Thinking After Crisis

News and analysis…

Largely overshadowed in the American media by the Eric Massa soap opera, on March 8th there was a tragic massacre in Jos, Nigeria of several hundred people. Coming out of this horrific event are questions about ethno-religious conflict, addressing religious differences in circumstances of tension, root issues of political and economic inequality, and most importantly how to overcome differences to see others as human beings.

Alas! A Blog | I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mistrust, and hatred of the Muslims in Nigeria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nigerian Muslims, not about people who follow Islam in general, and I believe her, and she tells stories about her own experiences in Nigeria and the experiences of the people she knows to justify herself. The fact that she makes this distinction, of course, suggests that the issues at stake are not really religious, but the fact that they are expressed religiously–in terms of spirituality and morality and the one true path to God–makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our invasion of Iraq and ousting of Saddam Hussein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats–check out this NPR interview with Deborah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the status of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in religious terms. And when I think about how may more examples I could list, I cannot help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, political; maybe the god or gods all these people fight over is just a way of not having to take responsibility for their own politics, their own desire for power, their own inability to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vulnerable; maybe the need to make your religion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the coward who cowers and the coward who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an undergraduate in fact, that I have known personally someone who could place her or himself so easily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thoroughly forget that the other side is also inhabited by people; and yet even as I write that, it would be dishonest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly religious terms, in a way that denied the humanity of the other side.

That we all have this capacity within us is by now a cliche, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you cannot accept it–which is not the same thing as approving of it, or allowing it to go unchallenged–then there can no longer be a real friendship. This is the question that I am confronting.

Global Comment |Nigeria is one of the world’s major oil producers and seventh largest exporter, yet many of its citizens live in abject poverty. The Niger Delta region of the country, home to the nation’s oil, is synonymous with violence and the kidnapping trade. Tribal and religious divides continue to claim lives, the most recent being the January Jos riots, where over 300 people died.

Thanks to the Christmas Day “Crotch Bomber,” as Umaru Farouk Abdulmutallah is now popularly known, Nigeria on a terrorism watch list, making life extremely hard for Nigerians as they travel. Lest we forget, Nigeria is internationally perceived as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. We are also known as 419ers, i.e. email scammers.

Following the Abdulmutallah incident, the US was quick to add us to the terrorist watch list, yet there was no president or representative to speak for us. A few members of the senate threatened to sever ties with the US, and that was laughed upon.

Keep in mind that we have a rich cultural heritage, and have made some great contributions to the world of art and culture. From the ‘Benin Bronzes’ to Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and, from my generation, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, we have made our mark. However, when it really counts, what we are really known for is instability.

I have watched the recent political dance in my country of birth with excitement, shame, and a sense of anger. Again and again, 150 million people have been continuously let down. It seems some part of the population have become so used to it, they excuse the bad governance or else get blindly religious about it, saying, ‘God will make things better.’ I am tired of this unending hope and hunger for real change.

Get Religion | The most frustrating element of all of this is that there is no clear way to establish facts in this conflict, a journalistic nightmare in which the integrity of both the regional and national government agencies (and the military) is in question. It is also clear that economic and ethnic factors are crucial. Yet, on the ground, the language and the imagery is primarily religious.

If you doubt me on that, check out this vivid report in the Wall Street Journal. The language is enough to make anyone shudder in a pew:

“At a mass burial Monday in Dogo Nahawa, site of the worst violence, angry residents talked of revenge as they gathered around a large pit and scattered dirt on several dozen charred and bloodied bodies, some brought from neighboring villages. When an infant was lowered into the pit, women broke out in wails.

A village chief chastised area youth for not being ready to fight. “This is a lesson,” the chief said. “Now is the time for everyone to wake up. Elders are calling you youths to come out.”

An elderly woman prayed at the edge of the burial pit, chanting. “By God’s grace we will enter their villages and kill their women and children,” she repeated.”

Horrors. Clearly it is impossible to write about this story — in a nation that is literally divided in half by religion — without dealing with the religious elements.

It is also crucial, whenever possible, to put names on these “rights groups” when they are quoted providing facts about attacks in the past and present. Some of these groups are neutral and some of them are not. We are, literally, dealing with facts and numbers that are leading to bloodshed.

Reuters |Residents of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat, about 15 km (9 miles) south of the central city of Jos, buried dozens of bodies including those of women and children in a mass grave on Monday following the attacks, which they blamed on Muslim herders.

The raids were in apparent retaliation for four days of violence around Jos, the capital of Plateau state, in January which killed several hundred people, many of them in an attack on the mostly Muslim settlement of Kuru Karama.

“Better security is clearly vital but it would be a mistake to paint this purely as sectarian or ethnic violence, and to treat it solely as a security issue,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said.

“What is most needed is a concerted effort to tackle the underlying causes of the repeated outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence which Nigeria has witnessed in recent years, namely discrimination, poverty and disputes over land.”

The latest unrest at the heart of Africa’s most populous nation comes at a turbulent time, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua remains too sick to govern.

NY Breaking News | Issues behind Nigeria Massacre: The latest Nigeria massacre has rattled the whole world.They have been termed “communal clashes,” or “religious conflict” but economic and political issues are the actual cause. Thin lines of differences lie between religious, ethnic, political, and economic divisions in Plateau State, owing to which they reinforce each other. Muslims in the state are from Hausa- or Fulani-speaking nomadic groups, most of who are herdsmen by occupation or do trivial businesses.

They are considered strong supporters of the opposition All Nigeria People’s Party. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which is in power both at state and national levels, has the allegiance of Christian Berom, Anaguta, and Afisare groups that traditionally have been farmers. With national elections due next year, the national government finds it tough to check the violence out of a fear that actions may estrange its potential political groups.

