Veronica Santos and Julia Parreiras from Belo Horizonte, Brazil make solar water purifiers using recycled plastic bottles and snack food bags turned inside out. The mylar bags are concentrators and the bottles are PET plastic, one side painted black to absorb more heat. They found that PET had more UV transmittance and stood up better to long term use.
Here's my own recycled solar cooker using snack food [popcorn] bags, a plastic cake box, and a dark saucepan.
Savannah College of Art and Design have been working on a homeless sleeping project, building three different models:
sleep shelter based upon a folding lawn chair
privacy screen for homeless shelter bunks
privacy tent for transitional housing bed
BRAZIL – THAT MUCH SMARTER THAN AMERICA?
Since 1975 Brazil A+ - America F.
Why is Brazil so much smarter than America ?? The robustly intelligent who frequent KOS will be instantly curious and want to at least explore this premise.
Brazil is one of the largest Democracies in the world. It operates the same way as the United States, as a republic. Brazil’s 190 million residents now enjoy the very comfortable position of being OPEC-Free, or energy-independent. (Notice how US politicians mouth that phrase as a distant, unachievable dream ... ?) Brazilians couldn’t care less what the Saudi Sheiks do with their oil production decisions: increase drilling or decrease? Brazilians don’t care. Imported oil previously accounted for more than 70% of the country's oil needs, but Brazil became energy independent in 2006.
Farming is the heart of every country. Corporate agriculture - INDUSTRIAL agriculture - is destroying it worldwide.
Notice that after the vaunted "Green Revolution" and the much ballyhooed "biotech" solutions to food problems:
the earth is swimming in 6-10 more pesticides than before GMOs,
fishing stocks are failing because of run-off into oceans,
prices on commodities are sky-rocketing,
people are not seeing the great promised yields that were allegedly proposed to solve hunger,
I was just curious to see online how much of the world is watching this election process and which candidate they would like to see as the next President of the United States. I have read a lot about the interest around the world, but I wanted to see it for myself so I looked on YouTube and found some very intertaining videos.
With food riots about to topple the Haitian government, from Mexico to Pakistan, Egypt to Cameroon, protests have turned violent. Rioters tore through three cities in the West African nation of Burkina Fasom a few weeks ago, burning government buildings and looting stores. Similar protests exploded in Senegal and Mauritania late last year. And Indian protesters burned hundreds of food-ration stores in West Bengal last October, accusing the owners of selling government-subsidized food on the lucrative black market.
Is this a sign of things to come? The answer is yes, because the world's governments have so far turned a blind eye to this crisis. Was this discussed at Davos in any length? Yes, up to a point, as Evelyn Vaughn would surmise, as Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath warned that prices of some foodstuffs had doubled in his country. So when are we going to set up a food summit, we ask? Referring to the challenge of providing food at affordable prices, he said: "Next year in Davos we'll be discussing this." Next year! Once again, the Gods of procrastination are smiling. In the meantime, let them eat grass.
April 7th is World Health Day, and today, we will be taking a look at some of the serious health problems around the world and what Barack Obama plans to do about global health.
The United Nations is intensifying its worldwide efforts to help create a new generation of children who will be born free of HIV/AIDS, a disease that has particularly devastated parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
While the news is "mixed", achieving an "AIDS-free generation is possible", predicts a new U.N. report released Thursday.
In 2007, an estimated 290,000 children under age 15 died from AIDS, and 12.1 million children in sub-Saharan Africa lost one or both parents to the widespread disease.
"For millions of children, HIV and AIDS have starkly altered the experience of growing up," says the report.
I just got off of a long phone call from a dear friend who spent time in the last two weeks doing voter registration in the town of West Chester, in Chester County PA. She was processing people who were changing parties.
My friend is a registered Democrat, Obama supporter, and is a Brazilian with American citizenship who spends much of her time in Brazil. She wanted to be back here in the US to make sure her vote got counted in the Pennsylvania primary, so she arrived here last month, spent some time visiting me, then went to Pennsylvania where she lives. She's an anthropologist, an astute observer of people, and has a wonderful ability to engage people in conversation.
More important to this report, she is looks " white" by American standards, which leads me to believe that what people shared with her was truthful. I think that they were more likely to be open with her than if she had looked Afro-Brazilian.
The diary I refer to is replete with links and no matter how many it has, it fails to capture the extent of the harm being done by Monsanto to this country, to other countries and to nature itself.
Mark Penn says he is taking a break from working for Monsanto to run Hillary's campaign, suggesting that would make him "clean" politically. Of course, no one is taken in that such a "pause" in his long-standing financial life and ties with that corporation means he is disconnected in any way from its purposes or from his own financial future as beholden to fulfilling its goals, PR-wise.
Whether or not you believe that Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is better than Barack Obama’s, whatever your opinions are about whose economic plans are superior, and whether or not you think a change in the political strategy is necessary to win the White House back, one thing is certain-- Democrats will need to increase their numbers in the Senate and House to enact the plans of either Presidential candidate. So equal with policies and electability should be the question of coattails.
