Shortages and Hunger on the rise

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In the U.S. and in Europe, pastries and pasta may cost a bit more, an increase that is, so far, mostly absorbed by the consumers in these and similarly wealthy nations. But in Pakistan, Egypt and other countries with large segments of the population living near or below the poverty line, soaring wheat prices have caused shortages, resulting in food riots that may spark political unrest.




With black-marketing and illegal hoarding on the rise in the global wheat trade, the world's poorest people go even hungrier, and fall victim to malnutrition and starvation at an ever increasing rate.

The worldwide wheat crisis is caused by many factors, such as drought in Australia, failed harvests elsewhere due to global warming, steadily rising demand in Asia, unscrupulous market speculation, use of grain to feed cattle, and, most recently, the use of food crops to make biofuels.


Will this lead to what some world leaders call
"a silent tsunami of hunger"?

(Video via Link TV - Sources: ABC News, U.S.; Deutche Welle, Germany; Hechos, El Salvador; Teletrece, Chile; BBC, U.K.; Al Jazeera English, Qatar; South Asia Newsline, India; KBS, Korea.)



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What it is REALLY like

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"I never wonder to see men wicked,
but I often wonder to see them not ashamed",

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), poet and prose satirist,
most famous for his novel 'Gulliver's Travels'

Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known ... that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

"This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency," said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University.

Only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.
(via various editorials published by The New York Times on the topic: 'Torture')



[Read about Torture on Wikipedia]


[Related: Fernando Botero and Mark Twain]


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Seeing Red at Redroom.com

Redroom.com is a new venture founded by entrepreneur and management consultant Ivory Madison. It made its debut on Dec. 21, 2007, as an encyclopedic global online community for writers and their readership. Redroom.com is a pragmatic response to the well-established fact that many authors whose primary focus is the printed word are strangers to self-promotion via the Internet.

The Red Room site provides a forum for viral marketing on the www. It is meant to appeal to readers, authors, booksellers and publishers as a kind of one-stop shop for biographical information, book reviews, video and audio content as well as authors' events calendars. Its goal is to showcase esteemed writers by way of creative social networking through original, author-generated content and comments.

The Red Room roster of authors is expanding at an explosive rate. The latest and most prestigious addition to the Red Room community is Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama.


See Barack Obama's Redroom page

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Visit the Red Room corner of Poet Ana Elsner


[Related: "We are the ones"]

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Do Something

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AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES Editor:

"I am marching in memory of Abdel Khaleq Nasser, Iraqi, male, civilian, husband and father, journalist, age 50, killed by mortar shell on 29 September 2007 in Bab Al Bedh, West Mosul. IBC database file #k7537."

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ImageBites -

- Snapshots borrowed from various photographers and taken on October 27, 2007 at nationwide demonstrations to End the War in Iraq.

(Unable to identify each one by name, AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES gives collective credit to all photographers whose work you see here.)

In Philadelphia:


In Salt Lake City:


In San Francisco:


In Chicago:


In Jonesborough TN:


In Orlando:


Everywhere:


Participants by City:

(Note: These are preliminary estimates pending verification. )

Boston 10,000
Chicago 30,000
Jonesborough 400
Los Angeles 18,000
New Orleans 300 (many Katrina survivors)
New York City 45,000
Orlando 3,000
Philadelphia 8,000
Salt Lake City 1,000
San Francisco 30,000
Seattle 7,000



Related article posted on CROSS-CULTURAL OUTLINE

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Desktop Insecurity

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Take a moment to assess exactly how much of your personal information is stored either on your own computer or on someone else's system. Do you use electronic banking, make online credit card purchases, submit your annual income tax forms electronically?


Along with these conveniences there are serious risks and dangers involved in relying heavily on the computer in your daily life. Among these dangers are viruses erasing your hard-drive, someone breaking into your system and altering files, someone using your computer to attack others, or someone stealing your credit card information and making unauthorized purchases.

At a minimum you should take these three important measures to protect your personal data and prevent attacks.

-1- Scan your computer regularly by running the most updated anti-virus software.

-2- Tweak weak passwords

Password "cracking" is a favorite activity of people who get their kicks breaking into hard drives and computer systems in order to perpetrate identity theft and other harmful pranks on the unsuspecting victim(s). The most effective tool to do it with are "Cracking dictionaries". This software can try not only every English dictionary word, but also names, phrases, slang words, substitutions (e.g., "time2go"), common abbreviations and a surprising number of other obscure sequences and strings. To protect yourself, tweak your weak passwords by using a combination of at least three of the following: UPPERCASE (A-Z), lowercase (a-z), digits (0-9), and special characters (@#$%&*, etc.).

-3- Trash-can suspicious e-mails

E-mail attachments can carry a variety of "malware", such as viruses, trojans, worms and "backdoor" programs, just waiting for you to set it loose by opening the attachment. Malware often comes with the filename extensions .exe, .pif, .scr or .vba (this is not a complete list, though). One of the favorite tricks of virus writers is to hide the virus in an attachment that, when run, produces a clever or entertaining animation on the screen that people like to forward on to all their friends thereby unknowingly spreading the 'disease' like wildfire...

