Provoking Policy

In the USA, there are millions and millions of guns in circulation. Today, Congress failed to pass a bill that would expand background checks to purchase a gun legitimately. The problem is that guns are so easy to come by that those who want to find a gun need not submit themselves to a background check. They can simply find a stolen gun on the street that probably cannot be traced in order for them to do whatever evil desires their twisted minds conjure. Background checks are a way to put a tiny little barrier between the bad guy and his bad deeds. Anti-drug laws stop lawful people from buying drugs but anyone who wants to buy anything from heroin to oxycontin wont find it difficult to do so despite all the barriers in place. Even the limits on cough syrup dont much hinder meth production. The background check is a distraction from the main issue that guns are still going to be for sale and the secondary sale of guns makes getting a gun fairly easily if one desires. A guy who w...

A Proposal for the 28th Amendment (Amendment XXVIII) The Congress makes the following findings: 1. Firearms injure and kill people. 2. There is common agreement that the right to bear arms articulated in 2nd Amendment (Amendment II) of the Bill of Rights was given to the people of the United States for their safety and protection and the US Supreme Court ruled in 2010 ( District of Columbia v Heller ), that this right was not linked with service in a militia. 3. There are almost enough firearms for every woman, child and man in the country (1, 2) and, 47% of households (3) in the United States possess a firearm. 4. Firearms are a danger to the health and welfare of the citizenry based on their role in the morbidity and mortality of people, especially vulnerable populations such as children, women with violent partners, and people who live in poor, urban settings 5. Therefore, in light of this demonstration of the crisis in our nation, it is the sense of the Congress that preven...

The right to keep and bear arms was given to the people of the United States to keep them safe. It is enshrined in the Bill of Rights ( click here for a copy of the Bill of Rights ) It states, " A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."   I'm all for the rights of the people. But I also know that historical documents have 'context' that apply to a particular time and place. Yes, the constitution was once about men and not about women. About whites and not about blacks nor the people that were here when the white folks came. And though I think men shooting at rocks and whatnot in the bush or at the range is men being men (and some women being women), i dont get the need for an assault rifle when we are not living in the DRC or are a mercenary on a secret op for Shell or some other Fortune 100.  I even love reading Soldier of Fortune magazine and watching S...

Recently on the Humanosphere blog there was a call for comment on a paper, titled ‘How can a post-2015 agreement drive real change’ , written by Duncan Green, Stephen Hale and Matthew Lockwood of Oxfam. So I took up the challenge to read the paper and I am offering up this feedback. Defining Poverty First, its time to stop with the global strategies, initiatives, imperatives, goals, objectives etc. Poverty, though common across the goals in its experience of inadequate resources for daily living, is by its complexity and locale-specific nature, not amenable to ‘global targets’. Any global target means that variations across locales disappear and the outcomes seems somewhat meaningless. Furthermore, and most importantly, the people setting these targets are usually not the ones who have to meet them, nor are they the ones who will be among the counted when these targets get evaluated. Authoring Poverty Second, it would be beyond wonderful if more of these papers get wri...

I am an academic and thus I am required to do research and to write. As someone who studied sociology, social welfare, public health, international health, and economics I am plenty equipped to study poverty and the lives of poor people. And in my areas of study, these are the people of whom we ask questions, whether here or abroad.Were I to do a search of any library database using poverty as a keyword, I will get hundreds of hits for journal articles published in the past month alone. But I have decided that I will no longer study 'poverty' or 'the poor' because I find it exploitative in its convenience, somewhat useless in its findings and creates a conundrum in its recommendations: how to change poverty by changing the poor. We study how the poor shop, what they eat, what they drink, how fat they are, how (un)educated they are, how much health care they (don't) get, how they parent, and how a wide range of social, political and economic factors interact to inf...

Food and Festivities Riding on the coattails of the London 2012 Olympics , there was a Hunger Summit - another grand meeting of officials who fly in business and first class to be put up in 5 star hotels where they eat sumptuous meals right before they meet to discuss how they are going to feed the world's hungry. They even roped in gilded Mo Farah and other Olympic-related media darlings to get some press. Seriously?? They needed Mo Farah to do this for them to take the issue seriously? Like the Family Planning Summit which preceded the Olympics, there are grand promises made by the 'Western' countries about working together towards eliminating world hunger. Co-hosted by Cameron and Michel Temer (VP of Brazil - host of the next Olympics), it has had to fight for page space among the continued media blitz, tsunami and hurricane of Olympic-related press. Of course, this summit came out of the last G8 summit in May when Obama made promises to African leaders on the i s...

I decided to edit this piece to start with a video of Melinda Gates talking about her privilege to travel the world and meet women whose voices are not heard on the world stage and so she feels it is her obligation to speak on behalf of them. This gets at the heart of why I wrote this piece so I will let her speak in her own words before I speak mine in response: Melinda Gates interview on her work as family planning advocate I work in the development industry. Sometimes. I have worked in the family planning sector a long time. I have worked in safe motherhood a long time. And I have worked in AIDS. (That these are not integrated in the development sector is a topic for another post). I came to development through childhood experiences with development workers whose ideas were formed in some office far, far away using the most recent data and information on my Jamaican community. They were talented, mulitlingual and well-intentioned. But something about the experience left an ind...