I honestly never liked the idea of giving a goat as a “Christmas present” to people in the developing world, and found a couple of articles about it that I thought I would share with you.
From Reuters Alertnet: (the article includes plenty of links)
From Times UK:
From the Independent:
This last articles explores the selection of available animal-giving charities available.
Or here is a better gift: impeach people who invade other countries based on false pretenses.
First, as you now know, the long effort by King Leopold II of Belgium to bring Congo under his control was driven by his avid quest for a commodity central to industry and transportation: rubber. Does that remind you of anything?
What’s more, the king justified his grab for Congo’s natural resources with much talk about bringing philanthropy and Christianity to darkest Africa. Now what did that remind you of?
Leopold cleared at least $1.1 billion in today’s dollars during the 23 years he controlled Congo, and his businessmen friends made additional huge sums. Much of the money flowed into companies with special royal concession rights to exploit the rain forest. Final question, for extra credit: Do those companies remind you of anything? If you mentioned Halliburton or DynCorp, you’re right again.
As a reader of history, you must have been interested, I’m sure, in something else in the Congo story: the case of another world leader facing his own Abu Ghraib scandal.
Of course, some backstory is needed for all of this. is the author of among other books, of , that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by Leopold II of Belgium. Basically King Leopold justified his grab of Congo’s natural resources - notably rubber - with talks of bringing Christianity & philanthropy to Africa.
Then why Hochschild’s op-ed? Because George W. Bush supposedly read his book. So Mr. Hochschild was very pleased that Dubya read his book, and he not only compares Dubya with King Leopold, but has a couple of suggestions for Bush as well:
For your next assignment, Mr. President, how about a different sort of reading? Ask Laura to stuff your Christmas stocking with books about people who’ve had the courage to change their minds. One former tenant of the house you live in, Lyndon B. Johnson, entered politics as a traditional segregationist but ended up doing more for civil rights than any American president of his century. Another, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spent half his life in the U.S. military but gave us (a little late) an eloquent warning about the military-industrial complex.
Another ex-military man, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps, won the Medal of Honor twice, but then ended up denouncing the oil companies and agribusiness corporations he realized that he had been fighting for in U.S. interventions in Central America.
You think Bush is going to listen to Hochschild? Of course not - the man barely listens to what the American people say of him.
That it’s taboo to talk about it in the U.S. Or that you will get pounded by the U.S. media and the American Israel Lobby for even daring to bring it up. Even if you are a former president of the U.S. and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, a.k.a. Jimmy Carter. :
In fact, if there is a failing in Carter’s stance, it is that he is too kind to the Israelis, bending over backward to assert that he is only writing about the occupied territories. Israel itself, he says, is a democracy. This would come as a surprise to the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live as second-class citizens in the Jewish state. The poverty rate among Israeli Arabs is more than twice that of the Jewish population. Those Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank are not permitted to get Israeli residency for their spouses. And Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the military or the country’s intelligence services and thus lack the important personal connections and job networks available to veterans, are systematically shut out of good jobs. Any Jew, who may speak no Hebrew or ever been to Israel, can step off a plane and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian living abroad whose family’s roots in Palestine may go back generations is denied citizenship.
The conditions in Palestine and the Gaza strip are already a full-blown humanitarian crisis, yet every time the United Nations gets together to pass a resolution against this display of unilateral violence, the resolution always gets vetoed by the U.S. That’s funny, the U.S. believes in the U.N. only when it is convenient to do so:
But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown humanitarian crisis. “Gaza is in its worst condition ever,” Gideon Levy wrote recently in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz. “The Israel Defense Forces have been rampaging through Gaza–there’s no other word to describe it–killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately…. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about ‘the end of the occupation’ and ‘partitioning the land’ now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before…. This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment.”
And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions carrying out gun battles in the streets, Ha’aretz reporter Amira Hass bitterly notes, “The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.’”
Go read the rest of the piece. It was written by Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. And by the way, who are you going to trust, the U.N. & Jimmy Carter, or president Bush and his band of neocons?
These news pieces come by courtesy of the IPS News Service, an awesome, but overlooked in the U.S., news agency.
Take this article by IPS, titled :
“I wish I could flee to any third world country and work in garbage collection rather than stay here and live like a frightened rat,” Adel Mohammed Aziz, a teacher from Baghdad told IPS. “We are all living in fear for our lives; death chases us all around..”
Live in a third world country and work in the garbage, than live in Iraq. How does that square with President’s Bush rosy “we are winning in Iraq” babble talk?
Also, forget about children in Iraq enjoying any of the fruits of the “democracy” Bush has brought there. Not only is Iraq lagging in all health indicators, :
Statistics released by the ministry in October showed that a mere 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to roughly 75 percent of students who were attending classes the previous year, according to the Britain-based NGO Save the Children.
Just before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003, school attendance was nearly 100 percent.
Iraqis are forgetting almost what a child needs. Dr. Ahmed Aaraji of the Baghdad Societal Organisation, an Iraqi NGO which monitors the state of Iraqi schools and families in an effort to assist families where possible, is trying to remind everyone what that should be.
[…]Iraq was awarded The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. At that time, literacy rates for women were among the highest of all Islamic nations.
(All emphasis is mine)
Not only that, but - yes, even eclipsing the situation in some African nations.
The displacement of Iraqis from Iraq is currently the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis, according to the Washington-based group Refugees International which works towards providing humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people.
The United Nations estimates that at least 2.3 million Iraqis have fled the growing violence in their country. They estimate that 1.8 million Iraqis have fled to surrounding countries, while another half million have vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq. An estimated 40,000 people are leaving Iraq every month for Syria alone, according to the UN.
And that is not counting the 600,000 innocent Iraqis that have died in the Iraq War (), so yes, we can conclude that it is pretty fucking bad for Iraqis.
At least, ever-growing faithful readers, you can rest assured that our Decider-in-Chief . The president of the U.S. started a war on false pretenses that thus far has resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilinas, lost all of our allies, bled the treasury dry, and he’s resting well.
In a very short time, this blog has become quite popular, receiving a couple of links from , one of the most popular blogs on the net, and from various established blogs on WordPress as well.
I would just like to thank everyone for their support. News about human rights, global health, climate change, and such are not very popular with the mainstream media, so if you keep supporting me (no money or Amazon wishlists, just visit me!), I will keep posting good, thoughtful articles.
Please excuse the erratic posting behavior - 4-5 posts one day, none the next - as I am in El Salvador at the moment and do not always have access to internet access.
Also notice, the news and articles I reference in my posts are rarely in the mainstream media, and very few blogs carry them. So if you want to stay on the cutting edge and get articles you will find nowhere else on the blogosphere, continue visiting the Truly Equal
A regional nuclear war between Third World nations could trigger planetwide cooling that would likely ravage agriculture and kill millions of people, scientists reported Monday.
[…]Scientists, reporting their findings at the American Geophysical Conference in San Francisco, said vast urban firestorms ignited by war would send thick, dark clouds into the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun’s rays and cooling much of the planet, with severe climatic and agricultural results.
The soot might remain in the upper atmosphere for up to a decade.
“All hell would break loose,” said Prof. Richard Turco of UCLA’s department of atmospheric and ocean sciences.
In some places, the planet could cool more than it did during the so-called Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when glaciers advanced over much of northern Europe, said Alan Robock of Rutgers University, speaking Monday at a news conference at the Moscone Center, where the conference is being held this week.
The planet could cool more, and agriculture would be impossible. Now no one believes a nuclear war could start soon, but the neocons - those crazed, power-hungry maniacs - are actually so ignorant that they think they have to push that button.
I just thought this was to cool to not pass it around. This is from the good folks at the :
“Thanks to the Center’s wild new Web site, now you can use your cell phone for calls of an entirely different nature: rousing ringtones of the croaks, chirps and sensational songs of rare and endangered animals from around the world.”
Just go to , and easily download free ringtones featuring authentic sounds of some of the world’s most threatened owls, tropical birds, frogs, toads and marine mammals.
Our free Web site allows you to listen to all of the wildlife ringtones - including the Blue-throated Macaw, Beluga Whale, Band-bellied Owl, Mountain Yellow-legged Frog, Yosemite Toad, or any one of 40 other endangered wildlife species - and have your favorites sent directly to your phone with one easy click.”
Of course they can have children, but they need to be fully aware and educated about their own reproductive rights.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health nongovernmental organisation (NGO), research in both the developed and developing world suggests that HIV status does not significantly dampen people’s desire to have children. As more and more HIV-infected South Africans access life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, the question of whether or not to have a child, and how to do so as safely as possible, is bound to become more common.
Here is some more:
The disapproval of friends and family, and even some health workers, may deter those less well-informed than Madonsela from learning more about their options. “Most people think if you’re positive you don’t have the right to be in a relationship, or to have a baby,” she said.
HIV-positive pregnant women in many countries face pressure by health workers to have abortions or to be sterilised, according to the International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW).
Despite these obstacles, a small but growing number of HIV-positive men and women are deciding to have children. In the developed world there are a number of options: a process called ’sperm washing’, which separates sperm from HIV-causing agents before being used for insemination, is safest for couples where a positive man wants to avoid the risk of infecting his negative female partner or reinfecting his positive partner; artificial insemination is the safest way of conceiving for couples with a positive woman and a negative man.
To say the least. This is not news to anyone that has been following the situation in Darfur, but the women in Darfur .
A new study of internally displaced women in Sudan’s South Darfur illuminates the bleak status of women’s mental health in the volatile region. The study, which will be published in January by the International Medical Corps (IMC), found that although humanitarian aid helps meet women’s basic nutritional needs, the mental health of displaced women in Darfur is largely neglected.
Since the Darfur crisis began in 2003, more than 2 million people have been displaced internally within Sudan or have fled to nearby Chad. Though the region is difficult for aid workers and researchers to access, IMC was able to examine displaced women in refugee camps in South Darfur.
It gets worse. Read the rest of the article, and read the report from the International Medical Corps .
Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.
I wonder what could have provoked that behavior in the bears?
The behaviour change suggests that global warming is responsible for this revolution in ursine behaviour, says Juan Carlos García Cordón, a professor of geography at Santander’s Cantabria University, and a climatology specialist.
[…]We cannot prove that non-hibernation is caused by global warming, but everything points in that direction.”
Hey doc, if you don’t find the answers you are looking for, you might want to ask Sen. James M. Inhofe, conservative idiot from Oklahoma,
Oh well, screw the bears. We’ll just show the kids old Coca-Cola ads instead.
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