So . . .
If anyone picked yesterday as the day I would fall off the latest diet wagon, you win!
Today hasn't been much better.
I'm strangely sad today. Perhaps because I started my day with getting enormously lost and then interviewing someone about the genocide in Sudan. Perhaps because it's nearly 4 o'clock and I've yet to have a real meal (a grande soy chai latte, 4 twizzlers, two salmon & cottage cheese roll ups, and a handful of crab chips do not add up to much). I've run out of noncarb food in my apartment and have been too lazy to go to the grocery store. And instead of just making a healthy meal that includes carbs, I've been eating around the edges.
My mood also could have something to do with Austin's weather, which seems to alternate between insanely hot and pouring rain. The rain doesn't do much to help with the heat; it just adds to the humidity making outside even more miserable.
Or maybe because my coworkers went to my favorite hot dog place and didn't invite me.
So even though I know I should pick up something healthy on the way home and then go to the gym, I'll probably go to the video store and heat up a frozen pizza for dinner. And pout.
posted by Lisa @ 1:45 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Oh, no.. I know SOMEONE (Mike) who's going to go cccrrrrazzzy for that hot dog place.
Guess where we'll be when he comes down to Austin? :)
Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!! Maybe they need an innovative taste tester, or menu item inventer...
Ok, on a more serious note now. The reason the media isn't covering Darfur is because of a few things.
1) Let's face it, more news will be sold and watched if it's Bush bashing. Iraq is unpopular, and it's an easy sell. The fact the Bush Administration has tried various channels to get the dis united nations involved is hard to spin to make GW look bad.
2) We aren't sending massive numbers of troops there, so how do you protest that?
3) It's the Sudan. No one really does care. It's that simple. Africa is a huge mess. It was years ago when I was there getting US dependents out of Sierra Leone, or rescuing UN Aid workers in the Congo.
4) They aren't white. WHAT?!!? The UN is racist. What did they do when North Vietnam had amassed 472 violations of the Paris peace accord by early 1974? Nothing, though they were supposed to intervene. What did they do when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and killed over 1.5 million people in a few short years? Nothing. What happened when Bosnia fell apart? The UN sent everything it had, then the Us finished the job. Bosnians and Serbs are closer to white than Southeast Asians and Africans. Europeans are more likely to return the UN investment. Money and racism. Same everywhere.
Mike,
1. Yes and no. Bush has at least mentioned Sudan, which is more than most world leaders have done. I give him that. BUT all he's done is mention it and then pass the buck on to Congress and the UN. The U.S. has the muscle to force a vote on this in the UN Security Council, but Bush hasn't exerted a bit of power. A lot of the financing for the violence is coming from Sudan's ties to China, but Bush has refused to even broach the topic with China. Whenever there's a stink elsewhere in his Administration, Bush cries out, "Hey. Look over there! It's Sudan! Isn't it awful!" But he never takes any substantive steps toward intervention.
2. Agreed. And given the mess of Iraq and memories of Somalia, it's going to be a hard sell to get the American public to support sending troops into such a volatile situation.
4. AGREED! I've been saying this for ages. Glad I'm not the only one. If this were happening in Eastern Europe, we'd be sending in billions in aid and thousands of troops. And it's not just this. Remember the tsunami? Who got put on the front covers of all the Western papers? The white tourists. And we sent troops and money and all sorts of help. There have been dozens of other natural disasters in both the Near East and Asia that we've done nothing about. We've had the technology for years to more accurately predict tsunamis, but we wouldn't share it with poor countries. Until a bunch of white people got killed.
The one thing you're missing from your list is economics: We have no financial incentive to intervene in Sudan---or most of Africa. They don't have anything we can exploit them for, so we don't care what happens to them.
Well, Africa does have oil, lots of it. And it has people, many of which have become guinea pigs for medecines and other ideas of modern science. Much like The Constant Gardener plot. Don't forget the gold and gems in middle Africa, and quite honestly, one time we were sent to protect a Coca Cola refinery from rebels in an interior country of Africa. Yeah, some of my friends were wounded protecting a giant soda fountain and the handful of american workers there...
As for the UN, forget them. They are so out to lunch it's not funny. We can force a vote in the Security Council, but because we force it, most other countries on it will vote no, thus defeating the measure. And what will they do, impose sanctions? We all know how well that works. My favorite memory of UN bigwigs was Bosnia, when my unit and the British SAS had secured the airport (and only the airport) so planes could start to arrive with more troops and UN personnel. We told the UN people to keep down and to not wear their blue helmets because of snipers and heavy machine guns. One high ranking idiot didn't listen, and in a minute or so bullets were bouncing around him. After we returned fire and my buddy and I tackled him and pullled him to safety, he said "they can't shoot at me, I'm with the UN"!!! Duh!! At least he only had a scrape on his arm.
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