The World is Losing, Two to One

I would like to share three things here, the evil outnumbering the good two to one.

1. There has been a lot of attention given to the cause of debt relief for third-world countries. Bono, in particular, through the Jubilee 2000 campain, helped give it a high profile and eventually the cause succeeded in getting the richest nations of the world via the IMF and World Bank to let a large amount of this debt go. It was a happy story. We need more happy stories. But oops, now, that work is being undone by Vulture Funds. "Vulture funds are companies which buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest - which might be ten times what they paid for it."

Check out this article. I mean, these Vulture Fund guys are devils, right?

2. Rob Nairn is a love ninja who wrote a book called What is Meditation (on Amazon right now used for under three dollars!) that has been very valuable to me and my broken mind. It's short, clear, and powerful. I've read it seven or eight times in the past two years. He comes at Buddhism and meditation with an insight into the way that the western mind fails in dealing with those concepts and explains the psychological benefits of simple forms of meditation and confronting your mind. I've turned several people onto this book. It was the least I could do. Almost as good as the book is this interview online which I keep coming back to.

Part 1

Part 2

3. I saw the movie Breach last night about the "greatest security breach in U.S. history," by a cheeseball FBI agent named Robert Hanssen. (It was pretty tight. Christopher Cooper is kind of one of the best actors there are.) I am a nerd, and so when I got home I Wikipedia'd Robert Hanssen - or rather, I Wikipedia'd Robert Hansen, leaving off a crucial consonant, and discovered this psycho, a serial killer who captured his victims, flew them in his private plane to the wilderness of Alaska, and hunted them like game.