mbjones

Good bit of advice, if you have the equipment to do it....

This is an interesting infographic on the money behind the world cup...

I happened to be filming the crowd sing the national anthem where we where watching the South Africa opening World Cup match right as South Africa got their goal and craziness broke out. It went on quite a bit longer than I filmed (this was just shot on a small point and shoot, hence the poor quality).

More than 10,000 farmers marched in Haiti last Friday, opposing a $4 million donation of hybrid seeds from the Monsanto Corporation that are being shipped with the support of the Haitian government and under the auspices of USAID. Small farmers — the backbone of Haiti’s agricultural system — say that since hybrid seeds cannot be saved from season to season, farmers who accept them would have to buy more seeds rather than save indigenous varieties, which risks debt. They walked from Papay to Hinche, the capital of Haiti’s humid Central Plateau region, picking up marchers along the way.

At a rally, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) burned a fistful of hybrid seeds and then distributed native corn seeds to the crowd. Kettly Alexandre, also of MPP, said of the day: “We have an agriculture of subsistence that permits us to survive. We have a family agriculture. It is up to us to protect our seeds … For centuries we have produced our own seeds. We cannot now become dependent on a corporation like Monsanto.”

Amen! Chaining themselves to Monsanto is definitely not the way forward. Hopefully they are heard, the hybrid seeds not allowed and their own farms strengthened.

Incidentally, check out the documentary "Food, Inc" (or google Monsanto) to see what this has done to our farming industry and why this is the issue that it is.

This sudden popularity of global justice has caught some older evangelicals off guard. They are concerned that the under-40 crowd is abandoning conservative theology in favor of a social gospel. What they fail to realize is that my generation is not rejecting Christian orthodoxy. We are rejecting the false dichotomy that the American church has perpetuated for the last century. We refuse to believe that the message of Christ is either social or spiritual, eternal or temporal. Earlier generations of evangelicals were more interested in saving souls than seeking justice because a cup of cold water would be little comfort in the flames of hell. But my generation cannot shake the global perspective imprinted on our minds from our childhoods. The gospel, we believe, must have relevance for this world and not simply the next.

But those, like me, who welcome this more holistic understanding of Christ's mission in the world need to pause and ask why the younger generation is awakening to issues of social justice. Some would like to believe it's because we're actually reading our Bibles more faithfully -- including the sections often overlooked in the past that speak of God's concern for the poor, marginalized, abused, and exploited. Some think evangelicals are awakening to social justice as they interact more with Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestants who have a robust and established theology of justice. But there may be more than the Bible behind this revival of justice among younger evangelicals. There may also be Boeing.

Skye Jethani (author of one of my favorite books of last year: Divine Commodity) writes about how globalization has re-introduced "justice" as a reality in the evangelical conversations, especially amongst the younger generations. Interesting article, for sure.

Manning isolated a key turning point in his regard for the military; he said it was when he was ordered to look the other way in the face of an injustice.

Manning had been tasked with evaluating the arrest of 15 Iraqis rounded up by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti Iraq” literature. “The Iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with U.S. forces, so I was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the ‘bad guys’ were, and how significant this was for the FPs,” he wrote.

But when Manning had the literature translated, he discovered it was a scholarly critique of Iraq Prime Minister Al-Maliki titled Where Did the Money Go?, he wrote. The document was nothing more than a “benign political critique … following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet.

“I immediately took that information and ran to the [U.S. Army] officer to explain what was going on. He didn’t want to hear any of it. He told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding MORE detainees.”

He continued. “Everything started slipping after that. I saw things differently. I had always questioned the [way] things worked, and investigated to find the truth. But that was a point where I was a part of something. I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.”

The Defense Department declined to comment on anything Manning wrote in his chats.

This is the story of the man who leaked the the video of an US Apache strike in Baghdad in 2007 that ended in the murder of 2 Reuters employees and the unarmed civilian that tried to rescue the wounded (this man's children were in the car and witnessed the entire event and sustained serious injuries themselves).

Personally I can't help but respect the courage it took to speak out about this for the sake of justice in the midst of great injustice (knowing full well the risk of being found out).

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

The rest of the column is interesting but this paragraph stands out. If there was ever cause to boycott an oil company this should be it. My word BP. 760 willful violations???

New government and BP documents, interviews with experts and testimony by witnesses provide the clearest indication to date that a hodgepodge of oversight agencies granted exceptions to rules, allowed risks to accumulate and made a disaster more likely on the rig, particularly with a mix of different companies operating on the Deepwater whose interests were not always in sync.

And in the aftermath, arguments about who is in charge of the cleanup — often a signal that no one is in charge — have led to delays, distractions and disagreements over how to cap the well and defend the coastline. As a result, with oil continuing to gush a mile below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, the laws of physics are largely in control, creating the daunting challenge of trying to plug a hole at depths where equipment is straining under more than a ton of pressure per square inch.

This is unbelievable. Reminds me of the story of Adam and Eve we've been reading with a lot of folks:

Adam: Don't look at me, the woman gave me the fruit.

Eve: Don't look at me, the snake gave it to me.

And while they are all blame shifting, evil enters and a world of hurt happens.