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POPSSocialites Without Borders Teach Rwandans How To Mingle
Arriving on private jets from their headquarters in Martha's Vineyard, volunteers from Socialites Without Borders touched down in northern Rwanda early Sunday morning. Following an extravagant luncheon held in their honor, the charitable luminaries were driven by limousine to a nearby refugee camp, where they provided impoverished villagers with emergency lessons in everything from making small talk, to name-dropping, to drastically improving one's life by marrying a wealthy steel magnate. "Always remember to keep things light and breezy when mingling," Danielle Watters, a real estate heiress, was overheard advising a group of war-ravaged amputees. "Talk about where you recently summered, or what boarding school you went to. When you feel at a loss for words, perhaps try remarking on the stunning architecture of the tent you're in." Enlarge Image Table Setting Ordinary Rwandans have been urged to put aside any latent tribal hostility and never forget to place water goblets to th
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POPSIs It Now a Crime to Be Poor? "Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty " affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them."
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POPSIs It Now a Crime to Be Poor? The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance. By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
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POPSUnclaimed dead stack up in Wayne County morgue Things like this truly sadden me, I don't blame people for not claiming them. As is stated ""Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones." What is really to blame is this crash/ recession which was engineered by the banks as it was in 1929. To think that they caused people to even have considered that decision is criminal.
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POPSIf you aren't sick now, you soon will be Unreal. But wait, Obama PROMISED his taxes would not effect anyone making under $250k a year. You mean he lied? No way. So, once GWB's tax cuts for the rich expire, the average family making $40,000 a year see an increase of over $1000 in federal taxes. Then, Cap & Trade will cost us around $4000 a year in higher utilities and costs (and I think that is way underestimated) Then, forced health care will run another $12k for a family. Then what? Wonder how we will pay to feed our kids? Oh, that's right, tax the "rich" and give the rest of us food stamps. Great plan. Really doubt it will workout for most of us.
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POPSPoverty Is The Answer - Environmentalism But you can bet that he and his co-believers would strive mightily to stifle development in now destitute areas of the world--dooming perhaps billions of people to lives of continued squalor, disease, and lower life expectancies. More to the point of what we discuss here at SHS, human beings are a logical species: We take our ideas where they lead! (Thus, once Americans accepted the verity of Jefferson's "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..."it doomed slavery, because servitude and equality are incompatible.) For the same reason, once we accept the fundamental premise of the piece--that we must sacrifice human prosperity to "save the planet"--the misanthropic ideology of Deep Ecology--humans as a viral infection afflicting Gaia--with radical depopulation as the cure--consider the genocidal implications--become a logical next step
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POPSRobert Fisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story. Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bun
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POPSFisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony continues (full at source): But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
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POPSAfrica is a "basket case" - exploited by China and others! The lingering, callous attitude to the destitute of Africa is perpetuated by nasties like the rotten Chinese regime and others like them. They have armed the renegades in Africa who have raped, pillaged and mudered as China reaps the spoils of minerals and other resources. Meanwhile the rest of the World tends to sit on the sidelines and watch the human misery unfold year after year after year!
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POPSBeyond The Fat Cats "We can find trillions for a foolish war and for pompous, self-righteous high-rollers who wrecked their companies and the economy. But what about the working poor and the young people who are being clobbered in this downturn, battered so badly that they’re all but destitute? Can we find any way to help them?"
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POPSNew Benefit Rules will Drive Mentally Ill into Poverty Often as the last sentence above shows, those who feel well enough to work cannot or must do so without support or understanding. As ever, the suffering of mental illness is amplified often beyond the pain of the illness itself by structural and societal factors.
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POPSMoral Dread "That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has become needless - only when duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force" George Eliot, Romola
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POPS"Only through direct contact with the destitute" The heartlessness of Reagan theory implanted in Clinton law leaves us with a more brutal society, and a need to cry out "unceasingly for ... the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor" - excellent writing from Catholic Workers
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