Found in my electronic chapbook.

Some aspects of block may be culturally determined. The phrase “writer’s block” was coined by an America, a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler. Jay Parini has slyly suggested that not only the name “block” but even blocked writing itself may be a peculiarly American habit…. One literary critic points out that the concept of writer’s block is peculiarly American in its optimism that we all have creativity just waiting to be unblocked. By contrast, Milton when he could not write felt he was empty, that there was no creativity left untapped. p. 84

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

If there is a wheel of becoming, there has to a special place at the bottom, in the slime, for people like the military dictators of Myanmar. Now that they’ve relented and are allowing aid to trickle into the country, the generals are slapping their own labels printed with their names on the incoming packages. Is that what took so long?

From the New York Times:

Myanmar’s military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week’s devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

The United Nations sent in two more planes and several trucks loaded with aid, though the junta took over its first two shipments. The government agreed to let a U.S. cargo plane bring in supplies Monday, but foreign disaster experts still were being barred entry.

Despite international appeals to postpone a referendum on a controversial proposed constitution, voting began Saturday in all but the hardest hit parts of the country. With voters going to the polls, state-run television continuously ran images of top generals including junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, handing out boxes of aid at elaborate ceremonies.

”We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

Continue Reading »

1851 Fuck Me, I Won’t Do What I Tell Me

1828 Whooping It Up

Debt woes drive thousands of Indian farmers to suicide.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog brain bump I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Why is suffering a major criterion for writer’s block? Because someone who is not writing but not suffering does not have writer’s block; they are merely not writing. p. 82

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

More than a week after Cyclone Nargis, with 10’s possibly more than 100,000 of it’s citizens dead and millions facing further deprivations and possibly starvation, the xenophobic military rulers of Myanmar remain hunkered down, refusing to admit that they can’t take care of their own people. But is this cause to begin food bombing?

From Time Magazine:

The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

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I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Keeping Students… Involved And Learning.

As She Who Writes Like She Talks rightly reminds people, I’m a rabid supporter of the First Amendment of our Constitution and believe that the response to hateful or offensive speech must always be more speech. So I was pleased last evening to get an email calling for my signature on a letter to the editor of the Cleveland Jewish News in response to the following letter that appeared in this week’s edition:

When I was young, my father instilled in me that you are judged by the company you keep.

Sen. Barack Obama’s friends n Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres and Tony Rezko n leave me to wonder what kind of leader he would make.

If he were to be elected, who would be his secretary of state? Louis Farrakhan? His secretary of defense? George Soros? His ambassador to Israel? Jimmy Carter? His cabinet might include Jessie “Hymie Town” Jackson and Al “Crown Heights” Sharpton. G-d only knows whom he would appoint to the Supreme Court.

Intelligent Jews must do their homework before casting their vote in November. I fear our younger generation has been dumbed down by biased teachers and professors. I hope I’m wrong!

James G. Price Mayfield Village

Price is full of it. At best he’s a dupe of Republican dirty tricks and at worst a racist bigot.

The email I received came from Gayle Horwitz — co-Founder and President of the Northeast Ohio Chapter of the American Constitutional Society and Secretary of the Board of the Cleveland Jewish News — and proposed sending the following to the CJN:

Dear Editor:

We write in response to a letter printed in your paper titled, “Can Jews Trust Obama.” We the undersigned are members of the Cleveland Jewish community and strong supporters of Israel. We are also deeply offended by what appears to be an organized and not so subtle effort — targeted specifically at Jews — to distort Barack Obama’s record. Barack Obama, a sitting Senator from Illinois, a state with one of the most vibrant and powerful Jewish communities in the nation — a community that strongly supports him — has passed every objective test in terms of his support for Israel and other matters of import to Jews. The Anti-Defamation League, the National Jewish Democratic Council and Jewish Senators with whom he serves, among others, have stated unequivocally that Barack Obama has an unquestioned record of strong support for Israel. He was among the first and strongest in denouncing former President Carter’s recent visit with Hamas, and he joined our community in celebrating Israel’s birthday just last week by intoning that as President he was committed to making sure that Israel’s first 60 years were followed by “600 more.”

With such a strong record, why, then, has a “guilt by association” propaganda campaign, full of lies and internet rumors, been so systematically aimed at Jews? Sadly, we believe that it is an attempt to exploit, for political gain, latent tensions and distrust between the Jewish and African American communities. Such tactics are even more outrageous because Senator Obama represents a golden chance make the ties between Jews and blacks stronger than they have been since they stood side by side to fight for social justice and civil rights in the 1960’s. As the general election approaches, no matter who is the Democratic nominee, we expect that such false, negative attacks will become more strident and frequent. The forces of the status quo have too much at stake not to try every trick in the book.

As Jews we will have none of it. We have seen our own people victimized far too often by propaganda — even before the internet — to fall prey to that tactic. From time immemorial our people have battled specious arguments and fear mongering. We know that, in a just society, a person is fairly held accountable for their own words and actions, and Senator Obama has repeatedly and unequivocally answered the bell for American Jewry and Israel.

This election should be determined on issues, not slime.

I have given her permission to attach my name to the letter.

