Freaky movie!

I felt really sorry for those kids. :( Especially that little blonde kid with the mop of hair, for anyone who has seen it. He seemed genuinely confused about his beliefs, and was beating himself up over having questions about the Bible.

Also, it was kinda creepy how that one kid, Levi, said that he’d become a ‘born again Christian’ at age five! That was perhaps the most disgusting thing in the film. I mean, the Bush worship was pretty bad, and the raving lunatic adults were bad too, but being born again at age 5?! That’s an incredible testament to the brainwashing these kids go through. :(

I think I’m going to give this to all my Christian friends to watch. Haha.

In all seriousness, though, this sort of extreme is a good way to convince other Christians that church and state should be separated, that extremism isn’t good, and that yes, some of their beliefs and practices look completely whacky to outsiders.

Ever noticed the fervour with which people treat their possessions? Here’s an interesting excerpt on that very topic, from a book I’m currently reading, called ‘Society of the Spectacle’, by Guy DeBord:

The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious fervour for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all the media of communication, are thus propagated with lightning speed.

A style of dress emerges from a film; a magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing fads. Just when the mass of commodities slides towards puerility, the puerile itself becomes a special commodity; this is epitomized by the gadget.

We can recognise a mystical abandon to the transcendence of the commodity in free gifts, such as key chains which are not bought but are included by advertisers with prestigious purchases, or which flow by exchange into their own sphere. One who collects the key chains which have been manufactured for collection, accumulates indulgences of the commodity, a glorious sign of his presence among the faithful. Reified man advertises the proof of his intimacy with the commodity.

The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism. The only use which remains here is the fundamental use of submission.

Pretty grim way of putting it, eh? Heh. This book is pretty interesting, even if a bit wordy. I’m not sure I agree with him entirely – after all, commodities do help us in our daily lives, and are satisfying to own. ;)

As an aside, for those of you who may be wondering, I’m not dead. This blog is not dead. It’s that time of year, though, when Uni students like me rush around trying to get all our assignments finished on time, our exams studied for, our work done. It’s been pretty hectic. I’ll return once things have settled down a bit. :)

Here’s an article from the BBC, talking about how the human species may split in two in several hundred thousand years:

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said – before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

What do you think?

I think they’re full of it.

I understand the ’smart upperclass’ versus ’stupid lowerclass’ idea, and that part makes sense. What doesn’t make sense, though, is that the smarties would be physically attractive, whilst the stupids would be ugly. In my experience, it works the other way. ;p

Seriously though, the BBC proposes they would look like this:

I think it’d be more like the tall, beautiful people are the ones too busy looking after their physical bodies to look after and nurture their minds and smarts. It makes sense that the little fat goblin-people are the smart ones, because they’re too busy nurturing their minds to go out and get the exercise required to maintain their physical appearances.

It makes sense that goblin-people breed with goblin-people, and beautiful people breed with other beautiful people, but I don’t see that it needs to be taken for granted that the beautiful people will also be smart.

Then again, this is all conjecture, so it really doesn’t matter in the end. :p

The story I blogged about previously, about a man questioned at an airport for ’speaking a foreign language’, or this new incident, where four North African Muslim men have been fired from their airport security jobs for ..wait for it: “not [having] shown that their behaviour was unlikely to violate airport security”.

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Stories like these don’t really need a comment.

I love AdBusters. Even more so, I love their spoof ads.

Let’s face it, how many men actually look like this:

And how many more look like this:

Heh.

A few more from AdBusters:

Visit their site for more. I like it. Do you know of any other cool spoof ad sites? I’m always ready and willing to take a dig at those evil, nasty corporations. ;)

Speaking of which, I finished watching The Corporation today. Quite interesting, in a scary ‘omg-the-world-is-going-to-end!’ type way. It was put together really well, so even if you’ve heard of it and know already that you don’t agree with the gist of their message, I recommend it anyway. It’s quite an eye-opener in many regards – especially, I think, on water as a commodity, to be sold to people by corporations.

I liked the story Vandana Shiva told in the movie, though. She said that when the British tried to tax salt in India, Ghandi and a whole bunch of his friends went down to the beach, picked salt up, and said they’d refuse to pay any tax on a commodity as basic as salt. They won out in the end, and so can we. The corporations may suck [and they do, for the most part] but the power is with the people who buy their products. If we stop buying, we help.

The truth of the matter is, though, that a lot of products are a necessity for us to maintain our current standards of living. Some of those products may be produced by dodgy companies, but how do you drop that product when the competition is inferior in design or quality? It becomes a wrestle between ethical standards and personal comfort.

