Random charts - health equity

Source: What Can the Health Care Sector Do to Advance Health Equity? (52-pg PDF)

"A study says eliminating racial/ ethnic health disparities would reduce health care costs by $230 billion and indirect costs of excess disease and mortality by more than $1 trillion over four years."

Turkmenistan's travails - redux

 

In September 2002 I penned an OPED bemoaning the unfortunate fact that the antics of 'Turkmenbashi' ("Head of all Turkmen," the then "Perpetual President of Turkmenistan," Sapamurat Niyazov) obscured the miserable lot of the ordinary folk of Turkmenistan...

I said: "... The total and utter ridiculousness of this situation makes an observer want to smile. But that is an unfortunate reaction. The buffoonery masks repression and misrule, under which the vast majority of Turkmenistan's citizens live a life of grinding poverty, while the country has vast reserves of natural gas and is the world's tenth largest producer of cotton. While the masses are hungry, Turkmenbashi spends money on grandiose projects (a 10 meter high gold-plated statue of Turkmenbashi atop a 72 meter tall tower surrounded by fountains, ornate palaces, Berzengi - a hotel and business center in the desert outside Ashkhabad that has 22 empty 5-star hotels built completely from imported materials), jails any opposition (some in psychiatric wards), has a tame and muzzled press, etc. As there are shortages of staples and hunger increases, Turkmenbashi has said, "Anyone who complains about going without sausage or bread for a day is not a Turkmen."

When he passed away in 2006 his Vice President, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, took over in his stead, and a May 2008 blog entry noted that he had rolled back a couple of Turkmenbashi's actions. However, as time passed it became clear that not much was changed, as reflected in this November 2009 blog update entry.

We are now mid-way through 2019 and apparently not much has improved, see: Crazy-Ass President Of Turkmenistan Proves He's Not Dead By Doing Donuts Around 'Gateway To Hell.' 

Also view the video on YouTube: Watan Habarlary 04.08.2019

Rinse and repeat - El Paso

April 2013's blog entry 'Anatomy of an Incident' listed the various stages that appear to routinely occur/play out after every mass shooting incident:

I. The Horror

II. The Coverage

III.  The Political Parade

IV. The Prohibition

V. The Search for a Hero

VI. The Search for a Reason

VII.  The Outpouring

VIII.  The Lionization

IX. The Debunking

X. Never Again!

XI. The Calls for Legislation

XII. Descent into Farce

XIII. The Fade-Out

XIV. The Next Horror

The recent outrages in El Paso and Dayton appear to be following the same well-worn 'script' although we have not yet reached the final stages (XII, XIII), as clearly demonstrated in the media and social media coverage:

Perhaps some day society will break out of this farcical cycle and things will actually change... This is devoutly to be hoped for!

Random picture - sharks

Source: Global Progress on Shark, Ray CITES Listings 

"Each year, at least 63 million and as many as 273 million sharks are killed in the world’s commercial fisheries, an unsustainable fishing rate driven by increasing demand for their fins, meat, liver oil, and other products.1 As a result, shark populations have suffered declines worldwide, and more than half of shark species and their relatives assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature are categorized as Threatened or Near Threatened with extinction."

Random charts - Yemen (war crimes)

 

Source: The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Aerial bombardment and food war (23-pg PDF)

"If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanʿaʾ. As described above, from the autumn of 2016, economic war has com-pounded physical destruction to create a mass failure in basic livelihoods. Deliberate destruction of family farming and artisanal fishing is a war crime. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United Kingdom and France are signatories to the 1977 Protocol I additional to the Geneva Conventions, which gives the fullest statement in International Humanitarian Law on the protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. 

If the Coalition war in Yemen is not to mark the erasure of legal referent in war, other forces and institutions will need to call into question the blanket ‘legitimacy’ accorded the Coalition to date by the world’s highest legal body, the UN Security Council. If UN Security Council resolution 2417 (24 May 2018), condemning starvation of civilians in wartime, is to be meaningful, then it is necessary for the UNSC and its member states to halt such crimes in Yemen, to investigate them, and to call to account those responsible for perpetrating them."

Random chart - inequality

Source: Twitter

Random chart - cheese

Source: The US has a 1.39 billion-pound surplus of cheese. Let’s try to visualize that.

Random charts - sexual harassment

 

 

 

Source: An Empirical Study of Prevalence and Perceptions of Sexual Harassment, Stalking, Dating/Domestic Abuse and Violence, and Unwanted Sexual Contact (96-pg PDF)

Random chart - gun deaths

Source: The shocking difference in how blacks and whites are killed by guns

Random chart - Syria deaths

Source: 'Almost quarter of a million people' dead in Syria war

Great quotes - eh?

“Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe.” 

- Avigdor Lieberman,  Foreign Minister of Israel, see here.