Kenneth Cole weighed in on how to solve the economic malaise in America

Guest contributor Andrew Huff highlighted an innovative new milk jug that may help save the environment

Louise Reid Ritchie contributed a photo from a Barack Obama rally in Oregon

Kenneth Cole Media Marketing Manager Heather Dumford profiled two politically-themed programs on PBS

Marc Schiller uploaded the trailer for a new documentary film about the Amazon

Warning : This Amnesty International advertisement about torturing by waterboarding may be too upsetting for some of our readers.

Christopher Hitchens is the curmudgeonly self-described polemicist and intellectual that most recently has been stationed at Slate.com. From his cyber column, he's been known to throw atheist molotovs to the theocrats of the American right wing and verbal judo blows to two of his most detested foes, the Clintons.

Yet even though he's no friend of the extreme right, he's been a defender of George Bush's foreign policy and a rabid apologist for the invasion of Iraq. Not of Abu Ghraib or torture techniques, but certainly for the war.

Which is why I find it fascinating (although not shocking given his propensity for pulling self-promoting stunts) that when asked by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter if he'd like to be tortured with waterboarding by former military Special Forces, he gladly accepted :

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and--as you might expect--inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted.

The men and women who show them their techniques for resisting waterboarding were training in the art of SERE, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Their lessons they learned in waterboarding were for survival. The didn't learn waterboarding so they could torture enemy combatants. They were taught waterboarding so they could survive it in the event they became prisoners of war.

Hitchens may be fool to support the Iraq War but he is not an unethical fool. His article is an argument for respecting the Geneva Convention and for the most basic respect for human rights even in the middle of a terrible war.

I have a lot of problems with a lot of what Hitchens writes but it's when he writes articles like this one that he earns my respect.

Grover Norquist is one of a "Gang Of Five" that redefined conservative politics in the United States and gave rise to neo-conservatism. He articulated the agenda of the neo-cons with a now infamous yet simple quote :

"Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal," Norquist stated in May 2000. "If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then the conservative movement can set a new goal. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050"

The problem with this strategy is rather obvious and David Michaelson, one of my co-bloggers at culturekitchen, pointed it out : When you drown the government, you drown America with it.

Neo-conservatism has been about maximizing profits for the corporations that keep alive the military-industrial complex --a term, by the way, coined by the Republican former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It's about making government so impotent, so incapable of taking care of it's duties to its citizenry that it obligates it then to farm out large portions of those duties. In effect, what neo-cons have always wanted was to have the closest thing to privatizing the government so corporations could make money out of their incompetency.

So now we're faced with yet another massive flooding in the United States. One that is indeed of Hurricane Katrina proportions.

Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Greg Marinovich, and ProjectExplorer journalist, Ilana Fayerman, discuss the lifestyle of being a conflict photographer. From issues of access to severe injuries sustained, Greg shares his insights on this most dangerous of professions.

Reducing the recent wave of violence in South Africa to a simple instance of xenophobia fails to get at the heart of the problem. Oftentimes the portrayal of the South African narrative in the West ignores the phenomenal achievement of a peaceful transition from totalitarian regime to democracy at the fin de siècle, and instead goes in for one rife with AIDS and violence. That template of the typical African basket case is well-worn but wide of the mark. And the recent violence between immigrant workers from around the continent hoping to make a better life for themselves and their economic competitors the native South Africans unfortunately plays into that narrative.

"Makwerekwere" is a highly derogatory word used by black South Africans to describe non-black South African migrants. These migrants are fleeing from places like South Africa's economically distressed neighbor, Zimbabwe, which had an astonishing inflation rate of 165,000 percent in February. Nigerian and Mozambican nationals have also been tagged with the contemptuous term. The writer Pius Adesanmi has written what he calls the Amakwerewere Syndrome, observing, "It reminds one of how the ancient Greeks referred to foreigners whose language they did not understand as the Barbaroi." This Us-versus-Them ideology comes from poverty, according to the acute social observer and comedian Chris Rock, whose South African comedy tour coincided with the attacks. From The Sowetan:

"The saddest thing about xenophobic violence is that it is a 'broke-on-broke crime,' US actor and comedian Chris Rock said yesterday.

"I don't believe in black-on-black violence because everybody robs and kills people...,' he said at a media briefing in Sandton, Johannesburg. 'It's not black-on-black but broke-on-broke when people rob each other.'"

Because these new immigrants often compete for jobs with the South African poor, the tensions can become acute. In 1997, for instance, local South African street traders clashed with foreign vendors. That was a classic episode of poor on poor violence fuelled by poverty. On the economic underpinnings of these tensions, Mandela Rhodes Scholar Boitumelo Magolego writes on the ThoughtLeader Blog:

"'I believe that pre-democracy, the black population by and large had a very similar and flat income profile (barring the few families which had shops, butcheries and medical practices); this homogeneity I believe played down issues of who had what, because by and large everyone was the same. Enter black diamonds and some families can now afford more than others. This I think creates subliminal pressure and frustration among those who are failing to access and reap the benefits of the country's liberalised economy. You may argue that this is not unique to South Africa; yes, nonetheless it is a contributing factor."

[image: AP/WorldWide Photo]