I’m in a pretty good mood. The new job is looking better and better every day – a definite relief after after leaving a company I really liked.

Today at lunch I was gobsmacked by a picture in the freeps of a massive “clay pie” factory in Haiti. What completely floored me was that this extreme diet was not brought on by the devastation of the recent quake.  Apparently so many Haitians are so poor, and the island so under-resourced, that eating dirt (for all intents and purposes) has become a necessity, and even common. I couldn’t find the pic on lfpress.com so I googled it and the article I found was from 2008.

Wow.  We can spend millions on olympics and “saving” banks, but as a race we can’t be bothered to even keep ourselves fed.  I guess what really makes me mad is that the relative cost of “saving the world” is trivial. This commercial does a great job of illustrating the disparity of spending.

Even if we combined the costs of providing clean water, education, and medical care to the cost of feeding the world, it would still be a small fraction of what gets spent on war or hoarded by the rich.

About the only way to combat knowledge of that kind of injustice is to put it in perspective. Thanks to Nik & Melissa for pointing this one out to me. It’s not exactly a feelgood piece, but it beats the hell out of the feeling Sean Penn left me with.

Sleep well, fellow apes.