For all practical purposes, the "Real Poor," like Frantz Fanon's oppressed Blacks, make no mark on the present world. Like all poor anywhere, they could disappear rom the face of the Earth without leaving any trace. What can be done about their predicament? There are two contrasting answers to this question. Either to eliminate all the poor on the lines of what the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift suggested in his famous "modest proposal" to solve the problem of famine in Ireland two centuries ago. Or if the conscience of the world will not accept a "final solution" (and fortunately there are people in the rich countries who would oppose this), then the only other alternative is to try to restore some measure of human dignity to this assortment of peoples.
"A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry." read more
FOX 2 (Detroit) -- The 42-year-old Detroit man charged in the kidnapping and murder of 13-year-old girl Na'Ziyah Harris is facing new charges. Jarvis Ramon Butts has been charged in connection with the sexual assault of a then-12-year-old New Boston girl in 2013. read more
When two South Korean companies announced a multibillion-dollar investment to build solar panel and electric battery factories in northwest Georgia, federal subsidies helped close a deal to diversify the local economy. read more
BLOUNT COUNTY, Ala. (WBMA) -- Sixty people face charges after a crackdown on an illegal cockfighting exhibition in Blount County, Alabama over the weekend. Just 5 of those arrested are in the U.S. legally, according to a news release. The June 14 raid was carried out by the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. read more
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"People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their own environment, but in the present state of historical scholarship we usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects man-induced changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, however, concern for the problem of ecologic backlash is mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to understand the nature of things, had flourished in several eras and among several peoples. Similarly there had been an age-old accumulation of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly. But it was not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and North America arranged a marriage between science and technology, a union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural environment."