On top of that, there’s the ethical question of whether to research as many products as you can, in order to make educated and informed consumer decisions, or whether to allow yourself to remain blissfully ignorant. It’s not quite ignorance, though, because you know that you could potentially find something unsavoury if you dig a little. So what do you do? Do you choose to remain ignorant and blissfully unaware of the questionable ethics that produced the products you consume, or do you dig into the history of each one? This isn’t a rhetorical question.

How do you guys do it? And do you boycott any particular products for any reason? Tell me your story. :)

This is an argument that seems to surface quite frequently – both from people on online forums and blog sites, and also in academic literature and pseudo-academic websites. It popped up again in my comments on my previous blog post. I started replying to it, and realised that it would probably do better as a post of it’s own, even if only due to sheer length.

And so, here it is. The comments from Carson Sasser are in italics. My response follows.

I’m certainly no expert on all this, but I have seen studies that have found direct monetary assistance actually hurts these people. What we need to do is help them get rid of their corrupt governments and install a free-market based economy. Or else we will have to help them again next year and the next and…

That’s a theory that’s popularly thrown around, but it’s very contentious, because you could just as easily argue that the reason Africa’s government officials are corrupt is because Africa is poor – it doesn’t have the infrastructure necessary to allow people to hold their governments accountable.

In any case, it’s kinda irrelevant to our Western governments giving ODA – it’s a measly amount per person to begin with, which means it has a very small likelihood of producing a visible result for the better. And on top of that, our governments could disperse that money through channels other than the official goverments in African states if they suspect corruption. There are plenty of NGO’s, UN groups, and various grassroots organisations that could do a lot of good with that money and not have it lining the Swiss bank account of the African official.

But to say that giving them money is wrong? No.

They could always benefit from having new facilities – schools, roads, sanitation, drinking water, basic health services, and health initiatives such as bed nets to keep away the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Stuff like this costs money, and it’s definitely not money that would just be wasted.

You know what does waste money though? Phantom aid. For example, ‘we’ll give you money and you spend it on our consultants’, or ‘we’ll give you money and you have to spend this much on our products – even if you don’t need them, and even if you could get them cheaper/better quality from elsewhere’. Or debt relief for countries who aren’t paying their debts anyway – which is technically giving them money, but it’s all on paper; there is no practical benefit.

It would be true to say that aid is wasted if all we did was buy them food and drop it off at their doorsteps – but that’s not what’s happening. We do that during emergencies, when there are people who will literally die right now unless we ship them some food – but that’s not an efficient way to spend the money in the long run, and we don’t do it.

Africa is a resource rich continent populated with people. North America is a resource rich continent populated with people. So, what makes the difference? Why are most of them living in poverty while most of us are doing a lot better?

Well, firstly, Africa is not exactly ‘resource rich’. Some areas may be, but ‘Africa’ is not a country – it’s a continent. I know this is saying something so very obvious, but it’s something people don’t think about all too often. Africa is a continent. It is made up of many smaller countries. Each country has it’s own government, it’s own resources, it’s own problems and people.

We also have to consider where they’re coming from. They were colonised up until about 50 years ago, when during the 60’s, many of the African countries gained independence. In terms of history, 50 years is nothing. And that’s assuming they’d be starting from scratch, when really, starting out on your own feet after a long haul under colonialism is not easy. As with most post-colonial nations, the first stage is authoritarian rule.

On top of that, Africa is a very big continent. Again, obvious, right? The problem is that our trade is still heavily reliant on the traditional method of shipping – literally, shipping, in a ship. And, well, there aren’t many major rivers in the African continent. Most of Africa is rural, and rural areas are unlikely to have paved roads. Africa is in the middle of the tropics, and gripped with the health problems that come along with it, especially malaria. They’re a huge expanse, with the rural people dispersed throughout, which means that organising help and services is quite the task unless you have people doing it through a bottom-up, grassroots sort of effort.

Africa has a lot of problems, but the truth is that many of these could be solved by throwing a bit of money at the situation. The people could benefit from education programs [at least basic primary education - which, by the way, is shown to have so many side benefits! Girls have less children, for example, if you just give them the basic 5 years of education.], health services, and all the other things I mentioned before. They can put that money to good use, and we can afford to give it.

I think what would benefit a lot of people was if we quit branding all the types of aid under the one banner of ‘foreign aid’ or ‘official development aid’. It comes in many guises, and each serves a different purpose, with different outcomes. Morgenthau identified the 6 main types of aid: humanitarian foreign aid, subsistence foreign aid, military foreign aid, bribery, prestige foreign aid, and foreign aid for economic development.

