Grumble.....Grumble......Grumble

Meet Grumbles.......

Grumble....grumble.....grumble. I am grumbling. Why am I grumbling? I am grumbling because of...........

a) Rising Food Prices: - All around the world the price of food and especially staples like rice has been going up in price. In some parts of the world, the price of rice has gone up threefold in the last year. The reason for this price hike may be due to a number of complex issues but it has mainly been due to greed and mismanagement. Reasons such as the loss of agricultural land to industrial development, decades of impoverishing farmers by fixing staple food prices at too low a level to benefit city dwellers, food crops diverted to better paying biofuel production, shortages within food producing countries due to dealers smuggling grain out to sell at higher prices in foreign markets. In Thailand, there is talk of joining forces with other rice producing countries too take advantage of the rising prices by forming a Rice Cartel so that they can force higher prices on importing nations. The Thai Prime Minister asks Thais to eat less rice so that they can profit more from selling the rice. Greed. Greed. Greed and now a global food crisis.
(This is what my meez is protesting about).

b) Military Juntas:- Like the government of Myanmar who show little concern for their people even in the face of a natural catastrophe like Cyclone Nargis. With a death toll climbing into the tens of thousands and an estimated one million without shelter, food or safe water for almost a week, the government is still holding up the entry of international aid by insisting on lengthy negotiations before allowing permits and visas for rescue workers. One report claims that an aid agency was told that financial aid in the form of hard currency could be handed over to the government official but the aid workers and relief supplies cannot enter the country. The military and there soldiers seem to be largely missing from relief efforts. In some villages, the soldiers have not come to help but instead the Buddhist monks that they have been persecuting are the ones on the ground rendering aid and clearing debris.

c) Monsters:- They exist. I refer to those men who prey on helpless children and sexually abuse them. In an update of the sad and tragic story of the Austrian woman who had been sexually abused by her father since she was 11 years old, imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years and forced to bear him seven children, the father has since claimed that he is NOT a monster. He argues that if he was a real monster, he would have killed his daughter and all seven offspring, burned and disposed of all the bodies and he would not have been caught. Instead, he points out that it was he who decided to let her and the children live and therefore, he is not a monster but responsible for sparing their lives! And then there is the pedophile that Interpol is searching for who is believed to have been sexually exploiting countless young children and having the incidents recorded on the internet. Monsters.

Sorrrrry for being so negative but it seems like its been a bad week around the world. Grumble....Grumble.....Grumble.