Paradise Preoccupied

Maybe it’s because I’m not feeling well this week that the news seems to be all snotty and headache-inducing. Does my miserable cold rule the world, or does the miserable world make my cold feel worse? Mox nix, as the truly jaded would suggest … or those with as nasty a bug as I’ve been full-frontally assaulted by.

Anyway, let’s start in Kenya, shall we? My neck of the woods, and all …

OMG! How few fractions of a millimeter under the surface has all this tribalism hatred been bubbling away? Not many, apparently.

For any not following, all hell has broken loose in “Africa’s greatest democracy” … as if that title ever meant anything other than “Well, there’s an African nation that knows what hoops are for!” … and looks to continue to spiral hellward for some time to come.

No worries, though, for in the usual style of the ways of the world, help is now at hand. Okay, it’s in the form of Kofi Annan, one of the more useless individuals on the planet, but he is there, and apparently has already figured out that things will need at least a year of yacking at before any calming down can commence. Wonder how many dead Kenyans they can chalk up in the amount of time it will take him to admit that nothing can be done without some real consequence from outside …

Yes, this is the same Kofi Annan that managed so well to get the Darfur situation under control.

Whose idea was it to bring HIM into this?

For a look at the Darfur mess through the UN PR spin machine, here’s the “News Center”. Look around and see if one positive thing the organization has done in Sudan presents itself, then understand just what a mess Kenya is in.

Not alone, of course, as checking out this story on a kidney-selling ring in India well proves.

When a place is so poor that stealing the kidneys from people becomes a common enough, if reprehensible, way to make a living, what possible hope is there that something like adoption could be protected. After all, people only have two kidneys, but children? Hey … those come by the dozen with hardly any effort at all.

This is the sort of reality people must accept when they go all misty-eyed over supporting children in birth countries rather than allowing adoption and insisting that everything can be made better enough soon enough to make a enough of a difference to children who are children now.

India is just getting around to thinking about regulation of legal organ donations, and this one “doctor” they’re after has been known to be a kidney thief for 15 years. How long do you figure implementation will take? And where on the list does this rank against female infanticide, child selling, trafficking, etc? (Keep in mind that it’s a lot of men getting their kidneys snatched. That makes it a bigger deal in some circles than if the same happened to women.)

Of course, horror isn’t reserved for other countries. The US gets it’s share, but in more individual doses, which seems better unless you happen to be up-close-and-personal with whatever the horror seems to be.

This one, a graphic example of one family gone to the dogs is about as disgusting as it gets, and from all the way around.

WASHINGTON, Pa. — A woman in southwestern Pennsylvania locked her 10-year-old grandson in a feces-filled dog crate for about 90 minutes because he told his family he had been spiking their drinks with lamp oil and household cleaner, police said.

Rhonda Lehman, 51, also called Washington County’s Mental Health/Mental Retardation office and said if someone wouldn’t come for the boy, she would bury him alive in the back yard, police said.

Apparently the family … mom’s in jail, by the way … doesn’t see anything wrong with any of this; all par for the course, I suppose.

And if you’re wondering about the dogs that are obviously kept in the crate when the boy is out and busy poisoning his relatives … well, that issue isn’t addressed in the report, but I’m thinking it’s not pretty.

(I’m not even going near the story about the Texas father who apparently threw his baby out the window of his car.)

Sometimes, however, animal abuse gets quicker action that bad things happening to kids. This story, for example where two slaughterhouse workers have been fired for mistreating cattle on the way to their death as a hope of getting around some very important health requirements related to the meat people eat.

The abuse, shown in videotapes shot with a concealed camera by an employee who was working undercover for the Humane Society of the United States, included zealous use of electric prods to get ailing animals on their feet; chains to drag live cows down a ramp toward the killing room; and repeated jabs with the prongs of a forklift, which was also used to roll ailing animals along the ground.

What the hell is wrong with people?

I’m going to back to bed.