Food secure 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Urban agriculture is a thing. Some believe that it could ease that food-insecurity (defined in yesterday's post) where a household is less likely to have abundance of good quality food.

One organization trying to do just that is Revolutionary Earth Farm. Recruiting homeowners, they transform backyards into food-producing gardens. Recruiting volunteers, they work those gardens and distribute the harvest to needy households.

U.S. industry is hugely successful at producing and distributing food. According to the USDA, about 89% of Americans have plenty of good quality food whether they live near a farm or not.

On the other hand, there are wasted resources in the system. San Francisco is an example: "Feeding the cities of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area with a total population of some 7 million involves importing 2.5 to 3 million tons of food per day over an average distance of 500 to 1,000 miles." More food could be grown closer to the people who eat it.

Turning backyards from grass deserts into gardens makes sense to me.

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Food secure 1

Occasionally you may hear this relatively new term, "food insecurity." Like any term, it can be used loosely or inaccurately. One in nine American households is said to be "food insecure." Maybe you wondered if that means that one in nine persons is starving. It doesn't.

There's a specific meaning as defined by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA). A household is food-secure if everyone in it has adequate food choices for a healthy, active life at all times during a given year. 

If their eating patterns are sometimes disrupted by having to go to community food pantries or government programs or by eating a less-varied diet, then they are called food-insecure.

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(continued tomorrow)

Remembrance 3

Hitler and his Nazi regime thought up and carried out the evil of the concentration camps in Europe. If they had not lost World War II, how much more evil could they have brought on the world? All the suffering, all the stealing of lives and property, in order to dominate people and their nations. 

But they were defeated. The Allies finally defeated them. At terrible cost. 

Battle of the Bulge was won of the worst. Thirty German divisions attacked Americans in the Ardennes forest of France over a period of six winter weeks, trying to divide them from their French and British allies. This last major Nazi offensive failed, and led to Allied victory.

The 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Bulge was just four days ago. 

Americans suffered 100,000 casualties - the costliest battle of the U.S. Army. Ever.

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from History

Remembrance 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Holocaust" is the term designated to refer to the attempt by Nazi Germany during World War II to entirely exterminate the Jewish people, resulting in the state-sponsored murder of an astonishing six million Jews.

walking to gas chamber

General Eisenhower, overall leader of the Allied forces, entered a concentration camp himself after it was liberated:

The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.

Truth about history is vitally important, too important to forget and too important to fail to pass on to following generations. 

Remembrance 1

Seventy-five years ago today, troops of the Red Army opened up the gate of the notorious Auschwitz concentration & extermination camp. About 7,000 sick and broken prisoners were in the main camp and another 500  were in sub-camps nearby. A mass grave was found containing 600 corpses killed by fleeing Nazis.

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, an army barracks at Auschwitz became a prisoner of war camp holding political prisoners and eventually Jews from all over Europe. 



Of the total 1,300,000 prisoners, about 1,100,000 were slaughtered. The Birkenau crematorium had 46 ovens to incinerate the bodies. Of the 960,000 Jews killed, most (865,000) were gassed on their arrival. 

A Red Army soldier was assigned to film what the liberators found in the camp. His original footage and his comments many years later are found here.

(cont'd tomorrow)

AI in HR

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a part in the work life of over half of America's workers, up from 32% back in 2018. Picture those big red robots at the Tesla factory, pizza-making robots, product-picking robots at Amazon, yes - but AI even helps Human Resources departments.

Virtual Reality trains employees in safety, customer service, and more. Employees actually interact with the VR training, practicing the desired behavior rather than just watching a video. Verizon uses VR to train store managers to handle potential store robberies.

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Best Western Hotels uses VR to train employees to solve problems at the front desk. Guests rate their satisfaction after staying in those hotels 2-5% higher as a result. Mars, Inc. (global food) now offers on-demand coaching by VR. 

One CEO puts it this way: "The big opportunity to use VR going forward is in the area of soft skills development. When we think about the skills employers need for the workforce of the future, it’s skills like building empathy, handling conflict, and having difficult conversations with both co-workers and customers."

Those "soft skills" which employers need so badly involve what used to be called "virtues": kindness, creativity, courage, thoughtfulness and so many more. It's exactly as Jay Richards said in his book The Human Advantage: in the age of smart machines, human virtues will be in high demand.

from Forbes

AI & seizures

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not good or bad in itself, but is a tool for getting things done. Whether the results are good depends on the person using it.