Any dispute turns into a religious riot at once in Plateau State. Sometimes hatred of Christian farmers against the Hausa-speaking Muslims’ coming from the North in search of grasslands for their animals takes the shape of a dispute over land. Again, craze for power also falls prey to religious bias. Muslims and Christians live in separate areas even in the state capital Jos.
This Muslim Christian conflict in the state has been because of power craze. Power corridor allows you access to enormous money, and so your community also gets share of it. Around 80% of Nigeria’s GDP runs through the state and local government channels. Therefore, to cling to power, one often takes detour by triggering ethnic or religious hatred or pushing people out of home to stop them voting.

And Nigeria’s classification of citizens between “indigenous” and “settlers” makes the situation severe. In Plateau State, this system creates local divisions as well. The Hausa-speaking Muslims are often referred to as settlers. These “settlers” are barred from taking up certain state positions, which gives rise to hatred among some who find violence the only way out.
 

Best of the web…

Women Flyers Honored 65 Years After WWII Service  | CNN

Some 65 years after their service, a group of former civilian women pilots whose unheralded work was key to helping the U.S. effort in World War II were honored Wednesday with the Congressional Gold Medal.

Fewer than 300 Women Airforce Service Pilots are still alive. About 175 of them, along with thousands of family members, traveled to Washington for the ceremony at the Capitol.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted that the event had one of the largest crowds ever gathered inside the Capitol.

Deanie Parrish, a WASP who joined in 1943 at the age of 21, thanked members of Congress, those in attendance and members of the media.

“I believe this is the day that when the people of America no longer hesitate in answering, ‘Do you know who the WASPs are?’” she said to the crowd filled with old and young alike. “It’s because of the media that that will happen.”

Ban the Box: People With Convictions Deserve a Second Chance  |  Alternet

On March 8, Governor Richardson signed legislation making New Mexico the second state in the nation to “ban the box.” This victory lays the groundwork for other states to proactively address the need of people being released from jail and prison to find work and truly rebuild their lives. Employment is a key factor in preventing recidivism and this law offers an innovative solution to not only save precious taxpayer dollars, but also save lives and keep families together.

Senate Bill 254 “bans the box” by removing the question on public job applications asking if a person has a criminal conviction. By eliminating the box, people with convictions can be considered on equal status with other job applicants, instead of being immediately labeled and dismissed as a “criminal” unfit for the job. The law is very clear that public employers still have the right to ask about convictions status, but only during the finalist interview process. Employers can also perform criminal background checks if it is relevant or required for the position.

MySpace, HerSpace: Daughters of Generation Facebook  |  Mona Eltahawy

Mona Eltahawy from paul daugherty on Vimeo.

Band Aids and Beyond

Analysis…

The Ethiopian government is asking for emergency aid of $285 million to feed 6.2 million people.  The country, faced with extreme drought and 4 years of bad harvests, is requesting donations from the international community.  A report titled Band Aids and Beyond calls on international donors to adopt a new approach that focuses on preparing communities to prevent and deal with disasters before they strike. The report also focuses on providing resources for communities, such as irrigation for crops, grain stores and wells.

Matthew Yglesias | I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa (there are problems beyond Ethiopia) as a reason not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. But I do think it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t look at individual elements of our foreign policy in isolation, or see the Afghanistan situation with tunnel-vision. Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa? Alternatively, if the US lacks the tools and skills to solve profound governance and economic problems in the Horn of Africa why do we have the needed skills and tools to solve the in Central Asia?

The Moderate Voice | The human race, generally, tends not to want to act in its long-term best interests, reacting to emergencies rather than proactively avoiding or planning for them. So, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether OxFam will be heeded. But the fact is that drought need not lead to famine, as tragically, it so often has in Ethiopia and elsewhere.

NPR Blogs | Ethiopia is asking for $285 million in emergency food aid for 6.2 million people facing famine. Oxfam says that the imported aid helps, but that the country needs longer-term investment in irrigation and well systems to avoid a food crisis every time drought strikes.

Shakesville | In the long term, Ethiopia needs “drought-resistant seeds and technical support to incorporate soil conservation and soil improvements on their small plots of land” and “more family planning services are needed so the population doesn’t double again in another 25 years.” The international director of Oxfam, Penny Lawrence, also notes: “If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them.”
So, Shakesville can go in one of two directions (or both): In support of providing immediate food aid (Americans: urge your congress people!), and in support of providing long-term tools.

News…

Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming  |  Pew Research Center

There has been a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. And fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem – 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking  |  NYTimes

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

Does Military Service Turn Young Men into Sexual Predators?  |  AlterNet

A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the Gulf War found that almost 8 in 10 had been sexually harassed during their military service, and 30 percent had been raped.
Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause’s with silence, or denial, or by blaming “a few bad apples.” But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook.

‘Family values’ of Mexico drug gang  |  BBC

They decapitate, torture, and extort. Then they pray, and donate to charity.
The “Familia” cartel is perhaps the most extreme example of the paradoxical enemy which Mexico faces as it tries to defeat organised crime.
It is a fight which would be much easier if the cartels were simply maverick gangs on the fringe of society.
But they are, in many areas, part of society.

News for July 3

Price Check on Health Care

Global retail giant Walmart this week announced that it’s backing an employer mandage on health care; that is, the idea that employers must either provide health insurance coverage for its employees or provide cash compensations so that they can obtain it elsewhere. Not only is tradtionally union-busting Walmart supporting this idea, which many U.S. businesses are against, but it also is standing with liberal think tank the Center for American Progress and the Service Employees International Union in its support. Is Walmart changing its image, or is the move business as usual? Links include:

ProfessorBainbridge (via Andrew Sullivan) |  “I think the unionization point is significant even if there is no Wal-Mart–SEIU deal. When unions have tried to organize Wal-Mart, they’ve always used health benefits as one of their selling points. If there’s a public option (or, better yet, a single payer plan), Wal-Mart gets to defang a strong argument for unionization at the tax payer’s expense.

“But there’s something else going on here too. Cannon claims that ‘Wal-Mart is a capitalist success story.” (Or, I guess, he thinks it used to be.)

“In fact, however, Wal-Mart has been suckling at the government teat for decades, transferring costs to the tax payer whenever possible.”

