While I’m in the mountains of North Carolina on my annual writer’s retreat, I’ve gone back to take a look at some of the websites dealing with Myanmar that you may not be familiar with. This morning I offer a story from The Buddhist Channel on: Burma plans crackdown on monks as election nears…

State media reported over the weekend that the senior abbot who heads a government-controlled committee of senior monks is to call a meeting to outline new regulations. While monks are not eligible to vote in the election, analysts believe new restrictions will be imposed to further prevent them becoming involved in anything considered “political”.

The junta, which styles itself the State Peace and Development Council, has said that elections are to be held later this year as part of a process of transforming Burma into a democracy. Most observers believe the vote will be a deeply flawed process that further cements the role of the military within the country’s political establishment, and the main opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is widely expected to still be under house arrest and unable to participate. But some analysts believe the authorities remain nervous about a potential challenge from the monks, who in the autumn of 2007 led major demonstrations.

“They are still very nervous about this election. They have done everything they can do to control it, and the monks are the only possible challenge to them,” said Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based analyst and author of a recent Human Rights Watch report on the fate of Burma’s monks. “They are reining in the ethnic minority armies; they have controlled the political opposition. The monks are the only potential threat.”

What is your favorite website for information from Myanmar?

Stella Award No. 6

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angele , California won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps.

While the above contains a grain of truth, the bull shit level is so high that it almost deserves teabagger status…

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Spalding composed a life of digressions. For him, Where was I? was never a rhetorical question. Roger Rosenblatt p. 175

From Life Interrupted: The Interrupted Monologue by Spalding Gray.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Judge Joseph Wapner and bailiff Rusty Burrell were nowhere sight when a people’s court in Japan passed a verdict to put Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council (aka, its military dictators) on trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against women. (Maybe if they added the cool music it would have helped.)

From Mizzima:

The verdict was reached during a mock trial at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, after a five-member panel of experienced judges heard the testimony of four victims from Burma and arguments from prosecution and defence counsels.

“The judges passed eight verdicts during the court’s session, including their finding that the [Burmese] military regime was guilty of committing crimes against women based on the testimonies given by victims and that it should be put on trial at the ICC,” Women’s League of Burma presidium board member Thin Thin Aung told Mizzima.

The panel comprised Japanese former Supreme Court justice Kunio Hamada, Chiba University law professor Hiroko Goto, Aoyama Gakuin University law professor Osamu Niikura, International Association of Democratic Lawyers secretary-general Miho Shikita, Japan Federation of Bar Associations former vice-president Hideaki Kobori.

The United Nations was urged to form a commission to investigate the junta’s crimes and said the international community including Japan should make concerted efforts to stop their heinous acts, the verdicts say Kyi Kyi Khin, Pu Sein, Tin Tin Nyo from WLB on behalf of Naw Sunset and WLB representative Mra Yar Zar Lin testified during proceedings between 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday. Eight lawyers acted for the prosecution and three conducted the junta’s defence.

“I testified … telling them [the judges] how I was put in a dark cell during interrogation by intelligence officers and of the other gross human rights violations in prison I experienced while serving my sentence”, former political prisoner Kyi Kyi Khin said.

Now if the real court would act.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

ALL THAT FOR A LOUSY 60-CENTS PER HOUR…? The news out of Chicago is that the jobless will now be able to line up for work at 24 Walmarts across Chicago for a whopping 60-cents more per hour in their paychecks for workers who manage to hold on to their jobs for a full year. Keep reading…

iPHONE 4s…! WALMART…! YAWN…! According to USA Today, Walmart claims that sales of iPhone 4s are “brisk.” (Wasn’t that Lipton’s trademark?) A quick comment from Just Me at 10:39 this morning, however, sounds a bit more relaxed. Walmart has proven me wrong. Sigh. Keep reading…

BALTIMORE CAN DO BETTER… I agree with Bmore Local. The city and residents are getting sold a bill of goods, specially considering that Walmart intends to close a failed store at Port Covington. Any jobs realized at the 25th Street Station project will simply replace those at the existing store. Keep reading…

