In case I forget over the holiday…

Charlie, a coyote at 10 days of age, after his parents were killed.

Jonathan Bloom has noticed in his Wasted Food blog that America wastes almost half its food. Farms, businesses, institutions and restaurants can capture and make use of much more food from their waste stream.

The Chicago Tribune tells us that an average-sized hotel purchases more products in a week than 100 families will in a year. That heavy purchasing, much of which is food, leads to great waste.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board says that the lodging industry in California generates 112,000 tons of food waste, 2 percent of the state’s annual total.

When we think of a person in the U.S. who is hungry, we tend to think of an unkempt homeless person with a drug or alcohol problem. However, the truth is that hunger in America is pervasive. While 36 million Americans live in poverty and struggle to get enough food, half are children, EndHunger points out that 96 billion pounds of food are wasted each year. Up to 25% is sanitary, edible and ready to distribute.

• 263,013,699 pounds of food wasted each day…
• 10,958,904 pounds wasted each hour…
• 182,648 pounds wasted each minute…
• 3,044 pounds of food wasted in America each second!

The Conference of Mayors reported a few years ago that one in four children do not eat regular meals each day because of lack of food in their home. Of those seeking emergency food assistance, 67% have an income of $10,000 or less. Of these individuals, 49% are working full time. Over 10% of Americans 65 years of age and older live in poverty. While more than 85% of food stamps are for children and elders, the average amount of money that food stamp recipients receive per meal is $0.96. [more facts here]

It seems an average family discards as much as 45 pounds per month. Along with many cities seeking to control land fills by producing compost or biogas, Seattle will require by 2009 that all single family homes to recycle their food scraps. A common solution is three bins where food scraps are discarded in new ‘green waste’ containers along with lawn and plant waste.

A ‘conversation project’ in San Francisco called Replate is encouraging folks to leave doggie bags outside restaurants for homeless people to eat. The project says:

“Hey, if you live in an area where homeless people dig through the trash for food, then consider this: Next time just set your leftovers on top of the trash can instead of in it. This may not work, but let’s try to expose this whole hunger issue a little more.”

Now the other half of the conversation about hunger:

“I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks.” – George W. Bush on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and donated US food exports. CNN January 2, 2003

The US has the highest child poverty rate of any industrialized nation while this Administration wasted at least $146 million over a one-year period on business- and first-class airline tickets, in some cases simply because they felt entitled to the perk.

And George W. Bush is merely reshaping failure while tweaking propaganda and eliminating the word ‘hunger’ from official documents! Can you believe it?

U.S. Stops Describing Americans as “Hungry”
In news from Washington, the Bush administration has stopped using the words “hunger” or “hungry” when describing the millions of Americans who can’t afford to eat!

Instead of suffering from hunger, the Agriculture Department now says these people are experiencing… “very low food security“.

A comment concludes,

“Bush would throw in the word ‘security’ just about anywhere on anything.”

Eat this!
Incidentally, Agriculture Department food stamps cost $28 billion each year [wiki]. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS noticed that the Air Force alone warehouses almost $19 billion in ‘absolute waste’ in spare parts it will never use and often throws away before it’s delivered!

How much more will be tolerate? We use email. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ours. But under the Bush Administration the National Labor Relations Board has ruled employees cannot use email to discuss unions. Count the bricks. The bricks are falling.

People, people, people. George Harrison tried to reach beyond the spitefulness that separates neighbors. In 1971 he used his celebrity and influence to produce the first rock and roll charity concert, the Concert for Bangladesh. Audiences, both at New York’s Madison Square Gardens watching the show live and later kids like myself listening in by the record player were treated to performances by a Hindu, Ravi Shankar, India’s master of the sitar, as he played for the benefit of Muslim Bangladeshis. The event was a gracious gesture that focused attention on our eternal option of forgiveness and charity over strife. We could use some of this energy now.

We will ignore our differences.

In each way we say hello, we will ignore our differences.

How will you in the name of democracy continue mind numbing lies?

I’m saying it’s not about money. It’s much more about love and caring.

It’s hard for me to believe the mean hearts that rule our world. Like Lenin, many hope war, poverty, exploitation, inequity will increase to a point where we revolt, but I do not want more pain. I hope we learn.

