Sue donates to World Vision and asked me to listen in on a conference call by their CEO. I knew they fed the hungry, but I didn’t realize how much. They have 800,000 donors and feed several million people daily.

In areas with Internally Displaced People, they often stay even after armies and the UN have pulled out. While a Christian organization, they don’t proselytize, both out of conviction and because it can be dangerous. They feed and help anyone, regardless of religion, and work in Hindu and Muslim areas as well as Christian, including the West Bank.

From the conference call:

In war zones areas like Congo, with displaced people, the death rate for children soars. Just providing soap cuts the child death rate by 50%.

Some of their workers in India had to hide in forests when Hindu extremists burned homes and raped nuns.

Haiti got just hit with four back-to-back hurricanes, which devastated the island. In a few areas where World Vision was able to build floodwalls, those towns survived, but some of the valleys remained flooded for weeks. They’ve delivered 23,000 tons of food to Haiti this year.

Poverty drives women and girls to prostitution because they have no other way to survive.

Bringing people out of poverty by providing food and education will eventually lower the birth rate. People who are not living in poverty have fewer kids.

The food crisis is destabilizing governments. A hungry man is an angry man.

Sobering stuff.

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Photo from The Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog

Other major indexes besides the Dow got whacked, closing at multi-year lows. 8000 on the Dow was where major support was, and a battle had raged there for weeks between bears and bulls. That support has now been broken. This was not just another bad day on the market, but something more significant.

When major support levels are smashed, program trading and those who follow technical analysis will start selling. Which will provoke more selling. This on top of the seemingly random dumping of stocks by hedge funds that are liquidating or are facing huge redemptions.

As a historical point of interest, it should be noted that Gene Simmons of Kiss opened the NYSE today. Maybe it should have been AC/DC singing Highway to Hell instead.

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This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008.

Click the icons for details on each piracy incident. You can also zoom in. The area off of Yemen has by far the most.

Tip: Bldgblog

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Cities going bankrupt

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Jamie at Intoxination says, and I agree, why all the venom from netroots over Lieberman?

I can’t stand Joe Lieberman, and I intend to watch his every move like a hawk from here on out, but there is a simple fact to remember. Joe votes with the Democrats more than the Majority Leader does. That’s something we can’t ignore. Obama has a very progressive domestic issue and we need every vote we can get. Let’s not cut off our noses to spite our face.

Many in the liberal blogosphere seem appalled that Obama might not be a liberal. Well, he never said he was. Like I said here many times before the election, Obama is a pragmatic, centrist moderate. So don’t be surprised when he acts like one.

Obama understands that global warming is real and that massive government funding of renewable and clean energy will create a zillion new jobs that can’t be outsourced as it helps to stop climate change, as witness his remarks to the Global Climate Summit. This is far more important than a tempest in a teapot by progressive netroots cranky that their views were ignored.

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For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

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DJ continues his series of posts on Left politics

The political landscape has changed.  Today, what passes for conservativism looks a lot like liberalism: bigger government, bigger budgets, bigger deficits, and a compulsion to regulate people’s behavior through legislation.  And while the Right has moved left, what remains of the Left has either moved Right or remains mired in ideals that have no place in a fragmenting, globalizing society.  Even progressives, whose fundamental principal is that societal practices should change as society evolves, have largely failed to keep pace with the changing world.  In other words, there’s very little Left left.

What is the Left?  According to its early definition from the time of the French Revolution, the Left refers to radical thinking.  It seeks change that will improve living conditions for the majority of people.  That change by definition should be “fundamental, drastic, revolutionary changes in society, literally meaning ‘changes at the roots.’”  But such vision is hard to find these days.  Even on the Left, arguments tend toward what sort of policies a central government ought to impose: Socialist, Capitalist, Marxist, or some hybrid of these.  That may be interesting discussion, but it’s not radical.

A radical Left would oppose the current growth model of economics, which ignores both the exploitation of resources and environment and the “value” represented by quality of life.  This doesn’t mean just the capitalist economic system, but the economic framework that measures and therefore values pure economic activity– a framework which traps socialist and capitalist economies alike in a web of competiton for growth in an environment of ever-scarcer recourses.  Instead, a radical Left would promote an economic framework which measures (and therefore values) both environmental integrity and quality of life.

A radical Left would oppose strong central governments, with their one-size-fits-all approach and concentration of political power among a small segment of population, whether aristocratic or proletariat.  It would recognize that in our post-modern world, conflicts arise less from lack of money than from lack of political access.  A man or woman willing to blow themselves up to get back at a government or people represents a particularly despairing case of powerlessness– and even economic equality would not solve the problem without political equality also.

Yet the lack of economic equality is itself a symptom of a disease that existing systems have failed to cure: consumption as a religion has failed us.  The quest for accumulation of capital and luxury cannot satisfy our inner human needs.  Why else would we Americans, the richest and the largest consumers on the planet, be so unhappy as a nation?  (We rank only 17th on the happiness scale, and Britain ranks 22nd.)

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Google is hosting the Life Magazine archive of photos, starting from the 1860’s. Some amazing stuff here.

Fashion Your Firefox. Compendium of Firefox addons.

Open Source software for Windows

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