Volunteer Tailgate Party
Big Orange Michael hosts the latest installment of the Volunteer Tailgate Party.  Check out particularly:

SKB's handicapping of the presidential race in Tennessee for The American Street,

The "No Quarters" item on getting around registration at news sites, which introduced me to the potentially very useful Bugmenot.com site;

"Voluntarily in China's" details about how Chinese entrepreneurs are editing pirated copies of Clinton's memoirs for the local market.  There are rather delicate touches: “I very much appreciated the famous sentence of Mao Zedong, ‘You want to know the taste of the pear, then you have to eat it yourself.’”

Despite several reminders, I forgot to send a contribution while wrapped up in posting yesterday's piece.   Oh well. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:40:00 PM -- |    

 
Zimbabwe, 2004 -- Ukraine, 1930s
The Washington Post's Craig Timberg reports that warehoused food aid is going unused in Zimbabwe while hunger stalks the country. The reason:

President Robert Mugabe, the only ruler Zimbabwe has had in the 24 years since the end of white rule, has announced that a bumper harvest will produce more than enough food for the country this year, for the first time since 2000.

That means officials of the U.N. World Food Program, which like other aid groups operates only at government request, have little choice but to ignore the evidence around them -- the brown and withered fields, the beggars on the street and the hungry faces in townships less than a mile from the warehouse, one of several the United Nations maintains in Zimbabwe. [...]

Few independent observers here believe there will be a surplus. In June, U.N. special envoy James Morris warned that as many as 5 million people in the country may need food aid in the coming year.  [...]

Mugabe has attacked aid groups as a threat to his party and made clear his willingness to expel them if they defy his wishes. A cabinet minister last month told provincial governors they should not hesitate to tell groups that fail to coordinate their activities with the government "to pack their bags and go," according to the government-run Chronicle newspaper in Bulawayo.  [...]

The corn harvest, once so bountiful that Zimbabwe exported food, has fallen sharply since 2000, the year Mugabe began violent land seizures of thousands of commercial farms owned by whites. Most of the white farmers have since fled the country, and the farms have been run by the government or doled out, generally to government cronies with little expertise in agriculture.  [...]

"The government will want to be the one giving out food," said John Makumbe, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe in the capital, Harare. "You have your party card, you get your food. You don't get your party card . . . you don't get your food."
(emphasis, links added)

It's happened before.  From Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest:

The immediate result of [the 1929-33 forced collectivization] measures was a catastrophic decline in agricultural output across the USSR as a whole over the 1930s.  The government's reaction was to base its requirements for delivery of grain ... on the estimated size of the crop in the fields before harvesting... And in 1932 even this tenuous link to the facts failed; the figure was distorted by merely multiplying acreage by optimum yield... [...]

 [The government's] action left the peasant with a notional but nonexistent surplus on which to live...We now have full documentation that the Stalin leadership knew exactly what was happening and used famine as a means of terror...  Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin responded to offers of food from the West by saying that "only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."
(pp. 95-96)*

Mugabe's Internationale
Meanwhile, South Africa's Thabo Mbeki isn't wrapping himself in glory either. Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International, writes:

On a recent mission to Zimbabwe and South Africa, Refugees International found that South Africa is denying access to political asylum to thousands of Zimbabweans seeking to escape persecution. Of the 5,000 applications filed by Zimbabweans to date, fewer than 20 Zimbabweans have received political asylum in South Africa. [...]

South Africa must not let solidarity with Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe or fear of the influx of economic migrants prevent it from living up to its obligations under international refugee law.

You can access the Refugees International report on Zimbabwe here.