But you know that something is wrong with our system when the US war in Iraq counts as foreign aid. Surprised? It’s military aid.

Or when the US implements a new law into Iraq which makes it illegal for Iraqi farmers to plant seeds they’ve saved from crops. Nup. Instead, they have to buy all their new seeds from the American corporation in charge of dispersing a new, patented brand of seeds. This is subsistence aid at it’s finest. [Yes, sarcasm.]

So in short, no, I don’t think that increasing our ODA is hurting the poor. I think the exact opposite: it would really help the poor – as long as enough is given, and as long as it’s given through the right channels, so the right people benefit from it.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: An excerpt from Jeffrey Sachs’ excellent book, ‘The End of Poverty’. He puts it all into perspective:

The first cut at the problem — the simplest but still eye-opening — is to ask how much income would have to be transferred from rich countries to poor countries to lift all of the world’s extreme poor to an income level sufficient to meet basic needs. Martin Ravallion and his colleagues on the World Bank’s poverty team have gathered data to address this question, at least approximately. The World Bank estimates that meeting basic needs requires $1.08 per day per person, measured in 1993 purchasing-power adjusted prices. Using household surveys, the Ravallion team has calculated the numbers of poor people around the world who live below that threshold, and the average incomes of those poor.

According to the Bank’s estimates, 1.1 billion people lived below the $1.08 level as of 2001, with an average income of $0.77 per day, or $281 per year. More important, the poor had a shortfall relative to basic needs of $0.31 per day, or $113 per year. Worldwide, the total income shortfall of the poor in 2001 was therefore $113 per year per person multiplied by 1.1 billion people, or $124 billion.

Using the same accounting units (1993 purchasing-power adjusted US dollars), the income of the twenty-two donor countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2001 was $20.2 trillion. Thus a transfer of 0.6% of donor income, amounting to $124 billion, would in theory raise all 1.1 billion of the world’s extreme poor to the basic-needs level. Notably, this transfer could be accomplished within the 0.7% of the GNP target of the donor countries.

It’s pretty crazy to read this and to think that if our governments actually gave what they promised, we could be pulling 1.1 billion people out of extreme poverty. They’d still be in poverty, there’s no doubt about that. But if one year’s worth of promised donations is enough to help one fifth of the world’s population in such a drastic way, then remind me again why we don’t put more pressure on our governments to do it?

Check out the stats of what the OECD countries give. These are the recent stats, for 2005: [From here somewhere.]

Judging purely on that, we can afford to give more.

And before some hotshot American comes along to tell me that ‘private donations’ in the US are really high:

The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD has compiled cross-country data on nongovernmental development assistance. The estimate for the United States is about $3 billion per year, an amount that raises the total US development assistance from 0.15 percent of GNP to 0.18 percent of GNP, still leaving the United States at the very bottom of the donor list.

Now, granted, these are 2003 rates that Sachs is citing, and all the OECD countries have improved a little since then, but even so — it’s still a pittance.

In 2003, the IRS released a special report about the richest four hundred taxpayers in the United States. These top 400 richest taxpayers had between them the grand total sum of $69 billion of income. This averages out to an incredible $174 million each, and is more than the entire year 2000 GDP of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda. Four countries! Those four countries had a total income of $57 billion in the year 2000, and were home to approximately 161 million people.

Here’s another little factlet:

The United States spent as much in Iraq for two weeks of support for the war (about $2.5 billion) as it does for an entire year of economic development assistance to Africa.

Still think we can’t afford to give more? Or wait, let me guess.. someone will point out that this donated money goes ‘down the drain’, right?

Here’s something for you:

Since the ‘money down the drain’ argument is heard most frequently in the United States, it is worth lookin at calculations for US aid. In 2002, the United States gave $3 per sub-Saharan African. Taking out the parts for US consultants, food and other emergency aid, administrative costs, and debt relief, the aid per African came to the grand total of six cents.

It’s not all negative, though. The ODA stats for 2005 were released recently, and the majority of OECD countries have increased their contributions. [Interestingly, Portugal decreased their contributions from 0.63% of GNI, to 0.21%. What's up with that?] With the added attention this issue has gotten thanks to projects like Make Poverty History, perhaps this upward trend will continue.

It’s our job to keep the pressure on our governments. We can afford it, and the people need it.

