Are we living in the Hunger Games?

Wehrwolfen

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May 22, 2012
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Are we living in the Hunger Games?​





Glenn Reynolds @ USA Today:


You know the story: While the provinces starve, the Capital City lives it up, its wheeler-dealer bigshots growing fat on the tribute extracted from the rest of the country.

We don’t live in The Hunger Games yet, but I’m not the first to notice that Washington, D.C., is doing a lot better than the rest of the country. Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn’t what it used to be. But not so much in the Washington area, where housing prices are going up, fancy restaurants advertise $92 Wagyu steaks, and the Tyson’s Corner mall outshines — as I can attest from firsthand experience — even Beverly Hills’ famed Rodeo Drive.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the contrast is even starker. As Adam Davidson recently wrote in The New York Times, riding the Amtrak between New York and D.C. exposes stark contrasts between the “haves” of the capital and the have-nots outside the Beltway. And he correctly assigns this to the importance of power.

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”

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Column: Are we living in the Hunger Games?
 
New breeds of a drought-hardy grain may help reduce iron deficiency among the world’s poor...
:cool:
Study: Biofortified Millet Fights Iron Deficiency
August 12, 2013 > Special new breeds of a drought-hardy grain may help reduce iron deficiency among the world’s poor, according to two new studies.
Iron deficiency anemia is the world’s most common nutritional disorder. The World Health Organization says half the pregnant women and two in five preschool children in developing countries are not getting enough iron. Anemic adults can’t work to their full potential, and pregnant women are more likely to have complications in childbirth. And the effects on young children can permanent, according to pediatrician Michael Hambidge at the University of Colorado. “One of the things we’re particularly concerned about with children is the major effects it has on brain development, and these are difficult to reverse later in life," said Hambidge. Hambidge and colleagues tested flour made from a special variety of pearl millet, a grain that is well known in the dry lands of India and West Africa, where drought-tolerant crops are essential.

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A woman winnows high-iron Dhanshakti pearl millet in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Researchers had raised the amount of iron in this variety with traditional breeding methods, not genetic modification. The process is called biofortification. Hambidge’s colleagues in India prepared traditional meals with the biofortified flour and fed them to a group of 21 iron-deficient young children. “A lot of this is eaten as chapatis and rotis [Indian flatbreads] and so on, but these are two-year-old children, and we found that they particularly liked the porridge," he said. Children who ate the high-iron millet meals satisfied their daily requirements for the mineral. Nineteen children who ate similar meals made with regular millet did not. The research was published in the Journal of Nutrition, along with another study of biofortified millet flour, this one in Benin. A group of 20 iron-deficient young women received about 70 percent of their daily requirement from traditional meals made with the biofortified flour. Regular millet, on the other hand, provided only 20 percent.

Pediatric researcher Stephanie Atkinson at McMaster University was not involved in the research. She wants to see larger studies showing high-iron biofortified crops actually do reduce anemia in vulnerable populations. But she says this research shows biofortification is a promising tool. “It seems like the most logical, practical, feasible, easily deliverable way to get these nutrients that are of the greatest deficiency for the masses of people in underdeveloped countries," said Atkinson. And experts say millet in particular is a good crop to reach some of the most vulnerable because it is typically cheaper than other grains. Plus, it needs very little rainfall, a growing concern as climate change alters precipitation patterns worldwide. The first high-iron biofortified pearl millet is already on the market in India, and researchers are working to commercialize other varieties elsewhere in the developing world.

Study: Biofortified Millet Fights Iron Deficiency
 
wehrwolfie can play chief storm trooper for President Snow in "Catching Fire." Saw it today, very good.

I would let several of our great ladies here audition for Catniss Everdeen.

The ending is a great twist.
 

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