TW3

October 10th, 2007

That Was The Week That Was … distressing, as usual; no cannibal’s this time, or agregious animal stories, but the baby in the bottle gave me pause.

For more on the “succession” issue, go here.

Jude

HARPERS WEEKLY REVIEW
October 9, 2007

Burma’s junta claimed that peace and stability had been
restored following its crackdown on mass pro-democracy
protests in which at least 30 people, but likely far more,
were killed. Up to 6,000 monks had been arrested, Internet
service to the country was almost completely cut off, and
the army was paying 20,000 kyat to the families of
non-protesters who had been accidentally killed. “Myanmar
people,” said a demoralized taxi driver, “have no blood in
their veins.” Sylvester Stallone, filming a sequel to
“Rambo” near the Burmese border, described the country as
“a hellhole beyond your wildest dreams.” Three thousand
two hundred South African gold miners were rescued without
injury after a power cable accident trapped them
underground; the last group of miners emerged within 40
hours of the accident, dehydrated and exhausted, singing
and stamping their feet. It was reported that the
U.S. Justice Department, despite calling torture
“abhorrent” in 2004, had secretly endorsed brutal
interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and the Iraqi
government launched an official investigation into the
role of U.S. military contractor Blackwater in last
month’s civilian shootings in Baghdad, calling the
incident a deliberate crime and raising the number of
people killed in the shootings from 11 to 17. In Iowa,
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson continued
to attest to the existence of WMDs in Iraq. “We can’t
forget the fact that although at a particular point in
time we never found any WMD down there, [Saddam Hussein]
clearly had had WMD,” he said; Thompson ended his speech
by asking for applause. Republican Senator Larry Craig was
selected for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame and
announced that he would not resign from the Senate,
despite being denied his request to withdraw his guilty
plea of disorderly conduct resulting from a sex sting at
an airport men’s room.

A Nepalese eighth-grader who felt pity for policemen
facing street demonstrations invented a crowd-controlling
robot that can “charge at the mob with baton, use water
canon, lob tear gas, and even shoot.” Canadian researchers
found that lonely, bullied, or ostracized children have
sex earlier than happier children, and the mother of a
bullied Jacksonville, Florida, boy brandished a gun at his
bus stop, asking his fellow pupils, “Does anyone have
something to say?” In England, American gray squirrels
were bullying diminutive, mild-mannered indigenous red
squirrels. A Thai restaurant in London was cordoned off by
police after passersby mistook the smell of its
extra-spicy homemade chili sauce for a chemical outbreak,
and a volcano erupted on the Red Sea island of
al-Tair. Ivory Coast was fighting chronic lateness, known
as “African time,” with a contest that offered a $60,000
villa as its grand prize. The winner, legal adviser
Narcisse Aka, is known by his colleagues as “Mr. White
Man’s Time” and said that his punctuality made him feel
like “an extra-terrestrial.” Studies found that nearly
two-thirds of HIV-positive patients in the United States
are overweight or obese. “It would be very sad to survive
HIV,” said an epidemiologist, “and die of something else
that was preventable.”

American pastors were luring teenage boys to church by
installing large-screen game consoles equipped for group
sessions of the video game “Halo.” Responding to concerns
that the explicit and realistic violence in “Halo” is at
odds with Christian values, Gregg Barbour, a youth
minister in Colorado, stated, “We want to make it hard for
teenagers to go to hell.” “Teens are our ‘fish’,” he wrote
in a letter to parents. “So we’ve become creative in
baiting our hooks.” British clergy were condemning the
nomination of video game “Resistance: Fall of Man,” which
features a fire-fight scene set in Manchester Cathedral,
for an award. “For a global manufacturer to recreate one
of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality,”
said the Bishop of Manchester, “and encourage people to
have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and
highly irresponsible.” The Middlebury Institute, a liberal
advocacy group opposing the Iraq War, and the League of
the South, which displays a Confederate battle flag on its
banner, met in Tennessee to discuss their shared goal of
secession from the Union. A white family in Florida found
three burning crosses in its back yard. An autopsy could
not reveal the identity of a baby found in a Big John’s
Pickled Sausage jar and left in a Florida cane field, and
researcher Craig Venter announced that he has constructed
a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals,
creating the first artificial life form on Earth.

– Gemma Sieff
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/WeeklyReview2007-10-09

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves