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I will not be accused of only being concerned about evil behaviour in China. It is not only in this country that people gain wealth and power through the exploitation of others even to the point of enslavement and murder. Let us look at the most powerful nation on earth, whose labor legislation is far behind most other Western countries. The latest scandal that has come to my attention there is that of the exploitation of young people who join teams which travel around the country knocking on doors and selling magazine subscriptions. The side of their activities that gets most attention in the newspapers is that some team members are prone to theft and other crimes, but in line with my ‘Thousand arms” focus I want to let you know that these young people are subject to abuses including beatings, deprivation of food, failure of payment, and sleep deprivation. There are many other abuses. Here’s a website http://wbztv.com/iteam/WBZ.I.Team.2.572468.html

To find out more about this issue search under ‘magazine sales crews’.

Isn’t it wonderful that anti-landmine campaigners won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Let us not forget that landmines still create horror around the globe today. I was surfing tonight and found that scientists have successfully trained bees to find landmines. A quarter of a million have been trained in Serbia and are on the way to different areas to find mines. If the outcome is as good as is hoped bees will be trained in other countries and used to locate mines in dangerous areas. The bees are being trained to associate the smell of dynamite with the presence of food. Dynamite is often used in making land mines. In an ironically sad circle of events, let’s remember too that Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite left his Peace Prize as a way of attempting to make amends for the terrible uses his invention was put to.

There is some useful information here http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1997/nobel.prize/stories/internet.coalition/index.html 

A year ago I was walking home to my village after gathering grain for my family and some men came along in a truck and two jumped out and grabbed me and pulled me into the truck. They showed me a gun and pushed me down in the back and told me to be quiet so I said nothing. That night I was locked up and they kept me that way for three days until I was starving hungry and they took me out and gave me a big feed. they laughed and told me that I was a man now because I was a soldier and if I tried to run I would be a traitor and I would be locked up again and killed. After that they taught me to shoot a big heavy gun and sometimes they went into a place where they killed people and I went with them. Sometimes we hid from other soldiers and I didn’t know them and didn’t know why I should hide.

A week ago we were walking to a place to kill people and take their food and suddenly there were other soldiers and they were shooting at us so we started running towards them and firing our guns. My best friend who was three months younger than me was shot and his arm came off but he didn’t know it because his belly was open and he didn’t move and my other friend went crazy and put his gun on continuous and screamed as he swung it round and I know it was going to cut me open but I saw a man shoot him, one of our men shooting his own soldier.

I don’t want to die because I’m only eleven and wonder what it is like to be a man and strong so you can do what you want but my mind is a little crazy too and maybe I do want to die. All the other children were killed but I ran away and hid and I don’t have a gun any more but I’ve got a uniform and they’ll know who I am. Who can help me? They looked real bad - my friends.

This is just a story but it reflects the life of hundreds of thousands of children, boys and girls, in the war zones of the world. Can you imagine how that would be? When you were 9 or 10, being taken away and forced to fight? Watching people kill and be killed and being forced to do the same. Not knowing when you were going to die. There will be more on my site, http:athousandarms.com and links to agencies trying deal with the problem and trying to rescue some of these poor mind-broken kids.

Hi everyone, I have moved my Thousand Arms page to its own site, which is now open http://athousandarms.com so pop over there and have a look. As it is not the done thing on the internet to duplicate content I have closed the Thousand Arms page here but have left the blog active, at least for now. It is my big humanitarian effort. Too many people are suffering hideously in this world and we all need to know about it. Without being conscious of it some of us are taking part in the persecution. Are we sitting on mahogany furniture which Amazonian Indians are being killed or dispossessed for? Where did the paper for that book come from, a rainforest? Do we really know what the agents and soldiers of our country are doing and how they are doing it? I added a page on the rainforest tribes to A thousand Arms, so there is some new provocation for you :-) 

I intend to build a little web of my own and hope all my friends and readers will hop around them and enjoy them as they grow. It’s a great learning experience for me, seeking out information on topics that come to mind so that even if I am not an expert at least I will give accurate information. Part of my purpose is commercial, as you will see from the ads and my translation and proofreading sites, but a lot of it is just because I am interested in or concerned about the subject areas. If you enjoy something or get something out of what I am building and writing I’ll be happy.

Of all the acts of organized violence on this planet which are a direct result of human greed perhaps the most obvious long term campaign of cruelty is being conducted against the rainforest peoples of the Amazon Basin. How many Indians have died? We all think of Brazil and its notable corruption but the problem extends into all the countries in this massive river basin. Companies from every western country and now ‘investors’, please read ‘exploiters’, from Asian countries are joining in. The local governments and their financiers have been slicing up this juicy pie as long as there have been foreigners in the area.

 Go to this website to get an idea of how little a multi-national cares about how it gets what it wants http://rainforests.net/amazonpollutionvictimsoftoxico.htm  There are many websites devoted to saving the rainforest and there is a lot of information there about the human side of this. Quite apart from the fact that we will all be affected if fools destroy the ‘Lungs of the World”, they are also killing or otherwise causing the death of thousand of real humans who bleed and break just like you. Can you feel it? Do you have shares in a company that is doing that? Do you know what the human cost of that nice mahogany table in your living room was? There are so many costs involved that to allow this destruction so some big nose shiny bum in New York can make himself even wealthier is totally, utterly unacceptable. Why do our governments not make legislation forbidding any company under their jurisdiction from taking part in this massacre of Indians and perhaps, in the end, of our own grandchildren. Read about it, think about it. If some of you answer my last question with the words, ‘we do legislate’, then ask the question ‘why don’t we enforce that legislation?’ Did you ever have the experience of being bullied at school? Imagine that experience magnified a hundredfold and even to the point of you being killed. Go to a horror movie and think of rainforest people who have those experiences and worse… NO! Not the big snakes! PEOPLE! Sick individuals paid to have their fun by people in suits in London, New York, Ottawa, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, etc…. Maybe you work for them. Maybe you know a way to stop them but want more money yourself. Can you live with that?

 Let’s get this straight, the people who live their lives like the characters in ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Will and Grace’, etcetera are getting their wealth directly or indirectly from the financial structure that exploits the poor of the world and even kills them to feed itself. The archetypes that drive the system are clearly related to the monsters in movies and their behaviour is much clearer in the movies than in the devious world they really live in. Don’t be fooled, corporations eat real people.