05 Jan 2011
Random Thoughts

An idealist is that person who does not believe that evil is an intrinsic property of the universe. A realist is a person who's sure of it.

All monotheist religions are tolerant as long as they are the ones who must be tolerated. They're not very good at tolerating others. At their very theological core they are by definition intolerant: There Can Be Only One! They're the Highlanders of theology.

We've gotten into the habit of watching "ghost chaser" shows - quite amusing! There's something so absurd about watching tattooed, mohawked and pierced 20-somethings run around in the dark saying things like "So, are you dead, or what?". The gadgets they use are amazing - well, amazingly stupid. Random background noise and codec artifacts become "spirit voices", or "EVPs". Even better is the spirit box: a speech generator running on some undefined software that acts as a sort of hi-tech Ouija board. I feel like we've discovered as video version of one of our favorite publications of all time: Weekly World News.

An even older (and perhaps odder) habit of ours is going to sleep by Coast to Coast AM, whose predecessor "The Art Bell Show" was a favorite late night habit of mine when I was on the road in the late 80's and early 90's. The show is probably 50% commercials, selling survival kits, gold coins, and investment advice. The remainder of the time is taken up with international callers discussing aliens (as in space), reptoids, ghosts, various versions of the apocalypse and who knows what else. Somehow, and I can't explain it, it's very relaxing, and puts us to sleep in a matter of minutes.

21:48 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Does International Aid Keep Haiti Poor?

Your tax dollars at work.

In the 1970s, Haiti imported just 19 percent of its food. During that decade, the U.S. government, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund began creating development plans designed to spur growth in the country's manufacturing sector and to move large parts of the workforce into urban communities. As part of the strategy, Haitian governments after François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled for 15 years until 1971, lowered the country's tariffs for food imports to as low as 3 percent, while the United States raised barriers to exports from Haiti. As Alex Dupuy, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University, wrote on Anthropologyworks.com recently, the island "went from being self-sufficient in the production of rice, sugar, poultry, and pork to becoming the fourth-largest importer of subsidized US rice in the world and the largest importer of foodstuffs from the US in the Caribbean."

(link) [Slate]

20:21 /Agriculture | 2 comments | permanent link

African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In

There is precedent for this thievery...

The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.

(link) [New York Times]

20:08 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link