HodgBlog

We hear a lot about global warming, technology, and energy in the news, but it's hard to get an overall picture of our energy situation. So, I decided it was time to do some research, and I've collected below some information about the present and projected future of energy production and usage by the world's people. But before I present the supporting facts, let me present my conclusions:

I started this blog mostly so that I could do some research into US foreign aid and report the results, which I have been doing. But I haven't written an article lately, and I realized that the reason was that I had really come to the conclusion that the Program Our Government Calls "Foreign Aid" (POGCFA for short) has very little to do with what you would think from its name: helping foreign countries. Instead, the POGCFA is mostly just a US corporate welfare program.

I've become increasingly troubled by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) lately, and I have come to think that it is a major threat to democracy in the United States. Here are some thoughts. Note that the activities described below have spanned the entire existence of the CIA, and have not been limited to the direction of one President or one political party.

I have been thinking lately about terminology in use by the news media and politicians, as related to the basic concepts of peace, human rights, and social justice. Here are some thoughts:

I just read an interesting report by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) about the real causes of homelessness in the United States. The main findings of the report, called Without Housing, are:

The latest question in my series on US foreign aid is this: who actually receives the money we spend on foreign aid -- are we sending it directly to foreign governments, charities, consultants, or what? Unfortunately, I was not able to answer this question definitively -- the US government does not appear to publish this information in its foreign aid statistics. Here is what I did find:

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the reasons why I do not think that world peace is possible. But some days I have more hope about it.

Today I was thinking about my previous posts on Foreign Aid. I realized that I have been basing my articles on total foreign aid, rather than strictly humanitarian aid, because the numbers I got from the USAID web site include military aid, aid used to fight drug traffic, and other items that do not fall under the category of humanitarian aid. So, I went back to the USAID web site, and downloaded numbers for aid from the USDA (agricultural aid), aid from USAID (mostly humanitarian), aid from the Peace Corps, refugee and migration aid, and Global AIDS Initiative aid.

The United Nations measures the level of human development of its member countries in its "Human Development Index" (HDI). This index is regarded as the standard measure for the well-being of people (especially children), and it incorporates measures of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy. It is published regularly as part of the Human Development Report. Presumably, countries with a low HDI would be the ones in most need of humanitarian aid, and those with high HDI numbers would not need much, if any.

Terrorism was in the news today (the U.K. apparently broke up a plot to blow up commercial trans-Atlantic flights)... it got me thinking about the question of whether it is possible to achieve peace in the Middle East, and the world in general. Here are a few thoughts.