BUSTED!! Hyperbole my ass, it is the same ole rhetoric coming from another Reich mouthpiece, "the poor are lazy, the left are enablers." This time people a fighting back as they realize it is the policies of the Reich that are destroying the middle class and below; that millions of Americans work full-time jobs yet still have to rely on help from the government.
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The candidate made the comments in a discussion thread on the Mad Mac page, which covers local politics.
“For almost three generations people, in some cases, have been given handouts,” Johnston said during the discussion. “They have been ‘enabled’ so much that their paradigm in life is simply being given the stuff of life, however meager.”
“What you see is a setting for a life of misery is life to them never-the-less,” he continued. “No one has the guts to just let them wither and die. No one who wants votes is willing to call a spade a spade. As long as the Dems can get their votes the enabling will continue. The Republicans need their votes and dare not cut the fiscal tether. It is really a political Catch-22.”
“The voters are the ones in charge,” Johnston said. “(H)owever when only 10-11 percent show up to vote, not much will change. People simply are not hurting enough, or simply happy enough that they will do nothing. consequently the dole continues.”
However, Johnston told the newspaper he didn’t advocate the end to programs such as welfare or food stamps.
Indiana GOP candidate: ‘No one has the guts’ to let poor people ‘wither and die’
Showing posts with label Hunger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hunger. Show all posts
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
One Day Below the Poverty Line | Heifer International | Charity Ending Hunger And Poverty
Last night I prepared food for my LBL practice day today. Three cups of rice, two eggs and one cup of edamame. Came to about $1.40 and 1400 calories.
I am doing what I can to prepare myself for this experience by being more mindful about hunger and actually willing myself to feel less hungry. I wonder, is that really possible? The food I prepared last night looks like enough, and I'm grateful I have even this much, when so many do not.
It was strange to decide whether to eat my two eggs at breakfast or to have one this morning and the other at dinner. I wonder what would be the most efficient way to do it if I were a farmer with a heavy work load ahead of me today.
I also wonder, if someone came to me having not eaten at all for a few days: would I share what I have? Right now I would, but if (when) I get hungry, will my answer change?
[,,,]
The reduced and bland food intake are two aspects of this, which are obvious and challenging. Another, which is not captured in this exercise, is the visceral experience that there may be less food than yesterday, or maybe none at all today. I may experience that feeling somewhat in Haiti in as much as I am able to have access to the very cheap food I have committed to eating. I had just a small glimpse of this. It is very disturbing... actually it filled me for just a moment with a lot of anxiety.
One Day Below the Poverty Line | Heifer International | Charity Ending Hunger And Poverty
I am doing what I can to prepare myself for this experience by being more mindful about hunger and actually willing myself to feel less hungry. I wonder, is that really possible? The food I prepared last night looks like enough, and I'm grateful I have even this much, when so many do not.
It was strange to decide whether to eat my two eggs at breakfast or to have one this morning and the other at dinner. I wonder what would be the most efficient way to do it if I were a farmer with a heavy work load ahead of me today.
I also wonder, if someone came to me having not eaten at all for a few days: would I share what I have? Right now I would, but if (when) I get hungry, will my answer change?
[,,,]
The reduced and bland food intake are two aspects of this, which are obvious and challenging. Another, which is not captured in this exercise, is the visceral experience that there may be less food than yesterday, or maybe none at all today. I may experience that feeling somewhat in Haiti in as much as I am able to have access to the very cheap food I have committed to eating. I had just a small glimpse of this. It is very disturbing... actually it filled me for just a moment with a lot of anxiety.
One Day Below the Poverty Line | Heifer International | Charity Ending Hunger And Poverty
Thursday, April 17, 2014
When A Doctor Finds Herself On Food Stamps, It Turns Into Something Amazing (VIDEO) | LiberalAmerica.org
Kudos to Tiffany Willis of Liberal America for bringing us this story and the program behind it,,,
Dickinson describes her first grocery store trip to use her SNAP benefits; her little girl — who loves cucumbers — was so excited that when she returned to the car, she was sitting in the back seat hugging her cucumbers.
A project by the non-profit group Hunger Free Colorado – ”Hunger Through My Lens” — gives digital cameras to food stamp recipients like Dickinson and asks them to chronicle what it’s like to be hungry in America. The project’s mission is “to empower people who are living in poverty and to promote awareness about hunger issues.” The resulting photographs have become a part of a traveling exhibit.
When A Doctor Finds Herself On Food Stamps, It Turns Into Something Amazing (VIDEO) | LiberalAmerica.org
Dickinson describes her first grocery store trip to use her SNAP benefits; her little girl — who loves cucumbers — was so excited that when she returned to the car, she was sitting in the back seat hugging her cucumbers.