GOOD Magazine |  “The company has never been shy to admit that, when it adopts social causes, the reasoning is less about altruism and more about cash flow. Lee Scott, the company’s outgoing CEO, admitted as much when he first began Wal-Mart’s massive environmental push in 2005. At the time he said, “As I got exposed to the opportunities we had to reduce our impact, it became even more exciting than I had originally thought: It is clearly good for our business …” Scott’s successor, Mike Duke, underscored that commitment last week, at Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting. “This is not optional,” he said. “It’s not something of the past. This is all about the future.””

Ezra Klein @The Washington Post |  “This isn’t, of course, a story of altruism. By being of use to the administration, Wal-Mart ensures that its concerns will be heard and heeded. By publicly associating itself with health reform, the company repairs some of the damage SEIU and others have done to its reputation in recent years. And, in a more macro sense, by throwing its weight behind strict cost controls, Wal-Mart makes it likelier that it gets the largest of all possible benefits: an eventual slowing in the double-time march of health-care costs.”

• Related link: An Interview with Wal-Mart Spokesman David Tovar  |  Ezra Klein

Pandagon |  “The likely employer mandate that Wal-Mart wants to see would cost every business that doesn’t provide benefits to part-timers, particularly those that finagle hours so that full-time employees are nominally part-time.  The clearest example of this?  Retailers, particularly grocery stores.  If there’s one operational tactic that Wal-Mart has perfected, it’s short-term loss for long-term gain.  Five years of an employer mandate on most small margin retailers around the country will put many of them out of business, leaving Wal-Mart with an effective monopoly across most of the country.”

Megan McArdle @The Atlantic |  “Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest private employer.  Target and Macy’s probably won’t have a seat at the table.  So Wal-Mart can influence the rules in ways that benefit Wal-Mart at the expense of the competition.  This is partly because the regulators often cycle into jobs at the firms they regulate, but also simply because the regulator’s attention is finite, so being consistently at the table allows you to shape their views over time.”

Homophobia: Who is Responsible?  |  Womanist Musings

Renee @Womanist Musings shares a video of Somali youths harassing a gay man that sets the stage for good insights about the intersections of race, sexuality, colonialism and education. She says:

These children have been failed by their parents, the education system and every other agent of socialization.  It is easy to look at what happened and feel rage because this man should not have been attacked, however I feel the anger would be misplaced if it is targeted solely at these children.  They are a product of our society and if we feel anger, it should be at the way that we have failed to endow them with a sense of value.  Each and every single person matters and until we can pass this message on to our children, we are avoiding the most basic lesson in how to be a decent human being.

Another display of the status of LGBTQI rights in the world is found at FP Passport, which marked Thursday’s decriminalization of homosexuality in India by posting a map of the countries left in the world where homosexuality is still a crime, and the six countries where gay couples have full legal rights: South Africa, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Norway and Canada.

Also, Queers United has a link to YouTube’s full-length upload of the Oscar-Award-winning documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

A General Theory about Politicians’ Infidelity  |  The Monkey Cage

Since South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s admission of his “soul-mate” romance and infidelity, political and social commentators have been comparing Sanford to former Demcratic candidate for president Sen. John Edwards, and wondered why it is that extra-marital dalliances seem to sideline Democrats (remember also Gary Hart? Eliot Spitzer?) but not Republicans. John Sides asks another question: Are politicians, irrespective of party, just more prone to cheat? And, if so, why?

I do not know the answer to the first question. Thinking about recent presidents, my categories are: definitely yes (FDR, JFK, WJC), there-are-rumors-but-just-rumors (LBJ, GHWB), I-have-no-idea (RWR, HST, DDE, RMN), and almost-certainly-not (JEC, GWB, BHO). So I wouldn’t hazard any definite answers based on this list. This article suggests some sort of systematic family dysfunction among the GOP’s class of 1994, although the stories there don’t necessarily involve affairs.

But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that politicians are more likely to have an affair. Why? A typical class of explanations revolves around personality, such as arrogance, hubris, neediness, or a desire for attention. Politicians are presumed to be “higher” in these qualities, and this leads them to have affairs. The counterfactual: take these same individuals out of political life — say, into the corporate world or some other occupational sphere — and they would be equally likely to have affairs.

He ends by musing that opportunity plus the kind of self-confident personality that leads one to seek higher office may be a killer indicator for cheating.

Salon’s Gene Lyons also weighs in on the “Do Republicans cheat more than Democrats?” discussion and says the only difference between the two stripes of politicians is that the GOP polices personal morals more strictly than do the Dems.

Theologically speaking, the two parties have divided the Seven Deadly Sins as follows: Republicans oppose lust, sloth and envy; Democrats scorn gluttony, greed, wrath and pride. Little progress is reported.

Rep. Barton: Obama Should Be Worried about Carbongate  |  TPMMuckraker

Yesterday we wrote about Environmental Protection Agency economist Al Carlin, the author of a report that casts doubt on climate change. Carlin’s study wasn’t taken as seriously by the agency as he’d been hoping — perhaps because he’s not a scientist, and because his bosses never asked him to produce it.

But his cause has become a favorite of right-wingers, who suddenly believe science to be sacred, and are charging that the Obama administration is “suppressing” a report whose conclusions it dislikes. The anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute first publicized Carlin’s report last week. Since then, Carlin has discussed his “findings” with Glenn Beck on Fox News, and on Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for a criminal investigation into the issue.

Now, Rep. Joe Barton is taking the outrage to a new level. This morning on America’s Newsroom, the industry-friendly Texas Republican accused the EPA of suppressing the report, and declared that “just as Nixon had Watergate, Obama now has Carbongate to deal with.”

Watch.

Designer Vaginas: Is Female Circumcision Coming Out of the Closet?  |  Truthdig

In this article for Truthdig, Gbemisola Olujobi outlines the latest cosmetic surgery trend for women, labiaplasties and genital rejuvenations, and asks how this quest for a porn-fueled standard of beauty differs with female circumcision practices of some cultures in Africa. She writes:

At the end of the day, it looks like female circumcision and FGCS are done for very much the same reasons. According to Simone Davis, professor and gender theorist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, among the key motivating factors raised by African women who favor female genital surgeries are beautification, transcendence of shame and the desire to conform. These clearly matter as well to American women seeking cosmetic surgery on their labia, says Davis.