Critics on the right, more loud than history, earn their pulpits and their spectrum using private money sprinkled to these psychopaths from foundations and golf course cash. Critics on the left earn their money at parties, whether tea or booze or music, among goddess driven suburbs until dollars amount to cheap events when media appears. But the public, you and me, gather nowhere, have no name, have sacrificed our town square for the mall. I hate you for it.

Do not think I will not love you. I will be first to leap into the air when I finally hear your voice. It is your time to speak of better things, to stop the cruel fools, to invent tomorrow again. You do not require new power.

Voice is enough to crush trumpets of arrogance, just your voice, “Hello”. Abuse will roll away. There will never be a hill we will not climb. I remember Ralph Nader said, “Don’t you see? We will crowd out the myths.“

Take better. This is our voice. And the secret our footprint finds.

Tell me when a teacher says,

“Follow your curiosity.”

Tell me when a teacher says,

“Only your curiosity knows where you are going.”

The recent discount selling price, the bargain selling price, of the copied Magna Carta tells of the cheap acquiescence of ourselves.

Consumer culture has an effect more than economists can dream or bankers own. If economic order is the only human order, then every Creed and Constitution is wasted on the rich it has not warmed, the crime it has not weakened, the terror it has not calmed, the greed it cannot steer.

Nobody is speaking to the error of having no purpose greater than our next bargain.

The clamor for wealth destroys us and made us a cheap populace.

We are too small to lift one of us and not great enough to carry us all.

We have other choices. Powers on parade, our gilded aristocracy of lies, will see we have begun again. There is not one danger, not one threat, not one step to harm us, when we build our tomorrow in our yearning. ‘Such rights seem trivial or ridiculous, but if such unenumerated rights are not defended, the result is subjection.‘

Bill Moyers has a talent for the elegant that often blends into a very fine rant:

Ours is a society on steroids, and we’re as blind as baseball’s owners were a decade ago.

In our drugged state, we cheer the winners in the game of wealth, the billionaires who benefit from a skewed financial system — the losers, we kick down the stairs. We open fire hoses of cash into our political system in the name of “free speech.” Television stations that refuse to cover government make fortunes selling political bromides over public airwaves. Pornography passing as advertising assaults our senses, seduces our children, and pollutes our culture. Partisan propaganda gets pumped up as news. We feed on the flamboyance of celebrities. And we actually take seriously the Elmer Gantrys who use the Christian Gospel as a guidebook to an Iowa caucus or a battle plan for the Middle East. In the face of a scandalous health care system, failing schools, and a fraudulent endless war, we are as docile as tattered scarecrows in a field of rotten tomatoes.

As for that war, you may have heard that a quarter of the heavily-armed ‘shooters’ working in the streets of Baghdad for the Administration’s mercenary Blackwater foreign legion are alleged to be chemically influenced by steroids or other mind-altering substances. [link to transcript]

‘Shooters’ on steroids is an allegation that requires vigorous follow through!

Two actors were killed and three others wounded in Angola while filming a bank robbery scene for a crime drama.

The film makers believed had police clearance to film in a crime-ridden suburb but the marksmen suddenly arrived in a pick-up truck and began shooting until he shouted out their victims were actors.

Interior Minister Leal Monteiro Ngongo said police had failed to assess “the situation they encountered in a logical, rational and scientific manner”. [story]

The Telegraph reports:
Jessica the 750lb teenage hippopotamus “eats, sleeps, swims and plays with retired game warden Tonie Joubert and wife Shirley at their home in South Africa.

“She wanders round the house, drinks coffee on the veranda, hangs out with the pet dogs and enjoys soothing massages that help her relax at the end of a happy hippo day.

“Most nights, Jessica totters off back to the river for a mudbath. But on other occasions she’ll wander into the house, wet and dripping slime and plonk herself on the couple’s bed. It is becoming a problem because she has broken the bed three times.” [slide show] [previous warm-hearted pics here]

J. Patrick Lewis has a thing or two to say:

A hippopotamusn’t sit
On lawn chairs, stools, and rockers.
A hippopotamusn’t yawn
Directly under tightrope walkers.
A hippopotamusn’t roll
In gutters used by bowlers.
A hippopotamusn’t fail
To floss his hippopotamolars.

The awful things a hippopotamusn’t do
Are just
As important as the lawful things
A hippopotamust.

