Everything is terrible Archive

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“The Most Severe Humanitarian Emergency in the World”

By
Ben Nolan
– July 14, 2011

Well this is fucking makes-your-insides-gape horrible:

Abdi Aden, a former farmer who lived in Sakow town before the drought forced him to flee, said he lost an 8-year-old son after eight days of trekking.

“He tried to cry before he died, but he could not. He was so weak. He died peacefully from hunger,” he said. “I buried him by myself in a shallow ditch so hyenas could not eat him.”

On her way to Dadaab, Abdullahi said she walked with friends for three days before she and her children lagged behind. She saw around 20 children dead or unconscious abandoned on the roadside.

“I saw two elderly people on the road,” she said. “They cried out, ‘Ma’am, give us a helping hand.’ They wanted to sweet-talk me, but I said to them ‘I can’t help’ and moved on.

“You will feel kind only when you have something,” she said. “I wanted to give the little water I had to my children.”

Context:

Trying to escape starvation and East Africa’s unforgiving drought, hundreds of Somali children have been left for dead on the long, dusty journey to the world’s largest refugee camp.

UNICEF on Thursday called the drought and refugee crisis “the most severe humanitarian emergency in the world.” The international Red Cross signaled “great alarm” this week at the nutritional state of Somali children.

[...]

The U.N. expects at least 10 million people will need food aid, and a U.S. aid official said he believes the situation in Ethiopia is even worse than the government acknowledges.

The Ethiopian government said that 4.5 million people need food aid there, 40 percent more than last year. Jason Frasier, mission director of USAID in Ethiopia, the U.S. government aid arm, suggested that Ethiopia might even be undercounting those who need help.

Aid agencies have appealed for more than $100 million in emergency funding while warning of dire consequences if help does not arrive.

You can donate to the Red Cross here.

Some perspective on the present (and likely future) global politics of food, and a picture:

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The Debt Ceiling Hit Your Dog With Its Car, And Then Drove Away, And This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

By
Tom OHare
– July 14, 2011

The man who would be Speaker, if he weren't inadvertently destroying his own career.

Last thing on the debt ceiling nonsense for the day. Swear to Jesus.

Yglesias offers a rosy assessment of the political factors that might be at play in all of the “grand bargaining” going on, and since I sometimes tire of depressing myself by reading about the insane amounts of power crazy people have in this country, I’ll quote it for a bit of reassurance — my own, more than yours:

…I hear people baffled as to why the president would pursue growth-reducing spending cuts that would damage his own re-election bid.

It’s generally wise to assume that the White House isn’t blind to that obvious potential political problem. Part of what they’re thinking is that a 2011 agreement to long-term spending cuts is the best way to avoid the need to reduce spending during the election season. How’s that? Well, it’s because the fiscal consolidation plans being discussed are for trillions of dollars worth of cuts over a 10-year horizon. Since you’ve got that horizon, it’s not strictly necessary for any of them to come between September 2011 and November 2012. On the contrary, in principle spending could go up in the short-term consistent with any long-term cuts. By contrast, what happens if the White House winds up getting a “clean” debt ceiling increase is that we then head into the September lapse in appropriations. It’ll be a replay of the “government shutdown” fight in which the GOP goal has to be short-term cuts. And the White House isn’t going to get away without giving something up in that fight. In other words, clean debt ceiling increase = guarantee of fiscal anti-stimulus, whereas a 10-year spending cut plan leaves open room to avoid that.

It’s important to remember that future Congresses won’t necessarily be forced to hew to whatever shitty agreement we end up with to avoid blowing up the global economy this month. They can always write new laws, remember, and appropriate budget funds differently in the future. That’s what Congress does, after all, when it isn’t too busy trying to make headlines for its idiocy on the teevee. And if the Republican party ends up having destroyed itself by ceding control of its political future to the craziest within it, well then, good on ‘em.

At least, one can hope. Or not-quite-despair.

Then again, we might all be eating each other in six months.

Who knows?

