Jeffrey Gettleman writes in New Duranty:

ED DAMER, Sudan — Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.

But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?

(...)

The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.

Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston. Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to United Nations officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.

(...)

In fact, part of the reason relief agencies bring their own food into Sudan stems from the American policy of giving crops, not money, as foreign aid.

Many European countries, by contrast, just give the World Food Program cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the program bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. United Nations officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.

“We don’t get discounts,” said Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program.

Sudanese officials say they want to sell more crops to the United Nations, but lost in this discussion about buying and selling food is whether the Sudanese government should be donating food to its own needy people.

(...)

For now, Sudanese officials seem more interested in doing business with their new partners in the Middle East. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, nearly one million square miles. It has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated. The Sudanese government is striking deals left and right with Arab countries just across the Red Sea: the Arab countries bring the money, the soil scientists and the $200,000 tractors. Sudan supplies the land.

“Our country is small and dry and mountainous,” said Man Shuqwara, the Jordanian director of a Jordanian-run farm in northern Sudan that grows wheat, beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, oranges and bananas. “By logic we would come to Sudan.”

The same logic is attracting big money from Saudi Arabia. About an hour’s drive north of the Jordanian farm, near the town of Ed Damer, is a huge new $200 million project to grow wheat in what now looks like a 10-mile-wide sandbox. Some of the wheat will stay in Sudan; some will be shipped to Saudi Arabia. A fleet of new John Deere tractors is already lined up for harvest time. A worker on the farm whispered that the tractors had been sneaked into Sudan through Saudi Arabia because of the American trade sanctions.

(...)

The Sudanese government is widely blamed for running many of the displaced people in Darfur off their farms, making them reliant on handouts. Still, the government has been slow to feed them.

The last time the government gave the World Food Program any food for Darfur was in 2006. It was 22,000 tons of Sudanese-grown sorghum. It was a fraction of what the people needed, United Nations officials said, and some of the grain was rancid and infested with weevils.

I'll be out of town for a week, so in the meantime, if anyone claims that jihad is a recent innovation,  aimed only at those racist white Christian colonialists, please set them straight for me. Cheers.

To Artemis - if it's raining cats and dogs, mind you don't step in a poodle:

In the UK, and probably in other Western countries, a disproportionate number of prisoners are Muslim. Some convert in prison; Islam is attractive to criminals since it provides certainty without condemning the criminal activity. Our prisons are too soft on "ethnic minorities" and have become hotbeds of jihad. From the Daily Mail, with thanks to Alan:

Emergency plans have been drawn up over fears that a prison officer could be taken hostage by Muslim fanatics inside Britain's jails.
 

The dossier has been compiled in the past few months amid mounting racial tension in the prison system.
 

Racial tension? What race are Muslims?

Intelligence gathered from within Britain's eight top-security prisons claims specific threats to kidnap and behead an officer first surfaced six months ago at Whitemoor Prison in Cambridgeshire.
 

But sources say the growing concern over security and the threat to prison officers is not confined to one jail.
 

'This is a threat faced by officers in prisons across the country,' said the source.
 

'This is why the prison service is preparing direct intervention if ever a prison officer is taken hostage.'
 

Details of the contingency plans emerged just days after Muslim prisoners at Frankland prison in County Durham claimed they would kidnap and execute an officer and film it on mobile phones.

What are prisoners doing with mobile phones? Are they allowed? If not, are they being smuggled in?

Sources there say the prison is 'like a powder-keg, just waiting to go off', adding that 'the tension is rising daily'.
 

In July last year Dhiren Barot, an Al Qaeda operative serving 30 years for a dirty-bomb plot, had a pot of boiling water poured over his head.
 

Barot's lawyer, Muddassar Arani, warned at the time that 'race riots' had erupted at the prison, describing it as 'an extremely dangerous environment for ethnic-minority prisoners'.
 

She claimed: 'People talk about radicalisation, but if there is a death that takes place in custody, then there will be a backlash.'
 