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And P.S. If you can find a copy of Sachs’ book at your local bookstore or library, I do recommend it. It’s economics and stats, but still a fairly easy read.

Apparently, a man was questioned at an airport after someone heard him speaking a ’suspicious’ language on his cell phone.

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Seattle P-I had the story:

A 32-year-old man speaking Tamil and some English about a sporting rivalry was questioned at Sea-Tac Airport and missed his flight Saturday because at least one person thought he was suspicious.

The Port of Seattle dispatched its police officers to investigate the case, which occurred Saturday around noon, said Bob Parker, airport spokesman. The Chicago man was preparing to board an American Airlines flight to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

The man was speaking Tamil, a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, on his cell phone at the departure gate and on the aircraft. An off-duty airline employee heard the conversation and informed the flight crew.

The man also apparently said something in English about a sporting rivalry at his alma mater.

“It’s a big misunderstanding,” said Parker. “He had a perfectly innocent explanation that all added up.”

Parker said it is incumbent on airport officials to investigate reports of suspicious activity.

“It’s hard to triage over the phone,” he said.

But Parker had no explanation as to why a man speaking Tamil, which is spoken worldwide, would be considered suspicious. The person who contacted airport officials could give an answer to that question, he added.

Parker said the man was cooperative and boarded a later flight to Texas. He told officials that he would not speak in a foreign language on his cell phone at an airport in the future.

Cool. We’ll all be much safer when all international airports start checking all foreign-speaking people. We’ll nip those wannabe terrorists right in the butt.

This is quite a long article, but well worth the read. He made some interesting comments. Food for thought, I think. :)

Check it out.

A few days ago, I wrote about the language of terror. My intent is not to excuse the actions of the terrorists – what they did was wrong, there’s no doubt about that. The problem, however, is the absolute refusal of mainstream media and discussions to explore the reasons why these people felt they had to resort to violence in such a public, large-scale manner. I think it’s absolutely daft to bury our heads in the sand and not look for answers. I would think that after being attacked, one of the first questions people would ask once the dust had settled is why?

The unfortunate thing is that there seems not to be much information out there as to why these people want our attention. It seems like to seriously ask ‘why’ is to somehow mark yourself as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. As though engaging in discussions and diplomacy with the terrorists is a cop-out to all the people that have died, and an admission that we’re weak, because we’re willing to listen.

Well, excuse me, but that’s bollocks.

If talking to the terrorists will help us stop the needless killing of more civilians, then I’m all for it. If diplomacy and sensitivity is what it takes, then why aren’t we trying?

So this is the question: why? Why did the terrorists attack the US on that day? What is the purpose they are trying to achieve? What do they want from the US, and from all of us?

That’s the question I’m asking, and the question to which I’ll be searching for answers.

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the book, in which Richard Jackson quotes from Peter Bergen’s book, Holy War, Inc.: Inside The Secret World of Osama bin Laden, then comments on it:

[From Bergen’s book:] “In all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden has uttered on public record, he does not rail against the pernicious effects of Hollywood movies, or against Madonna’s midriff, or against the pornography protected by the US Constitution… bin Laden cares little about such cultural issues. What he condemns the United States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East… the continued US military presence in Arabia; US support for Israel; its continued bombing of Iraq; and its support for regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The hijackers who came to America did not attack the headquarters of a major brewery or AOL-Time Warner or Coca-Cola, nor did they attack Las Vegas or Manhattan’s West Village, or even the Supreme Court. They attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, preeminent symbols of the United States’ military and economic might.”

And Jackson’s comment on this quote:

In other words, bin Laden attacked America for clearly defined political reasons, in the belief that just as the 1983 suicide bombings drove American forces out of Lebanon, and just as a sustained terrorist campaign drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, so too would terror attacks force America to change its policies in the Middle East. Within this alternative narrative, the reasons America was attacked take on a whole new meaning, and the attackers actually emerge as rational and complex political actors rather than one-dimensional hate-filled anti-modernists.

I would argue that seeing the terrorists in this light actually makes them scarier than the alternative: irrational and simple-minded religious extremists. To see them as being rational means that each time they strike a target, it’s with a specific intent and purpose. They have objectives, and killing civilians is a part of that.

Writing them off as irrational religious extremists, then, is a dangerous line to take as it oversimplifies the issue.

Instead, we need to be asking the questions, and engaging in dialogue with the terrorists and their leaders, to find out what they want. It’s not good enough to simply assume we know – this isn’t a game. Real people’s lives are at stake, and it’s not worth the pride of a politician to jeopardise that.