If you’d like to also sign the letter, drop a note to Steve Dettlebach.

We need to put the Age of Karl Rove an his ilk behind us.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog brain bump I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

…all blocked writers share two traits: they do not write despite being intellectually capable of doing so, and they suffer because they are not writing. p. 80

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

There is a despicable tradition among tyrants of shipping cash crops out of their countries in exchange for hard currency while their own peasants starve. After all, you need cash to buy bullets. The generals in Myanmar are holding with the tradition, feeding their people with rotting rice while selling the good stuff.

From the Los Angeles Times:

While Myanmar’s military regime Friday restricted the rush of international aid offered to help hungry and homeless cyclone survivors, the government was exporting tons of rice through its main port.

Four of the five berths at the port of Thilawa for oceangoing container vessels were empty, but a crane was loading large white sacks into the hold of a freighter. The sacks were filled with rice destined for Bangladesh, said the drivers of at least 10 transport trucks waiting to deliver several tons more of rice to the docks.

The regime has a monopoly on rice exports and said this week that it planned to meet commitments to sell rice, whose price has reached record highs on the world market, to countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, even though Myanmar’s main rice-producing region suffered the worst damage from the cyclone, which hit a week ago.

Continue Reading »

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Abstract concepts vs. concrete examples for teaching math.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog brain bump I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

One very preliminary study has used transcranial magnetic stimulation over the temporal lobe to induce the sensation of being visited by the muse – an experience presumably linked to drive more than talent. p. 77

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

Suspecting that there might be crates of automatic rifles and ammunition buried among the bags of rice and other relief supplies sitting on planes read to take off for cyclone-ravaged Myanmar, the generals withheld landing permission while thousands died. It took them six days to grant permission. President George Bush acted faster to Hurricane Katrina.

From The Australian:

With up to 100,000 feared dead and one million missing, Thailand today said it had convinced Burma’s secretive junta to accept US assistance, almost a week after Cyclone Nargis devastated the country.

Thailand’s Supreme Commander Boonsrang Niumpradit said Rangoon had agreed to allow in US planes that have been participating in joint Thai-US military exercises.

“We have helped the Americans to talk to the Myanmar (Burma) government to allow US planes … to fly humanitarian aid to Myanmar. They just agreed,” he said.

A US embassy official confirmed the decision, and Boonsrang said the first flights could leave Thailand within a day or two.

“They were very suspicious that the Americans would do more than just distribute relief supplies, but we helped convince the Burmese to allow the Americans in,” Boonsrang said.

The decision is a surprise given the huge distrust and acrimony between Burma’s generals and Washington, which has imposed tough sanctions to try to end decades of military rule.

However, international pressure had been building on the junta to throw its doors wide open to an international relief operation for the worst cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people were killed in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Aid has been trickling into one of the world’s most isolated and impoverished countries, although experts feared it would be too little to cope with the aftermath of Nargis.

The storm pulverised the Irrawaddy Delta with 190km/h winds followed by a massive tidal wave on Saturday.

Three planes loaded with vital UN emergency supplies for Burma’s cyclone victims were delayed today, awaiting clearance from the military government hours after they were due to land, UN officials said.

“They need assistance today. They needed it yesterday,” Tony Banbury, Asia regional director of the UN World Food Program, said in Bangkok.

“They can’t wait and they shouldn’t be asked to wait until tomorrow, and it’s crucial that food, water, shelter and medical supplies need to go in right away.”

Another WFP official said the three planes were waiting on tarmacs in Bangkok, Dhaka and Dubai with 38 tonnes of supplies.

The WFP officials said they believed one Thai commercial cargo plane had landed in Burma’s main city of Rangoon with seven tonnes of high-energy biscuits.

In a rare move today, Burma’s Southeast Asian neighbours today pressured the junta to unlock its borders to allow aid in.

Association of Southeast Asian Nations chief Surin Pitsuwan said the junta needed to work with the international aid community “before it’s too late”.

“It’s very much a matter of urgency,” he said.

Surin said regional governments, working through the Jakarta-based ASEAN secretariat, were “trying to communicate (to Burma’s regime) the sense of urgency and the flood of goodwill that is being offered”.

Member countries of ASEAN - which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam - are generally reluctant to comment on other members’ internal affairs, according to the group’s closely held principle of non-interference.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley said aid agencies normally expect to fly in experts and supplies within 48 hours of a disaster, but nearly a week after the cyclone, few international relief groups have been able to send reinforcements into Burma.

Witnesses reported that villages were destroyed and people fought for survival by clutching trees as the storm brought walls of water charging inland from the sea.

Reports of cyclone damage in a country that used to be the world’s largest rice exporter added to worries about tight global supplies of the grain.

The UN Office of the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 5,000 square kilometres of the Irrawaddy delta were under water.

The government insists it has enough rice reserves, although the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said damage to crops and storage buildings in the delta could mean that Burma will need short-term imports and miss its 2008 export targets.

If you want to help, here’s one suggestion.

Cindy Zawadzki wrote:

As far as cronyism, Ohio Democratic Politics is not the Walmart. There is a limited number of people interested and qualified for the job, they all know each other. There is no getting around that.