The whirling vortex of wind that roared through Myanmar(a.k.a Burma by romantics) last week – killing up to 100,000 people and leaving more than a million injured and homeless – demonstrates that food is the highest priority of mankind and can be a weapon and/or salvation of the future.

Another significant event last week in Svalbard, Norway -- substantiating this hypothesis -- was barely noticed.

"Environuts" are ecstatic over subsidies for ethanol refineries that convert field corn into "clean propellant for fancy automobiles."

The resulting shortage of edible corn has driven up the cost of food worldwide. This at a time when millions of people are starving in places like Zimbabwe, Africa; Haiti, Hispaniola; and Malaysia, Indochina.

We are reminded of the ethnic starvation in 1994 at Rwanda when a million Tutsi and Hutus succumbed.

Recent earthquakes in Nevada and Indiana upset folks accustomed to terra firma.

The relatively minor Nevada tremor on Friday, near Verdi-Mogul, was rated 4.7 on the 10-point Richter Scale. No one was injured.

The April 18 quake -- centered near Evansville, Indiana -- rattled dishes, dislodged a few bricks, collapsed a front porch and sent tender-footed cats scurrying under beds.

A six-day whirlwind tour of the United States of America by Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI mended fences, gathered in the flock and wowed the United Nations General Assembly with stout support of a concept known as "Responsibility To Protect."

The concept of benign intervention was conceived by the U.N. to encourage massive aid to Africans displaced by civil wars in places like Darfur.