Because I live in Illinois and have worked in state government, I’ve been an Obama fan since the late 1990s. At the beginning of the presidential primary race, I was resigned to the fact that Hillary would win—just about everyone was. I don’t think anyone outside the immediate Obama circle had the ability to imagine that a freshman African-American senator had the ability to put together such a great campaign against the universally-perceived inevitable candidate with her rolodex, her contacts, her fundraising juggernaut.
Brazil's foreign minister on Monday condemned a Colombian military strike on rebels inside Ecuador and called on Bogota to offer an explicit apology.
"The territorial violation is very serious and needs to be condemned," Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said in Brasilia. "Brazil condemns any territorial violation."
Amorim also said the Colombian government should offer an "explicit" apology to contain the growing crisis prompted by the weekend raid, in which Colombian forces struck at a FARC rebel camp inside Ecuador.
It is nice to think in terms of dreams, of Camelot, and Fairy Tales, but when the realities of the current world includes many wars, globalization, a potential international monetary crisis as never seen before, even a possible global depression – then we have to be a realist and separate the men from the boys and we should elect Al Gore as the next United States president in November 2008.
Here is a foreign perspective which could be just a snap shot of what millions of people from around the world are thinking about the 2008 US presidential race:
An estimated 2700 square miles of forest was cleared between august and december of 2007 by Brazil's cattle and soy industries. AP reports a 30% increase in these numbers over the same period for 2006.
SAO PAULO, Brazil - The rate of Amazon deforestation rose sharply during the last five months of 2007 as land was cleared for soy and cattle, prompting a top-level emergency meeting Thursday by government officials to deal with the problem.
Last year Brazil cited a drop in Amazon deforestation, but the new statistics indicate that this trend has been reversed. Most of last year's destruction was concentrated in the three Amazon regions of Mato Grosso, Para and Rondonia. Mato Grosso is the center of Brazil's soy industry, and is second only to the United States for soy production. Jungle is typically cleared in the Amazon to provide pasture for cattle, later soy farmers move in and cultivate their crops. Brazil also has a booming beef export industry, and cattle ranchers have been expanding their operations in the Amazon.
As a child growing up in Nigeria in the 1970s, there were not many Black figures to look up to on TV except Pele and Muhammad Ali. They both thought us to be great in whatever we did, be loyal to your community, and always do the work of God.
Pele was my first love. He was the first Black character I saw on TV that was at the center of the screen, always smiling, and seemed to be loved by all. He was so good that he went to play at the world’s biggest event, the World Cup, at the tender age of 17 and helped Brazil to win three out of four World Cup tournaments. I believe that he is still the only player in the world that has officially scored over 1000 career goals in soccer. He was so great that there was a time he was given a red card and sent out of the game, the game officials had to change the referee and put Pele back in the game in order to appease the dissatisfaction of the spectators.
In many ways, the World Bank is a magnificent institution, with many tremendous people working at it, with a highly valuable large charter in terms of changing the world for the better.
The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world.
our mission of global poverty reduction and the improvement of living standards. ... we provide low-interest loans, interest-free credit and grants to developing countries for education, health, infrastructure, communications and many other purposes.
Sadly, as is all too known by anyone who pays attention, the World Bank's core charter does not speak to sustainability, does not address ensuring that the path for generating wealth does not foster disaster for tomorrow.
The enclosed article caught my attention about 4 years ago. The only problem is that this trend might be accelerating even further today, because of the new technologies that were not available only a few years ago.
The enclosed article explains why jobs are being transferred from the US economy to other countries at a faster rate than before or they are being eliminated forever. The article also gives you the essence of the theory of creative destruction - a critical economic concept that the next president of the United States must understand it.
Brazzil Magazine - Wednesday, September 06, 2006
"While the American Dream Is Outsourced Brazil Drives the World into the Future"
Written by Ricardo C. Amaral
For many years, South America has been a zone of negative peace, where it appeared that the military competition that had characterized the continent for much of this century had yielded to economic competition. It was living proof of the liberal belief that trade brings peace. To quote A.O. Hirschmann, the interests (commerce) had tamed the passions (conflict), and one of the most potent political arguments for capitalism was given physical form. Even the backlash against neo-liberalism at the beginning of this decade looked to accept the central premise that the world was a positive sum place, but the political underpinnings had to be moved to allow for economic justice.
"In the old days," said a priest in northern Brazil, some 14-odd years ago, "Child death was richly celebrated. But those were the baroque customs of a conservative church that wallowed in death and misery. The new church is a church of hope and joy. We no longer celebrate the death of child angels. We try to tell mothers that Jesus doesn't want all the dead babies they send him."
There is a place called Alto do Cruzeiro. The poverty there is difficult for me, a Yankee - a child of privilege, generally speaking, compared to so many others - to imagine. And I am going to write about that, this evening.
people working at it, with a highly valuable large charter in terms of changing the world for the better.
