York Times.
Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.
These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.
"It's like buying fire insurance on your neighbor's house - you create an incentive to burn down the house," said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.
Now the Germans want the Greeks (and the rest of the PIIGS) to slash public salaries and services, raise taxes, and turn themselves into globally respectable poverty-zones, and Ireland's neo-con government has already complied.
"I can't even keep up with my own debts, never mind the nation's," Cullen said, shopping for cut-rate sausage at a discount supermarket he disdained to visit in better times. "I've got to spend 30 hours a week taxiing just to break even. Something else has got to give. I can't give any more."
Despite the pain its cutbacks are imposing on ordinary people, the conservative Irish government of Prime Minister Brian Cowen has won praise from the European Unionand the bond markets for its efforts to cut debt, prices and salaries.
But Greece is resisting, mainly on the basis of a (slightly veiled) threat to default on all those bonds German banks have already swallowed, and it would probably be a very good thing for all of us if all the PIIGS refused to implement the draconian austerity program which the Germans (and their tools at the ECB) want to impose, and a very bad thing if Europe stymies its feeble recovery with a lethal combination of higher taxes and diminished spending.
Tax and don't spend! What's not to like? It worked for Hoover!
"This premature fiscal tightening is the route to the Second Great Depression" - or at the very least, a long period of economic stagnation, warned Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Unlike many, if not most of the Southern areas, Boston's busing program was confined to the city limits, which was also partly why Boston became so explosive during the mid to late 1970's when mandatory school busing was implemented there. A Metropolitan solution was considered in a number of areas including Boston, but it got scrapped. People in Boston's all-white suburbs would not accept it, and Boston's black community, already small, and fearful that the limited amount of influence and power that they had, would be "diluted in the sea of suburbia", also rejected it.
However, the latest and greatest op-ed released by the RIAA has to take the cake. In it Bainwol tries to intertwine the recent attempted hack into the gMail accounts of human rights activists and theft of the company's source code, which it dubs as intellectual property in the same vein as music, with its efforts to fight intellectual property "theft" on P2P networks.
"In texting parlance, Google has finally had an OMG! moment when it comes to intellectual property," he writes. "Unfortunately, it took this theft of their IP to flip on the switch. Frankly, Google has never been very warm to the idea of copyright protections. Google routinely has sided with the "free access" (more aptly the "free of charge") crowd against those who actually create the intellectual property."
Never mind the fact, as Techdirt's Michael Masnick points out, that the stolen source code was never meant for sale or public consumption unlike the tracks and albums the music industry is having an increasingly tough time convincing people to buy in a crowded entertainment marketplace.
He even takes a swipe at its Google Books project whose sole purpose is to make knowledge more accessible to all, upset that some authors may not be able to profit as much from their works as they have in the past. "Remember the Big G's idea to digitize every book in the world and put it in their digital library? That went over so well that Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild of America sued to stop Google from creating the virtual library. Google argued that they were just trying to make the world a better place by making important works of literature available to people all over the globe," he adds. "A rather egalitarian idea (unless you're the authors and publishers who depend on people actually buying books in order for you to make a living)."
I doubt that many authors would have seen a diminished income from its plan, and in fact Google has already reached a $125 million dollar settlement deal with authors and publishers in exchange for the right to make millions of books available to the public.
Ok, this is not consipiracy. I don't think anyone would do this or think of it.
But I did hear recently that the Three Gorges Dam actually is causing the world to spin ever so slightly slower because of the volume of water it is holding.
Could there be a relationship to the timing of the fault releases?
While the shit-head Army spin-doctors are bellowing about our next great "operation" after "Operation Moshtarak" has completely destroyed the little of Marjah that existed before we arrived with our tanks and artillery and rockets and supersonic bombers and Marines trained to kill with incredible efficiency...
While idiots on the blogs are blathering about the evil Taliban,as if you shit-heads have a right to make life-and-death decisions about Afghanistan...
This man must die, because we say so, we Americans, the stupidest fucking sons-of-bitches on the face of the earth...
We Americans who can't even find Afghanistan on a map...
We Americans who can't speak any of the many, many languages of Afghanistan...
We Americans decide life and death in Afghanistan!
While this whole obscene circus was celebrating the murder of at least another dozen children in Marjah and planning our next great "operation" in Kandahar...
While this obscenely stupid dog-and-pony show was repeating itself for the hundredth or five hundredth time in Afghanistan, after nine goddamned years of our obscenely stupid occupation...
One reporter for the Associated Pressactually interviewed a couple of actual citizens of Afghanistan, and one particle of truth somehow found its way into the nauseating ocean of bullshit and outright lies that passes for "reporting" in the United States.
"There is no difference between Taliban and the civilian people. The Taliban are the rural people. They are our people," said Musa Jan, who arrived a week ago from Marjah. He spoke to the AP outside a makeshift warehouse in Lashkar Gah where the government was distributing essentials to war victims.
"The fight was continuing when we were trying to get out," said Jan, who said he paid about $35 for each of the three taxis. "That was all our money, and now we have to come here and beg."
Jan said his neighbors house was bombed by an aircraft, killing five occupants inside, including children.
Sultan Mohammed who fled last Friday from Marjah said he had to walk for several hours before a motorcyclist gave him a lift. He said the Taliban fled when the soldiers came to his area.
"But who are the Taliban? They are the rural people," he said.
Al Qaeda is gone. The "foreign militants" are gone.
Now it's just villagers, rural people, their people, and us...
Their people and us with our tanks and artillery and rockets and supersonic bombers and Marines trained to kill with incredible efficiency.
Today's health care summit didn't completely bring out the Republican's side in what they believe about health care.
Quite simply, they believe not everyone is entitled. Only the chosen ones are eligible. The computations for that involve God and the hand of the Free Markets and other things that don't involve anything the CBO can quantify.
Poor people. Ugly people. Different people. People that don't go to their churches are denied (i.e. corporation, golf club).
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We spent a couple of amazing days in Lilongwe, Malawi - although it was cut short because we took an emergency flight back to Canada for the funeral of Bernard's grandmother (by the time you are reading this, we are back in Africa).
Today, he runs 