Motley Moose – Archive

Thanks to Ivorybill in Green Square for the image.

Yet to be double sourced, but if true, this is good news for the Arab Spring, Human Rights and International Law – according to Reuters

Deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been captured and wounded in both legs, National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid said on Thursday.

“He’s captured. He’s wounded in both legs … He’s been taken away by ambulance,” the senior NTC military official told Reuters by telephone.

I hope he recovers and is put on trial. As anyone who has followed my diaries on this knows, I think UN intervention in Libya was necessary under the Responsiblity to Protect doctrine and to support the Arab Spring. I think Power, Rice and Clinton played a blinder by persuading Obama to join France, the UK and the Arab League in degrading Gaddafi’s army.

For more on the politics behind the scenes of that decision, do read the Rolling Stone piece Inside Obama’s War Room

Al Jazeera is running this. Rumours of death in a hospital in Misrata might not be incompatible with such a severe injury:

Libyan TV is reporting that Muammar Gaddafi has been captured by NTC fighters in Sirte.

Jamal abu-Shaalah, a field commander of NTC, told told Al Jazeera that the toppled leader had been seized, but it was not clear whether he was dead or alive.

Gaddafi is captured and is wounded in both legs, Abdel Majid, another NTC official, told the Reuters news agency.

“He’s captured. He’s wounded in both legs … He’s been taken away by ambulance,” the senior NTC military official said.

An NTC official also said that Abu Bakr Younus Jabr, the head of Gaddafi’s armed forces, was killed during the capture of Gaddafi.

Maybe I could have figured out a ride to Cleveland by car if I had waited till Sunday, but I was determined to make the journey. I had follwed the Occupy movement obsessively on the Internet, and wanted to see it in person. I thought going by bike was a little symbolic too, that I would make nearly all of the 39-mile trip from Ravenna to Cleveland on our great system of taxpayer-funded bike trails, on which construction suddenly stopped when our new “cut-everything” state government was elected last year. I packed what I thought was enough gear to stay the night, made a tweet and Facebook post about my trip, and off I went.

By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

It’s quite interesting to see how America perceives Spanish. There are two quite different ways that the Spanish language is viewed in the American imagination. Indeed, in many ways these two approaches are the exact opposite.

The first way is the one more associated with American politics. This is the nativist perspective, the one which led to the defeat of the DREAM Act.

More below.

MOOOOOOOOOSE!

We had a spirited discussion surrounding Rick Perry and his Niggerhead Ranch.  If you recall we were waiting for him to make a further statement, maybe comment on why that symbolism would be so offensive perhaps do something to erase the legacy of a hunting camp run by White men called Niggerhead.  

So, the Perry camp didn’t do any of that of course.  Instead they launched a bigoted attack on the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney.  One of his hand picked pastors stated his opinion that Mormonism was a cult, and when questioned on the subject Perry disavowed the “cult” label pretty much the same way he disavowed the name on his hunting ranch.

Well my stars, look what we have from Talking Points Memo some leaked e-mails.

On October 13 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released CF Disclosure Guidance: Topic No. 2. This document establishes requirements for public companies to account for the cost of cybersecurity incidents and defenses, as well as to disclose their cyber risk mitigation plans to investors.

This sets the stage for a scene where a public company loses in court, a judge ruling their cyber risk mitigation plan not reflective of diligent best practices.

How this reflects into actions by enterprises will tell whether this matters or not, of course. But putting the question explicitly into the class-actionable hands of investors could focus many organizations on a topic they can relate directly to:

“When you are standing in court, do you really expect the jury to believe you have done enough?”

Crossposted from Infosec Island

As you probably all know, the Square Mile of the City of London is the world’s second biggest financial centre, and ever since the mid 80s has very much followed suit in the Thatcher Reagan concoction of deregulated markets, fluid global finance, strange derivatives, and the sharp increase in wealth inequality that comes from the ‘Anglo Saxon Model’. Indeed, the problems of the last three years are very much an international problem, with a transatlantic origin. So it’s about time the Occupy London movement took root.

I live on the edge of the City, only a ten minute walk from St Paul’s where the demonstrations began at Noon today, so it hardly showed great radical commitment to head down there, be a witness and a supporter, before heading back to diary what I saw. I would have stayed, but my daughter is not well, and I didn’t want to get ‘kettled’ (contained) by the police, and unable to look after her this evening.

So here are some images. It is a preternaturally warm day here in London, and the crowds were pleasant, well behaved and peaceful. It was a great mix of people

Recently, there were questions about the Occupy Wall Street Movement and “hyperbole.” Protesters were asked to remain accountable and report accurately based on evidence, evidence that the American public could then interpret for themselves to make their own decisions about. The kind of evidence which lends credibility to the Movement, undermining the mainstream media counterpunch engineered specifically to undermine its power through contentions that the movement is largely comprised of iconoclasts, anarchists, blowhards, malcontents, naifs, or zealots.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project

The volatility of food prices, in particular price upswings, represents a major threat to food security in developing countries and typically affects poor populations the hardest. According to the World Bank, during 2010-11 rising food costs pushed nearly 70 million people worldwide into extreme poverty.

