Whenever we hear of a lack of food in Africa, we hear about droughts and such. What folks don’t tell us is there is still plenty of places to grow things, but those places have been dedicated to providing luxury food items to far flung regions of the world.

Take Kenya for example …

Immediate, medium and long-term priority interventions, including controlling food prices, providing food aid and creating employment, are required to stop more Kenyans going hungry, an inter-agency assessment of the 2008/2009 short rains recommends.

The interventions in livestock, agriculture, fisheries, water, education, health and nutrition sectors would address Kenya’s food insecurity, which is becoming “increasingly entrenched”, states the report compiled by the Kenya Food Security Steering Group, with several Kenyan ministries, UN agencies and NGOs.

(KENYA: Severe warning sounded on food security, UN news reporting agency IRIN, 03/2/09)

The proffered solutions are quite standard big corporation/government action to save the tiny child, woman and man

For agriculture, the report recommends providing drought-tolerant seeds and farm inputs to farmers in areas affected by months of post-election violence in early 2008.

For the water sector, the assessment recommends water-trucking; fuel subsidies, borehole rehabilitation; desilting water sources; rain harvesting; rehabilitation of shallow wells and the rehabilitation of irrigation canals.

In the food sector, the report says at least 123,000 metric tonnes of food commodities will be required from April to September and recommends the prioritising of food and association costs for 2.5 million drought-affected people; 850,000 school children and 150,000 internally displaced persons; and a supplementary feeding programme.

(ibid)

Now take a look at what Kenya is exporting (numbers from the UN)

   

Kenya has a huge agricultural base, but much of this base has been turned over to interests that aren’t serving the immediate and long term needs of Kenya itself. Imagine if Kenya grew an extra 123,000 metric tons of food for a hungry population instead of growing for export.

But then they couldn’t afford the latest genetically modified and tightly controlled seeds from Monsanto and others, could they? (For more see GM Crops Irrelevant for Africa, printed at the Institute of Science in Society.)

… really!

A review of bird populations in the United States was released March 19 by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Nearly a third of the United States’ 800 bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, the new report shows.

Bird populations are critical indicators of the health of our environment – “like the canary in the coal mine,” Salazar said at a press conference.

(U.S. bird populations in decline, report says, Science News, 03/19/09)

(Using bird metaphors in a story about birds doesn’t really work … does it?)

The heartening side of things

But conservation projects have been successful in reversing declines in some bird populations. Populations of 39 different species of waterfowl have increased by more than 100 percent during the past 40 years, thanks to efforts to restore more than 30 million acres of wetlands, the report says.

When society works together in a cooperative and practical fashion, great things can happen. Obama is attempting to follow a fantastically successful model presented by FDR in the ’30s (whether Obama is successful remains to be seen, but early indicators portend good things). Here in Vermont we have Efficiency Vermont as a great example of working hand in hand with excellent results.

Yes … what we do does make a difference.

and it sure as hell ain’t ACORN!

8. It was part of the conspiracy that the Defendants discussed and agreed to buy votes also during the early voting of absentee voters in favor of “the slate.” This plan involved having Defendants William E. Stivers, William B. Morris, and Debra L. Morris pay absentee voters for their vote and then sending them to Defendant Charles Wayne Jones who was acting as operator of the voting machine at the Clay County Clerk’s Office. Voters who sold their votes were given a mark or otherwise told to signal to the Defendant Charles Wayne Jones by Defendants William E. Stivers, William B. Morris, or Debra L. Morris and, based upon the mark andior signal, Defendant Charles Wayne Jones would cast their vote for “the slate.”

9. It was part of the conspiracy that the Defendants discussed and agreed that in order to implement the method of corrupting the voting process described above, it would be necessary to cause to be appointed as precinct workers for both major parties persons who were in the conspiracy. It was further necessary that their assignment to respective precincts be coordinated so that no one outside the conspiracy would be in place to observe their actions.

…

11. Over numerous days during on or about a date in January 2006 to on or about November 7,2006, a list of voters who agreed to sell their votes was compiled by Defendants Russell Cletus Maricle and William E. Stivers and other co-conspirators made

arrangements with these persons for voting and payment. On numerous occasions, voters were brought to the courthouse during normal voting and the early voting period for absentee voters and paid to vote for candidates on “the slate” by Defendants William E. Stivers, William B. Morris, and Debra L. Morris.

12. On or about May 16,2006, and November 7,2006, Defendants William E. Stivers, William B. Morris, and Debra L. Morris paid voters to vote for members of “the slate,” as described above. They informed these voters to ask for assistance from selected precinct workers who then took them into the voting booth and selected the votes for them.