An AI researcher, MIT professor Rosalind Picard, is using it to improve and save lives.

Mars ambition 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Mars holds a fascination for people, regardless of what country they're from.

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The European Space Agency and Roscosmos (Russian) are working on a mission called "ExoMars" with a rover they hope will launch late next summer.

Virgin Orbit is working with partners from Poland to send satellites to Mars around 2022.

United Arab Emirates (UAE) will send an orbiter this summer.

NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, says “Mars remains the horizon goal for NASA’s [U.S.] human exploration program, but it is important to note that we are at Mars now, with a growing number of robotic assets.”

Travel to Mars at its closest proximity will still take months. Its thin atmosphere has only a trace of oxygen. So the mission NASA plans to launch this coming summer will be to try making oxygen from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

from Bloomberg

Mars ambition 1

So far, only the United States has successfully landed probes or rovers on Mars, starting in July of 1976 with Viking 1. It probably won't stay that way much longer. 

This summer Mars will be closer than any time since July of 2018. A number of countries plan to launch probes, along with private sector SpaceX and Virgin Orbit LLC. And China:

"The Chinese space agency is preparing a mid-year mission to Mars, marking the most ambitious project on an exploration checklist intended to achieve equal footing with NASA . . .

"Landing the unmanned probe on the red planet would cap President Xi Jinping’s push to make China a superpower in space. The nation already has rovers on the moon, and it’s making bold plans to operate an orbiting space station, establish a lunar base and explore asteroids by the 2030s."

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from Bloomberg

(cont'd tomorrow)

SpaceX tested

Americans have not gone into space on an American space craft since 2011. But SpaceX is on track to take astronauts into space this year, probably the second quarter of 2020.

Working together, SpaceX passes tests that NASA requires before astronauts will be entrusted to them - and a big milestone was reached yesterday. Called the "abort test," it demonstrated that Dragon could separate from the Falcon 9 rocket in-flight in case of emergency. 

NASA called it a "flawless execution."

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from Business Insider

MN tauntaun

It's getting cold up here in deep-freeze Minnesota. It can be, under some conditions, life threatening. Extreme measures may be taken:

"THIEF RIVER FALLS, MN—While out shoveling his drive Wednesday morning, local Minnesota man Carl Manders was forced to warm himself inside the carcass of his recently deceased Tauntaun, sources confirmed."

screen shot

(from Babylon Bee)

Fire relief

"[U]ncontrolled bushfires have claimed at least 25 lives, between $3.5 and $7 billion dollars (US) in property damage, and nearly a billion animals." Australia is suffering horrible losses of lives, homes, property.

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The Prime Minister of Australia, who probably now regrets taking a vacation early in the fire, has set aside over a billion dollars (US) to fight the fires and fund the recovery. New Zealand, the UK, Canada and America have pledged to help, and one hundred American firefighters came.

Churches are involved in the crisis. This author's home church, Hillsong, has raised a million dollars (US) and is providing food to firefighters and those evacuated while coordinating with Salvation Army. The Anglican diocese of Sydney, Billy Graham organization, and Scripture Union are giving help.

At least two different narratives are offering explanation for the fires. One blames climate change, one blames poor forest management due to unwise regulations.

And then there's the evil of arson.  "Nearly 200 people throughout Australia have been arrested for acting to start or fuel fires since late last year. What are their motives?"

UN IPBES

A department within the United Nations, the "Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services" (IPBES), released a report last May to be given to "policymakers" so they can make the right decisions.

earth from space

They say that nature is declining all over the world. To illustrate their point, they say that animal and plant species are rapidly being lost: "around 1 million species already face 
extinction, many within decades."

One million species?? Well, over half of that, if you count about 600,000 
species of insects.

"Goals" (I assume they mean the UN's goals) cannot be met with "current trajectories." Apparently drastic measures are called for: "transformative changes across economic, social, political, and technological factors." 

So, they're not asking for much - just to change all human activity across all the globe. 

Exaggeration and overstatement don't impress me.

Glacier in 2020

Signs at Glacier National Park say goodbye to the glaciers:

"The small alpine glaciers present today started forming about 7,000 years ago . . . They are now rapidly shrinking due to human-caused climate change. Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020."