And according to McNamara, although most plastic surgeons usually insist that the women they treat seek the procedure to enhance their own sexual satisfaction, some concede that many women have a consultation at the urging of their husbands, boyfriends or partners who want increased sensation for themselves.

These procedures—vaginoplasty, labiaplasty, hymenoplasty, female circumcision or genital mutilation—all have one thing in common. In McNamara’s words, they “highlight the constructedness of the sexed female subject because her body requires constant maintenance to adhere to gender requirements.”

While she agrees that the process through which her own circumcision occurred was less-than hygenic, the intent and outcome behind it were little different than those behind the high-priced surgeries. Olujobi pokes at the blindspot in the Western eye that condemns aesthetic practices in one part of the world and ignores those in its own back yard.

Speaking Out — Silence is the Enemy

Writing for “The Intersection,” a blog at Discover Magazine’s website, Sheril Kirshenbaum shared her own story of sexual assault to kick off the “Silence Is the Enemy” campaign.  The goal of this campaign is to overwhelm the silence on this issue with a chorus of voices lifting up the plight of women and children who continue to suffer humiliation, injury, and abuse.  Throughout the month of June we at Xenia along with others in the blogosphere will be doing our part to offer a voice to those who are not being heard.

A good place to start is to simply take a closer look at the world around us.  Rape has been and is continuing to be used to intimidate and terrorize women throughout territories caught up in ethnic conflict.  CNN’s website hosts a report by Nic Robertson that sheds light on the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Rape is a way of life for Darfur’s women  |  CNN.com

Thousands of women as young as 4 caught in the middle of the struggle between rebel forces and government-backed militias have become victims of rape, they say, with some aid groups claiming that it is being used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing.

“That is one of the biggest issues in Darfur: the rapes, and crimes against women and children,” said Micheal Fryer, police commissioner of UNAMID, the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed to try to tackle the violence.

Relief workers say they are powerless to stop the attacks and say that if they do speak out, they fear that the Sudanese government will tell them to leave the country.

Humanitarian group Refugees International said in a report last year that rape was “an integral part of the pattern of violence that the government of Sudan is inflicting upon the targeted ethnic groups in Darfur.”

Other voices are also reporting violence in Africa.  A report from the Church of Christ in Congo details the ongoing atrocities there in the wake of the recent civil war.

Accompaniment of Women and Girl Rape Victims Report  |  GlobalMinistries.org

The recent civil war following the departure of long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko lasted six years before there was relative calm.  Although the war has officially ended, there are still skirmishes in the eastern part of Congo.  The people of Congo have known many forms of violence – the death of more than five million people, the violent rape of women and girls, and the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the environment.  Every region of the country has been affected; however, the eastern provinces continue to be plagued by atrocities.  This is especially true of women and young girls who continue to be raped on a daily basis, with hundreds of new cases being reported.

These offer a couple of examples of the ongoing sexual violence in Africa.  However, this is only part of a much broader concern.  A recent law passed in now democratic Afghanistan legalizes marital rape, continuing a pattern of patriarchal male dominance and the continued decline of women’s rights.

Shea-Porter: Afghanistan needs more help than U.S. can give  |  New Hampshire Union Leader

A recently passed law that severely restricts women’s rights led the congresswomen to draft a letter to President Hamid Karzai denouncing the legislation before it can be fully enacted.

“This law has raised a furor, both among the Afghan public and the international community, because of its blatant violation of the fundamental human rights of women,” they wrote. “The Shiite Personal Status Law legalizes marital rape, undermines womens’ parental rights in divorce proceedings, and restricts their rights to movement.”

While pointing out how rape is used to demoralize and control women overseas is important, we need to be reminded of the ongoing problem here in our own country.  A more recent development growing out of the drug violence in Mexico is now being reported here in the United States.

“Rape Trees” Found Along Southern US Border  |  Latina.com

Although many politicians would like to believe that the violence will stay to the south of the border, the reality is that it has already begun to affect South Western states. The revelation that Phoenix is now the “kidnapping capital” of the United States only affirms what many residents already knew.

A new method of marking territory has crossed over into the United States. “Rape trees” are popping up in Southern Arizona and their significance is horrific and disgusting. These “rape trees” are places where cartel members and coyotes rape female border crossers and hang their clothes, specifically undergarments, to mark their conquest and territory.

It is past time for us to overcome the silence and start speaking out about the violence perpetrated against women both here and abroad.  As more people become aware of the problem, the hope for overcoming this travesty grows.  Help spread the word so that we might work to bring an end to violence against women.

• Related articles: News for June 3  |  The Xenia Institute
• Related articles: Don’t Look Away: Learn about Domestic Violence  |  The Xenia Institute

News for May 29

The High Costs of Health Care

Atul Gawande has a riveting piece in this month’s New Yorker examining why health care is so expensive in, of all places, McAllen, Texas. Gawande, a physician himself, looks at hospital practices, doctor referals, the general health of the population and insurance availability, and his conclusion lays the responsibility at the feet of capitalism and the reckless entrepreneurism to which medicine is turning. Gawande writes:

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen.

It’s a grand narrative that’s generating links and discussion across the blogosphere over what the government and the public can do about the rising costs.

xpostfactoid links to the article and writes:

Creating the right incentives — or unwinding the wrong ones — is complicated. Some institutions have done so by creating systems in which doctors essentially oversee each other and the institution holds itself collectively responsible for outcomes. Some, like the Mayo clinic, produce excellent outcomes at low cost. But how to replicate their successful cultures is not yet clear.

