Relief from Conspiracy

I had an idea:

If the conspiracy theory is true, than there is a barrier between the poor of the world, and the people who would like to improve the lives of those poor. Wealth is accumulated with shrugs and political easements to make us feel better. The people who want to eliminate poverty are often stymied by Jesus' comment about the poor always being with you, as said to Judas. One wonders if this sole verse is not the basis of the whole judeo-christian edifice. Should we always have the poor among us?

Eventually, we end up seeing some country that starves as in Ethiopia, Sudan or even now in North Korea. We see kids with glassy eyes, bodies withering from lack of food. We feel helpless, powerless to affect their lives.

Here's my questions:

1: Assuming a population of 1 million people are starving, how much, more or less, water and emergency food/medicine would it take to alleviate their pain for four weeks? [I want tonnage and raw cost. IV bags, mothers in labor, children with potentially fatal kidney failure due to lack of food, etc. Let's have a scale of costs from doinging-it-on-the-cheap all the way to spend-all-you-can with onsite surgery or whatever. Four weeks of medicine and food for a million starving people.]

2: How many people onsite are required to distribute and oversee the delivery of aid? How many doctors, admins, nurses? [FredT?]

3: How to provide security for the people in the above. [Wouldn't you sign up to be a defender of a team that went in with such a simple goal? Even beyond nationalism, I think humans from all over Earth would sign up to fight local warlords if such decided to interfere. Security would have to be thought through, but it could also become passionate in a Marine-Corp style but for good, eh?]

...So if we address the three questions above, we should be able to put a round figure, in dollars, of what it would take to help a million starving humans say in Africa or Asia or wherever.

Then, we can take that figure and simply do one thing with it: Publicize it.

We hear about billions and trillions of dollars as if those #'s mean anything. Without comparative concepts in our head, we lose perspective. I think the number we come up with will become a useful benchmark.

We've seen ATS members talk about theorized war games with the most minute detail. Lets see some slide rules get applied to this problem. I want to know the cost, per capita, of aiding a million starving humans.

I'm running your posts tonight cuz, just for kicks, you always have good ones.

1. I send 500 pounds of aid to .
I drop it off at an allied and protected area.
they ship it out to 5 towns, 100 pounds each.
a. gets grabbed by rebels 2 miles out of jima and all are killed.
b. never gets radio contact and the truck dissapears.
c. gets to the town and a few get some food before the local rebels come through the town and collect it all.
d. arrives, but has noone medically able to administer any of it, it gets old and just sits there.
e. e actually gets where it needs to go...unfortunatly, they need 50,000 pounds of it, not 500.

It's not that there ISN'T aid.....it's that it's not getting where it's needed....

-DT

Smallpeeps, an excellent idea, but if your sole purpose is getting figures out to the public, one that will get nowhere.

I would not know the costs involved, but send a letter to the World Health Organization. Those guys know their stuff.

It truly is amazing how much mass amounts of money we see go down the drain, or through a paper-work door never to emerge again. I was bored last night, and managed to find out that the Melbourne city council, Australia, is willing to spend at least 5 million dollars just to extend a drain 100 to make a beach look more pretty. 5 million, and there is money a million times that amount just disappearing into DoD in the U.S. They should get their goddamn act together. The public should get their goddamned act together.

Forget sponsoring children: work out how much force it will take to get rid of those stupid warlord governments, forget politics, force, and then go and do it, with a billion tonnes of supplies behind you, an amount America would throw away annually. We've all seen those shots of cargo-ships full of grain just sitting there spoiling, right?

Get a lot of big, powerful organizations behind you, which would be fairly easy, considering all want good advertising and such, as a well as a few [a lot] of marines and soldiers, which theoretically should be easy taking into account the rate at which the U.S. and others are deploying them to the mid-east, or get U.N. Peacekeeps to tail you, go in there, establish what you need to, give them food and toilets and wells and electricity and seeds,

and hope Viet Nam doesn't happen all over again.

Originally posted by Derek Trance
I'm running your posts tonight cuz, just for kicks, you always have good ones.

Thanks bud.

1. I send 500 pounds of aid to .
I drop it off at an allied and protected area.
they ship it out to 5 towns, 100 pounds each.

[...]

It's not that there ISN'T aid.....it's that it's not getting where it's needed....

I agree with you, DT. But, I am thinking of the Vietnamese Ho-Chi-Minh trail. That thing would be blown to bits and within hours they 'd have it rebuilt. Humans can't be stopped when they want something bad enough. My point is simple: If people wanted to help the millions who are starving right now they could do it.

Actually I sort of posted this thread in a snide way, just to prove that nobody here gives a crap. We all want to improve the world, but to make even the slightest move toward that goal is really too difficult for 99% of the people who have anything to share. It's a conspiracy of disinterest and hopelessness.

Anyway, thanks to you two for proving me wrong. I'm sure even if we got a dollar figure, and even if we figured out how to get around the Blackhawk Down crowd (pickup wth .50 cal stealing your shtuff), there's the question of the political sabotage which happens to these countries.

I guess Jesus was right about the poor always being with us because he knew the rich would always invent ways to suck the poor dry, and to prevent them from being aided or to learn how to rise from poverty.