Getting over the Colts Super Bowl Loss

It is just a football game played by highly paid professional athletes. 

Both Indianapolis and New Orleans are beset by huge economic and social problems that will not be fixed by a  mere Super Bowl victory or victories.   And, it has been less than a month since an earthquake devastated Haiti and left 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless.  

That is what I keep telling myself. 

Okay.  I really need to get over the Colts losing the Super Bowl.

I love the Indianapolis Colts.  I loved them when them during the Mike Pagel, Gary Hogeboom (though i guess he was a scab, which isn’t cool), Jack Tradeau, Chris Chandler, Jeff George, and Jim Harbaugh eras.  I cried when Steve Emtman blew his knee out and the only time I missed following a Colts game during the Peyton Manning era was when I spent a semester in Jerusalem during the fall of 1999.

I never imagined that the Colts would win a Super Bowl and be the  team with the most wins of any decade.

  Still, we just should have a few more Super Bowl rings.

Time to move on. 

Though, it looks like the Colts are the favorites to win it all next year..

2010
02/09
CATEGORY
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The Industrialized farming and destruction of our oceans

We like to show happy movies at Earth House.  For instance, we screened The End of the Line last night.  The tagline?  Imagine a World Without Fish.  By the way, thank you to Slow Food Indy for sponsoring the event.

There’s no doubt that environmental problems are wrecking our oceans.  Just watch Sea Change: Imagine a World without Fish, which is about ocean acidification.  Or read about ocean dead zones or the “great Pacific garbage patch.”

Happy stuff. 

According to The End of the Line, the biggest problem is technology.  Humans have gotten really good at fishing. Industrialized fishing ( aka”strip mining the seas”) has wiped out the world’s oceans. Look what happened to the famed cod fishing of Newfoundland.  

Happy stuff.

2010
02/05
CATEGORY
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Bring back Papa Doc? The worst email forward I have ever recieved.

 

Haiti doesn’t need democracy, what Haiti needs is Papa Doc. That’s not just my opinion , that is what virtually every Haitian we talked with said. “the French run, the UN treat us the same as when we were a colony”, at least Papa Doc ran the country.

The above is from a forwarded email that I received yesterday.  You can read the whole email here.

 Has the American right-wing and those who blindly forward on these emails  lost their fucking minds? 

Here is how one author describes Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, who brutally ruled Haiti from 1959 to 1986 with U.S. support. 

US troops invaded Haiti five times, once staying for almost twenty years (1915-35). At the end of that prolonged visit, during which we killed thousands of Haitians for daring to rebel, we left the country in the hands of the local National Guard, confident that they’d carry on our good work.

From this arrangement emerged the Duvalier family dynasty and their private terrorist force, the machete-wielding Tontons Macoutes. “Papa Doc” Duvalier (he was a medical doctor) also relied on voodoo incantations and, during a 1959 uprising, the timely assistance of the US military. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his 19-year-old son, called Baby Doc, became “president-for-life.”

Throughout the blood-drenched rule of the Duvaliers (nearly 100,000 killed by the Tontons Macoutes alone), the US barely uttered a peep about human rights violations. In 1986, however, when it became apparent that Baby Doc’s presidency could not in fact be sustained for his entire life (unless he died soon), the Reagan administration airlifted him to a retirement villa in France and started talking about the “democratic process.”

2010
02/03
CATEGORY
Haiti
human rights
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