Daily | Bill Gates & Immunization | Gendercide | Weiner's Rabbi & Death Curses?
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Billionaire Bill Gates and Britain pledged $2.3 billion at an international donor conference on Monday to fund vaccination programs to protect children in poor countries against diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this sobering photo of an aging, pensive Bill Gates speaks volumes to us. Many of us are concerned that time is running out on key challenges of our time. More than once, Bill Gates has acknowledged that we just might not beat the clock.
Norway has pledged doubling its annual contribution to $180 million by 2015. Australia’s Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd promised his country will donate $210 million to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) over three years until 2013.
A series of academic studies published last week found that if 90 percent of children in the more than 70 poor countries supported by GAVI were fully immunized, some 6.4 million children’s lives and more than $151 billion in treatment costs and lost productivity could be saved over 10 years, producing economic benefits of $231 billion.
Other countries, including America, have yet to weigh in. The question we have for readers is: with regard to the American pledge that will come, is our word any good? Can we keep our promise? We don’t even know how Washington is functioning these days, and our greatest concern is whether our pledges can be delivered on.
HopeTracker
1000 Community Gardens
Corporate sponsorship of a community garden?At Proyecto Pastoral, it’s not a questionLA Times
Students at Community Gardens Dispatch No. 33: Proyecto PastoralSome question Scotts Miracle-Gro’s sponsorship of 1000 community gardens. The company’s products include chemical fertilizers, insecticides and the herbicide Roundup. Synthetic fertilizers are often discouraged, if not forbidden, at community and school gardens.
The company’s Organic Choice line of products is being used in the community gardens, including the one at Proyecto Pastoral in LA. Yvonne Savio, who oversees the region’s master gardener training as manager of the UC Cooperative Extension’s Common Ground Garden Program, says people need to look at the larger picture.
“The whole point is to get the kids growing, literally, in the garden and in themselves as individuals, and it doesn’t matter to me how it happens,” she said.
Ethne Clarke, editor of Organic Gardening magazine, agrees.
“Who’s going to do this if it is not corporate?” Clarke said. “There’s no public funding for this kind of project. What Miracle-Gro is doing with their philanthropy is marvelous. These communities need gardens for all kinds of reasons.”
Rodale Institute
Teaching the World to FarmOrganic Gardening
The Rodale Institute combines multiple identities as a working farm, soil research station, tourist destination, international agency, and outdoor classroom. For decades the Institute has been a dynamic force in the progress of the organic agriculture movement throughout the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. That knowledge is used to help. The knowledge gained from these fertile acres helps growers from the deserts of Africa to the rice fields of Japan to the backyard gardens of Iowa find success without chemicals.
RedTracker
Gender Selection & A World Full of Men
Are the world’s women disappearing?Salon
Asia now has 163 million females “missing” from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval.
Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability.
Mara Hvistendahl is unflinching in her discussion of this difficult issue and also pro-abortion rights. Like Anne she is dismayed that the only loud voices dealing with the strong preference for boys in Asia and Eastern Europe are the anti-abortion forces. The left internationally — as they are in America — remains silent in support of any logical cultural approach to this challenge that focuses on maternal health, maternal rights and a cultural understanding that educated women with fewer children offer the best hope for the 21st century.
My own stance on abortion didn’t change, in that I continue to be pro-abortion rights. I was, however, dismayed at how much American abortion politics on both the right and the left has come to bear on the issue of sex selection in ways that are reshaping the developing world. On the right, conservatives have made this an issue about the fetus and when life begins. They are using what happens in Asia to try to push through restrictions on abortion in the U.S. But I don’t see much concern for what’s happening to men and women in the developing word. On the left, people are generally pretty scared to tackle this issue because it deals with abortion, and the result is that we don’t see much international action.
