No, really – Haitians are eating dirt. Fucking dirt?!?!?!?

The hand of a woman is covered in mud as she makes mud cookies on the roof of Fort Dimanche, once a prison, in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Nov. 30, 2007.

First let me just say that this is the reason we, the richest nation in the world, have immigration issues. People aren’t coming here to steal our jobs and lazily exploit our “entitlement programs”; they come here because they don’t want to eat fucking dirt anymore. They just want honest work, honest pay and for Christ’s sake, honest food.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, it makes me sad to read this:

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

One reporter was brave enough to eat a Haitian dirt cake:

A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.

Can you blame people emigrating from literally dirt-poor countries by any means necessary? Would you give a flying flip about immigration laws if you ate dirt three meals a day while nursing a child?

Female Circumcision in Indonesia

Go check out the article and the haunting photo essay at The New York Times Magazine. Oh, and this is done to 9-month-olds and 14-year-olds alike.

The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14….

According to Lukman Hakim, [Assalaam Foundation's] chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.

“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”

“Atheists, if there’s no God, where do you get your morals from?”

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker says, shockingly, evolution.

Pinker is the Harvard prof I mentioned in an earlier post about swearing, and whose new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, I’ve just started.

Pinker’s latest article for the New York Times Magazine titled The Moral Instinct engagingly and elegantly tackles an oft-asked R&S favorite, Where do atheists get their morals? Pinker draws us into the article with this question:

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug?

….[A] deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.