Addendum by Ben: Fun Cantor fact, while we’re on the topic:

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively “shorts” long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.)

According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,000 in the same fund. Contacted by Salon this week, Cantor’s office gave no indication that the Virginia Republican, who has played a leading role in the debt ceiling negotiations, has divested himself of these holdings since his last filing. Unless an agreement can be reached, the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debt payments on Aug. 2. If that happens and Cantor is still invested in the fund, the value of his holdings would skyrocket.

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The Strongest Case Yet For The Mass Adoption of Burqas

By
Ben Nolan
– July 14, 2011

I’m talking everybody: men, women, children, old people… Or maybe it’s the only case, but it’s a good one…

Manjoo:

According to the Wall Street Journal, police departments across the nation will soon adopt handheld facial-recognition systems that will let them identify people with a snapshot. These new capabilities are made possible by BI2Technologies, a Massachusetts company that has developed a small device that attaches to officers’ iPhones.  The police departments who spoke to the Journal said they plan to use the device only when officers suspect criminal activity and have no other way to identify a person—for instance, when they stop a driver who isn’t carrying her license. Law enforcement officials also seemed wary about civil liberties concerns. Is snapping someone’s photo from five feet away considered a search? Courts haven’t decided the issue, but sheriffs who spoke to the paper say they plan to exercise caution.

Don’t believe it. Soon, face recognition will be ubiquitous. While the police may promise to tread lightly, the technology is likely to become so good, so quickly that officers will find themselves reaching for their cameras in all kinds of situations. The police will still likely use traditional ID technologies like fingerprinting—or even iris scanning—as these are generally more accurate than face-scanning, but face-scanning has an obvious advantage over fingerprints: It works from far away.

Buy a blue or black burqa of your very own at Zarina’s for the rock-bottom price of $27.99!

Other options:

  • Fencing masks ($55 from Amazon), or
  • Balaclavas ($16 at MEC), or
  • A good old-fashioned bandana (couple bucks at a bunch of places close to your house) —
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This is Probably the Worst Song in the World

By
Tom OHare
– July 11, 2011

Told you.

(via Kieran)

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Fuck Cineplex

By
Ben Nolan
– July 11, 2011

I went to see Midnight in Paris yesterday — fun and funny and pointed and all those other nice and buoyant things that Woody Allen can make his movies be when he’s not too overcome by existential angst – but that’s not what I want to write about. What I want to write about is how the Varsity Cineplex in Toronto thinks that it’s okay to play commercials at you at full volume for the whole 20 minutes you’re sitting there before the lights go down (you got there a bit early because you’re keen like that), and this is after you’ve just dropped about four hundred dollars or whatever it is that they’re charging for a ticket these days. And when the lights finally go down, they make you sit through another 10 minutes of commercials before you even get to the preview. But that was a battle lost a while ago.

The pre-lights-going-down commercials are so fucking loud that the people behind you are yelling at each other, not because they’re mad or anything, but just because they want to have a conversation or do anything else, really, than succumb to the banal eight billion decibel demands of whatever the fuck car company’s paying for Cineplex’ board members’ coke habits (wild conjecture — I have no evidence that Cineplex’ board members have coke habits; they might just be really into paying for sex or blood diamonds or something; it’s gotta be something).

The point I want to make is this: I can’t remember… Something about kids these days. No! Wait! I DO remember! The point is that I’m not going back to any Cineplexes ever again in my life probably (I probably will, but I won’t like it, and it won’t be often… like maybe if the Varsity is the ONLY place to see something I really really want to see, which it sometimes is). Anyway it’s not worth it. Especially when there’s a perfectly good (read: fucking amazing) institution like the Lightbox even closer to my house where they charge less money for better movies (generally) and better popcorn, show you maybe a couple trailers, no commercials at all, where there’s better sound systems, where they actually still employ projectionists so the picture quality is consistently perfect (read: better), and where they respect you as movie-goer.