World Food Day is a global event designed to increase awareness and understanding and to create year-round action to alleviate hunger. Since 1981, the event has been observed on October 16 in recognition of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a specialized agency that was established in Quebec City, Canada, in 1945. This year’s World Food Day theme is “Food prices – crisis to stability,” with the purpose of shedding some light on this trend and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable.

Since the inception of World Food Day, organizations have taken advantage of the occasion to inform the public about what they can do to help end world hunger. Although the number of undernourished people worldwide has decreased since 2009, to nearly 1 billion, it is still unacceptably high. According to a recent FAO report, in Africa alone, nearly one-third of the population is undernourished and one child dies every six seconds because of the problem.

On October 16 of this year, countries, organizations, and communities are organizing events to educate and raise awareness, with the aim of addressing widespread problems in food supply and distribution systems. These events are raising money to support projects that focus on initiatives such as measures to ease population growth, boost incomes, and prepare farmers to protect their harvests against the negative effects of climate change, among others.

Throughout the world, organizations and governments are developing and implementing various plans to stabilize food prices and ensure that there is food on every table. Here are just a few examples:

• India. The government is in the process of enacting a food security act that would provide food for nearly 70 percent of the population, specifically targeting the poor, who are often not counted in state surveys and who are denied many benefits.
• Armenia. The government is enacting a sustainable development program that invests in infrastructure improvements, makes financial services and credit available to farmers, encourages the environmentally sustainable use of natural resources, and ensures food safety by improving food standards.
• Telefood. Launched in 1997 by the FAO, Telefood funds micro projects that help small-scale farmers at the grassroots level. The projects aim to help farmers be more productive and to improve both local communities’ access to food and farmers’ access to cash income. Telefood is involved in 130 countries worldwide.
• World Food Programme. The WFP operates in 74 countries and is the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger. Currently, the Horn of Africa is suffering from the worst drought in 60 years, and 4 million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the next four months. WFP is providing food assistance to nearly 1 million people in Somalia and will scale up its operations during the coming months to reach some 1.9 million people.
• Hunger Free World. This Japanese NGO was formalized in 2000 with the goal of ending hunger and poverty through education and awareness around the world. The group supports local initiatives and young volunteers, organizes information programs, and joins forces with national and international networks to make these issues a priority for both citizens and politicians.
• Trussell Trust. This charity works to empower local communities to combat poverty and exclusion in the United Kingdom and Bulgaria. Last year, the group’s U.K. food bank network fed more than 60,000 hungry people.

There is no single solution to end world hunger, and these are just a few of the organizations that are taking the multi-pronged approach that is necessary to address this global problem. World Food Day is the perfect occasion for researchers, policymakers, and NGOs to reflect on the existing efforts as well as potential future initiatives that can help fight global hunger and malnutrition.

This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will discuss the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election, which Republican candidate Rick Scott won in an extremely close contest.

Florida’s Gubernatorial Election

On November 2010, Democrat Alex Sink faced an extremely flawed Republican opponent: multimillionaire Rick Scott, a businessman accused of heading the biggest fraud in Medicare history.

Ms. Sink still lost, running in a Republican leaning state in a very Republican environment. Here is what happened:

More below.

So last night at the latest in this new reality TV series that we call “Republican Debates,” Governor Rick Perry, who has been derided for performances that suggest he hasn’t done his homework seemed to quote a great American poet:

Charlie, as the son of tenant farmers and a young man who had the opportunity to wear the uniform of my country, and then the great privilege to serve as the governor of the second- largest state in this country, I’ve got not only the CEO experience but also working with the private sector to create the jobs.  And that’s what people are begging for.  Talking to that out-of-work rig worker out in the Gulf of Mexico today, they’re begging for someone to make America America again.

Now it’s not clear that this was intentional.  Indeed, it seems unlikely, not only because the poet in question, Langston Hughes, differed so significantly from Perry on just about everything, but because Perry seems an unlikely reader of poetry by anyone and an unlikely reader generally.

But I can’t think of a better poet, or a better poem of his, to recommend to Perry and his fellow republican candidates.  Forgive me for taking the editorial liberty of bolding the most pertinent passages for them.

Let America Be America Again  

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one’s own greed!



I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–

Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That’s made America the land it has become.

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home–

For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,

And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came

To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?

Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed

And all the songs we’ve sung

And all the hopes we’ve held

And all the flags we’ve hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay–

Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–

The land that never has been yet–

And yet must be–the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath–

America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain–

All, all the stretch of these great green states–

And make America again!

In this age of growing wealth disparity, words like these are derided as divisive class warfare, as sentiments that oppress and impede those who hold the possibilities of prosperity in reserve.  The message seems to be that if we stop demanding it and cease to seek it, they will dispense it.

When in history has that ever happened before.

Unlike Herman Cain, I guess Hughes never quite made it off “the liberal plantation.”  I guess he just wanted “someone else’s cadillac.”  

Searing poem.  Yesterday, I taught the St, Crispin’s day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V.  It is also framed to inspire a sense of shared national purpose and unity.  This poem is every bit its aesthetic equal, with a better argument.  Cain and Perry and all of the rest of them should read it.  I suggest at next week’s Las Vegas gathering, they open by having the candidates read it out loud, alternating stanzas in a circle.

Then the should answer a question about whether they support the poem’s message, whether or not they thing it is still relevant, and if not then they should explain why the oppose it.