Matthew Yglesias @ThinkProgress offers two comments about the issue of entrepreneurship and health care. In the first, where he joins Ezra Klein @The Washington Post in cheerleading readers to go read Gawande’s article for themselves (and I third their encouragement), Yglesias looks to further the conversation:

I suspect the kind of reforms currently being contemplated by congress are really only going to be the first steps in a substantially longer journey that we’ll have to take as a country. In addition to things being totally screwed up in terms of who gets health insurance and how and from whom, the actual delivery of health care happens in a very screwed-up way. But the common view is that it actually isn’t screwed up, and so short-term politics dictates spending a lot of time reassuring people that no terrible change for the worse is on the way in terms of delivery. Which is fine as far as it goes, since the insurance mess really does need to be cleaned up. But then there’s this other problem, where the actual practice of medicine in America, though perceived to be good, is actually extremely hit-or-miss and in some respects getting worse.

Later, Yglesias muses that in fact, universal health care would boost entrepreneurship:

I’m the sort of person who’s prone to saying that we could have a more entrepreneurial economy in the United States if we had a universal health care system. The thinking is that our current system unduly punishes risk-taking. There are a lot of different aspects of this, but basically the American health care system both produces labor market rigidities (”job lock”) and makes jobs at small firms relatively unattractive.

Finally, Andrew Sullivan @The Atlantic offers a one-line comment on the piece:

I understand the problems of McAllen. I also shudder at the phrase “totality of care.”

Global Crisis Hits Human Rights  |  BBC News

BBC News and Truthout both highlight Amnesty International’s annual report, which says that the global economic downturn has distracted the world’s attention from human rights abuses and is causing newer ones. According to the BBC:

The world’s poorest people were bearing the brunt of the economic downturn, Amnesty said, and millions of people were facing insecurity and indignity.
Migrant workers in China, indigenous groups in Latin America and those who struggled to meet basic needs in Africa had all been hit hard, it said.

Where people had tried to protest, their actions had in many cases been met with repression and violence.

The group warned that rising poverty could lead to instability and mass violence.

“The underlying global economic crisis is an explosive human rights crisis: a combination of social, economic and political problems has created a time-bomb of human rights abuses,” said Amnesty’s Secretary General, Irene Khan.

The Irony of Social Networking Technology  |  Atlantic Correspondents

Lane Wallace blogs about how social networking technology both helps and hurts our societies.  On the one hand, social networking technology like Facebook and cell phones have expanded our range of community networks. On the bad side, the abbreviated means of expression that social networking systems like Twitter have stunted how we express ourselves. Wallace calls for balance:

It’s not a new problem. Technology often creates new problems, even as it solves old ones. The advent of computerized flight management systems in airline cockpits, for example, was supposed to relieve the workload and improve safety. While the new technology achieved that goal overall, having to program the systems created a new problem of pilots being “heads down and locked” — or, concentrating on programming the computer to the detriment of overall safety awareness. (see: American Airlines’ 1995 crash in Cali, Columbia). As a result, new training and procedures had to be developed to counter the safety problems the new technology had unintentionally spawned.

Unfortunately, it’s harder to train humans how to use cell phones and internet-based social networks for all the advantages they offer without letting the technology get in the way of the very thing it was supposed to assist. Balanced use is a challenge with any new technology, and we don’t always do such a terrific job of achieving it.

Historically, America Both Legalized and Deported Immigrants — Since 1996 it Only Deports Them  |  AlterNet

Why should undocumented migrants in the U.S. be offered amnesty? Perhaps a better question might be, why shouldn’t they, since the U.S. has done it before, repeatedly. AlterNet offers a history of U.S. immigration policy, which shows that the U.S. has switched between legalizing the statuses of migrants and deporting them, depending on its needs. Policies also vary depending on which country the migrant is from.

A Starry Night. A Warm Gun  |  alias Bruce

How a bill allowing citizens to bring guns into U.S. national parks became a law:

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (R) buried the gun bill in the credit-card legislation as an amendment, a trick often used by both parties for pet causes that need propping up. Dems knew the credit card package was a must-pass. But rather than use their majority to revolt against this perversion of process, some Dems ducked their heads and went along. Others, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, (D-Nevada) and many Dems from Southern and Midwestern states, actively bought into this Dodge City bill on the basis, as Reid claims, that it reflects the Second Amendment (that sloppily-written, impossible-to-decode provision that needs to be coherently refashioned to reflect civilization in the 21st century). As for Repubs, the vote was a mixture of guns-are-good gospel and let’s-get-the-liberal-bastards politicking. The law is due to go into effect on February 22, 2010.

News for May 6

Religion & Persecution

Last week, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a survey that showed that churchgoing American Protestants were more inclined to say that torture of terrorism suspects could be justified. The finding generated discussion among commetators about whether there are cultural or theological issues at play, and what the results might say  about American Christianity. Links include:

Articles of Faith |  “the other element that I don’t see discussed anywhere is simply partisanship. Evangelicals, and frequent churchgoers, are more likely to vote Republican; it was a Republican presidential administration, of George W. Bush, that allowed interrogation practices many have now concluded constituted torture; and the debate over torture today is, in some ways, a proxy for a debate over the conduct of the Bush administration. It seems to me it might be difficult in survey research to disentangle attitudes toward torture from attitudes toward the Bush Administration’s legacy in general, and response to terrorism in particular.”

Christian Post |  “The results might come as a surprise to the National Association of Evangelicals, which less than two years ago issued a 20-page statement regarding the issue of torture. In their “Evangelical Declaration Against Torture,” the organization renounced ‘the use of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by any branch of our government (or any other government)-even in the current circumstance of a war between the United States and various radical terrorist groups’.”

GetReligion |  “What would be great to have in coverage of this larger story is an attempt to answer the question of “why?” Why would someone who goes to church more frequently — be they mainstream Protestant, evangelical or Catholic — be more likely to support torture?”

Spiritual Politics |  “The real point here is that moral issues are tied into a whole array of ethical and political values and commitments. Explaining a particular position on a particular issue at a particular time according to religious identity or commitment is a complicated undertaking. One thing should, however, be clear. In this regard there are few if any slippery moral slopes. The oft-cited claim by the pro-life community that support for abortion rights leads individuals and communities inevitably into moral squalor cannot be sustained–certainly not when it comes to opposition to torture. The most anti-torture element in American society–the Nones–is also the most pro-choice.”