Also, a couple of other random words that were spinning through my head that whole horrible 20 pre-movie minutes: 42 inch flat-screen with an HDMI adapter, Netflix and Demonoid; being able to drink beer while watching. Just sayin’.

I should probably note that there are people in the world with real problems too, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop going to Cinpelexes.

What the commercials were like (actually, I wish they were this one one millionth as awesome):

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In case you missed it, the world has a new country

By
Trevor Macomber
– July 11, 2011

From MSNBC last Friday:

As one of the thousands of “lost boys of Sudan,” Mawut Mayen remembers eating mud, hiding from death squads and watching a friend die under an acacia tree after civil war invaded his life, destroyed his village and sent him on an extraordinary exodus from his war-torn homeland.

On Saturday, more than two decades later and half the world away, he will watch with equal measures of hope and trepidation as his homeland formally declares its independence from the north, becoming the Republic of South Sudan.

Don’t bother prepping your passports, however; it’s not exactly ready for tourists yet. Shit, it’s not even ready for citizens:

Lise Grande, who leads the U.N.’s humanitarian operations in South Sudan, told the Associated Press this week that the region is “one of the most underdeveloped on the planet.” Only 15 percent of the population can read. Most live on a $1 a day. Education and health facilities are sorely inadequate.

If you’re lacking in perspective on the situation — well, obviously you’ve got The Google and The Wik’pedia, but if you’re lacking in poetry on the situation, I can only urge the hell out of you to pick up a copy of What Is the What by Dave Eggers and settle in for 560 pages detailing one of the most grueling, astonishing, hilarious, and heartbreaking stories you’ll ever encounter.

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A Brief Flicker of Good News for the Terminally Depressed: Pollution Control Edition

By
Tom OHare
– July 8, 2011

Sometimes, I admit, I grow incredibly tired of bad news, and occasionally this exhaustion grows to the extent that I wonder whether any effort to effect political change is even worth it. Our unmitigated march toward unseemly death is assured — on a macro, as well as a micro, scale — so why bother trying at all? What is there to fix, when all that “fixing” entails is engaging in a struggle in which you are doomed to lose, because the forces you are fighting are so disproportionately powerful?

Well, humbug to all that humbug, I declare. I’d rather die fighting than laying down. So it’s good to remember that occasionally we win battles, too, even if it only helps us just barely stay on our feet.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued new standards for power plants in 28 states that would sharply cut emissions of chemicals that have polluted forests, farms, lakes and streams across the Eastern United States for decades.

The agency said the regulations, which will take effect in 2012, would reduce emissions of compounds that cause soot, smog and acid rain from hundreds of power plants by millions of tons at an additional cost to utilities of less than $1 billion a year. The E.P.A. said the cleaner air would prevent as many as 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks and hundreds of thousands of cases of asthma and other respiratory ailments every year.

In an infinite cycle of death and destruction, you should take a firm grasp of these small victories and you should hold them close to your heart, because otherwise there is nothing at all to be hopeful for.

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Today in the American Economy

By
Tom OHare
– July 8, 2011

The jobs report is out. Hahaha, no I didn’t read it. But other people did, and it’s bad. Here’s Krugman’s initial reaction:

Ugh. That was a seriously ugly jobs report (pdf). Almost no job creation, with slow private-sector growth offset by falling public-sector employment; a falling employment-population ratio; and (I don’t know how many people have picked this up), an actual decline in wages, albeit a small one.

Unemployment leapt up to 9.2%, and yet, as Krugman noted yesterday, the President has basically ceded the responsibility of defining the terms of our national economic debate to Republicans, with their belt-tightening, and their bootstrap lifter-upper-ing, and their bullshit, bullshit, bullshit:

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

It’s impossible to run controlled macroeconomic experiments, so in place of them we look to history for parallels. Right now, we’re re-living something like a miniature version of the Great Depression — high unemployment, no private job creation, super-low inflation, and overall economic malaise. (And I know, I know, the parallels aren’t perfect — none are. So sue me.) The sad part is that, unlike our political elites of the 1930′s, today’s Galtian overlords have accepted our current national shittiness as the new normal, while one of our major political parties is actively trying everything it can think of to make things worse so that Michele “Crazy-Eyes” Bachmann can get elected and bring about the rapture in 2012, or something. So instead of at least getting cool infrastructure projects out of the widespread horror — your Hoover Dams, your hike-able national parks, etc etc — we twiddle thumbs as the country both literally and figuratively crumbles.

