poverty
sastyk | September 15, 2010Ok, that's not quite the headline at the New York Times, but close enough. Yes, the latest Oxfam figures that came out today say that we're back under 1 billion starving people. But yes, those figures were compiled before the Pakistani Floods, and before the 5% rise in food prices driven by the Russian wheat crisis.
The number of hungry people fell to 925 million from its all-time high of 1.02 billion in 2009, with much of the improvement tied to income growth in the Asia-Pacific region as well as a 40 percent decline in food prices from their 2008 peak.
The hunger number remains "…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2010tags: Stephen Fry on Catholicism, Intelligence Squared Debate, religion, catholicism, Catholic Church, poverty, sexuality,homosexuality, AIDS, HIV, condoms, pedophilia, child rape, culture, Stephen Fry, streaming video
Stephen Fry provides his very articulate and thoughtful opinion on Catholicism and the Catholic Church at the Intelligence Squared Debate.
sastyk | June 24, 2010From HuffPo, this article about the likely outcome that the Democrats will fail to pass an unemployment extension - unfortunately it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it will be crushingly hard on millions of people who have just been barely making it, and now aren't.
The legislation, known as the "tax extenders" bill, would reauthorize extended unemployment benefits for people out of work for six months or longer, would protect doctors from a 21 percent pay cut for seeing Medicare patients, and would provide billions in aid to state Medicaid programs.
Come Friday, 1.2 million people…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2010tags: Education Innovation in the Slums, education, technology, poverty, slums, curriculum, philosophy, learning as a productive activity, Charles Leadbeater, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the…
sastyk | June 7, 2010Thanks to reader Sunshine for forwarding me this AP article, which I think does a really good job of pointing up something I've been talking about for a long time - the food crisis that was in the news two years ago never actually went away. While food prices stabilized in the developed world and things like the economic crisis shoved the situation of the poor and hungry off the front pages, that doesn't mean the food crisis came to an end.
With food costing up to 70 percent of family income in the poorest countries, rising prices are squeezing household budgets and threatening to worsen…
sastyk | May 13, 2010I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I've been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing. Zuska comments on the difficulty of this, and challenges me to come up with something too:
A few problems with any of these solutions: as noted in the article, cooking from fresh ingredients takes more time than buying processed food, so although you get more, and…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2010tags: I'm A Teabagger For Jesus, teabaggers, America, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, socialism,humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, social commentary, cultural observation, Edward Current, streaming video
What would Jesus do to help America? In this video, William Current, one of my favorite social satirists, explains how he decided that he would be a Teabagger. No taxation without representation!
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: The Danger of Science Denial, vaccines, modern medicine, poverty, environmental destruction, science, cultural observation, film maker, animal behavior, Michael Specter, TEDTalks, streaming video
Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Sex, Drugs and HIV -- Let's Get Rational, behavior, disease, prostitution, gay men, drug addicts, sex, STD, HIV, AIDS, poverty, medicine, public health, Compassion Conundrum, Elizabeth Pisani, TEDTalks, streaming video
Armed with bracing logic, wit and her "public-health nerd" glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: How to Combat Modern Slavery, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, poverty, culture, slavery, human rights, human values, Kevin Bales, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research -- and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.
Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
sastyk | March 25, 2010It is interesting that young and unemployed (two words that are now virtually synonymous) and highly educated folks are using food stamps to buy high quality food - and taking a lot of heat for it. I can understand the visceral reaction that people have, but I also think it is fascinatingly difficult to try and figure out what we think poor people should eat - we criticize them freely for buying junk, and then we criticize them for buying high quality food. Where is the space that the poor are free to choose in?
Controversy about how they use food stamps marks an interesting shift from the…
sastyk | March 15, 2010Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.
First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.
Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2010tags: fish farming, aquaculture, piscivory, bird sanctuary, foodie, ethical eating, permaculture, agriculture, poverty, hunger, Dan Barber, TEDTalks, streaming video
Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain. My one complaint about this video is that the speaker never once identifies either of…
grrlscientist | February 25, 2010tags: neuroscience, health, medicine, health care, blindness, poverty, India, Pawan Sinha, TEDTalks, streaming video
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Dr Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
sastyk | February 25, 2010In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US Victory Gardens in WWII, for example - in 1944, US Victory gardens, which averaged only about 350 square feet, grew fully half the produce for the US. That is, home gardeners grew as much produce as all the vegetable farms in the US at the time. While it may seem, intuitively that small gardens…
sastyk | February 21, 2010Because of the enormous impact of agriculture on climate change, pick up any book about "green" solutions and you'll find the suggestions that you grow a vegetable garden. Bang into the "we can't go on as we are" end of the environmental movement (mine), and you'll see the general assumption that growing food is part of any process of adaptation to lower resource use.
This often then morphs into the assumption that all of us should be able to grow all of our food, or a vast majority of it - that sustainability means the country life for everyone. You might think that because I do produce a…
sastyk | February 21, 2010From Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can't find work in this recession but don't qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.
Without the help of welfare, Eva doesn't have enough money left at the end of each month to feed her daughters full meals.…
sastyk | February 16, 2010Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the Depression. Besides the pleas for help and the accounts of the situation on the ground, there was a profound anger at those who needed help. "Paddle your own canoe or sink" one letter wrote. A "Poor Southern Arkansas Woman" wrote that she felt she was a slave required to carry thousands of idle men on…
sastyk | February 5, 2010I somehow missed this Times article in January that documents the rising number of Americans living on nothing but Food Stamps. If you missed it too, you have to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html
This is the American equivalent of living on $2 per day.
Sharon