For the cheetahs, substitute the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. For the antelope, substitute Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, or possibly even France.
Tag Italy
Where Are We Going, And How Did We Get In This Handbasket?
More proof that Everything Is Going To Shit:
Last week, one of the best-known landmarks of the excavated ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii collapsed. The House of Gladiators had survived the explosion of Mount Vesuvius over 1900 years ago, was excavated in the 1920s, and even survived Allied air raids during WWII, but poor maintenance of the site and budget cutting from the government of Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi finally did it in. The rest of the ruins are similarly imperiled, to the outrage of many in Italy.
Several years ago, when I went to Ireland with my brothers, it seemed like everywhere we went there was the none-too-pleasant smell of peat being burned. Having long ago denuded the Emerald Isle of practically all the trees, the irish have been cutting peat out of the ground and using it as fuel for their furnaces, fireplaces, and stoves for centuries. But that’s coming to an end pretty soon, because the industrialization of peat excavation is destroying the bogs. Burning peat is seriously less efficient than other biofuels, and creates a lot more pollution, plus the bogs are highly-specialized habitats, so there’s actually an upside to driving the peat industry out of business, but they’re making sure they squeeze every last Euro out of it while they die.
And, then there’s this: Bristol Palin has made it to the semifinal round on this season of Dancing With The Stars and could win the whole magilla due to an organized effort of Palin-drones to rig the vote. Insert your own joke about this not being the first time Bristol went all the way.
Oh, and I almost forgot: Facebook launches their e-mail service today.
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Islamophobia Über Alles
Hey, ALL the cool kids are Islamophobes now, so you should be, too!
Not satisfied with kicking all the Roma out of the country, yesterday the French Senate overwhelmingly voted to ban the wearing of full-facial veils, as is the custom of some Muslim women. The so-called “burqa ban” has been a political hot potato since the lower house of Parliament passed the bill a couple of months ago. Proponents, including President Nicholas Sarkozy, have portrayed the ban as a “human rights” effort, but it is estimated that there are only a couple of thousand Muslim women in France to whom the ban applies and critics decry the effort as pandering to the resurgent right wing in France and singling out Muslims over other religious groups.
The Germans, in the meanwhile, have had a whole ‘nother ballgame going on as Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of Germany’s central bank and former finance senator for Berlin, resigned under pressure from the Merkel government after making a number of anti-Muslim remarks in his latest book. Unlike Sarkozy, who uses the cover of secularism to justify his policies, Sarrazin is a straight-up racist and all-around troll who sounds suspiciously like some FOX News personalities talking about little Muslim girls in headscarves having lots of Muslim babies.
And guess who else thinks there are too many Muslims in Europe…that’s right, the Roman Catholic Church. Quelle suprise! Sounding like someone who watches a little too much Glenn Beck, senior Vatican official Fr. Piero Gheddo urged Italian Catholics to start fucking like bunnies to counteract the evil upswing in Muslim births that imperil Christendom. Not to mention the need for future generations of altar boys, I presume.
Back here in the good ol’ United States of Jesus, last week New Republic editor Martin Peretz wrote the New York Times that American Muslims don’t deserve First Amendment rights. That’s caused some appropriately outraged reaction in other quarters, but didn’t stop Harvard University’s plans to name a research fund after him, complete with a big celebration for Peretz planned for next week, though they did call his remarks “distressing”. Peretz has issued an apology of sorts, but it’s one of those “I’m sorry you took offense at what I said” sort of dealies that doesn’t really apologize for anything.
Gosh that’s an awful lot of fuckwittedness.
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Racism Isn’t Strictly American
Topic #1 for the month of August has been and continues to be the ugly return of racism in American politics. The very thin veneer of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been driving the “Ground Zero Mosque” story grows thinner and thinner every day, as the video of the black guy who was mobbed by the anti-Muslim protesters in New York clearly demonstrates, and as the nonsense about Barack Obama being Muslim has now seemingly infected somewhere around a quarter of the entire population. It’s “Scary Black People” Month 24/7 on FOX, as Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, and “Muslim” is just the code-word-du-jour for a certain word that rhymes with Tigger.
But racially-tinged politics and the threat of ethnic violence has been popping up all over Europe, as well. Writing at Project Syndicate, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder decries the return of violent anti-Semitism and a series of incidents in the Swedish city of Malmö. Confounding the issue, he says, is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism playing into the hands of anti-Israel Muslims living in European countries, even as Muslims themselves find their own battles with intolerance.
