Conrad Theodore Seitz

Oklahoma has seen a dramatic increase in small to medium earthquakes over the last fifteen years.  This corresponds to the period in which the injection of waste water from fracking oil wells has also dramatically increased.  Unfortunately for the residents of Oklahoma, oil and gas operations have been highly profitable and are tilting the actions of government away from any response to this increase in earthquakes.

The facts are obvious: the New York Times (NYT) has shown documents that indicate that, as 1.1 billion barrels of waste water were injected into deep wells in 2013, the number of earthquakes has increased by many fold.  In 2000, there were twenty-nine quakes with a magnitude of 3 or above.   In 2014, there were 5,417 such quakes, concentrated in north central Oklahoma, where most of the injection wells are functioning.

Oil and gas businesses claim that the quakes are a natural phenomenon and not due to the waste water wells.  But research done in England (where there are virtually no faults to confuse the picture) has conclusively demonstrated that these wells cause earthquakes.  As one commenter to the NYT story(Maani of New York, NY) wrote,

“Just as with anthropogenic climate change, the science on fracking vis-à-vis earthquakes is actually quite settled. It was first discovered – and settled – by seismologists in England, where the relation of earthquakes to fracking is more easily determined because there are few if any faults in the areas in which the fracking is occurring.

Here in the U.S., seismologists, including from the USGS, have also recognized a causal relationship between fracking and earthquakes (or at least tremors). Oklahoma sits along the Meers fault line, so tremors and quakes are a natural occurrence. However, seismologists, who have been monitoring quakes along the Meers fault for decades, have determined that, since fracking began, there has been at least a threefold increase in tremors over 3.3, and a fivefold increase in tremors over 5.0.

As with climate change, the “deniers” do not need to fully support their position. All they need to do is “sow doubt” by underwriting “scientific” studies that support the conclusion they are looking for. Sadly, all too many in the U.S. cannot tell the difference between real science and junk science.”

There have been, in the last several centuries, a few very serious earthquakes in the Midwest: in 1811-1812, a series of quakes caused widespread destruction in the New Madrid area of Missouri, which is not far from Oklahoma.  They are believed to be the largest earthquakes in the eastern United States in recorded history.  The magnitude of the largest of these quakes was estimated at up to 8.0.  Quakes in this fault complex are felt over a huge area of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, reaching all the way to Oklahoma in the west.  This fault complex is, among others, called the Reelfoot Rift, after a lake that was created by the obstruction of rivers during the earthquakes.  Over 4,000 quakes have occurred in this area since then, most less than 3.0 magnitude.

In 2003, the USGS released an estimate of the risk of future quakes in that area:

” New forecasts estimate a 7 to 10 percent chance, in the next 50 years, of a repeat of a major earthquake like those that occurred in 1811–1812, which likely had magnitudes of between 7.5 and 8.0. There is a 25 to 40 percent chance, in a 50-year time span, of a magnitude 6.0 or greater earthquake.”

(Quotes are from Wikipedia)

The Reelfoot Rift is a good distance from Oklahoma, but there are smaller rifts within the state that can be activated either spontaneously or in response to the pressure created by injecting materials (waste water) into the fault zones.  It is very clear that the dramatic increase in quakes there is not a natural phenomenon, but it is less clear whether injections could cause a major earthquake like the New Madrid disaster.

The problem is that even small, 5.0 magnitude quakes can cause destruction and even a few deaths.  Homeowners whose houses have been damaged have been forced to sue the drilling companies to get compensation for the damage to their houses; none of these suits have been settled or gone to judgement yet.

(Addendum, April 16, 2015: very few of the homeowners in Oklahoma had earthquake insurance, and the insurance wouldn’t have helped anyway.  There is usually a clause in these policies that excludes induced earthquakes, and the insurance companies would be sure to insist that the earthquakes are induced– despite industry claims that they are natural.)

The bottom line is that fracking and waste water injection cause earthquakes (not to mention the risk of groundwater contamination) and this side effect is going to have to be dealt with in some way.  In a just society, those responsible for the damages would be forced to compensate those who are injured or lost property as a result of their behavior.  This has not happened, and will not happen because of the tremendous political power that large amounts of money bestow upon any company that makes the money.  Even litigation will not produce a just result, since only a few people will be compensated in this way.   Class action lawsuits are a poor substitute for government action to restore the balance of justice.

