They should put his picture on the 99 cent coin

I would like to apologize for the way in which a certain politician, occupying a very high position in the Federal Government, has been represented in this blog.

It has never been my intention to imply that this person is an ignorant, political time-server, more concerned with his own personal issues, beliefs, and private power struggles than the problems confronting the United States

It has never been my intention to suggest in any way that he has destroyed his credibility by denying free debate on vital matters of national import in the mistaken impression that party unity or his own agenda should come before the well-being of the people he theoretically represents, nor to imply at any stage that he is an insecure, uneducated, unscrupulous dirtbag more concerned about his own political well-being than he is with other people and their problems. Nor indeed have I intended that readers should consider him an over-promoted, incurious, short-sighted, slime with a great deal more power than sense and a predilection for certain sexual practices which are still illegal in several states.

I am sorry if I gave this impression.

Very low description security

"Hell has three doors: lust, rage, and greed." -Bhagavad Gita

Recently the USDA began using the phrase "very low food security" in place of the words "hunger" and "hungry". The official statement of this change in verbiage is here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/labels.htm

I'll be the first to say that Americans have very different ideas about scarcity than do most people in the world. On this particular chunk of rock that everyone you know calls home, 1.2 billion people lack access to something as basic as safe drinking water. http://www.un.org/ga/president/57/pages/speeches/statement030605-EnivornmentDay.htm
If you don't have access to safe drinking water in America, you're not just in the vast minority, you're just not taking advantage of the resources available to you. We give away water that more than exceeds of the World Health Organizations standards for safe drinking water in public places in every city in America. When was the last time you didn't see a drinking fountain in a public library or public park? In America, resources which other people in the world fight over are simply taken for granted.

With that in mind, there is still hunger in America. I think many Americans are understandably appalled that, in a nation where the average CEO (of companies with more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue) makes $42000 per *day* http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/news/companies/ceo_pay_epi/index.htm
that some people have trouble procuring even one balanced meal a day.

No one likes to be appalled, but in response one can either continue to be appalled, fix the problem, or hide the problem. This Orwellian change of language from "hungry" to "very low food security" isn't just bureaucratic jumble-speak that destroys precision by substitution of vague terms for well-understood terms, it is a replacement of visceral language with gilded, torpid verbiage that dummies up the whole problem and in so doing helps to make it less immediate and less threatening such that people have less impetus to remedy it. That's bad.

What was wrong with the term "hungry"? It is evocative. Hearing it, you can visualize the problem and imagine the frustration of people that know they're not eating enough, or are not eating right even though people in their neighborhood are throwing perfectly good food away. "Hungry" is hard to ignore. Even hard-boiled asshats like yours truly who think that seeing perfectly able-bodied (and cleanly shaven) men standing on the street corner with signs that say "Hungry. Please Help" is amusing in some vague way, are compelled to help when confronted with genuinely hungry people.

On the other hand, "very low food security" doesn't evoke squat. (When was the last time you heard a child whine, "Mommy! My food security level is low!"?) It's easy to ignore the problem when it has the label "very low food security" because the term evokes no thoughts, no images, and no desire to help.

The USDA, and other government agencies in general, should spend the money they take from us to help fix problems not help hide them.