I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war famine and natural disasters.

War famine poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

Let's face it - think of Africa and the first images that come to mind are of war poverty famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations which in their day were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

Americans are blessed with great plenty we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty disease war and famine.

People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

If you continually diet you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.