The only just answer to this problem is to remove money from politics.  Somehow, those with large amounts of money are going to have to relinquish some of their outlandish degree of political power.  Recent Supreme Court judgments, however, have trended in the opposite direction.  Our Supreme Court is corrupt, and this problem must be dealt with as well.

(Revision, April 16, 2015: the water injected in these wells is not from fracking, but a much larger volume of waste water that is removed from the material that comes up in the normal operation of oil wells in the area.  When these oil wells produce, much of what comes up is not oil or even natural gas, but briny water full of heavy metals and complex toxic compounds related to oil.)

According to the Reuters news agency, a man was helping his wife decorate his mother-in-law’s tomb prior to the Easter Holiday when the 400 pound tombstone toppled over in the “soft spring ground”, pinning him underneath.  His wife ran to get the caretaker, who came and pulled part of the stone off him, but it was too late and he died.  Apparently, although the story is unclear, another party arrived and helped to pull the rest of the stone off of him, but it doesn’t say just when he died.  It’s possible he lived for a short time afterwards, but it’s also possible he was killed immediately.

We don’t know and it doesn’t matter.  The man’s mother in law reached out from the grave and killed him, there’s no doubt in my mind.  Mother in laws are like that.

Speaking of religion, here is an outrageous fact: establishments of religion, and their ministers, are exempt from taxation in the United States, presumably based on the notion that religion is a public good that justifies the sheltering of its outposts and proselytes.  What is a public good of religion?  That is highly arguable.  Most atheists, and many agnostics, would deny that there is any “public good” to religion that could justify a tax exemption.

At least, the benevolent view of religion would say that it is a sort of social glue that holds society together; in many cases, there are also charitable activities such as caring for the poor.  However, there are “religions” that can be shown to provide no public good whatsoever, and in fact are organized for the express purpose of avoiding taxes.

One such “religion” was established by a well-known science fiction writer of the 1950’s.  In his writings, he mused on what the best way to earn a good living would be; he concluded that religion was best, since all earnings could be made (or argued to be) tax-exempt.  He had, in addition to a native intelligence, what is known in Ireland as “the gift of the gab” meaning he could keep listeners in a state of near-hypnosis while spinning tales for hours on end.

He himself felt emotions and mental states that distressed him, which he could not personally control at first.  He discovered the use of a simple electronic device which measured the electrical conductivity of the skin; this tracked quite closely to a person’s state of anxiety, partially based on subliminal sweating(which greatly improves the transmission of a tiny electrical current).  By experimenting with the device, he discovered the fact that repeated exposure to a stressful stimulus evokes a gradually decreasing anxiety reaction (the psychological principle of “extinction”)

On this basis, he established a religion which started with the use of a physical tool for observing anxiety, the measurement of relative skin conductance or resistance to electric current.  This device was used to probe the mental state of an individual in relation to thoughts that were elicited that might cause anxiety or distress.  The religious practitioner would ask the acolyte what things were causing her distress, and the acolyte would relate these items, which would then be written down.

With repeated exposure to these distressing items, the body’s drop in electrical resistance (partly caused by subliminal sweating) would be attenuated, and over time the reaction would be extinguished (eliminated.)  It was then said that the subject had eliminated these sources of distress from his psyche.  At that point, if the subject could be induced to undergo further sessions with the device, the practitioner would search for other sources of distress, perhaps incidents that occurred in the past.

The key money-making component of this religion was that each session was paid for ahead of time by the subject.  Usually, she would feel tremendous relief at discovering that certain incidents or situations were causing a reaction that could be observed and at the same time, felt as a source of distress; repeated exposure to the items would reduce the reaction and make the subject feel that the distress was being relieved.

People who were introduced to this procedure were usually those who already felt a kind of free-floating anxiety about matters of which they were not completely aware.  People who felt perfectly comfortable with themselves would look upon this procedure with considerable skepticism and were unlikely to get involved or pay good money.  Thus, people who were in distress were those most likely to seek out and try this “religion.”

These distressed people would pour out their troubles to the practitioner and then feel a great relief afterwards.  With conditioning, this relief became self-reinforcing and the money just rolled in.  At the same time, the practitioner was gaining a tremendous amount of information about things that were distressing to the subject and also likely to prove a source of embarrassment or shame if they were revealed publicly.