International financier George Soros also has an article at Project Syndicate about the efforts of a number of European governments to expel the Roma people from their countries. The Roma are more commonly, though derogatorily, known as “Gypsies”, and have been a persecuted ethnic minority for centuries. Not unlike the Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, the Roma have no home country to speak of. They mostly come from Southeastern Europe, but through diaspora have ended up in just about every country. The Roma are highly stigmatized as a “criminal element” throughout Europe, but the recent actions in France and Italy to expel them are unusual in targeting the ethnicity as a whole as a criminal group, sadly reminiscent of pre-war imperial times.
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Time For Another Episode Of “That Darn Ratzi!”
Let’s see what that zany infallible-spiritual-leader-of-a-billion-people is up to now!
Proving that you can’t teach an old Pope new tricks, the former Hitler Youth has once again publicly praised Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II to turn over Italy’s Jews to the concentration camps. His remarks were delivered in the context of delaying the beatification to sainthood of Pius XII, which has been a rather divisive issue among Catholics. Rather than dropping the beatification process altogether, Papa Ratzi agreed to postpone it for several years while “further research” was done to determine the extent of Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.
Pius XII, seen here with Adolf Hitler during his tenure as Papal Nuncio to the Third Reich, had associations with the Nazis dating back to the 1920s and Hitler’s “Beerhall Putsch”. The Roman Catholic Church of that time was virulently anti-Semitic, and Hitler, who was raised as a Catholic and considered himself to be Catholic throughout his life, signed a treaty with the Vatican, negotiated by then-Cardinal Pacelli, that granted the Catholic Church in Germany special privileges that allowed them to continue holding Masses, while other churches were shut down. As Pope during the war, Pius XII was well-informed about Nazi concentration camps, Jewish deportations, and other atrocities. His inconsistent response — sometimes aiding Jews, sometimes not — and ties to Hitler have earned him much scorn and denunciation. The beatification of Pius XII along with a concurrent beatification of Pope John XXIII has been seen as a way to engender detente between the “conservative” and “liberal” wings of the Vatican, sort of like Barack Obama naming Hillary Clinton AND Robert Gates to his cabinet.
But wait, there’s more!
Over and over again, Papa Ratzi has made it clear that he doesn’t cotton to Jews and Muslims all that much. He’s paid some lip service to improving understanding between religious groups, but there’ll be no more of that nonsense, buster, not while he’s on the beat. Ecumenism, my pasty, pimpled, silk-covered ass!
He’s apparently not too fond of that Intarweb thing-a-ma-jig either. In fact, it seems like the Catholic hierarchy in general isn’t too fond of letting the proles learn how to read. The Bishop of Lancaster, England calls education a “sickness” responsible for virtually every evil of the modern age.
And politics? Fuhgeddaboutit! Former South Daktoa Senator Tom Daschle, who is about to join the incoming Obama Administration as Secrety of Health and Human Services, has practically been ex-communicated from his church by his local bishop after a nasty public dispute about abortion rights based on a doctrinal note written by Benedict while he was still a cardinal, forbidding Catholics from voting for candidates or issues that oppose basic Catholic values. (You’ll recall that this was also the rationalization used by the priest who wanted to forbid communion to anyone who voted for Obama).
It should come as no surprise, then, that the Catholic Church in the United States is beginning to look a lot more like the Republican Party now that Karl Rove and Sarah Palin have had their way with it: fewer members, skewing older and more rural, and with the highest disapproval rating of any religious group in the country. But not to worry, because they’ll make him a saint when he’s dead anyway!
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Mutual Friends Of Torrez
Several things to share that come from some of the people I know from “The Site Which Shall Not Be Named”:
First off, let me recommend to you a new feature from the Boston Globe’s website, Boston.com: The Big Picture
It is the pet project of Alan Taylor, who is a web developer at the Globe and one of the best-known denizens of our particular web community. For a long time now, he has regaled us privately with photos snatched from the press agency wires — the photos that are sent to most every major news outlet in the U.S. every day. Most of the photos he’s shared are NOT the ones that photo editors pick for their publications, but are often times gripping pictures of crises, beautiful photos of exotic locations, or just interesting shots that weren’t quite newsworthy. After a lot of begging and pleading, he finally convinced the powers-that-be at Boston.com to let him post some of those pictures to a daily photo blog, which has now been up and running for a couple of weeks.
I highly recommend adding The Big Picture to your daily blogcrawl.