This reminds me of the mock headline: "Muslims fear backlash after tomorrow's terrorist attack." And what's this about "a death that takes place"? Sawing someone's head off is a brutal - and very Muslim - murder, not a death that, passively, accidentally, takes place.

Two days ago, the Georgian town of Gori, close to the South Ossetian border, was attacked by Russian jets. None of the reports I have seen mentioned that Gori is the birthplace of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin. It is one of the few towns, if not the only one, where his statue still stands.  

The Joseph Stalin museum contains classic Soviet propaganda. Stalin’s top marks in school, his poetry and his close friendship with Churchill are covered in great detail, but no mention is made of the Gulag. Outside the museum is the small hut where he was born, and where you can see his father’s workshop and his mother’s samovar, neither of which give any clue as to how their son would turn out. You can also go into his personal railway carriage, in which you can see his personal toilet - this man of the people could not be expected to share a toilet with others – but again this gives little away. There is no art to read the mind’s construction in a toilet.

The BBC news this morning was keen to see two sides to the Russia-Georgia conflict. Not so Denis MacShane, who writes in The Telegraph:

Czechoslovakia was once described by a Conservative prime minister as "a faraway country of which we know nothing". Many may feel similarly about Georgia. But the frontiers of today's Europe now stretch to the Black Sea. Britain's energy supplies depend on a narrow pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan, across Georgia, to Turkey.

The failure of foreign policy in the 1990s led to a million or more people from Balkan states flooding into northern Europe as asylum seekers, many heading for our shores. As jihadist Islamism seeks new terrorism bases further east, Britain's security now requires engagement in the troubled arc of instability from eastern Turkey to the states of the Caucasus and all the countries ending in "stan".

Into this stewpot, Vladimir Putin has dropped - literally - a bombshell. By ordering a full-scale military invasion of Georgia, he has revealed the true face of his autocratic rule. By flying in person to the scene as if he was field commander-in-chief, he is showing the world that Russia will revert to being a military power willing to bully and threaten its neighbours.

[...]

The dispute in Georgia will find some temporary brokered settlement. But the bloody assault unleashed by Putin adds new dangers and difficulties to Europe. Once again, Russia threatens peace, stability, the rule of law and the rights of sovereign democracies on its border.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ3xDxcr2rk&feature=related

One of the reasons Iraq looked promising for democracy at the beginning of the occupation was its relatively large middle class. In hindsight, it is now obvious that a middle class was made possible by the Saddam's suppression of Islam. After the invasion, the private sector collapsed and is unlikely to be revived due to resurgent Islam's suffocating effects - effects our planners refused to take into account and refused to check, even going so far as to allow Islam to be placed above the Iraqi Constitution. Cambell Robertson writes in New Duranty:

BAGHDAD — Hampered by years of violence, a decimated infrastructure, a lack of foreign investors and a flood of imports that undercut local businesses, Iraq’s private sector, particularly its small non-oil economy, has so far failed to flourish as its American patrons had hoped.

In its absence, the Iraqi government has been sustaining the economy the way it always has: by putting citizens on its payroll. Since 2005, according to federal budgets, the number of government employees has nearly doubled, to 2.3 million from 1.2 million.

The impetus is not only economic: In exchange for abandoning the insurgency that plunged the nation into civil war, many of the 100,000 members of civilian patrols known broadly as the Awakening movement have been promised jobs in the security forces or in reconstruction, though many Sunni Muslim members complain it is not happening quickly enough.

But this growth has not come without problems. Already, a huge wage increase to government workers that was instituted — but then suspended because of fears that it was pushing up inflation — has underscored the difficulties of being far and away the largest employer in an unstable country.

In 2006, 31 percent of Iraq’s labor force was working in the public sector, according to the agency for statistics in the Ministry of Planning. The agency expects that figure to reach 35 percent this year, about 5 percentage points short of where the C.I.A. estimated it to be on the eve of the 2003 invasion.

