HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It's also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery.
But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there's no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we've all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you're not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there's 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already.
So ... how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people "just say no" to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he's not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it's also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.
Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo? Andy Worthington has compiled a four-part series telling us their stories. Here's the disturbing bottom line:
[A]t least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.
I don't pretend to know enough to know whether these accounts are totally accurate, but they are filled with details, personal anecdotes, statistics and reports regarding individual court cases. It has a strong ring of authenticity. Further, these individual accounts corroborate general accounts produced elsewhere. I have no reason to disbelieve any part of Andy Worthington's work. He is a well-reputed journalist who has published elsewhere, such as this post at Huffington Post.
I am proud to be an American. America does much right in the world and has the potential to do much more that is admirable. This account by Andy Worthington, however, describes America at its shameful worst.
Barack Obama has quite a knack for addressing deep themes with his surface eloquence. What are those deep themes? Linguist George Lakoff has taken the time to set them out in a recent Huffpo article, and I think he's thought it through impressively. Lakoff's article is well worth a slow read. What is Obama really about?
Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.
Note that for Lakoff (and Obama), "progressive values" (#2) are the natural result of genuine and uncorrupted empathy:
Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider--who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire "free market," which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone's interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states--with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.
Here are Lakoff's seven insights into the ideas that drive Obama's spoken words:
1. Values Over Programs
2. Progressive Values are American Values
3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship
4. Protection and Empowerment
5. Morality and Economics Fit Together
6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk
7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language
On February 17, 2009, Pamela Olson gave a riveting talk on the details of daily life in the Palestinian West Bank. She gave her talk at a recent session of "TechTalks," a series of talks sponsored by Google.
Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor.
What is startling about this video are the many gorgeous scenes from the West Bank accompanying Olson's introduction to day-to-day life in the West Bank, something which Americans rarely learn of from the American media. The happiness and charm of the West Bank is covered in the first half of Olson's talk. But there is more to the West Bank, of course. Behind all of the charm:
looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels -- which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.
[Her story is] a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together -- a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.
Olson talks in detail about the numerous checkpoints, the wall and the Israeli settlements. She plainly explains that the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall and the settlements are indisputably illegal pursuant to international law. The wall now runs 70 km., cutting Palestinians off from each other. The wall is a "huge scar on the landscape." It keeps Palestinians from each other, keeps them from farming, keeps them from their own hospitals and keeps their children from getting to school. Even Palestinian politicians are prevented from having free access to their own people. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed, to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The Palestinians are essentially being herded into an ever-smaller prison. Olson backs up her statements with extensive photography.
Olson's vivid photos and her calm commentary makes the violence by Palestinians much more understandable. Watching this talk gave me more information than watching dozens of the simplistic stories told by the American Media. Perhaps this unrelenting stream of simplistic media stories is a major cause of America's unflinching support of Israeli's harsh policies toward the Palestinians. Sadly, it is a common Palestinian saying that "The silence of the West is worse than the bullets of the Israelis."
Here is Olson's talk, which lasts 80 minutes:
For more information on Pamela Olson, you can visit www.pamolson.org
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