Two stories at the British Guardian caught my eye.  The first is the Guardian’s announcement that its readers think Private Bradley Manning deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.   You’re not imagining things.  Britain’s Left — at least that portion that answers unscientific online newspaper polls — thinks that the man who stole thousands of classified U.S. government documents and gave them to a man hostile to America, who in turn published them, leading to lots of boredom and, unfortunately, many deaths, is deserving of a “peace” prize.  The only thing that makes this logical is that you and I understand that “peace prize” is a misnomer.  What it really should be called is the “Nobel Hate America, Individual Freedom, and Capitalism Prize.”  Called by its true name, Manning is a perfect recipient.

The other story is one that’s both unbelievably tragic and that highlights the Left’s moral blindness.  The story is about a terrible famine affecting North Korea.  Here’s the Guardian’s take on the famine:

Footage of malnourished North Korean orphans and official warnings over failed harvests have given a rare glimpse at the scale of devastating food shortages in the country following a harsh winter and widespread flooding.

[snip]

North Korea has struggled with its food supply since the crippling famine of the 90s, and its biggest donors – South Korea and the US – have yet to decide whether to resume aid suspended in 2008, while rising global commodity prices have exacerbated its problems.

[snip]

The Reuters AlertNet humanitarian news service, which shot the new video, was allowed to make a tightly controlled trip to South Hwanghae, a farming province in the country’s arable heartland. The team reported signs of severe malnutrition in children and medical staff said they lacked the drugs they needed.

“The natural disasters of last year and this year have forced the people to live on potatoes and corn. Because people aren’t taking in proper nutrition, the number of in-patients has increased. While in May the number of inpatients was about 200, we have had around 350 inpatients each month from July to September,” said Jang Kum-son, a doctor.

Kim Chol-jun, paediatrician at a school for orphans, said heavy rainfall and flooding had also contaminated water supplies, leading to digestive diseases.

The governing People’s Committee said a bitter winter destroyed 65% of South Hwanghae’s barley, wheat and potato crops, and that rains, flooding and typhoons had destroyed 80% of the maize harvest. Officials added that they expected less than half the usual rice crop this month.

What’s missing from this story, with its focus on rainfall and flooding (some of which I assume affected neighboring South Korea) is that North Korea has had a perpetual famine problem.  This is not a weather related famine problem, although you wouldn’t guess it from the Guardian’s coverage.  Instead, it’s the same famine problem that affected the Ukraine in the 1930s and China during the Great Leap Forward:  It’s called a Communist-caused famine, and it occurs when a tyrannical centralized government destroys markets, designates food and farmland for favored citizens, diverts most of its resources to the military that props it up, and generally uses its citizens as servants of and tools for a small cadre of privileged people.

Did you notice, too, that the South Koreans are feeding their starving neighbors?  On the one hand, I totally understand it.  They don’t want hordes of hungry, nuclearized North Koreans swarming over the border.  On the other hand, it’s a shame that they’re propping up a dictatorship that’s systematically starving its own citizens.  I’m not exaggerating with the systematic starvation comment.  When I quoted from the Guardian, I left out a paragraph that provides the Guardian’s single nod to the fact that nature isn’t the only one at fault as North Korea’s children die:

Some suspect that Pyongyang may be hoarding crops to ensure there is plenty of food next year. The North has pledged that 2012 – the centenary of founder Kim Il-sung’s birth – will be the year it becomes a major power.

Starvation, sadly, regularly stalks the African continent.  This religiously prophetic website, in its famine page, tracks those trends and provides truly horrible images, one of which I reproduce here (from Somalia):

In the great country of America, however, hunger has a different face:

I do not post the above picture to be mean to the voluminous ladies who appear in it.  Indeed, it’s not my picture at all.  Instead, it’s the picture used to illustrate an NPR story about the way in which rising food prices are affecting the poor:  among other things, they’re not able to buy all the food they want:

The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles.

I appreciate the story’s main point, which is that, for people who live their lives on the economic razor’s edge, inflation is devastating.

I also understand that the story is trying to show that, from an Atkins’ diet point of view, cheap hi-carb food is more likely to increase weight than more expensive low carb food, including meat.  The ladies above  clearly aren’t shopping at Whole Foods.  It’s just as clear, though, that these gals didn’t suddenly gain weight when inflation began.  Instead, it’s obvious that their weight problems pre-date the recent rise in prices, and that, even as they stock up on potatoes and noodles, they’re not buying much in the way of fruits and veggies.  And perhaps, just perhaps, they’re eating too much.  (Incidentally, you can still get a good value on meat at McDonalds, if you wish to offset your all carb diet, but I suspect McDs is a dirty word in NPR circles.)

Hat tip:  Moonbattery (and Danny Lemieux)

….but you wouldn’t listen.  You had to go ahead and do it anyway, and only now, when things are getting serious, are you figuring it out yourself.  These are words parents say to teenagers, and conservatives say to liberals.  In teenage land, you end up with pregnancies, STDs, and substance abuse.  In liberal land, you end up with increased greenhouse gases and world starvation:

The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly “bioplastics” made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

The market for bioplastics, which are made from maize, sugarcane, wheat and other crops, is growing by 20-30% a year.

***

Concern is mounting because the new generation of biodegradable plastics ends up on landfill sites, where they degrade without oxygen, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This week the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration reported a sharp increase in global methane emissions last year.

“It is just not possible to capture all the methane from landfill sites,” said Michael Warhurt, resources campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “A significant percentage leaks to the atmosphere.”

“Just because it’s biodegradable does not mean it’s good. If it goes to landfill it breaks down to methane. Only a percentage is captured,” said Peter Skelton of Wrap, the UK government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme. “In theory bioplastics are good. But in practice there are lots of barriers.”

***

Bioplastics compete for land with biofuels and food crops. About 200,000 tonnes of bioplastics were produced last year, requiring 250,000-350,000 tonnes of crops. The industry is forecast to need several million acres of farmland within four years.

I like to say “I told you so” when I forecast something good, viz, “I told you you’d get the promotion.”  It depresses me when I forecast something bad.