Know thy enemy

Viruses - This type of malicious code requires you to actually do something before it infects your computer. This action could be opening an email attachment or going to a particular web page.

Worms - Worms propagate without user intervention. They typically start by exploiting a software vulnerability (a flaw that allows the software's intended security policy to be violated), then once the victim computer has been infected the worm will attempt to find and infect other computers. Similar to viruses, worms can propagate via email, web sites, or network-based software. The automated self-propagation of worms distinguishes them from viruses.

Trojan horses - A Trojan horse program is software that claims to be one thing while in fact doing something different behind the scenes. For example, a program that claims it will speed up your computer may actually be sending confidential information to a remote intruder.

Scary? - It certainly is.

So, don't delay: research, implement and install the most effective counter-measures to protect yourself before it's too late and the damage has been done.

[See also: Preying on the Un-informed]

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Take a shot

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A sure fire way to get blotto

Bottoms up!
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The Phenomenon of Blogging REVIEWED

An editorial by Ana Elsner


You have signed on with a blog host. You have designed the layout of your pages.
Welcome to the Blogosphere! ... So, what next?

Obviously you feel the urge to communicate. The question is: What do you wish to say, and to whom are you addressing yourself ? - Answering this question will define your blog's platform, i.e., its basic theme and content. It will also determine your blog's readership and popularity.

Weblogs seem to fall into at least five general categories:

- The primary motivation for the blogger novice is to keep an online DIARY of his or her personal life, and share with the world-at-large their innermost hopes, fears and other private matters, concerns, events and affairs. This type of blogging seems to be born out of a sense of isolation and can be understood as an attempt to 'reach out'. These blogs, while often fascinating, can also be too recondite and boring to those of us, not enrolled in PSYCH 101.

- Another type of blog is the 'insider' SPECIAL INTEREST BLOG where all content and links center on a specific hobby, profession, pursuit or mission (such as photography, singers or bands, cooking, pets, to name just a few). These blogs have a devoted and highly interactive online 'tribe' of followers who, depending on geographic proximity to each other, will also meet in person or come together in support of a cause related to their common interest. Such blogs are self-limiting in that they appeal only to an exclusive group.

- Gaining in popularity are TUMBLELOGS. They are a type of modified 'remaindered links' style Linklog with minimal commentary, a maximum of eye-catching visuals, sparse text, little cross-blog chatter and the barest whiff of a finished article. They serve as a sort of 'switchboard' for the trigger-happy blog browser flitting about at break-neck speed, never stopping long enough to investigate any topic in depth.

- A fourth type of blog is pure and flagrant SOLICITATION in the weblog format. It serves no other purpose than to push products or services, which are often of dubious legality. Such blogs are stuffed with popular keywords in order to lure the searchbots to index their pages and thereby drive traffic to their site(s). Should you accidentally land on one of these, your screen will instantly light up with flashing banners, pop-ups and other annoying, if not harmful little programs. In addition to sending out cookies, many of these 'pseudo' blogs run sophisticated listbots on your harddrive that harvest additional data and send it back to their server. Blogsurfer beware!

- By contrast, there are the INTELLIGENT and INFORMATIVE BLOGS that aspire to meet the highest of journalistic standards. They are dedicated to bringing their readership a wide array of well written, well researched and thought provoking articles and news items. They are de facto Online Magazines rivaling those you pick up at the local newsstand. Their content delivery is made with conviction as well as with humor and promotes further reading. Rather than merely compiling a long list of links and condensing each post to the proverbial soundbite, these WEBZINES feature comprehensive articles that develop a topic from start to conclusion. Such blogs are made by writers for writers. They will not, however, appeal to the 'on-the-fly' websurfer with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

Being a blogger means that you are the captain of your own ship in cyberspace. You map your course by the content you choose to present. Blog on!

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[See also: "On Cruising the Blog-Scene" ]

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[Related Post: "What type of blog is this?"]

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MISSION STATEMENT

Amalgamated Perspectives is a public forum. Its focus is and shall remain on you, our Fellow Web-Citizens. Our platform is multinational and independent. We strive to present material that is cutting-edge, informative, well-researched and of journalistic merit. The links which we build into our posts will take you to sites that explore our topics in greater detail. They do not constitute our endorsement of those site-holder's opinions, products or services. We rely on your good judgment when following a link trail that extends beyond our original referral.

The Amalgamated Perspectives site is always safe and free of advertising. The selection of topics presented here is designed to promote continuing education and critical thinking. We aim to induce discussion either with us by way of the comment feature below each posting, or among you, our readers. In some cases we provide our email address to enable direct correspondence."

Please bookmark this site and keep checking-in for updates.

[A similar site: CROSS CULTURAL OUTLINE]

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