More reading at AOC about gendercide
Gendercide of Girls Increases Worldwide AOC FP
India’s Sex Ratio Problem Deepers As Technology Aids Patriarchy AOC World’s Women
Will Polyandry Become a Way of Life in China and India? AOC World’s Women
Women’s Oppression Not Important Says Erica Jong’s Daughter
Molly Jong-Fast Says World’s Women Aren’t Oppressed, Feminism Is A Luxury Problem AOC Sexual Politics
In an exchange that has left Anne speechless, Feministing.com posted the following interview commentary between Erica Jong and her daughter Molly Jong-Fast, as part of an interview on Erica Jong’s new anthology and her daughter Molly’s contribution to it:
Molly and Erica are asked:
CA: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?
EJ: Waking up the women who don’t realize the risk they’re in. Getting the conversation going again. It’s hard to get the conversation going again, because people think they have it all. And meanwhile all these states are going to outlaw not just abortion, but birth control, which is what they were always about. If you read successive UN reports on the status of women, there is one thing that leads to prosperity in poor countries, and it’s controlling fertility. Once women can control the number of children they have, everybody’s life gets better – economically, and healthwise, and in every other way. It’s been proven. So to see our country going backward in this way is ridiculous. There are probably many unconscious factors, like the fear of being outnumbered by brown and black people.
MJF: You can’t say it like that. It sounds inherently racist when you say it like that. “Fear of being outnumbered by” – it’s not a race war! First of all, you can’t say it like that. To say someone’s “brown” or “black,” you can’t say that. Every liberal bone in my body cringes. And the reality is that it’s not; America’s going to be more Hispanic, but it’s not going to be more “brown.” I don’t know what “brown” is. Is that tanned people? You can’t, I mean, what planet do you live on, “brown?” Mulatto? Did you mean Mulatto? Quinteroon? You can’t say that.
I would say the greatest danger is climate change. We’re going to be screwed. We’re going to have such bigger problems than women being oppressed when we’re living on a bubble on Mars with no water. We’re going to have much bigger problems than feminism. The entire world is going to be obliterated, so that worries me a little more. We won’t have time to worry about who’s being oppressed. That kind of thing is really a luxury problem.
EJ: But why is it that feminism is always considered a luxury problem?
MJF: I mean, I think we’ve gotten far enough. We’re not that oppressed.
Boys Club
Weiner’s Spiritual Adviser
Sexting pol Anthony Weiner often seeks counsel with Rabbi to the Stars Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto New York Daily News
Rep. Anthony Weiner is a fan of Rabbi to the Stars Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto. Craig Warga/News; via Facebook
The embattled Queens-Brooklyn Democrat is a follower of Rabbi to the Stars Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, a self-proclaimed kabbalah scholar who puts death curses on his critics.
The 37-year-old Pinto comes from a long line of Moroccan rabbinical royalty, only speaks Hebrew and refuses to meet with women. Weiner regularly stops by his classes and holiday gatherings, sources said.
New Photos Emerge | Do We Ignore?
Anthony Weiner and The Media’s Selective Sex Scandal SavageryThe Daily Beast
Howard Kurtz reviews the big list of bad boys, noting that both David Vitter and John Ensign got a pass because geography matters. Same for Idaho Congressman Larry Craig who served out his term after being arrested for lewd conduct in the men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport on June 11, 2007 and pleading guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct on August 8, 2007. After announcing that he would resign from the Senate, he served out his term.
All three politicians lived at C Street, God’s house in Washington. It’s realistic to argue that God takes special care of men who live in one of his residences.
David Vitter was able to lie low, and win reelection as a senator from Louisiana, despite turning up on the D.C. Madam’s phone list. Had Vitter been from New York, the tabloid press would have hounded him day and night with intrusive tactics and screaming headlines. The same goes for Larry Craig in Idaho after the “wide stance” incident in a restroom, and for John Ensign in Nevada after he acknowledged an affair with the wife of a top Senate aide. Can you imagine what the New York Post would have done with that, and the revelation that Ensign’s parents had coincidentally given the ex-aide a $96,000 “gift”? No way he could have hung on for two more years.
Anthony Weiner: Why He Shouldn’t Quit The Daily Beast