People who persisted with this series of procedures (and the series never ended, since once current worries were relieved, the practitioner would search further and further into the subject’s past for additional sources of distress) eventually became “cured”, except that a person could never really be completely cured, at least not permanently.  However, after investing a significant amount of money in the procedures and achieving a significant sense of improved well-being, the subject would be gradually introduced into the mythology behind the procedures.  If the subject became disillusioned on learning about this absurd back story, often she could be blackmailed into silence using the information gained previously.

At no time would it ever be revealed that, first, the measuring device simply detected skin resistance usually related to psychic distress elicited by the thoughts related to the questioning, and second, the relief that the subject felt was purely a function of the process of revealing things that were distressing to a fellow human being.  The same relief could be felt after confessing one’s sins to a priest, or consulting a psychoanalyst, or talking to one’s aunt over coffee.  These secrets (unknown even to the practitioner in most cases) formed the basis of a powerful mystique which rewarded the subject for paying money to have the procedures.

Once the science-fiction writer had developed this technique and this measuring device, he began to practice his religion and claimed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that all his earnings (which he duly reported) were tax-exempt.  At first, the IRS denied his tax-exemption; over the years, this evolved into an all-out battle between him, his organization, and the IRS.  The stakes grew ever higher with every year that he failed to pay taxes, until the IRS claimed that he owed a billion dollars in back taxes, interest, and penalties.

At last, after he had developed a large and powerful organization with expensive lawyers, filed over two thousand lawsuits against that division of the federal government known as the Internal Revenue Service, and engaged in a well-funded public campaign to destroy the public’s trust in the institution of taxes, the IRS finally caved in.  In 1993, the IRS declared that it accepted the claim that the science fiction writer’s “religion” was in fact a tax-exempt organization.  By this time, the organization was enormous and had as many as 500 thousand disciples (according to adherents.com); however, since then, the membership has dwindled to possibly less than 50 thousand.  At the same time, the book value of the organization (primarily invested in prime real estate) has grown rapidly, and now exceeds $3 billion by conservative estimates.

There are many other aspects to this organization which are exceptionally disingenuous, blatantly fraudulent, or callous and brutal, but the basic procedure remains the same.  There is nothing religious about this procedure, and the mythology behind it makes it seem absurd, but at heart, it is a money making enterprise operated for the benefit of its higher-level disciples and certain celebrity acolytes.  It is obvious that the top 0.1% of them live like kings and the rest work like dogs.

I will not name this organization for obvious reasons, but anyone with a subscription to HBO can watch the movie recently released to discover just how brutal and disingenuous the people who run it are.  If anyone reading this can guess who these people are and wishes to discredit me, or even attack me, just ask yourself: is it worth your time and trouble to assault such an unimportant, little read writer?

Here is a little argument about Heaven and Hell that I’ve never heard before.  Not that I believe in “the Afterlife” of any variety at all (even Near Death experiences), but my eye was caught by a reference to the evolution of beliefs about Heaven and Hell and I found this interesting to an objective view of religion.

The argument, written by Winston Wu, is that there is no eternal Heaven and no Hell in the Old Testament except in the very latest portion, the Book of Daniel.  This Book is thought to have been written some time in the second century BCE, roughly 165.  At this time, the Jews were “in exile in Babylon” and under the rule of King Antiochus IV(c. 175), who took over control of the Jewish religion by replacing the high priest, plundering the Temple treasury, and setting up an altar to Olympian Zeus within the Temple precinct.  The Maccabean revolt was partially in response to the tyrannical rule of Antiochus and the Seleucid dynasty, and Daniel reflects this orientation.  The Seleucids tried to introduce the Jews to Zoroastrianism, which, not by coincidence, had a well-developed concept of Heaven and Hell.  The Jewish savants would have been exposed to Zoroaster during his lifetime because they were captives of the Persians and did not return to Palestine until the Maccabean revolt.

Zoroaster, a prophet of the time around 630-550 BCE, taught that the world was the site of a titanic struggle between good and evil, embodied by the gods Omazd (Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman(Angra Mainu.)  This struggle was not endless, but contained in a finite series of time periods (between four and seven) during which things would get progressively worse, culminating in a final victory of good over evil and the onset of an eternity of goodness.  During this final age, the just people of the present would receive their just reward and dwell with the god of goodness forever.  Bad people, however, would be cast into eternal darkness to suffer forever.

