Yearly Archives: 2014

Doge Care.gov?

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I’ve really started getting a kick out of the fun social media teams in some of the cabinet departments and Federal agencies. h/t to @radlein on Twitter for catching this official Doge-based posting by the Dept. of Health and Human Services and bringing it into my timeline

dogecare

Now if we were to get health insurers to accept DogeCoin as a currency, would that bring us one step closer to former Nevada U.S. Senate Candidate Sue Lowden’s dream of people being able to barter chickens for health care — or is it still too abstract and non-animal-based?

Backlash mounts on Spanish abortion rollback

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spainBill and I have already discussed Spain’s proposed abortion law, the Ley Gallardón, which would restrict abortion in Spain to cases of rape or long-term harm to the mother.

Opponents of the proposal have created a satirical website called “Bebés de contenedor” (“Dumpster babies”) advertising a fake startup that connects hopeful adoptive parents with the babies that will be abandoned because of restricted abortion rights.

The site states (all translations in this post are my own):
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No joke: Arizona SB 1062 just cleared way for Uganda anti-gay law

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uganda-flagThe office of the president in Uganda has announced they will be signing their anti-homosexuality bill into law today.

The president’s spokesman cited the Arizona legislature’s decision last week to pass a bill (SB 1062) permitting private non-religious businesses to discriminate against/refuse service to gay customers, suggesting that this showed them that the U.S. wasn’t serious about lecturing Uganda — a major regional military player and U.S. ally — on anti-gay legislation.

As I write this, the following tweets were posted just in the past couple hours ago by Ofwono Opondo, the official spokesman of the president’s administration.


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South Sudan: Gathering the victims

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south-sudan-map-ciaThe fighting in South Sudan is somewhat reduced, in large part because of a massive Ugandan Army operation on behalf of the South Sudan government, but it’s still going on.

Meanwhile, human rights workers are already undertaking the awful task of trying to assemble and count the bodies from hundreds of different massacres in December. In those incidents, entire groups of civilians — ranging in size from a dozen to well over a hundred — were cut down by rampaging soldiers from the divided army after it split suddenly along ethnic lines at the end of last year. In the past 3 weeks alone, one man and a few helpers have recovered 2,000 bodies.

Sochi: Imperial Russian minority deportation center

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Circassian-WarriorIn addition to the much more contemporary mass slaughter of ethnic Chechens by the Russian Federation (and earlier waves of deadly internal deportations by the Soviet Union), there’s the simple, horrifying reality that the Sochi Olympics are being held pretty much at ground zero of a 19th century genocide/mass expulsion.
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Interview: Background on Venezuela situation

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In March 2013, a little less than a year ago, I interviewed the University of Delaware’s Dr. Julio Carrion, an expert on mass support for authoritarian alternatives to democracy in Latin America, about the legacy of President Hugo Chavez, who had just passed away at the time. Since then, his party and successor has struggled to keep Venezuela’s population happy — leading to protests in the last several days.

This 18 minute interview provides a ton of great background information on the problems facing Venezuelans today.

Interview on Hugo Chavez – Dr. Julio Carrion

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