Solvable Crisis

Sometimes I get impatient with humankind. We make so many things a crisis and at the same time ignore those crises that are solvable.

We, and I don’t mean you and I, but those “we’s” that run stuff and like to ring our bells. They like to make money off of our insecurities and our naiveté. This Ebola crisis until recently has been ignored in the United States. It’s OK if they are dying; West Africans have been dying from Evola for decades.

Now it’s a big deal. But you know what is a big deal? Hunger, not only in the world but also in the United States. Did you know that 50 million Americans suffer from hunger? And included in that number 17 million children.  Almost 15% of households in the United States have issues with hunger.

In 2011 8% of seniors in the U.S. had hunger issues, which translates into one million households. Shameful really, when you consider it is food we are talking about and not some unknown virus.

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."—Franklin D. Roosevelt 

Check out The Hunger Site Maybe there is something you can do to help.

And if you want to venture outside the borders of the United States you will find statistics that are really staggering.

• Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year.

• The vast majority of the world's hungry people live in developing countries, where 13.5 percent of the population is undernourished.

• Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth.

Go to World Food Programme for more information.

Hunger is a solvable crisis.

Obama Appoints Czar

Tzar Nicholas II - 1898

No, not that Tzar, this Czar, Ron Klain. He is the new Ebola Czar and you can read the full story here.

The NYT article says:

"Mr. Klain is known for his ability to handle high-stakes and fast-moving political crises. He was the lead Democratic lawyer for Mr. Gore during the 2000 election recount, and was later played by Kevin Spacey in the HBO drama “Recount” about the disputed contest."

Hmmm, I thought Ebola was a medical crisis. Wouldn't that be handled by our Surgeon General? Oh, wait, that's right we don't have a Surgeon General. It seems the Surgeon General nomination  got caught up in politics.

Maybe Mr. Klain would best be the Czar of clearing up Surgeon General Nominations, then we would have a Surgeon General, aka, a medically trained person, that could work on the Ebola medical crisis.

On the other hand if we just declared War on Ebola I am sure our Defense Department could take care of everything lickedly split.

Yucca Mountain Now Deemed Safe

"Yucca, a volcanic structure adjacent to what was formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, where the government exploded hundreds of nuclear bombs, was never described as the best place for burying nuclear waste, only an acceptable one about which a consensus could be achieved." ~ Read the full story here