Making Monday Worse: Your International Sucking Update

Hey there, postindustrial worker bee! You probably think your life is tough because you spent the weekend getting enjoyably shitfaced, or watching that movie that is just an 80-minute Youtube clip of cute babies, or getting shitfaced and then watching the babies movie, and now you have to drag your ass to your air-conditioned cubicle and pretend not to be playing computer solitaire for eight hours or so, but things could be a lot worse. For instance:

You could be associated in any way with the economy of Greece, which is so completely fucked it's threatening to drag the Euro down with it, plus the Greeks are rioting and burning down banks. The European Union is creating a TARP-like fund to protect the Euro but that might not even work, so, uh, yeah. Welcome to the worldwide economic panic of 2010, part II.

Those Greek rioters burned three bank employees to death, which seems like a big deal, but three murders would go almost unnoticed in Jamaica, where people are getting slaughtered every day by the police or by the gangs who have lately taken to butchering their victims with large knives. Jamaica has become one of the most violent places in the world, unnoticed by the college kids who are inhaling hits from their expensive bongs in front of Bob Marley posters as we speak.

Also unnoticed by the genial stoners of our universities who will soon be running our country: the AIDS epidemic in Africa is getting even worse, as the global economic crisis from two paragraphs ago is causing clinics to close their doors and medicine supplies to dry up. According to the article, "For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected."

On the somewhat lighter side, a Catholic priest in Zimbabwe is blaming the media for the church's sex scandals, saying "They write and say such and such a priest has been chow-chowing small children – are they not also chow-chowing too?” Well, no. Some sins are worse than others. Like when your priests--who are supposed to be basically non-sexual beings--have sex with children to young to give consent and then your church covers it up and then doesn't fire those priests when their abuse gets revealed to the world, that's a fairly bad sin.

That priest should be glad that the press is just commenting on Catholic chow-chowing, rather than issuing death threats against opposition parties. That's what a government-owned paper in Sri Lanka did, and given the police-state conditions in Sri Lanka, printed death threats are usually serious. The article is (warning) from a socialist publication, but they point out that the Sri Lanka is, like Greece, deep in debt--the country might go from civil war to police state to widespread rioting in the space of two years. So even the Greeks can be thankful they aren't in Sri Lanka, I suppose.

Have an excellent week, and don't buy any Portuguese bonds!