A project by the non-profit group Hunger Free Colorado – ”Hunger Through My Lens” — gives digital cameras to food stamp recipients like Dickinson and asks them to chronicle what it’s like to be hungry in America. The project’s mission is “to empower people who are living in poverty and to promote awareness about hunger issues.” The resulting photographs have become a part of a traveling exhibit.
When A Doctor Finds Herself On Food Stamps, It Turns Into Something Amazing (VIDEO) | LiberalAmerica.org
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Golden Rice Opponents Should Be Held Accountable for Health Problems Linked to Vitamin A Deficiency | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
Society needs groups like Greenpeace and other environmental organizations to hold big companies accountable when they put their profits before our health, as they too often do. But society also has the right to hold advocates accountable when they let their passions blind them to the facts and, in pursuit of their values, put us at risk. Let’s be absolutely clear. That is precisely what opposition to genetic modification of food is doing, as the study of the Golden Rice delay in India makes sobering clear.
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I am finding this recent debate concerning Golden Rice kind of interesting and "educational" in an odd way. Hoping I haven't bitten off more than I can understand,,,
By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A–producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.
It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.
Their study, published in the journal Environment and Development Economics, estimates that the delayed application of Golden Rice in India alone has cost 1,424,000 life years since 2002. That odd sounding metric – not just lives but ‘life years’ – accounts not only for those who died, but also for the blindness and other health disabilities that Vitamin A deficiency causes. The majority of those who went blind or died because they did not have access to Golden Rice were children.
These are real deaths, real disability, real suffering, not the phantom fears about the human health effects of Golden Rice thrown around by opponents, none of which have held up to objective scientific scrutiny. It is absolutely fair to charge that opposition to this particular application of genetically modified food has contributed to the deaths of and injuries to millions of people. The opponents of Golden Rice who have caused this harm should be held accountable.
Golden Rice Opponents Should Be Held Accountable for Health Problems Linked to Vitamin A Deficiency | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
Monday, March 17, 2014
A senseless fight | Cosmos Magazine
The sickly toddler is about two years old. Holding the hand of her thin, ragged mother, her eyes are horrible to behold, just a bluish membrane where eyes should be. She is, of course, blind and will probably not live beyond her third year. Like 500,000 other children born in poor countries, her blindness is a result of vitamin A deficiency, a problem that could have been fixed by a diet adequate in vegetables such as carrots or tomatoes. These contain beta-carotene, which her body could convert into vitamin A. But in the rural east of India, while rice is affordable, year-round vegetables are not.
Twenty-two years ago, Ingo Potrykis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer at the University of Freiburg, set out to solve the problem by creating a rice plant that could produce its own beta-carotene. They did it by transferring genes from maize into rice to create so-called Golden Rice; golden because it produces the same pigments that yellow vegetables do. The scientists spent close to a decade tackling the difficult techniques required to transfer the genes and another to meet the stringent safety requirements for genetically modified organisms (GMO). Finally Golden Rice was trialled in the Philippines last August. You might think the trial would have been met with celebration. Instead a mob of anti-GMO activists, bussed in from the city but claiming to represent farmers, tore into the crop. Globally their actions were championed by Greenpeace and plenty of others.
How could anyone in good conscience seek to thwart technology that has even a remote chance of tackling the problem of vitamin A blindness?
Many readers will have no trouble providing an answer. The anti-GMO clichés go something like this: GM crops are unsafe to eat; they are bad for the environment; they are a tool of agribusiness corporations; and they exploit poor farmers who must buy seed as opposed to their traditional practice of saving seed.
A senseless fight | Cosmos Magazine
Twenty-two years ago, Ingo Potrykis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer at the University of Freiburg, set out to solve the problem by creating a rice plant that could produce its own beta-carotene. They did it by transferring genes from maize into rice to create so-called Golden Rice; golden because it produces the same pigments that yellow vegetables do. The scientists spent close to a decade tackling the difficult techniques required to transfer the genes and another to meet the stringent safety requirements for genetically modified organisms (GMO). Finally Golden Rice was trialled in the Philippines last August. You might think the trial would have been met with celebration. Instead a mob of anti-GMO activists, bussed in from the city but claiming to represent farmers, tore into the crop. Globally their actions were championed by Greenpeace and plenty of others.
How could anyone in good conscience seek to thwart technology that has even a remote chance of tackling the problem of vitamin A blindness?
Many readers will have no trouble providing an answer. The anti-GMO clichés go something like this: GM crops are unsafe to eat; they are bad for the environment; they are a tool of agribusiness corporations; and they exploit poor farmers who must buy seed as opposed to their traditional practice of saving seed.
A senseless fight | Cosmos Magazine
Sunday, October 27, 2013
The Real Hunger Games | The Nation
A sobering look "the world of food rationing for the elderly",,,
Eva Perdue, her legs wrapped in a black- and-white-checked blanket, a bright red kerchief tied in her hair, sits on a couch in her small house near downtown Atlanta that Habitat for Humanity built. She once worked as a housekeeper at a Georgia state mental facility but quit nine years ago to care for a sick husband. Now 64 and widowed, Perdue herself is sick. “Curses of the liver and high blood pressure,” she says. She has little money to buy any food, let alone healthy food: $98 is all she has after bills are paid from her $848 monthly Social Security check plus $68 worth of food stamps.