For the full story and links to background news coverage as well as the full indictment(quoted from above) visit The BradBlog, KY Election Officials Arrested, Charged With ‘Changing Votes at E-Voting Machines’.

“monotonicity”

Here’s a definition one of the monotonists have put out there: “Monotonicity: If choice X is a winner of an election and, in a reelection, the only changes in the ballots are changes that only favor X, then X should remain a winner of the election.”

Some of our local monotonists, Wes and his apparent favorite anti-IRV website specifically, have even advanced the notion that if we fiddle with people’s voting patterns and apply a very specific number of one candidate’s votes to another candidate … why we can change the results of the election!

Okay, I already knew changing the vote count could change the election. BUT WES AND COMPANY ARE BUSY TRYING TO LURE YOU INTO A FALSE SENSE OF MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY ABOUT A FALSE ISSUE!

What the monotonists fail to tell you is that the primary purpose of instant runoff voting is a runoff. That means unless there is a first round winner, the number of votes a candidate receives is relevant only so far as to whether or not that candidate advances to the next round.

Once in the second round the vote count makes no distinction between “first” or “second” choices … everybody’s top choice in the existing field of candidates is counted equally.

But the monotonists would have us believe we should still count the “first” choice votes as being something more special than the “second” choice votes in a runoff. And they will repeat the monotonicity mantra with fervor … drumming on our heads that their claim has some real application.

Here’s the trick … we already know that the candidate who finished in the lead but didn’t win a mandated majority contest is not necessarily the one who will win the final election. That’s for a simple reason … people who can’t have their preferred candidate might want to vote for someone other than the first round top vote getter.

So monotonists will happily inform us they have a scenario THEY COOKED UP IN THEIR OWN IMAGINATIONS where Kiss could have received more first round votes then he did in reality and yet have lost the election!

But we know that everybody’s top choice of existing candidates in the second round of voting is counted equally. Nobody’s vote is counted as more meaningful than another’s. In the second round of vote counting you’re vote for Montrol is a vote no matter if you ranked Montrol first or second. THE RANKING ITSELF IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO THE VOTE COUNT!

A second scam being perpetrated by the monotonists is their claimed special ability to measure levels of preference without ever asking folks.

For example: monotonists will add up first and second and third place votes in an attempt to tell us which candidate was preferred above another. The idea being that rating one candidate above another indicates the preference.

What they can’t do is tell you if person A really didn’t have a preference and just arbitrarily put one ahead of the other or if person A really had a large preference for one candidate over another. And they can’t come close to any of the shades of preference folks express by different rankings … is it large, small, insignificant? To the monotonists those gradations are all equal numbers they can present with mathematical certainty. The monotonists will inform you that an unmeasured quantity can be presented as measured.

Certainly, if we entertain the monotonists imagination and take 700 some odd first place votes from Wright’s column and arbitrarily transfer those first round votes to Kiss, there is a scenario where Kiss would not have been elected.

But that is because Montrol would have garnered a majority of support that Kiss wasn’t able to. Not because of some failure due to “monotonicity”, but because in the second or third round of voting, people who picked someone other than Montrol or Kiss as their top one or two choices picked Montrol over Kiss.

And that is what instant runoff voting is all about after all, the electorate getting to tell the vote counters who the electorate wants.

Remember this?

HIGHGATE, VT – Small mushy lagoons hold the odoriferous byproduct of numerous dairy farms in this speck of a town near the Canadian border. Diesel fumes spew out of rumbling grain trucks. A dead skunk lies on a lonely two-lane highway. But what really smells, some residents say, is something new to these parts: a huge egg farm that is home to 100,000 chickens. The birds generate two million pounds of manure each year, and nearby dairy farmers say the chickens pollute the air and attract armies of flies. The egg farm operators say cows are worse. But for now, the dairy farmers appear to have the upper hand -drawing the interest of state lawmakers and regulators looking askance at the egg farm’s planned expansion.

(Chicken Farm Is Raising a Big Stink In Tiny Highgate, VT, Wall Street Journal, 11/13/97)

There certainly were a lot of fly problems reported in this …

Besides water quality problems, another environmental problem has been flies. The source of many citizen complaints has been the 100,000-hen facility, Vermont Egg Farms, Inc. (VEF), owned by a Canadian agribusiness that has also attempted to open hog operations in Maine.18 Virtually every farm within a one-mile radius of VEF has reported unprecedented problems with flies, according to a July 1998 survey by the family farm group, Rural Vermont. Farmers report that the flies are spreading mastitis, an udder infection, among their cows as well as increasing stress for the animals, leading to reduced milk production and economic losses.19

VEF’s closest neighbor, a dairy farmer a half mile away, has filed a nuisance suit for economic losses and put his farm up for sale.20 The state Agriculture Department has measured as many as 3,000 flies in a single calf hutch on that farm, reports Ellen Taggart, Executive Director of Rural Vermont, who has visited the farm. Upon entering the cow barn, Taggart says, the flies were so thick that they looked “like a cloud of dust moving up from your feet. Cows were constantly stomping their feet and moving around trying to get rid of the flies.” The cows, whose tails have been removed, were “shooting their feed onto their backs to shoo the flies,” Taggart recalls. “This farmer said he was losing thousands of dollars each week in feed.”