NOW IT’S NOTHING-MORE-AN-HOUR IN CHICAGO… Organized labor gave away the stores in Chicago. Yesterday WBBM TV reported that Walmart and the unions had agreed on a raise of 60-cents per hour on the first anniversary of an employee in Chicago. Just Me let us know that that was no big deal. Keep reading…

NOT NEARLY SKEPTICAL ENOUGH… Every urban area where politicians, community leaders and workers (employed, underemployed and unemployed) are concerned about Walmart can do to their neighborhoods is studying what happened this week in Chicago. Keep reading…

TALK ABOUT YOUR HEAVY READING… I sincerely hope everyone appreciates what we do for you. This morning I’ve downloaded Jeremy Wilson’s Statutory Interpretation in Wal-Mart Stores East, Inc. v. Hinton and Why North Carolina Courts Should Apply Anti-Tax Avoidance Judicial Doctrines in Future Cases.
Keep reading…

NEW YORK SCRUTINIZES CHICAGO ON WALMART… Only New York City is a more important market for Walmart than Chicago. I’m still seeing conflicting and vague reports coming out of Chicago about exactly what was agreed to and who is getting what, so I’m happy to have a little distance from the story. Keep reading…

WEAK KNEES IN CHICAGO… Apparently the problem in Chicago is not a lack of spine but rather anatomically much lower, in the knees. I’m still not seeing explanation the cheerleaders are getting 12,000 full-time jobs from 24 stores. I think their shoulder stink from reaching up so far. Keep reading…

BUT WHAT IS THE INTEREST RATE…? Canadians can now request and carry the official Walmart MasterCard courtesy of the federally licensed Walmart Canada Bank. The first question I have is does it work in the United States (it should) is there any prohibition of an American getting one? Keep reading…

CHINA STRIKES, CHEAP PLASTIC CRAP IN PERIL… The Communist leadership of China believe that they can flirt with Capitalism and remain true to Chairman Mao’s principles. Perhaps they can, but as recent labor unrest demonstrates, when bosses get wealthy, workers get pissed. Keep reading…

ACLU TO FILE IN JOESPH CASIAS CASE… Let the fun begin. I don’t know that anyone has made the connection yet, but yesterday’s shocking 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision invoking the 14th Amendment in McDonald v Chicago could trump all medical and recreational marijuana laws. Keep reading…

FISKING AN OBJECTIVE WALMART NEWS STORY… I watched a purported news video from the CBS TV station in Chicago and the obsequiousness of the two Channel Two employees — I won’t call them reporters — is so thick, I wanted the camera to pan down to see Mike Duke’s arms up their asses playing puppeteer. Keep reading…

I used to think that David Macaulay was awesome. Michel Guyot goes seriously 3D.

Stella Award No. 7

Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.

While the above contains a grain of truth, the bull shit level is so high that it almost deserves teabagger status…

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Stories seem to fly to me and stick. They are always out there, coming in. We exist in a fabric of personal stories. So I never wonder whether, if a tree falls in the forest, will anyone hear it. Rather, who will tell about it? p. 151

From Life Interrupted: The Interrupted Monologue by Spalding Gray.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

The military dictators of Myanmar believe they’ve found their lucky charm that will trample any doubts of their legitimacy and the rightness that they be democratically enshrined in power come the faux elections in the fall. When ignorance and superstition hold sway, finding a white elephant can make a difference.

From the Democratic Voice of Burma:

Only the third white elephant, a potent symbol of power and good fortune in Burma, to be found in Burma in the past decade has been caught by government workers in the country’s western Arakan state.

Officials from the forestry ministry were alerted on 26 June to sightings of the rare elephant by locals close to Maungdaw township, which has been hit by heavy flooding in the past fortnight, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper said today.

A sighting of a white elephant, perhaps the same one, in Arakan state in January this year was followed by an emergency deployment of army troops tasked with seeking out and bringing the capture to the capital, Naypyidaw, to be gifted to junta chief, Than Shwe.

