Bad Blogger

I was planning on doing another post this morning before I went off to work, but then I saw this article, and knew I had to say something.

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
Tue May 27

GENEVA - The Red Cross warned Tuesday of a possible surge in "food-related violence" because of soaring prices that are increasing hunger around the world.

Most of the debate surrounding the global food crisis has focused on boosting aid to poorer countries, but there is also concern about the potential for violence as people become desperate for food, said Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Kellenberger, whose agency serves as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war, said fallout from rising prices has already sparked violence, alluding to food riots that erupted in Haiti, Egypt and Somalia.

It's not just a matter of higher prices, he said. "It becomes a question of survival, of just having access to food."

Because this post was of a more serious nature than I usually get into in this blog-- and because of the fact that I usually do considerably more research for my newsblog, Media Vulture, I decided to do my full report there, titled Let them eat sand.

Since I started my new job, which ends up consuming well over the normal 40 hours of work per week, I had to shape this story up in a hurry, so I'll ask you to forgive me if it's not the most well-crafted piece I've ever done there.

and btw... this thing about food riots spreading worldwide really has me quite upset.

(I've completely forgotten what I thought was so important when I left home this morning...)

I like to check Hitslink to find out where in the world people are surfing in from. Yesterday (and today), I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic from a site called "opencongress.org". I went to take a look at the site, and discovered my Wikilinks posting was excerpted on the front page of their blogroll. OpenCongress is a congressional watchdog group, and is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. I recommend that you check out their sites.

Oddly, this was one of the posts that (mysteriously) did not appear in the Opera Community blogroll. I have no idea why this, and one other post, Returning to my roots, were conspicuously omitted by the blogroll.

Some pictures, for your dining & dancing pleasure:

Nike denies the charges of sweatshop conditions, but has chosen to try to avoid court completely on the grounds that its press releases and public statements weren’t ads, and therefore weren’t covered by the California truth in advertising law. Instead, Nike claims the denials were made as free speech, and protected by the First Amendment. Under this argument, whether the denials were the truth or lies is irrelevant.
Read more on Media Vulture
Read even MORE on CommonDreams.org

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees

WASHINGTON - The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business...

By Neil A. Lewis, New York Times

Read more...

when I took my SATs years ago (at the ripe old age of 16), I declared myself a journalism major, and proceeded to take a grand total of one journalism class (before changing my major for the first time, to music, which pays sooo much better than journalism). My instructor (for the Spring Quarter satire edition of the Humboldt State journalism magazine) later became famous-- as a hostage in Beirut.

I guess musicians don't make the best hostages.

So here I am, lo these *ahem* 23 years later...

and I'm working on a satirical webzine The Paranoid Gazette, and I'm actually doing more research for each article than I would probably be doing if I were under deadline at a real journalism gig... Could explain why Comedy Central wins more Peabody Awards than Fox News. (I mean, other than the obvious fact that Fox news is to journalism what ptomaine is to egg salad...)

In other news, one of my favorite Texans (a short list) and favorite politicians (an even shorter list), the inimitable Ann Richards, died this past week of cancer at age 73. I've posted an excerpt from Molly Ivins column marking the event (as well as a link to the full column) in my news blog Media Vulture, including a cool picture that I found in some archive from Texas.