(Natural Resources Defense Council)

Now Reuters is reporting

Flies, already blamed for spreading disease, may help spread drug-resistant superbugs from chicken droppings, researchers reported on Monday.

They matched antibiotic-resistant enterococci and staphylococci bacteria from houseflies and the litter found in intensive poultry-farming barns in the Delmarva Peninsula region of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

. . .

“Our study found similarities in the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in both the flies and poultry litter we sampled. The evidence is another example of the risks associated with the inadequate treatment of animal wastes,” Graham said in a statement.

(Flies plus chicken droppings spread “superbugs”, Reuters, 03/16/09)

There is a low level caveat at the end of that last story in that the researchers didn’t “quantify the contribution of flies to human exposure”. Makes me wonder about my own little farm yard though.

CAUTION: simple math with no fancy interpretations presented below!

(Unfortunately I still have to refer back to this site for numbers. My problem isn’t with their numbers, but the faulty, deliberately so I believe, interpretations made about the numbers.)

There is one caveat: I can’t account for every vote in my totals below. For example, if somebody had listed Kiss below 3rd ranking, I’d have no way to know. I also have no idea how many folks had somebody other than Kiss, Montrol or Wright as their first choice and also listed Kiss anywhere down ballot. I looked on the Burlington web site and couldn’t find any official breakdown. It should be noted that any ballots I can’t include would only increase the approval numbers I demonstrate below … thus at worst I underestimate the level of support for the final outcome.

These numbers seem to be the accepted official vote tallies for Burlington’s recent mayoral election:

Below seem to be the accepted count for those who voted for Kiss, Montrol or Wright as their first choice:

Add up all the ballots that have Kiss’ name on them … doesn’t matter where. Simplest interpretation is just about everybody with that name on the ballot will be okay to happy with Kiss as mayor.

I come up with 7,089 ballots that had Kiss’ name listed on them. In the last round of counting there were 8,374 ballots counted.

The simplest explanation for the above numbers: about 85% of the ballots cast in the final runoff round are fine with Bob Kiss being mayor! In total? 79% of all the ballots initially cast in the mayoral election listed Kiss as one of the preferences.

So take your pick … 85% or 79% approval of the outcome … it was a great day for Burlington and a huge success for instant runoff voting.

The only anomaly is folks using faulty interpretations of data in an attempt to thwart the election process that delivered what Burlington’s voters so obviously wanted.

From Wall Street Watch:

Last fall, the house of cards finally collapsed. For those who might have heard the “blame the victim” propaganda emanating from the free marketers whose philosophy lies in a smoldering ruin alongside the economy, the report sets the record straight: consumers are not to blame for this debacle. Not those of us who used credit in an attempt to have a decent quality of life (as opposed to the tiny fraction of people in our country who truly got ahead over the last decade). Nor can we blame the Americans who were offered amazing terms for mortgages but forgot to bring a Ph.D. and a lawyer to their “closing,” and later found out that they had been misled and could not afford the loan at the real interest rate buried in the fine print.

Rather, America’s economic system is at or beyond the verge of depression today because gambling became the financial sector’s principal preoccupation, and the pile of chips grew so big that the Money Industry displaced real businesses that provided real goods, services and jobs. By that time, the amount of financial derivatives in circulation around the world – $683 trillion by one estimate – was more than ten times the actual value of all the goods and services produced by the entire planet. When all the speculators tried to cash out, starting in 2007, there really wasn’t enough money to cover all the bets.

(Sold Out, How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America)

A thief breaks into your house, steels everything, and leaves you nearly broke. Law enforcement responds by visiting with the thief and the resellers of the thief’s stolen goods in a very friendly setting, perhaps lunch at the Four Seasons. Law enforcement then takes the information to government officials who respond by writing the thief and the resellers a check from what is left of your checking account. They decide this too over lunch, perhaps also at the Four Seasons and on your dime.