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Good news, the glaciers are still there! The signs will have to be updated, maybe with a new scare date.

from KPAX News

Kenya attack

The Kenya Defense Force and the US military are working together to defeat terrorist attacks, like the one reported in yesterday's post when one soldier and two civilians were killed at the camp in Kenya last Sunday.

 "US Africa Command -- which is responsible for military relations with nations on the continent -- said Africa Command and Kenya Defense forces repelled the attack."

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Al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab claimed to be responsible for Sunday's attack, but they more commonly target civilian Christians.

Nine Christians traveling by bus in December were ordered to recite the Islamic creed. When they didn't do it, they were "paraded out of the bus and shot dead at close range by those believed to be Al-Shabaab militants."

"In 2018, Fredrick Ngui Ngonde and Joshua Ooko Obila were killed in a similar manner for declining to recite the Islamic creed along the Garissa Masalani road."

"In 2015, 148 students at Garissa University were killed by gunmen while the Muslim students were freed."

There are incidents where non-extremist Muslims have tried to defend Christians. In at least one case, that individual suffered the same punishment.

Gone in 2020

Another U.S. Army soldier died last Sunday. His mother has requested prayer for their family.

"The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Octave Shield. Spc. Henry J. Mayfield Jr., 23, from Evergreen Park, Illinois, was killed Jan. 5, 2020, during an attack in Manda Bay, Kenya."

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The army installation at Manda Bay is there to support anti-terrorism efforts of our Eastern Africa partners. The Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab has taken responsibility for this attack which also killed two American civilian contractors.

Gone in 2019

A total of 35 Americans in the military died while serving their country during 2019. It's good that we recognize their sacrifice, and pray for their loved ones at home who have lost them.

World prosperity 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

In the "age of globalization" mentioned yesterday (starting ~1980), more free & open  markets are available. People dream of starting their own business and making it a success, but they are held back if they live in a command-type society where no person-owned business is allowed by government. Freer economies provide many more opportunities.

When more people are free to dream about prospering, their society has more prosperity. 

Cambodia's story is a great example. Check out the series from last fall:

Cambodia 1
Cambodia 2
Cambodia 3
Cambodia 4

Mr. Lim (owner of a tourism business) says in "Cambodia 4" that his country prospered because of freedom, technology, and the "entrepreneurial spirit of the Cambodian people."

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World prosperity 1

Last Friday's post included World Bank's chart of growing prosperity in the world's poorest countries. Global poverty has been shrinking for decades while the good metrics (education, nutrition, etc.) climb higher. 

Some might ask: is this just World Bank's self-serving interpretation? No, the global trend is widely reported. Just as an example, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is definitely on the other side of the political spectrum, but it reports the same global trend.

In 1992 the world's population was about 5.5 billion. Twenty-five years later it was about 7.5 billion. In spite of adding two billion additional people to the world, the number of extremely poor fell. How did that happen?

"The Industrial Revolution turned the once-impoverished western countries into abundant societies. The new age of globalization, which started around 1980, saw the developing world enter the global economy and resulted in the largest escape from poverty ever recorded."

Asean business networking

(cont'd tomorrow)

2020 vision 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

It's true. People of the world's poorest countries are not getting more destitute, but rather getting more prosperous. I've reported this a number of times in the past seven years, and there are always surprised and skeptical readers. Take a look at the World Bank's chart:

Poverty and child mortality in these poorest countries have been in decline for decades, while measures of education, clean water, etc. are growing. 

2020 vision 1

Joking about "2020 vision" is probably at an end now! But the need for real vision for the future never ends. There is good news and room for optimism in spite of all the scare headlines.

Are catastrophes around the world, whether related to climate or not, taking a bigger toll on people? Are more people of the world dying of disasters, or fewer people? 

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Disasters claim more lives and more destruction in parts of the globe which are less developed. Hurricanes result in more deaths where the local economy doesn't allow for stronger residences and public structures. Stringent building codes only work where people can afford them. 

So growing economies and improved technology are making a global difference in people's lives.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Auld lang syne

Almost no one understands this song, but it's traditionally sung at midnight on New Year's Eve.

"[T]he song begins with a rhetorical question: Is it right that old times be forgotten, should we not remember the old times?

"The answer is generally interpreted as a call to remember long-standing friendships, to remember deeds done, both for you and by you, and save those memories for the future."