This type of religion is known as apocalyptic, based on the idea that there would eventually be a final battle between good and evil with the victory of good justifying everyone’s hopes (and fears.)  Prior to the time of the influence of Zoroastrianism over Judaism, the Jews did not have an apocalyptic point of view (according to this argument.)  There was no “elaborate angelogy or demonology.”  Satan, originally a servant of God and his prosecutor, became more and more like the anti-god Ahriman.  Finally, the Zoroastrians had the notion of a “virgin-born Savior”  who would raise the dead and judge them at the end time; this idea was borrowed and turned into Jesus Christ.

As a corollary, Darrell Till states that Judaism had a “fuzzy” notion of what happened after death and appeared to conclude that the dead simply went down under to a place called “sheol” and dwelt (still dead) in this underworld forever.  There appears to have been considerable skepticism about whether there was any life after death.  This attitude corresponds to the Greek idea of the Underworld, which was definitely underground and could be reached through a cave.

What makes all this entertaining is that it seems to show that religions, and religion in general, have gone through evolutions and have merged into each other.  The idea is that Judaism borrowed its eschatology from Zoroastrianism and that Christianity evolved from a merger of the two religions.  It is probable that Islam can be shown to be an evolution of Judaism and Christianity; this is plainly shown in that Mohammed incorporated both religions as acceptable forebears.  Zoroastrianism appears to have disappeared, or at least become completely submerged.

There are also indications that the religious syncretism that resulted in Christianity occurred in Greece, or at least in a Greek-speaking or Hellenistic context: the New Testament was originally written in Greek.

This is merely a dip of the toe into the subject, coming from the following documents:

http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/DebunkingChristians/Page28.htm (“The Evolution of Heaven and Hell” by Winston Wu, 2011, part of a series on “debunking” Christianity)

http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/014front.html (“Daniel and the Resurrection” by Farrell Till)

There is enough on this subject to fill a lifetime’s research, so don’t take it badly if you’ve never heard it before.  I’m currently reading a book on the Hellenistic world from the death of Alexander the Great to the battle of Actium, a period of only 300 years; it is nearly 1,000 pages long, including 120 pages of footnotes.  Most of what happens is forgotten.

The United States has the largest proportion of its population in prison, of any country in the world, including China and Russia.  A majority of these prisoners are of minority origin, either black(African-American) or brown (Mexican), and blacks in particular face a much greater risk of being arrested, incarcerated, and sentenced to longer prison terms, followed by long periods on parole.

While some uninformed persons may claim that blacks are in prison more because they commit more crimes, there is good evidence that blacks are the victims of prejudice rather than the perpetrators of crimes.  Blacks are suspected more, convicted more readily on less evidence, and sentenced to longer terms for the same crimes.  Considering that 95% of criminal cases are settled by plea bargains and blacks do not have the funds for high powered lawyers, most blacks are intimidated into pleading guilty by the specter of a longer prison term if they resist a plea bargain and are convicted at trial.

The most disturbing factor in this insane policy of locking up everyone is the rise of for-profit prisons.  States have sold out their prisons to private companies, which make a profit on incarcerating people.  There is no incentive to reduce prison populations when private companies show healthy profits for doing this work.

A particularly egregious form of profit-making is the practice of charging inmates ridiculously large fees for making telephone calls.  Here is a quote from a New York Times (NYT) article that shows clearly, in a nut shell, how excessive this practice is:

“Until the 1990s, inmates could place and receive calls to lawyers and family members at rates similar to those outside prison walls. But the prison phone system is now a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies that manage phones in prisons and jails in all 50 states, setting rates and fees far in excess of those established by regular commercial providers. The business is so considerable — some 500 million prison and jail phone calls totaling more than six billion minutes in 2014 — that it has caught the eye of private equity firms.”