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly |  “ABERNETHY: There is a recent poll by the Pew Research Center that found that 71 percent of Americans — American adults — said torture can be justified often or sometimes or rarely. Only 25 percent said never. Is that influential to you at all?
“Dr. CASEY: I think that shows the influence of the Rupert Murdoch school of ethics — that we’ve been watching Jack Bauer, where torture is routinely shown to be effective on our television screens. I don’t think we decide what is moral and what is immoral based on the latest Pew poll about American opinion.”

Out of Africa? Foreign Aid is Part of the Problem, But So is Corrupt Politics |  Slate

The truth is that these books have more in common than their authors may admit. Both women see sub-Saharan Africa’s fundamental problem not as one of resources, human or natural, or as a matter of geography, but, rather, as one of bad government. Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by “big men” for the sole purpose of acquiring resources—resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.

How Kevin Bacon Sparked a New Branch of Science  |  BBC News

Recreating a famous experiment done in the 1960s, 40 parcels were given to people randomly picked around the world, as part of a BBC programme testing the “six degrees” theory. They then had to try and get the parcel to a scientist called Marc Vidal based in Boston, via someone they knew on a first-name basis. Three of the parcels made it to Mr Vidal, and on average took six steps to get there.

Who’s the Ugliest One of All?  |  New American Media

More than 200 million people have now watched as dowdy Susan Boyle transformed Simon Cowell and fellow judges from skeptics to fans in Britain’s Got Talent. Along with many in my newsroom, I teared up with the first glorious notes emanating from Boyle’s plain and squarish face. One might have thought this a triumphant moment for the ugly duckling brooding in us all. …  Yet, the ugliness seems to live on, not in the self-effacing Boyle, but in ageist, and certainly sexist, disdain so strangely and publicly directed at her by comedians and the media.

One Nation, Seven Sins  |  Las Vegas Sun

The question of evil and where it lurks has been largely ignored by the scientific community, which is why a recently released study titled “The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada” is groundbreaking: Never before has a state’s fall from grace been so precisely graphed and plotted. Geographers from Kansas State University have used certain statistical measurements to quantify Nevada’s sins and come up with a county-by-county map purporting to show various degrees of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride in the Silver State.

News for May 5

Diversity and the Court

The announcement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter on Friday that he would be retiring from the court at the end of its session in June has brought up rampant speculation about who President Obama will select as Souter’s successor. The pending selection has also sparked conversation about how the gifts Souter has brought to the court, the process of how Supreme Court justices are selected, and the need for diversity on the court. Links include:

The American Prospect |  “One of the reasons that the Supreme Court will miss David Souter is that he possesses a gift that we seek but rarely find in a judge – the ability to step outside the bounds of his experience. Nowhere is this more evident than in Justice Souter’s astute take on the fraught relationship between race and politics, a topic that has dominated the Supreme Court’s docket for much of his tenure.”

The Wall Street Journal |  “The current system of life tenure leads to many abuses. Justices time their departures strategically to give presidents they like an appointment. Presidents appoint young candidates to the Court in place of 60-year-olds to maximize their impact on the Court. We believe that Senate confirmations are more bitter because all involved know that they are picking someone who may end up serving 35 years instead of 18, making the stakes much higher. For 180 years through 1970, we had Supreme Court tenures of about 15 years, a practice that worked well. Now that this system has broken down, it is time to restore some sanity to the process of selecting our justices. A first step would be to institute reasonable term limits for the members of the Supreme Court.”

Brookings Institution |  “While both parties feel pressure to keep the bench diverse, Democrats have less latitude for bucking these expectations in judicial nominations than Republicans do. The core constituency that Republicans must satisfy in high court nominations is the party’s social conservative base, which fundamentally cares about issues, not diversity, and has accepted white men who practice the judging it admires. By contrast, identity-oriented groups are part of the core Democratic coalition, so it’s not enough for a Democrat to appoint a liberal. At least some of the time, it will have to be a liberal who also satisfies certain diversity categories. ”

FiveThirtyEight |  “Few things capture the political class’s attention like a botched or controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearings over Reagan nominee Robert Bork, who was ultimately voted down by the Senate, or G.H.W. Bush nominee Clarence Thomas, who was barely approved after months of deliberation, are the stuff of C-SPAN legend. Even a nominee who never makes it to a floor vote, like George W. Bush’s choice of the seemingly underqualified Harriet Miers, can potentially impair a President’s credibility. But are Supreme Court nominations really a substantial risk to the President?”

The Daily Beast |  “More rare than a lesbian or Latino on the bench: a justice who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. While others speculate on the race and gender of Justice Souter’s replacement, Paul Campos explains that the Supreme Court’s real diversity problem is career path and class. It wasn’t always this way.”

Condi and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day  |  FP Passport

A D.C. fourth grader grilled former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her approval for the waterboarding of detainees in Guantanamo, which, echoing Nixon, she described as “by definition” not illegal if approved by the president. Her response again checked September 11.

Boston Globe, We Hardly Knew Ye  |  Megan McArdle @The Atlantic

Speaking of bankruptcies and hardball negotiating tactics, the New York Times is carrying out a bruising battle against the Boston Globe’s unions, and has now filed notice that it is shutting the newspaper down.  The globe is hemorrhaging cash, which the New York Times isn’t exactly flush with right now–it’s mortgaged its headquarters, borrowed $250 million at credit-card interest rates, demanded pay cuts and layoffs from its own union, and presumably lit about a billion candles at the nearest church for a rapid recovery in ad revenues. I find it hard to believe that this is anything but a negotiating tactic.