Then the same government officials declare that a new and better alarm system should be installed in your home and in the home of all Americans, at a high cost to you of course (The reality is that the alarm system worked perfectly, but that does not matter).

(I called it a corporate coup, they call it looting… either way, we got robbed…, at-Largely blog, 03/13/09)

Yeah … she’s talking about the Wall Street bailout.

and lies my radio and my tellie and my internet also told me. Actually it’s lies people who know better told me. Actually this is more about those in the middle, the “reporters” and pundits, and what they’re willing to do.

Secrets, secrets everywhere

Spreading lies with those that share

Brother, do you have a dime to spare?

‘Cause the liars left my cupboard bare

And now the whole issue ……………..

For openers here’s a link to the Cramer V. Stewert clip from last night … Stewart to Cramer: ‘It’s not a f**king game’, Raw Story, 03/13/09.

I think two things bear emphasizing from the above: Cramer is putting himself forward as an honest broker and adviser while he is simultaneously depending upon the same financial industry he “reports” on for his livelihood; and Cramer openly admits he has had corporate CEOs lie to his face, but I don’t find any record of him making that statement during his own show (I could be wrong, but I’ve watched his show once in a while and have seen no indication he would do such a thing).

In this Washington Post story (Intelligence Pick Blames ‘Israel Lobby’ For Withdrawal, 03/12/09), we see a perfect example of reporters hiding their sources EVEN WHEN THE SOURCES ARE PROVIDING PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION!

For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), often described as the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, “took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it,” spokesman Josh Block said.

But Block responded to reporters’ questions and provided critical material about Freeman, albeit always on background, meaning his comments could not be attributed to him, according to three journalists who spoke to him. Asked about this yesterday, Block replied: “As is the case with many, many issues every day, when there is general media interest in a subject, I often provide publicly available information to journalists on background.”

That doesn’t seem too sinister, until one reviews just where all this anonymous sourcing leads us to.

Remember when the cheney/bush administration uncorked every public relations weapon they had to pursue and persecute Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie? Remember how virtually all the reporting that came from anonymous sources variously described as “ex congressional staffers”, “highly placed administration sources” and the lie really all came from the most partisan actors in DC? (cheney, Liddy, Addington, Fleischer, Rove and a couple others)

Did any single one of those reporters deem it important to tell us their information could be tainted because of the radical partisanship of those “sources”? No … at least until the “reporters” were put under oath by a federal prosecutor who had no fear of jailing the “reporters”. (I could go on a loooooooong roll about the NYT’s Judith Miller and how she acted with alacrity as cheney’s conduit of misinformation to the American public regarding Iraq.)

And bear in mind almost everything reported from the above mentioned partisan sources was found inaccurate at best and direct lies at worst.

What I’m describing is a lack of principle. None of the many “reporters” mentioned or alluded to above would have voluntarily told us the reality behind their “reporting” without threat of legal consequence or the very public beating of John Stewert (thank you John).

Flip back to 1996. Republican John Carrol was running for Lt. Governor with a campaign based mostly on his alleged understanding of business and creating a business friendly atmosphere in Vermont (the more things change the more they stay the same, etc).

Carrol came on my radio show, and I proceeded to do my usual shtick: give my guest a platform to speak their piece while I offered up questions I thought would illuminate what was being said.

Because Carrol was running as one who understood and thus could help small businesses I asked him some questions about his own background in this area. You see, Carrol had had a construction company that had gone under, and the Rutland Herald had written a good sized story about how Carrol’s business had not been able to meet payroll or pay bills.

I understood very well that businesses go down the drain on a steady basis, so I was going to offer Carrol a real softball question: I wanted to ask him what he had learned form his own bankruptcy that could be passed on to others.

But I never got past the confirmation that he gone bankrupt. Carrol exploded in denial of any bankruptcy ever, he was red in the face with anger, he was a large (not fat) man and was physically leaning in to me as he castigated me for making things up. When I pursued the question he compared what I was doing to the old style of asking if someone had stopped beating his wife.

Fortunately for Carrol, and unfortunately for me that day, I had left the copy of the Rutland Herald article at home … I couldn’t confront him about his deliberate lie to my audience and me on that Friday.

And then came Monday.

I showed up to my show with the article. I read it on the air. I informed folks I didn’t like guests lying to them or me. I made sure I called Carrol a liar, and I did it publicly … because that’s what he did, and because he did it with such certitude, I applied the word directly to him in a personal manner.

Over my time as radio host I had one other incident where I had to come back and tell the audience I had done a little research and it was obvious a specific guest was lying to them.

I just wonder why that expectation of honesty and willingness to hold folks accountable for their words seems to be so limited in the arena of public news gatherers and pundits.