summer '12 fresh easy re-up NYT social determinants of health in Mississippi, Persian linkages ...

Cox doesn’t know oak trees, but she knows how to talk to people. She knows when to ask if someone cannot afford insulin, or is not taking insulin, or is not keeping the insulin cold, or cannot keep the insulin cold because there is no electricity or refrigerator. Not having health insurance is a huge problem in Mississippi, but it isn’t the only one

Bhakti Shringarpure riffs from Concerning Violence, a new documentary on Fanon, by Göran Hugo Olsson. Quoting David Macey

In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticise Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence. By 1961, the violence was everywhere. It had even seeped into the unconscious.

A schoolteacher "somewhere in Algeria" set his pupils, aged between 10 and 14, the essay topic “What would you do it you were invisible?” They all said that they would steal arms and kill the French soldiers.

The children of Algeria dreamed of violence, and two of Fanon’s young patients in Blida acted out those dreams. Our prosperous societies do not have nightmarish dreams of massacres in Sétif or Philippeville or torture in their schools. Algeria had been having those nightmares for over a century.

Tokers, table football, cabbies, as many places. A day in Goma archived

"the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement"

(h/t RS)

Creating and Destroying the Universe in Twenty-Nine Nights
by David Shulman

Last spring - new genetic complexity discovered in mosquitoes

'Sex workers' rights are just workers' rights'

Guy Walks Into a Bar

from her archive: Samia Errazzouki responds to Chomsky on Western Sahara and the 'Arab Spring'

How warming impacts the Andes: one example

I think mistersloane (Jim Hollands) is superb here on District 9

Stanley Kauffmann, reply by Joan Didion

'If Philip Roth Hates Women, Why Does He Want To Have Sex With Them, Hmmm?'

On Smarm

Britain and empire: vessel of cruelty

"Short-term savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their long-term costs".

Earlier this year, the New Scientist reported on a Greek austerity tragedy

(via the best fish.)

'Reorienting the discussion about sex work'

here

'Asked why he had not tried to leave, he said: "If we are caught, it is straight to the Palestine Branch. Anyone who goes in there does not come out."'

If, for example, you are an Aguaruna Indian in Peru, with a history of occasional revenge raiding stretching back the small handful of generations which comprise living memory (no Aguaruna can really know the extent to which such raiding was going on even a few generations ago, leave alone millennia), and if you have recently been pushed out of the forest interior into riverine villages by encroachment from oil exploration or missionaries, then your chances of being killed by your compatriots might even exceed those caught in Mexican drugs wars, Brazilian favelas, or Chicago’s South Side.

In such circumstances there would undoubtedly be much more homicide in Aguaruna-land than that faced by well-heeled American college professors, but also much less than that confronted by inmates in Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps, or those who took up arms against colonial rule in British Kenya, or apartheid South Africa.

If you find yourself born a boy in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the center of the world’s richest nation, your average lifespan will be shorter than in any country in the world except for some African states and Afghanistan. If you escape being murdered, you may end up dead anyway, from diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction, or similar. Such misery, not inevitable but likely, would not result from your own choices, but from those made by the state over the last couple of hundred years.

What does any of this really tell us about violence throughout human history? The fanciful assertion that nation states lessen it is unlikely to convince a Russian or Chinese dissident, or Tibetan.

oh

A hurricane's inequality