• Related link: Goodbye to the Globe  |  Ballon Juice

How to Write About Africa  |  Granta Magazine

In this  essay for Granta Magazine, author and director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College Binyavanga Wainaina satirically explains how Africa is usually presented in Western literature. (Hat tip to Womanist Musings)

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

The Hate That Pretty Much Speaks Its Name  |  Obsidian Wings

The Oklahoma GOP recently held their state convention.  And judging by the party platform they adopted, it seems the GOP rebranding effort has a long road ahead.  The platform is genuinely creepy – and apparently uninfluenced by Meghan McCain’s Twitter feed. … But what’s most scary about this platform is its obsessive focus with homosexuality.  The level of hate and vitriol directed at homosexuals by this document – adopted by a state political party – is jarring.

News for April 29

Democrats’ Darlin’ Arlen

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s political party switch to the Democrats from the GOP set jaws dropping and tongues wagging about the senators motivations and what his change will mean for both parties. While many Democrats and liberals cheered his addition to the Senate majority party, some of them were leery and wondered whether he makes for a happy addition. Links include:

FiveThirtyEight |  ” If you’re a Democrat, would you really want Arlen Specter to be anything other than a soulless, unprincipled hack? If Specter were more concerned about self-consistency — and less about self-preservation — he’d probably still be a Republican right now. Moreover, Democrats had better hope that Specter is as nakedly power-hungry as possible, because his best move from the standpoint of self-preservation is probably not merely to become a Democrat but to become a reasonably liberal one, along the lines of Bob Casey Jr.”

Obsidian Wings “Today’s flip further vindicates Clinton’s decision to fight it out to the bitter end in last year’s primary.  Looking back, nothing but positives came out of that contest.  As I’ve explained before, the primary had an “anti-Tasmanian Devil” effect – rather than chaos, it left stronger party organization and big increases of registered voters in its wake. And it’s that structural shift that doomed Specter.  He couldn’t afford to lose hundreds of thousands of moderate PA Republicans.”

Global Comment | “This is a tremendous, symbolic move. While the Republicans are struggling to rebrand themselves, consolidating their “message” as one of opposition to taxes—any taxes—support for torture, and knee-jerk anti-Obama blathering, one more member of the party stood up and said “This isn’t me.” Yes, he did it out of self-interest, but he made a very big, very visible gesture showing that the center is now firmly the domain of the Democrats. This is good news for the party.”

The Daily Beast |  “Of course, this speaks to much larger problem in the GOP. We need to attract more centrist and progressive conservative voters at the primary level, so that level-headed candidates stand a chance. We need courageous Republicans more than ever. And this week, Sen. Specter turned his back.”

The Anonymous Liberal |  “From a political perspective, instead of facing serious pressure from the Right (because of Toomey’s primary challenge), he will now face serious pressure to move to the left on various issues. That’s because he’s now going to have to run in a Democratic primary, and though the party will do what it can to clear the field for him, he’ll still likely face some competition. And whoever he faces in the primary will play up his or her own Democratic bona fides while attacking Specter’s lack thereof. So Specter will have to do things to prove that he is a legitimate Democrat.”

Farewell to the American Century  |  Salon

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on Dec. 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like. So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants. The problems with this account are twofold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story line.

Rights versus Rites  |  The American Prospect

On Feb. 6, 2007, two women, both of whom had been circumcised in Africa, met in the conference room of a small foundation on Fifth Avenue in New York City for a highly unusual debate. It was the fourth annual International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation, an occasion for events across the globe dedicated to abolishing the practice. The gathering drew about 30 women, half of them African immigrants from countries including Senegal, Sudan, and Kenya, where female circumcision is common. Several of them were shocked to realize that, despite the name of the event, this wasn’t so much a discussion about how female circumcision can be eradicated as about whether it should be.

One Waterboarding is a Tragedy; a Million is a Statistic  |  Julian Sanchez

Civilian life affords us the luxury of a good deal of deontology—better to let ten guilty men go free, and so on.  In wartime, there’s almost overwhelming pressure to shift to consequentialist thinking… and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have leaders who remember to factor the other side’s population into the calculus.  And so we might think of the horror at torture as serving a kind of second-order function, quite apart from its intrinsic badness relative to other acts of war. It’s the marker we drop to say that even now, when the end is self-preservation, not all means are permitted.  It’s the boundary we treat as uncrossable not because we’re certain it traces the faultline between right and wrong, but because it’s our own defining border; because if we survived by erasing it, whatever survived would be a stranger in the mirror. Which, in his own way, is what Shep Smith was getting at. Probably Khalid Sheik Mohammed deserves to be waterboarded and worse. We do not deserve to become the country that does it to him.

Signs the GOP is Rethinking Stance of Gay Marriage  |  The New York Times

The fact that a run of states have legalized gay marriage in recent months — either by court decision or by legislative action — with little backlash is only one indication of how public attitudes about this subject appear to be changing. More significant is evidence in polls of a widening divide on the issue by age, suggesting to many Republicans that the potency of the gay-marriage question is on the decline. It simply does not appear to have the resonance with younger voters that it does with older ones.

News for April 23

Torturous Links

McClatchy reported this week that the Bush administration pressured CIA operatives to use harsh tactics on detainees with the goal of finding links between al-Qaeda and the regime of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Salon also reported that the planning to use torture began in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. The usual political commentators had a lot to say about both. Links include:

Andrew Sullivan @The Atlantic |  “Remember that the Bush-Cheney techniques were most aggressively used by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions. These false confessions legitimized the torture and provided the justification for the next torture. This is the Imaginationland some of us have been worried about for quite a while now. Once you have abandoned the rule of law and placed your trust in the hands of human beings with the power to torture, there is no returning.”

The American Scene |  “It seems to me that the real question is whether torture works strategically; that is, is the U.S. better able to achieve these objectives by conducting systematic torture as a matter of policy, or by refusing to do this? Given that human society is complex, it’s not clear that tactical efficacy implies strategic efficacy.”

Alas, a Blog |  “So to summarize, we tortured prisoners so we could find the non-existent Iraq-al Qaeda link, which would justify the war against Iraq that the Bush Administration desperately wanted to wage. I don’t even know how to express how depraved that is.”

