Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Dickie's Quickies

A couple of amusements this morning:

Ryan Greis draws upon his experiences of living in Kentucky for his Pooptooth illustrations featuring backroad hicks. Pretty amusing. Having grown up a number of years in Kentucky and having most of my family's skelatives in Southern Indiana on the border of Kentucky, I find that I can relate very well with these pictures even in their absurdity. His editorial illustrations, while amusing, don't draw me in quite as much.

Want to know about corporate board incest? Check out They Rule and learn who sits on a corporate board and which other boards those people sit on as well.

Update: A new report on U.S. arms sales around the world from the World Policy Institute. No surprises here to anyone who follows such things, but it's worth repeating:

In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that "citizens do not have the right to change their own government." These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).

When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80% -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

No comments: