... and food for the table In 2015, the U.S. used about 5 billion bushels of corn to produce over 13 billion gallons of ethanol fuel. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol just once can feed one person for a year, so the amount of corn used to make that 13 billion gallons of ethanol will not feed the almost 500 million people that it might have served. That is more than the population of North America.
Seventy percent of all corn imports worldwide come from the U.S. Food price spikes affect the poor immediately. In the run up to 2007, the global price of corn doubled as a result of an explosion in ethanol production in the U.S. coupled with the Great Recession. In eastern Africa alone, 400,000 died as a result according to the World Health Organization. Competition in the marketplace is troublesome, sometimes. Because corn is the most common animal feed and has many other uses in the food industry, the price of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, corn-based sweeteners and cereals increased as well. World grain reserves dwindled to less than two months, the lowest level in over 30 years. Globalization is more complicated than we expected; it's not going to be easy to avoid doing harm.
... and persecution continues today. It spreads broadly, and note the persecution of Christians and Shiites by ISIS. Adults and children have been abducted, raped, beheaded, crucified, and worse because they didn't profess the right religion.
The Obama administration has formally recognized the genocide.
(CNN) Secretary of State John Kerry said on April 15th that the United States has determined ISIS' action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide. "My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims," he said, during a news conference at the State Department.
Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations," executed Christians "solely for their faith" and also "forced Christian women and girls into slavery."
Persecution in practice is an extraordinary wickedness that permeates today's world. It must not be confused with simple crime or conflict. It is inhumanly perverse and requires an appropriate response.
There is a singular feature that men notice in a woman.
Although the curves get a lot of attention in the media and perhaps in juvenile conversation as well, there's more. There are eyes and ankles, and everything in between, all part of the picture and scoring on the scale of visual beauty. Surprisingly, a man won't fall in love if that is all there is, even if she's a 10.
But he might fall in love if he sees that one feature that every man admires, ... and that's backbone.
She may or may not be a classic or modern beauty, a runway beauty, or a high school 'most beautiful', but if there's depth to her character, if there's courage of conviction, if there's substance to her as a person, he's impressed. And maybe even stunned. So much time and effort is spent on appearance and perhaps not so much on who they are, what they value, what they're willing to tackle in order to live up to their principles.
One of the more stunning young ladies I know has that quality. She's pretty, wonderfully engaging and open, smart; okay, she's really attractive, but I don't think she knows or cares much. What you notice when you talk with her is that she's a person of substance. She's fought her way through school and college and graduate school, and she's on her way to Africa with the Peace Corps for two years. She's scared, but she's going. She wants to do something that makes a difference. She's smart enough and has the credentials for big business and commensurate salary, but she wants substance and meaning in her life, She's off on her adventure today. I'm so impressed and almost jealous. Only almost, because the next two years aren't going to be easy. She's off to see the real world, knowing that everything she holds dear will be challenged, and she will be radically changed by her experience.
I'd tell my daughter's story which is similar, but I'm understandably prejudiced. She was a talented ballerina, a comfortable scholar all the way through graduate school, and gorgeous, of course. She also picked a path for her life where she could attend to things that mattered. I remember her telling me, "I'm going to pour out my life on something, it might as well be something that makes a difference."
Crossing paths with such a person is refreshingly uplifting, encouraging in so many ways,
Women of substance, the ones who are genuinely admired, the ones who are truly beautiful people, they probably won't show up in Hollywood or on reality shows. They live in a real world that is far above and beyond such things. Of course.
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Memory Banda’s life took a divergent path from her sister’s. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional “initiation camp” that teaches girls “how to sexually please a man.” She got pregnant there - at age 11. Banda, however, refused to go. Instead, she organized others and asked her community's leader to issue a bylaw that no girl should be forced to marry before turning 18. She pushed on to the national level … with incredible results.
This is the fun part of being a genuine person. We build our own identity and character over a lifetime.
Self-construction starts with ideas and concepts we get during our formative years, usually from parents and others. Those are templates and perhaps a foundation upon which we will build.
Every element of personality,
identity, and character must
be built up and prepared
for the battle to come,
or it will fail at the
critical moment
of specific
need.
Morals, ethics, theology, philosophy, and worldview before age twelve or so are usually simple and comfortable. If left unrefined, they'll settle in as part of who we are but in a perhaps insubstantial way.
That can be a problem when real life intrudes. If we don't have the depth and strength we need, we can do harm to ourselves and others when the day comes.
Deal with it! One way is a deliberate disassembly, validation, and reassembly of each aspect of our identity and character, of every value we hold. Opportunities for such honesty aren't offered by quiet times and pointless days, however.
Honesty hears a differing opinion without anger, a contradictory analysis without judgement, an alternative solution without criticism, and in so doing you have opportunity to know what you believe and why. Often, we'll learn more from folks who don't think like we do, those who see things differently.
(If you can't have a comfortable discussion as an outsider, you don't know why you endorse the values you hold. An angry response in such a conversation comes from insecurity and fear, does it not?)
Reinforce for strength. Study to know and live the truth, and in so doing, you'll find you need not be ashamed, rightly handling truth as it is offered.
The minimum wage is the introductory point for teens and the unskilled to get some exposure in the workplace. That's its purpose. True? No. The enactment of a minimum wage was intended to preclude the abuse of workers by employers, to ensure an adequate wage was paid for a minimum living standard.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, when first passed into law, applied to industries whose combined employment represented about one-fifth of the labor force. In those industries, it banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.
The law was extended over time to deal more effectively with the tendency of employers to misuse and underpay employees. It was intended to provide a living wage precisely because employers tended to overuse employees and throw them away. Such is still the tendency in many business venues.
Those who suggest that minimum wage need not keep pace with inflation are endorsing, perhaps unknowingly, the practices of employee abuse and enforced poverty. There are many economic factors at play, and perhaps several concerns about the impact of fair wages, but that's the issue. Fair wages, fair schedule policies, fair consideration of employees in the business plan.
Retail and fast-food are among the industry offenders. Most of them artificially limit employee hours to avoid the costs associated with full time. This is not an unintentional practice, but a careful plan for distribution of hours to minimize cost to the corporation at the expense of the employees. Two half-time workers cost less than one full time worker. That's not actually true due to reduced productivity, loyalty, and high turnover, but some industries like Walmart and Burger King use the method aggressively.
“If you raise the minimum wage, the inevitable effect will be, number one, young people will lose their jobs or not be able to get their first jobs,” says Ted Cruz, 2013. That's one opinion; is he right? Keeping wages low; is that the solution we need for the sake of the teens?
Minimum-wage workers today are older than they used to be. Their average age is 35, and 88 percent are at least 20 years old.Jun 9, 2014 There are between 3 and 6 million folks in the category.
What solutions are available? Is it time to reconstruct the fair labor standards act?
Understanding Must Change! The alternative is deliberate ignorance.
Slavery was normal and accepted until Wilberforce and others said it wasn't. They said it was wicked and unchristian and inhuman, and they described it as it was, actually. They described individuals affected by it, how it tortured and degraded and robbed them of life and family and liberty.
John Brown recounts how as a young fellow, he had visited a family who had a negro slave boy about his own age. Brown remembers being treated wonderfully while the slave boy was poorly clothed and fed and, while Brown looked on, was beaten with a shovel. Brown commanded the raid at Harpers Ferry which led to secession and the Civil War.
It took more than a century for the common understanding of slavery to be reshaped. More than a century to deal with basic human equality. Today, everybody knows, it was just wrong. Now, there's no way to talk about slavery that makes it good or just or moral.
So, what are today's issues? What are those parts of culture that are normal and accepted, but which similarly need to be reshaped in our understanding?
Your first reaction upon seeing this - this is wrong! Of course. This isn't what we saw in school. Countries are their correct size in relation to each other in this south-up view,
an example of a cylindrical equal-area projection.
... how about the real world?
The world we've been shown never existed. It's a distorted map that was created when Europe was the center of the world. In use since 1600, it exaggerates the relative size of northern countries by 2x-3x. Bizarrely inaccurate, yet it's used in most of the world's academic curricula today. Does size matter? Would it be helpful to our worldview if we knew how the countries of the world are actually arranged? (watch the short video here before moving on)
And yes, Brazil is about the size of the U.S., and four times the size of Greenland.
The impact of such misrepresentation:
The world's view of the developing world is 'below' and 'lesser', in part from our concept of relative size and position. The common map is known to have been produced as an expression of cultural superiority, racism, and positional relevance. Most westerners refer to Africa as a country. It's not. ... then perhaps, class distinctions?
Prejudice and discrimination have historically been imposed along racial and ethnic lines, but even more so based on wealth. We have created a class and economic inequality in every instance. The upper class has access to wealth and privilege to which lower classes do not.
We've labored in the west to provide equal opportunity, and in many ways we've done well. Social mobility has changed over the decades in America for minorities and others. For a while (part of the 20th century), we saw the working and middle classes doing well along with the rich. For the last five decades, however, the GAP between working folks and the wealthy has widened, and the GAP is accelerating. It's now visible in every developed nation. Social mobility, the opportunity to rise out of poverty, has declined through that period for a number of reasons.
Updated 10/2018
Economic inequality - it plagues every nation, and in the developing world it is exploding in an exaggerated form. Its root is ancient, and it is propagated today to a great degree by the international marketplace. What was once trade for mutual benefit has become wealth extraction at the expense of others, a predatory form of capitalism.
How if affects people - in a developing country, I sat with the men of a large, extended family. All had been educated in local schools and had done well enough. All were bright, energetic fellows. Conversation continually returned to 'a little business', things they might attempt that would generate income. They raised crops in gardens, they bought in the country and sold in the city market, they tried roadside kiosk sales, they attempted to restore a junked taxi and put it into service. The country has no emerging industry, no jobs market, no particular growth that offers a chance for the great majority. Kids who stay in school at great expense and effort by the family find little opportunity for employment afterwards. The country is corrupted, of course, by the international marketplace. Natural resources are profitably exported, but the profit goes to just a few, mostly outside the country. This is typical. Wealth flows from bottom to top. Developing countries pay more in interest to the developed world than they receive in assistance projects. Sixty dollars monthly is a typical employment income.
In the developed world, the GAP is that uncrossable expanse between those who are working hard to get by and those who accumulate wealth just by having wealth. In the U.S., income for the top 1% exceeds the total for the bottom 40%, and it's not from labor and productivity, it's from the effort of others. Every day, income; extraordinary wealth is extracted from the economy at the expense of those at the bottom.
Social and economic mobility happens for some, but it's largely a myth for most. Forty-seven million Americans live in poverty; their children and grandchildren are likely to do the same. It's not something they chose; it's done to them. It's a less obvious but equally virulent form of indentured servitude, of slavery. As William Garrison would have said, there is no neutral position.
We've attacked discrimination based on race, on culture, on gender with some success. The root of it all continues unchanged, based solely on position, wealth, and influence, the acquisition of more at the expense of others. Is there anything wrong with that? Or is there some appropriate equality for all mankind, some measure of grace and worth that makes a place for each one? Can we contribute to it? Is there any good news on the subject?
Macroeconomics is not a simple science. There are no single-point solutions to such broad spectrum flaws of function. As with the issue of slavery, however, the GAP exposes a national flaw, a vulnerability which, unless addressed and resolved, will continue to fracture the national identity and preclude success of the national purpose. Welcome to the American life, the vision, and the task.