Patiently enjoying a happy hippo kiss:

Three news articles are showing that Star Trek medical scanning devices are becoming reality soon. [wiki]

Philippe Fauchet at the University of Rochester has engineered a scanner to detect a virus. The device captures particles less than 240 nanometers, billionths of a meter, and is designed to help detect the common cold.

Eliminating the need for a biopsy, Howard Chang has built a new DNA scanner to see the molecular details of a tumor without removing tissue.

Calit2′s Paul Blair is working on a wireless healthcare infrastructure. As smaller and cheaper sensors track vital signs, a patient’s health data is automatically uploaded.

Novomer is incubating new plastic clean enough for medical transplants that is manufactured using Carbon Dioxide.

Chief Two Eagles was asked by a government official, “You have observed the white man for many years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress and the damage he’s done.” The Chief nodded in agreement. The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

The Chief stared at the government official for over a minute and calmly replied, “When white man find land, Indians running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water; women did all the work, medicine man free. Indian men spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

Then the Chief leaned back and smiled. “Only white men dumb enough to think he can improve system like that.”

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” said long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means….

The treaties have been “repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life.”

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old. The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The Economist reports on food price inflation and food diversion:

“Ethanol is the dominant reason for this year’s increase in grain prices. It accounts for the rise in the price of maize because the federal government has in practice waded into the market to mop up about one-third of America’s corn harvest. A big expansion of the ethanol program in 2005 explains why maize prices started rising in the first place.

“Ethanol accounts for some of the rise in the prices of other crops and foods too. Partly this is because maize is fed to animals, which are now more expensive to rear. Partly it is because America’s farmers, eager to take advantage of the biofuels bonanza, went all out to produce maize this year, planting it on land previously devoted to wheat and soyabeans.

“This year America’s maize harvest will be a jaw-dropping 335m tonnes, beating last year’s by more than a quarter. The increase has been achieved partly at the expense of other food crops.

“In other words, the demands of America’s ethanol program alone account for over half the world’s unmet need for cereals.”

Is there one, count ‘em, one successful government program recently? It seems too easy merely to think that cash for corn is profiting only the Whitehouse agribusiness cronies.

Got No Milk?
There’s also a global milk shortage and rapidly increasing prices. The Food and Agriculture Organization shows international dairy prices increased 46% in only six months, with milk powder prices increasing even faster.

“Oil is not the only product on the market for which record prices have to be paid. With the increased dairy demand in (primarily) Asia and the rising costs for animal feed, milk is also trading at record highs.

“In some countries the beer is more affordable than milk, ” says AllAboutFeed.

Before DDT, malaria caused by mosquito bites was a serious problem along the Gulf states. Mosquitoes remain a very serious threat.

Today we rely only on an arsenal of biological and chemical suppression techniques – many of these increasingly ineffective, and costly.

Are there alternatives? Is there an industrial-scale green technology to control mosquitoes? Why not a Municipal Bat Roost?

In the center right of this 1914 photograph, Dr. Charles Campbell is posing on his innovative mosquito control for San Antonio, Texas, “Disguised with a church steeple complete with cross, the roost became a favorite bat habitat.”

To harvest guano, still a costly and highly valuable organic fertilizer, the roost was “fitted with a trapdoor and stilts to facilitate the harvesting of guano by the wagon load”.

Larger version at Shorpy via ecotality

Overheard on the golf course:

“How did you earn your retirement?”
“I sued the drug company before they killed me.”

Too many medications are injuring people or can have serious side effects. Drugs to strengthen bones, for example, may cause serious problems or be entirely effective, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As boomers reach to save their health and consume the attention of medical services, the market for remedies and drugs is growing and growing.

And there’s an increasing use of anti-psychotics to manage intrusive or annoying members of the family as well. Doctors are continuing to prescribe drugs dangerous to seniors in spite of government warnings, says CBC News.

Millions are elderly are prescribed drugs without adequate restraint. “Along with overall quality of care provided to a nursing home resident, it’s of tremendous concern that federal programs are paying for prescription drugs that could be unnecessary or potentially harmful for people living in nursing homes,” Iowa’s Senator Grassley said.

To paraphrase a comment from the investigation, the Hippocratic Oath of first do no harm has been replaced with the Pfizer-cratic Oath of first prescribe.