Here we go...

All I wanted to do was respond to my friend Scott's first posting and here I am with my own...ee gad...

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How Afghanistan's Opium can save the world - and itself !

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In researching Funding Access-vs.-Prevention at 14th ICASA AIDS Conference in Nigeria there was this other topic, indirectly effecting the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. Its wider effects on the world stage are equally staggering, and it effects every person on every continent to some extent. The issue is the fledgling democracy of Afghanistan and threat that the illicit opium trade poses in destabilizing the democratic process and stability in the entire region. Opium is bleeding Afghanistan of its chances of democracy. Go anywhere in southern Kandahar, Afghanistan (the former spiritual stronghold of the Taliban) and you’ll run in to poppy fields. Drive 20 minutes in any direction and you’ll find farmers busy harvesting their crop, in spite of the Interim Authority's January 2002 ban in on poppy cultivation. An estimated 1.7 million people are directly involved in opium production, as widespread and family-based poppy cultivation proliferates in 28 of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. ...
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A uniquely American holiday!

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Having been absent and not able to post as often as I like, I feel like the wayward child returing home for this Thanksgiving message. For me there are few things that are so utterly expressive and filled with so many of the totems of what it is the be an American as there are in the Thanksgiving celebration. To so many people, no matter where they are, Thanksgiving Day is a joyous family festival when we gather with friends and family and take a moment to just “BE” with in the love of those in our lives and those we too seldom. Thanksgiving's purpose has evolved countless times since the Pilgrims mythic celebration and other early harvest festivals, and yet no matter the evolving meanings or patriotic intentions or global-societal distractions or emphasis on football games or “the day-after” shopping stimuli, on Thanksgiving, we manage to continue to cull a singular, cohesive narrative that is forever emotionally electroplated to the holiday. One of its unassailable qualities; the...
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Thanksgiving? What’s all this then?

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Yes, once again, I have neglected my blog all year only to remember that it exists when I remember its time for the re hack of my annual …. “What’s all this then about Thanksgiving” posting….. William Sydney “O. Henry” Porter, author of ”The Gift of The Magi” believed that, “There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one-day that is purely American.” Me and other amateur hacks and pundits, have always felt compelled to write FOR and ABOUT Thanksgiving, which I think, is kind of the testimony of its uniqueness, more than any other day, in the American psyche. A time when, timely as the autumn leaves, I easily can pull from the recesses of my mind, thoughts and remembrances and ponder Thanksgiving in my life. Year in and year out, I am moved by the sublime, prolific and axiomatic iconography of what it is to be an American in the Thanksgiving celebration. Whether for financial or atheistical reasons most of us trying to ignore the ‘crazed consumerism’, with its almost entirel...
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