This figure is not atypical for the region, but it hardly indicates the free market state initially envisioned by the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which pushed for full and rapid privatization in its first few months...

Americanism or not, "staycation" is here to stay. I've come across it about ten times over the last couple of days. Perhaps Americans passed it on to us without suffering it themselves, like Typhoid Mary.

"Can I get a coffee?" is another. Take it back. Proper English is going "out the" window, as we never used to say, but do now.

Another annoying turn of phrase, perhaps a distant cousin of "I'm, like, duh?" is illustrated below:

And you know this how?

And this matters why?

And I should care because?

This could be Australian, in which language every sentence uttered by anyone under thirty is a question. It may even be British, in which case, try not to catch it.

Do Americans and Australians say "Bob's your uncle"? If not, they should.

For avoidance of doubt, annoying Americanisms generally annoy Americans too, so it's our fault for taking the worst of your language.

Putin has attacked the most advanced and in many ways most winsome state in the Caucasus, the state that is the surest friend -- in its essence -- of the West, and by the West one includes those Russians who reject Putin and his KGB-cum-crooked-capitalism state and who, though they have not been able to rouse their morally somnolent countrymen, all so delighted with Putin as a "strong man" (just like any old General Beranger, if General Beranger had been in the KGB), deserve to be listened to, even elected, deserve to instruct and to properly -- not criminally and improperly -- protect the people and culture and state of Russian. And forget, just for a second, that Saakashvili may not be the perfect leader of Georgia at this time, may even be lacking in proper breeding  and Georgian charm ("durno vospitan" claims Russian writer Grishkovetz in a verisimilar article). That shouldn' t get in the way.

Georgians were victims, over many centuries, of Muslim raiders, who found Georgian women and girls, in particular, just the thing to bring back to Muslim -- Arab and Turkish and Persian -- harems. Even the memory of Griboedov -- he is buried on a holy mountain, in the most hallowed cemetery, in Georgia, because his wife was Georgian -- reinforces resentment toward the Muslims, for it was a Persian mob that beat him, Griboedov, to death in Teheran for daring to protect Christian women from Muslims.

To the south of Georgia is Armenia, another historic victim of Islam. Below Armenia is an insufficiently secularised, and therefore permanently worrisome -- will it go this way, will it go that? -- , Azerbaijan.

But what do those tin-pot irrational machiavellians in the Kremlin, eager to prove a point, and to protect the redoubt for money-laundering by Russian Mafiosi that northern Ossetia is reputed to have become (with a certain Kokoiti involved as local suzerain in Ossetia for Russian interests), know about all that? They are, if such is possible, even dumber than the Americans, throwing their money away on Tarbaby Iraq and on Tarbaby Afghanistan, the two so-called "central fronts" in what is billed as a "war on terror," when the war is something else, and has no central fronts.

Does the Russian government, supposedly peopled with those their admirers think of as "patriots," think that weakening the most solid anti-Islam redoubts  in the Caucasus is a clever idea, an act of farseeing geopolitical cunning? We'll all see about that.

It's strange that Hugh would put up a Hank Williams song today. Hank Williams' steel guitarist Don Helms, who played on more than 100 Hank Williams recordings, died at 12:30 this morning from an apparent heart attack at age 81.

Mr. Helms was the last remaining link to the Drifting Cowboys. His guitar was heard on more than 100 of Williams’ recordings, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Cold, Cold Heart” and “I Can’t Help (It If I’m Still In Love With You).” His steel playing is an indelible part of those records, and after Williams’ death Mr. Helms went on to provide significant parts on recordings such as Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Stonewall Jackson’s “Waterloo” and Lefty Frizzell’s “Long, Black Veil.” He played with other greats as well, including Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, Ray Price, Jim Reeves and Webb Pierce.

Everyone knows what they got up to in Sodom. But what did they do in Gomorrah?

We should be told.

Update: Was it sexual a-salt?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKb5HkAMNc