On The Mark

What is beyond me is how people in America, the freest nation in the world, still don't speak out as righteously as this woman does; she's in a location where she has everything to lose and it doesn't stop her at all.



I hope she's still alive.

The Mystical Notion of "Fair Trade"

I go to the library a lot. It's conveniently located at the heart of all my classes, so when I have a break between American History and Existentialism, I wander in there and socialize and possibly even study. Outside of the library different organizations usually collect, promoting some leftist and/or "progressive" ideal. I'm used to PETA and Greenpeace nuts being out there, but last week, I noticed a new group set up shop. They were promoting what is called "fair trade". I inquired further. The conversation went something like this:

(Me): "So what is fair trade? Is it like free trade, because I know what that is." (playing clueless, naturally)
(Socialist Progressive Nut): "::Laughs:: No it's not free trade. We want to make sure companies like Starbucks are paying the people who pick their coffee beans fairly. They don't get paid hardly anything, and Starbucks pretty much exploits this.
(Me): "Don't the workers apply for the jobs? I'm sure that the workers can quit whenever they want. The workers wouldn't stay on the job if they felt that it wasn't worth it.
(Socialist Progressive Nut): "...Man, I sure am an idiot."

And so forth. No one is being exploited. I can't believe that people actually refer to this practice of intimidation as "fair". Attempting to force a company to pay any other wage than that previously agreed upon is not fair, it is force. The only "fair trade" is free trade. Both parties agreed to the terms without coercion; that's as fair as it gets.

Conclusion: If you can afford it, the next time you go to Starbucks, or any other "oppressive, evil corporation" for that matter, buy two cappuccinos and throw the second one in the trash right in front of androgynous creature known only as "Starchild".

Propaganda, Plain and Simple

Here's a couple pictures of Cuban propaganda that I've ran across.


The one above translates to "ideas are the essential weapon in the fight of humanity".



This one above means "victory of the ideas".

It's too bad that Castro's ideas are all seriously misdirected.

Castro sure is eloquent; check out this man's rhetoric:

"As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing the gap is widening. The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was 37 times larger than that of the poorest is now 74 times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries combined. The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No less than 11 million children under the age of 5 perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A."[Source:http://tinyurl.com/3d54wr]

That is some seriously sly talking. Castro seems to know firsthand about the suffering of all kinds of different people. I can't but help to wonder how many of those poor people were under his own rule.