Salon |  “As a newly released Senate Armed Services Committee report makes clear, the effects of Rumsfeld’s cavalier attitude toward what the report calls “detainee abuse” — and what international law would probably call torture — didn’t just stop at the military prison on Cuba. The techniques Rumsfeld approved for use at Guantánamo oozed into prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, undermining decades of U.S. policy about humane treatment of detainees and leading to some of the worst outrages of the Bush administration, including the Abu Ghraib abuses, which Salon has covered extensively.”

Slate |  “The release of a newly declassified congressional report on Tuesday suggested that some of the brutal interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration were developed in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE) military training program, which was designed to teach American soldiers how to resist interrogation. In January, David J. Morris detailed his own experiences with SERE.”

• Related link: List of Likely CIA Prisoners Who Are Still Missing  |  ProPublica

Water is the New Oil  |  Truthdig

Turns out polar bears aren’t the only land mammals struggling with global warming. Many of the world’s most-used rivers, from the Colorado to the Ganges, have been losing water for the last 50 years. So, in addition to coping with floods, storms, deserts and mass extinction, we could all die of thirst.

When Hope is the Enemy of Change  |  FiveThirtyEight

The conventional wisdom — which I do not necessarily dispute — is that when the economy declines, so does concern over global warming. People have other things on their minds, like losing their jobs or 401K’s. They also may suffer from a sort of bad-news fatigue (there is still plenty of bad news on the environment). The environment, however, may have another problem as well. Because of Barack Obama’s election, many Americans assume that the environment is getting better, whether or not it actually is.

• Related link: 10 Environmental Challenges We’ve Got to Solve  |  Foreign Policy

Debtors’ Prison Making a Comeback  |  Intelligence Daily

The jailers of the 19th century–even in the pre-Civil War South–largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century.

How Texting and Google Maps Helped Kenyans Survive Crisis  |  TEDTalks

At TEDU 2009, Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a GoogleMap mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries. Blogger (AfriGadget, WhiteAfrican), geek and power networker Erik Hersman is a key member of the African blog revolution. As a builder of Ushahidi, he helps expand the power of everyday people to share vital news via text.

News for April 13

Aarrrr

The captain of a U.S. cargo ship who had been taken hostage by Somali pirates late last week was recovered by U.S. naval forces Sunday. Three of the four pirates who had been holding him were killed by U.S. snipers during his escape. Capt. Richard Phillips’ saga has brought worldwide attention to pirates and their activities off the coast of Africa, and the West’s cultural understandings of piracy itself. Links include:

FP Passport |  “Pirate exhaustion looms. (Though we’ve tested the limits on this blog, and found them boundlessly wide.) At one point, the pirates seemed a welcome distraction. Not so much any more — people are dying, Somalia is a failed state. Second, as others have suggested, we should stop calling them pirates and start calling them something like “maritime terrorists,” to end any remaining romanticization.”

Mathew Yglesias @ThinkProgress |  “I don’t really understand the appeal of this suggestion. What the Somali pirates are doing—hijacking ships at sea through force and threats of force—is exactly what “pirate” and “piracy” have always referred to. “Terrorism” is a pretty different concept. If some Palestinians were to blow up an Israel-bound cruise ship, I would want to call those guys “maritime terrorists” which would denote an activity pretty different from simply robbing the cruise ship. Insofar as people have overly romantic ideas about pirates, they ought to be disabused of those notions.”

The Nation |  “Somalia is about as failed a failed state as you’ll find on the planet. Piracy, once a minor problem in the region, exploded into a major matter after the collapse in late 2006 of the Islamic Courts Union, which had controlled the central and southern regions of Somalia. Now, the country is lawless and impoverished. And desperate young men are taking to the high seas in search of illicit income.”

The Independent (U.K.) |  “Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.”

RNS Blog |  “The American ship hijacked by Somali pirates since Wednesday is carrying food from Catholic Relief Services destined for needy people in Rwanda, CRS says. According to CRS: Forty-nine containers aboard the ship hold 860 metric tons of bulgur wheat that are to be used by CRS relief workers for some of the poorest populations in Rwanda.”

Why Do They Stay?  |  Obsidian Wings

I worked in a battered women’s shelter for five years, four as a volunteer, and one as a full-time staffer, so I might be able to answer this question. I’ll try to get to the respect part in a subsequent post. Obviously, this will be too general: people stay for lots of reasons. I knew someone once who had a bad heroin habit, and while getting involved with a guy who beat her up if she tried to leave the house would not be my preferred method of detoxing, it worked for her. … To start with, it helps to know that (last time I checked) the two most common times for violence to start were the honeymoon and the first pregnancy. By the time you reach either point, you’re already in a pretty serious relationship, and leaving is not something that anyone would do lightly.

What If You Refuse to be Seduced by Violence?  |  Professor What If …?

We like to act as if violence happens out there, beyond our control, yet violence is a part of most of our lives. For some of us, it happens regularly in our homes; for all of us, it happens in our neighborhoods, our schools, our cities, our nation, and our world. And, while US culture is good at convincing us we are powerless to change this, we are not – in fact, a key hope for change lies within our daily acts of resistance to violence. One place to begin the process of eradicating violence is within our own desires.

What’s in a Name?  |  RaceWire

Maybe Asian people would have an easier time participating in democracy if their names weren’t so darn tricky. That was the suggestion of one Texas legislator at a hearing on a proposed voter identification law. … State Rep. Betty Brown, Republican of Terrell, was miffed when a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans warned that some voters of Asian descent would have trouble complying with the regulations because their official name translated from their native language would differ from the name used on common identification forms, such as a driver’s license. Brown commented, “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

• Related link: Betty Brown Apologizes  |  Angry Asian Man

Honeybees in Danger  |  Truthout

Bee experts know that insecticides cause brain damage to the bees, disorienting them, making it often impossible for them to find their way home. This is a consequence of decades of agribusiness warfare against nature and, in time, honeybees. In addition, beekeepers truck billions of bees all over the country for pollination, depriving them of good food, stressing them enormously, and, very possibly, injuring their health.

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