The article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-inmate-phone-calls-are-under-scrutiny.html

It seems that there are only a few companies dominating this business: one company, Global Tel-Link, takes 50 percent of all revenue.  These companies are being taken over by private equity firms because of their tremendous profit potential.  The states are using these companies as a source of revenue, and the companies are obliging by paying enormous commission fees to the prisons for the privilege of controlling their phone service.  Then the companies turn around and charge the inmates through the nose for making phone calls.  Some charge as much as $1.22 a minute for in-state phone calls.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has limited out of state phone charges to 20 cents a minute, but the companies have responded by jacking up the charges on in-state calls, which the FCC does not control, and which make up 90 percent of the calls.  In addition, there are multiple charges for various aspects of the telephone service, such as paying your bill or maintaining a prepaid account.

The states are using the commissions that these companies pay (a total of $460 million last year) to subsidize many other aspects of incarceration, even unrelated expenses like the states’ general revenue funds.  These charges result in another aspect of the retrogressive charges that poor people pay to support their government.  These charges are similar to a retrogressive income tax, which places the greatest burden of taxation on those least able to pay.

The practice of incarcerating so many people is an unconscionable expense paid by taxpayers, and the way the incarceration is implemented places the greatest burden on those least able to afford it.  This is just one more unjust practice that diminishes our faith in government and damages the social contract that is supposed to bind all people together in a fair and equitable society.  We must fight to make all expenses of government progressive– paid for by those most able to pay and not those least able to resist.

Those who benefit most from government– wealthy people who obtain protection for their wealth from government services– must be made to pay the most for the administration of government: a progressive scale that charges the most to those most able to afford it.

The “situation” in Israel-Palestine is, in my humble opinion, the result of two opposing forces which have no interest in negotiation; both sides are interested only in conquering.  The Zionist side made a strategically brilliant secret offensive that was conceived as early as the late 1800’s.  The Arab side was at first completely disorganized, then completely brainwashed into a millenial monotheist dictatorship that is still militarily inadequate.  There are dominant elements on both sides that make reasonable negotiation impossible.  The current situation can only be separation by armed elements of the United Nations.  Jerusalem should always have been a demilitarized, transnational territory. In particular, the Western Wall and the area that used to comprise the Temple in Jerusalem should be opened to archaeological inspection to determine what specific writings can be located that bear on the history of the three main monotheistic religions.  The areas that ’til now have been restricted from archaeological exploration need to be opened up because there are likely to be writings that contradict elements of our history of religions.

This is also likely to be true of the Ka’ba in Mecca that has been occupied for thousands of years and reconstructed many times.  There is only one entity that can impose archaeological exploration on all these sites.  That is an alien that is able to impose its will by the use of superior force.

In “The Day the Earth Stood Still” the alien demonstrates his power by shutting off all the internal combustion and electric engines in the world for an hour.  After this demonstration, he explains that the earth cannot be allowed to export its destructive behavior to other worlds or it will be destroyed.

It is clear that our self-destructive behavior will continue unless we are somehow forcefully explained that we are making a mistake.

Here’s a couple of comments from the New York Times (NYT) that bear repeating:

“[March 20 , 2015]

How do the right-wingers who voted for the prime minister based on his no-Palestinian-state pledge feel now? How do the Palestinians feel, hearing two diametrically opposed positions in the same week from their negotiating “partner”? Which position is accurate?

Will anyone trust Benjamin Netanyahu now or believe anything that he says? Why would they, given that he has proved himself to be nothing but a typical politician, one who seeks to have it both ways, to say or do anything to be re-elected?

When we seek to understand why so many voters and potential voters have become apathetic, if not hostile, to government at all levels, look at the Netanyahu farce of 2015. Disgraceful.

OREN M. SPIEGLER
Upper St. Clair, Pa.

”

“[March 20, 2015]

In focusing the blame entirely on Israel by stating that a change in the current situation cannot and will not come from within Israel, he completely ignores recent history regarding the intransigence of the Palestinian leadership.

In the waning days of the Clinton administration nearly 15 years ago, Israel made a very reasonable offer of land to the Palestinians for a state of their own. This offer was rebuffed outright with nary a counterproposal. Instead, the Palestinians launched a second intifada.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005, which was the only time in history that anyone gave the Palestinians even an acre of land for themselves. The Palestinians responded by converting the territory into a rocket launching pad, directly provoking two wars.

The two-state solution has indeed “seen more funerals than a reverend,” but the main reason for that has been a Palestinian leadership apparently more interested in embracing a culture of death and destruction rather than one of life and hope.

