Love to hear more ... I had heard the local diet was composed of much more grain and corn than the American diet and that it was good for you.  Local corn though, varieties of maize.  That chit from Iowa will give you the chits, all I can say.  /sammie

Onward through the fog

Right after the Iowa caucuses, IIRC, a CNN correspondent (not Zain Verjee though) did an interview with Barack Obama's grandmother, in the west, perhaps Western Province.  As the woman spoke, she was cutting corn off a cob with a large knife.  She had a few chickens and goats at her feet, who were trying to get some of the falling corn; and therefore it was not clear if she intended the corn for her family to eat, or if it was for the animals.

I thought it was cute that since Obama's mother is from Kansas, and his father's family are corn-growing farmers, he apparently has a corn connexion on both sides.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

Recently I attended a lecture in Seattle by 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Kenyan Wangari Maathai who initiated the tree planting organization The Greenbelt Movement.  She is a wonderful speaker and has an optimistic view of the world.  However, when I researched the true situation in Kenya, I uncovered found the situation does not deserve such optimism.  The population in Kenya is growing at a rate of 2.8% per year with a population that is 42% below the age of 14 years old.  Women have 4.8 children on average.

The efforts by the Slow Food movement and the Greenbelt Movement cannot begin to counter this burgeoning population.  It is not surprising that people turn to violence when resource are stretched and allocated unfairly.  It is also surprising (and extremely disappointing) that environmental leaders such as Wangari Maathai do not have the courage to state that the root cause of environmental degradation is due to pressures of overpopulation.  I waited for her to mention this in her lecture, but she did not.

Is it possible with strategic food drops to get the innocent people out of the war zone and keep them alive?

Who is providing the miltia with arms?  If a geograpic separation between the area the folks who are funding the militia want to takeover (oil, diamonds, mineral deposits?) and the victims can be established, then negotiations with the corporation (US, chinese, canadian, multinational) could halt the violence.

Meanwhile the victims would be safe, they could return later once militias are disbanded after peace negotiations.  A UN force could protect them if they were removed from the battle zone.

The company expoliting the resources doesn't want the militia gangs around once they have what they want.  They just want to avoid paying a fair price for the resources, or local labor, or abiding by any environmental laws.

Make a deal with the company in secret, record it, then arrest the board of directors and CEO for mass murder.

Do this a few times in a few different conflicts like this one.  It would discourage these tactics from corporations in the future.  Asset forfieture, losing the rights to those resources and criminal prosecution and punishment for the corporatistas responsible.  

Justice is fairness.  When corporate operators are no longer immune from laws we all have to obey, then things will be "taken care of a little better"  ("Casino"), fewer heads found in the desert.  Right now, contract killers and their boardroom bosses, from Blackwater for instance,  face no legal jeapordy at all.

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