Also of major prominence, you might remember the sudden popularity of a website called “Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle”. A genuine Internet meme if there was one, it shot to the height of popularity just as Obama’s campaign started to take off in the polls this winter. Matt Honan is responsible for that website and also the paperback book version of it, which goes on sale nationally in August, just days before the Democratic National Convention. The Internet has, of course, moved on to other memes since then, but you can buy the book and remember those glory days forever.
Somewhat less importantly, but worth looking at anyway: Jason Rhode wrote a well-timed post about the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here”. The book tells the story of the rise to power of a homespun demagogue who becomes president and ushers in a wave of fascism that overwhelms America. Written in the 1930s, as Hitler and Mussolini were consolidating their power in Germany and Italy, the book is clearly aimed at the widespread popularity of fascism in the United States and at populist politicians like Huey Long, but, as Jason writes, the scenario envisioned by Lewis has many parallels to the rise of George W. Bush and the current political scene in the U.S. that it could have been written last week.
Last, but not least, Derek Taylor, who usually writes about the goings-on in my old stomping grounds of Portland, ME, recently went to Italy for an extended vacation and offers some potentially useful tips for anyone else who might follow in his footsteps. Included in that post is a link to the photos he shot there, which you’ll want to look at even if you’re not planning a trip to Italy.
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Today’s Link Dump: Food
For centuries, the pigs of the Perigord region of Southwestern France have been used by the farmers to root out the highly-prized black truffles that bear the region’s name. Perigord truffles are among the most expensive foodstuffs in the world and are doled out in translucent slices or very finely grated on top of outrageously-priced entrees in the hoity-toitiest restaurants in the world. Now, the BBC reports, an invasive species of truffles from China has spread into the fields of neighboring Italy and may overtake the local species. The Chinese black truffle is rather tasteless compared to the Perigord truffle, but has been used to help stimulate truffle growth due to falling truffle production because it can interbreed with the Perigord species (Tuber melanosporum), and is even sometime passed off by unscrupulous traders as being real Perigord truffles. Tuber melanosporum black truffles are also grown in this country in Virginia and in the Pacific Northwest, but cannot be called “Perigord” due to EU regulations.
Remember how last month people were freaking out about not being able to buy 20-pound bags of rice at Costco and how the media were whipping us all into a frenzy about food shortages? Remember how the price of rice had gone up almost 150% in the last year? Sure you do! Well, guess what…turns out that the government of Japan has been sitting on an enormous stockpile of rice at the behest of the United States government, but now they’re going to release it to the open market and crash the price of rice. Turns out that Japan is REQUIRED to buy and stockpile a certain amount of American-produced rice every year by the World Trade Organization, and most of that rice rots in the warehouse while people in developing countries starve, all in the name of keeping prices higher for American rice growers. Now that the price of rice has gone up so high that it’s causing political instability, complaints have finally compelled Japan and the U.S. to stop the hoarding. Record wheat and rice crops have been projected for this year, which was already beginning to drive down prices, but the availability of the stockpiled rice will cause immediate easing in the demand.
Speaking of rotting food, yesterday’s New York Times ran this feature article about one of the most serious problems this country faces with regard to its food supply: waste. As a whole, we waste between a quarter and a third of all the food we buy — roughly one pound of food per person per day. And that figure is from a study conducted eleven years ago. I don’t even get to be all morally superior on this one, friends; we waste an appalling amount of food in our house. After reading this story, I am determined to see where Bridget, Charlotte and I can make the changes that would decrease our waste. If you’re interested, the blogger highlighted in the NYT piece is writing a book and, for the moment, trying to deal with the deluge of visitors as a result of the Times story AND a link from BoingBoing. I’m going to follow his RSS feed for a bit to see what he has to say.
This post at The Atlantic Monthly’s “Current” blog by Graeme Wood offers a precis of a new book called, plainly enough, “The Hamburger”, by Joel Ozersky. It’s a cultural history and sociological review of the quintessential American food product (even though it, like the hot dog, was really invented in Europe). I point out to my loyal readership that this is just the sort of book I would *love* to receive as a birthday present (August 27).
Ditto that for this book: The Warmest Room In The House: How The Kitchen Became The Heart Of The Twentieth-Century American Home, by Steven Gdula. Here’s an interview with Gdula in The Atlantic from February 2008. The book looks at the sweep of food’s history in the culture of the last century, as viewed through the prism of our obsession with our kitchens. Just last week, for example, I had to go see the nurse practitioner who prescribes a medication for me, and we spent the entire visit talking about her kitchen renovation; she peppered me (no pun intended) with questions about my kitchen, since she knows that I’m a part-time chef.