Wednesday, August 03, 2011

The Horn of Africa needs your help.

While we were (or I was) all distracted with the debt-ceiling stuff, the more urgent issue of the Somalian famine was below my radar.

Tens of thousands of Somali children have already died from malnutrition, and more than half a million are on the brink. Please look at these fifteen amazing pictures made by Tyler Hicks
and send a donation to UNICEF or donate to the World Food Programme.

And not that I have anything remotely worthy of complaining about... but I wonder, is it possible to tweak your knee sitting in your kitchen on a barstool? If so, then that's what I did. I suppose it's possible that maybe I tweaked it doing squats yesterday; I did up the weight by 10 lbs, thereby ignoring the 10% rule... well, anyway, after sitting on the barstool for about 20 minutes this morning, I got up and my knee felt fat inside and a little hesitant, if that makes sense. So... I didn't train at lunch, and looks like I won't train tonight. Iced it, ibuprofen'd it, and confessing to the blog as penance.

Check out this post on BJJHacks.com yesterday, about competing and training in Brazil as a gringo. *sigh* I'd love to do it, but I'm hoping that we'll start a family soon, and that means Rio may have to wait till the sprouts are a little older.

I'm very excited food-wise today because I picked up a half-gallon of raw whole milk and it's so super-good and creamy, I can't wait to drink it. I want to make icecream with it, too. (Waiting till I get both raw milk and raw cream to do that though.) I am so lucky to live in America and have a good job, a good education, and a pantry full of food.

4 comments:

Megan said...

Profoundly jealous of your raw milk. There's a place around here that sells it and I need to make the trek down south.

Your tweaked knee is why I hate squats. I do them and inevitably I get some kind of weird injury way after I'm done. I have wonky knees though.

Those photos broke my heart.

Kintanon said...

Sooo..... I'm going to get a ton of shit for this comment, but it has to be said.

Nations with unsustainable populations do not need food donations. They do not need money. They do not need free rice air dropped into their villages to destroy the local economy.
They need to reduce their populations by half and have the brutal dictators and warlords that confiscate their food to feed pointless and oppressive armies to be crushed beneath the bootheels of marine squadrons.

You could donate a hundred million dollars to unicef and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference because those people will still be starving to death.

Until the so called governments of those countries stop raping their own population there is no amount of money in the world that will solve their problem. Crush those oppressive governments, educate the population, and reduce the population to a level that can be sustained by the available food supply and you can then slowly begin to modernize their society, reduce the percentage of the population required to feed everyone, and create a healthy and sustainable society.

Throwing money and food at them won't do anything long term to help.

Megan said...

True, but depriving those suffering in the short term won't solve the issue either. It's not an either or situation. You can address both situations at the same time. The most impact most of us can make as individuals is in these short term issues...since "crushing" other governments is something we don't have much control over.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I take part of my agreement out. I know people that do those food drops and plan on doing one myself. They do make a difference in everyday people's day-to-day lives.

It's beyond unfair, possibly even amoral to decide to punish those who happen to have been born under oppressive and criminal governments for nothing other than their citizenship.