JERRY RAPP
New York

“

“If you didn’t pick up the phone, if you didn’t go on the Internet, you didn’t use technology, you’re virtually undetectable,” a second law enforcement official said, speaking anonymously in order to discuss the investigation.

Population of Haiti, and Growth Rate Reduction With Rising Economy:

The Federal Survey that was extensively quoted in the last post also stated that the population of Haiti was about  8.3 million and that the growth rate was about 2.3 percent.  Now the population is estimated at 10.6 million, despite a huge level of emigration to other countries such as the United States and a huge death rate from the earthquake of 2010. (See http://populationpyramid.net/haiti/2015/ )

The reason for the increase in population despite local deprivation is that each woman has an average of 4.9 children in her lifetime.  There is a high death rate but the population is largely young and relatively dynamic, with a median age of 18.

There is clearly a tendency for women in poor countries to have more children.  There is also a clear trend towards fewer children in countries that have higher economic status than before.  Improved economic status over time frequently results in a lowered birth rate; this has been seen in some counties in India.  What happens here is that the overpopulation problem tends to solve itself when the economic status of the society involved is increased significantly.  This phenomenon has been demonstrated repeatedly in other situations.  Economic improvement alone will reduce the number of children that each woman has (whether it is due to better education or more access to birth control and abortion is immaterial.)  In a way, this is automatic women’s rights, because there is less stress on women when each has an average of only two children.  There is more time between and after having children to engage in political activity in print and to demonstrate in favor of one’s cause.

Therefore, raising the economic status of a group of people will reduce population growth and show the way to solve the problem of overpopulation.  In countries like the United States, the average birth rate is 1.8 children per mother, less than the replacement rate; population growth occurs only by immigration.  This is the simplest way to solve Haiti’s problems, in particular their problem of overpopulation, where without excess children there would be no need to emigrate to the United States, which is quite the same as their problem of economic salvation.

To return to Haiti’s current situation:

We suggest that some of Haiti’s problems are related to their youthful population and rate of dynamic change secondary to that youth.  As noted previously, the country’s median age is 18.  The life expectancy at birth is an average of 53 years.  The resulting population is unusually young and unstable.

There is, in addition, a group of unusually healthy and intelligent men and women who have been raised in privilege; in myth there are 400 citizens at the top who make all the decisions.  This myth reflects the unusual degree of mythology involved in what appears to be decision making apparatus.  We need only mention the use of voodoo in the administrations of Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

Another important transformation has to be discussed, which is that of the Aristide party.  At first it was a civilly elected, democratic party which was saved by American intervention but later on, Aristide’s loyalty seemed to shift towards Russia and the administration of Vladimir Putin, now an enemy of the United States in Latin America for reasons that may be obscure to the average American.

Relief Plans, Why They Don’t Work:

The decisions of virtually all relief plans have resulted in large amounts of relief money going to the central administrative areas with relatively less distributed to the rural areas.  There is clearly an enormous amount of money wasted on the administrative apparatus that goes with distribution of aid in the normal way– a sort of injection at the center that takes a long time to reach the periphery, with a great deal of material lost along the way.  That’s how aid programs have always worked,  because of the belief that other methods will result in lost material due to waste and fraud.

Pie in the Sky Solutions:

In a reversal of this pattern, there may be a way to route the relief to peripheral areas more quickly if one determines the pattern of very small administrative areas and uses single flights to distribute complete and comprehensive packages with ridiculously simple instructions to individual administrative centers.

There is also the relation to amount of aid given to the country to which the United States gives the most money in the world: Israel, at $3 billion a year.  What if, instead of $250 million, Haiti was to get $3 billion a year in aid?  How much would be wasted on graft and embezzlement?  How much would go to the starving “farmer” with a tenuous relationship to a piece of land to lives in Port-au-Prince looking for a job, any job?  With a wife and five children, he has a family, but one in eight of his family are living abroad.  Likely with so much money , some of it would get to almost all of the people but a lot would go to those who control the top of the food chain.

Long Term Problems and Solutions:

There are ways to reduce the graft that inevitably reaches into aid programs but they may be unattractive, even violent to the average viewer. At present, I do not have all the answers to this problem, but I hope to present some in future posts.

In addition, I would like to go over Haiti’s history since its recognition as a country and discuss its significance, although this is a much more fraught discussion.