Have I said this all before? It bears repeating.

UPDATE FOR THE HELL OF IT: Also, what Felix Salmon said.

“Spend less money, create more jobs” is the kind of world one normally finds only in Woody Allen movies, and it’s a profoundly unserious stance for any politician to take. Spending cuts, whether they’re implemented by the public sector or the private sector, are never going to create jobs. And there’s simply no magical ju-jitsu whereby government spending cuts get reversed and amplified, becoming larger private-sector spending increases.

Boehner’s rhetoric, here, is a cynical play on our nation’s economic illiteracy. But the jobs crisis is far too big and too important to become a tactical political football. Now more than ever, it’s the job of government to come together and to do something constructive to create high-quality, long-term employment. Fast. Instead, the House majority is giving us aggressively harmful stupidity. Today’s a bad day in the annals of job statistics. But it’s equally bad in the annals of public service.

Yup.

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Sports Miscellania Terrible and Wonderful

By
Trevor Macomber
– July 8, 2011

Two incredibly contrasting feelings that I was forced to contend with back to back while perusing the Globe this morning.

First, the terrible: Fan dies after falling from stands at Rangers game.

A man attending a Texas Rangers game with his young son died after falling out of the stands and about 20 feet to the ground while trying to catch a baseball tossed his way Thursday night, the Rangers and Arlington fire officials said.

Christ. I mean, obviously there are more painful and drawn-out ways to die, but the cosmic, tragic irony of this accident is almost unbearable. A man and his boy at a baseball game, the epitome of a happy family outing, father/son bonding time, hot dogs and peanuts, cheering your favorite players, faux-booing your least favorite — a quintessential and iconic life experience. And then, wonder of wonders, the opportunity to catch an actual game ball and present it to your son, forever cementing your legacy as a hero in his eyes no matter what else you do with your life. And then an under-thrown ball, or a reflexive but unbalanced catch too near a railing, or both, or neither — and in the end, this heart-breaking scene:

“They had him on a stretcher. He said, ‘Please check on my son. My son was up there by himself.’ The people who carried him out reassured him. ‘Sir, we’ll get your son, we’ll make sure he’s OK,’” Ziegler said. “He had his arms swinging. He talked and was conscious. We assumed he was okay. But when you find out he’s not, it’s just tough.”

***

And then an emotional whiplash to the wonderful: Man with no arms throws out the first pitch

 

Now, granted, he probably doesn’t throw many strikes, but I think that’s kind of beside the point.

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A Few Thoughts on Raising the Roof

By
Tom OHare
– July 7, 2011

1) The debt ceiling crisis is not a crisis. It is a hostage situation. There are two sides to the argument. In one scenario, we ensure the good standing of the United States as trustworthy and reliable economic actor. In the other scenario, we push the country off a cliff, pepper its writhing carcass with bullets, and shit on its mother’s grave. The Republicans are publicly advocating the latter course of action.

2) Because he is apparently much less politically astute than we gave him credit for three years ago, Barack Obama is caving to absurd Republican demands over and over again, which only emboldens them to make crazier ones.

3) The mainstream media, which should be running headlines like, “REPUBLICANS DOING EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO SABOTAGE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR CYNICAL POLITICAL GAINS,” are treating this with kid gloves.

And finally,

4) A default would be terrible for our Galtian overlords; they certainly aren’t the ones pushing this debt ceiling nonsense. Who is? Why, the Tea Party, of course. On that note, esteemed Teabagger Michele Bachmann is surging in the polls.

I can’t wait to see what happens next!

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