The country’s ruling general, whose superstitious bent was a key catalyst behind the creation of Naypyidaw in 2005, has long sought a white elephant, and this discovery will likely be paraded as a sign that controversial elections this year have the backing of higher powers.

The Age of Reason is not such a sure factor in the world.

On Sunday I posted a long excerpt from Wendell Berry’s Andy Catlett: Early Travels. That bit involved Berry and his views (or at least his narrator’s views) on Race. Only a score or so pages latter, Berry again brought me to a full stop, this time with his thoughts on Economy.

Though the Feltner house was more modern in is appliances than that of my Catlett grandparents, the same household economy of home production and diligent thrift prevailed there also. Everything that the place could provide, it did provide, and in abundance. Like Grandma Catlett, Granny Feltner still made her own lye soap for the washing of dishes and clothes.

I think often now of that old economy, which was essentially the same from a farm household that was fairly well-to-do, like that of Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, to the household of Dick Watson and Aunt Sarah Jane, which would be classified as poor. For many years now that way of living has been scorned, and over the last forty or fifty years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skills, and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent, to some extent, on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendents could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum, which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – even could have improved it. Now we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress.

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants ad animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.

The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth sense of the real cost ad worth of things. Whatever came, came of somebody’s work.

Again this dovetails so well into what Sherry Chandler has read and written about in recent months concerning the romance of farming and the myth of the yeoma farmer.

I grew up in farm country, but did not live on a working farm. I had friends who did though and despite membership in Future Farmers of America, I don’t know that many of them aspried (or even that their parents encourage them) to become farmers. The work is hard.

I emailed Sherry yesterday with a notice about a four part seminar here in Cuyahoga County on becoming a farmer. I’ll be out of town for the first session, but I’m going to do my best to make at least one of the other sessions. I’m curious as to the kind of perso who wants to become a farmer and what the balance between romance and reality is among those taking part.

A frightening knock-knock joke

Knock, knock…

Who’s there?

Eyes.

Eyes who?

Eyes yo new healthcare provider.

Previously: How To Birth A Teabagger…

It’s time again for the annual Stella Awards! For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald’s in New Mexico, where she purchased coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right? That’s right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head.

While the above contains a grain of truth, the bull shit level is so high that it almost deserves teabagger status…

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

The brain can be a cruel organ. When it breaks, it breaks the Universe. John Perry Barlow p. 126

From Life Interrupted: The Interrupted Monologue by Spalding Gray.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Some 140,000 refugees from Myanmar are known to be living in camps along the Thailand side of Myanmar’s eastern border. Like all refugee camps, the life is hard and the hope sparse. Staying out of Myanmar where enslavement, imprisonment or death may wait is a day-to-day fight for people without a place to call home.

From MCOT:

A forum was held on that day [20 June 2010, JH] in the Thai capital with the discussion topic “Looking at the future of refugees in Thailand where they call it home”. It was attended by representatives from related agencies, namely a project on developing the quality of life of transnational workers and those with personal status problems under Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth), the Lawyers Council of Thailand’s Human Rights Sub-Committee on Ethnic Minorities, Stateless, Migrant Workers and Displaced Persons, followed by Friends Without Borders Foundation and Asylum Access- Thailand.

The country’s recent several rounds of repatriation of refugees was discussed at the forum, where the repatriation was seen as the government’s mistake which has raised questions among the international community. Some believed that the deportation by Thailand was partly to blame for the country being put on the US State Department’s human trafficking watch list.

The State Department said that Thailand was a source, destination and transit point for trafficking, with ethnic minorities and citizens of neighbouring countries at particular risk of sexual abuse or forced labour.

Statistics by Thailand Burma Border Consortium stated in April that 139,239 registered and unregistered refugees from Myanmar, mostly ethnic minorities, are now housed in Thailand’s border camps, while the rest are scattered in border villages or mixed with migrant workers in towns across the country.

And the unregistered not living in the camps?

0729: 28% of Americans Believe the Military Should Have No Civilian Oversight?