The morning I visited Perdue, she had eaten for breakfast the breading from two corn dogs, washed down with a cup of tea. The corn dogs she gave to her 18-year-old grandson, who lives with her. Too much salt, she said. “I can eat cereal. But I have no milk.” A gallon would cost $3 or $4, which Perdue did not have. Lunch might be a small salad with some rust-tinged cabbage and carrots from a convenience store up the street. She wasn’t sure about supper or what she’d eat the next day—if she ate at all.
Perdue tried to get help from Meals on Wheels Atlanta. In mid-April of 2012, she was twenty-seventh on a waiting list of 120. In November, she was still on the list, which had grown to 198. Her daughter finally found another program.
Such is the world of food rationing for the elderly—the hidden hunger few ever see. Tenille Johnson, one of two case managers at Meals on Wheels Atlanta, said there were others on the list who were even more in need than Perdue. In 2012, the program served 106,000 meals—up from 84,000 three years before—and it will serve about 114,000 this year. “We’ve been able to up our game and reduce the waiting list to between 145 and 160 seniors, but the need has outpaced us,” says executive director Jeffrey Smythe. “The numbers are going up more quickly than we projected. We have waiting lists all over the metro Atlanta area, even in suburban counties.”
[,,,]
Eating, however, is not discretionary, but more and more seniors are going hungry. In 2005, some 5 million people over age 60—about 11 percent of America’s senior population—faced the threat of hunger, according to a study by the Meals on Wheels Association, the nation’s largest trade group for meal providers. In 2012, that number was almost 15 percent. “Between 2001 and 2010, we have seen a 78 percent growth in the number of seniors facing hunger,” says Enid Borden, founder and president of the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger. While the threat is more prevalent among blacks and Hispanics, the largest increases have been among whites, particularly women, those in rural areas, the “young old” between 60 and 69, and the poor and near-poor with incomes in the $12,000 to $23,000 range. Many, once solidly in the middle class, now find themselves with little money as old age robs their savings.
The Real Hunger Games | The Nation
Eva Perdue, her legs wrapped in a black- and-white-checked blanket, a bright red kerchief tied in her hair, sits on a couch in her small house near downtown Atlanta that Habitat for Humanity built. She once worked as a housekeeper at a Georgia state mental facility but quit nine years ago to care for a sick husband. Now 64 and widowed, Perdue herself is sick. “Curses of the liver and high blood pressure,” she says. She has little money to buy any food, let alone healthy food: $98 is all she has after bills are paid from her $848 monthly Social Security check plus $68 worth of food stamps.
The morning I visited Perdue, she had eaten for breakfast the breading from two corn dogs, washed down with a cup of tea. The corn dogs she gave to her 18-year-old grandson, who lives with her. Too much salt, she said. “I can eat cereal. But I have no milk.” A gallon would cost $3 or $4, which Perdue did not have. Lunch might be a small salad with some rust-tinged cabbage and carrots from a convenience store up the street. She wasn’t sure about supper or what she’d eat the next day—if she ate at all.
Perdue tried to get help from Meals on Wheels Atlanta. In mid-April of 2012, she was twenty-seventh on a waiting list of 120. In November, she was still on the list, which had grown to 198. Her daughter finally found another program.
Such is the world of food rationing for the elderly—the hidden hunger few ever see. Tenille Johnson, one of two case managers at Meals on Wheels Atlanta, said there were others on the list who were even more in need than Perdue. In 2012, the program served 106,000 meals—up from 84,000 three years before—and it will serve about 114,000 this year. “We’ve been able to up our game and reduce the waiting list to between 145 and 160 seniors, but the need has outpaced us,” says executive director Jeffrey Smythe. “The numbers are going up more quickly than we projected. We have waiting lists all over the metro Atlanta area, even in suburban counties.”
[,,,]
Eating, however, is not discretionary, but more and more seniors are going hungry. In 2005, some 5 million people over age 60—about 11 percent of America’s senior population—faced the threat of hunger, according to a study by the Meals on Wheels Association, the nation’s largest trade group for meal providers. In 2012, that number was almost 15 percent. “Between 2001 and 2010, we have seen a 78 percent growth in the number of seniors facing hunger,” says Enid Borden, founder and president of the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger. While the threat is more prevalent among blacks and Hispanics, the largest increases have been among whites, particularly women, those in rural areas, the “young old” between 60 and 69, and the poor and near-poor with incomes in the $12,000 to $23,000 range. Many, once solidly in the middle class, now find themselves with little money as old age robs their savings.
The Real Hunger Games | The Nation
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