=====
* I skipped over some of Conquest's account because it doesn't parallel the Zimbabwe experience -- yet. But it deserves to be quoted for the sake of Stalin's victims:

As a result, over the winter of 1932-33 major famine swept the grain-growing areas. Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and Lower Volga area. During this period about 1.7 million tons (1.5 million metric tons) of grain was exported, enough to have provided about a kilogram a head a day to 15 million people over three months; and this apart from millions of tons held in state reserves supposedly in case of war.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:52:00 PM -- |    

 
Go forth and be ticketed no more
A Washington Post article today describes a spray you can apply to your license plates that may defeat traffic cameras by making the license plate too reflective. Experts claim there are easy ways for traffic law enforcement to work around the trick, and that it may not be legal, depending on which state you're in.

All that aside, this was good for a snicker:

Furman Eldridge of Cheverly bought PhotoBlocker a year ago as 'a defense mechanism.' He has enough faith in it that he says he gave a can to his pastor.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:15:00 PM -- |    

 
Chicken Little, crying wolf
Regarding a widely circulated account by airplane passenger Annie Jacobsen about her fears of some Middle Eastern co-passengers, Aziz Poonawalla explains why he also engages in some 'suspicious' behavior on planes -- like going to the bathroom:

Due to rapid dehydration, I drink a lot on planes, mostly water and ginger ale. Also I go to the bathroom to wash in preparation for prayer, which I do in the rear of the aircraft near the stewardess area (with their permission). I prefer praying on a plane to praying in the terminal because I usually get stared at intensely and it's discomfitting; the rear of the plane affords more privacy and with zero exceptions, the plane crew has always been understanding and helpful.

Still, having read Ms Jacobsen's account, I'd be lying if I claimed I wouldn't have been a bit nervous myself. It's true that some of her suspicions were based on very flimsy reasons indeed -- "The man did not smile back. ... the cold, defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine." But her report about an item changing hands and perhaps contents is apparently a potentially relevant observation, if accurate.

Poonawalla concludes:

The bottom line though is that the threat of a hijacking scares me too. I travel with my family, including my toddler, and it's her safety, not mine, that I fear for (especially now that a hijacking is a fatal event for the passengers rather than just an inconvenience). But there's a legitimate threshold for suspicion, and there are legitimate authorities and professionals to handle those assessments. If the threshold gets lowered, or assessed by amateurs, then the number of false positives will overwhelem [sic] the ability of those professionals to find (let alone cope with) the true threat. Chicken Little ain't just a movie, it's a parable which is very relevant and bears remembering.

True -- but Chicken Little was peddling a patently ridiculous "the sky is falling" scare, as opposed to a "multiple Middle Eastern hijacker" scare.  In all, Ms. Jacobsen has made me aware of a tactic terrorists might employ -- assembling a weapon from individually unsuspicious objects -- and Mr. Poonawalla made me aware of innocent explanations for some of the things that alarmed Ms. Jacobsen.  I'd choose a slightly different parable, and agree with Aziz that there are costs to "crying wolf" too often.


=====
UPDATE, 7/22:  Whew.  Stanford U. radio news director Clinton Taylor "and my research assistant, Mr. Google" have i.d.'d the perps as Nour Mehana and his Syrian band of renown. In case they've got some good oud playing, I'm going to check them out. (Via the omnipotent Volokh Conspiracy).

UPDATE, 7/26: Brett Marston responds, rightly recommending Dave Neiwert's cautionary history of the Japanese scares and internments during World War II as a companion piece to this post.
 
UPDATE, 7/30: Aziz follows up, noting that KFI-AM 640's Eric Leonard reports that air marshals reacted not to the Syrians, but to Ms. Jacobsen.  “The lady was overreacting,” said the [federal official or source]. “A flight attendant was told to tell the passenger to calm down; that there were air marshals on the plane.” ... "We have to take all calls seriously, but the passenger was worried, not the flight crew or the federal air marshals," [FBI spokeswoman Cathy Viray] said. "The complaint did not stem from the flight crew."  The KFI-AM report appears to contradict a July 28 NPR report by Mary Louise Kelly stating that "David Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service, says there were air marshals on the flight, and that they were also disturbed by the men's behavior -- so disturbed that officials on the ground were alerted..."
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:47:00 AM -- |