One little goat, one little goat, that Father bought for two zuzim.

It's the first night of passover tonight (we just had a lovely Seder with some of the wife's coworkers, and in the spirit of the holidays, the time has come to choose this months Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month. This month, we'll be guided by the notion of Tzedakah, the religious concept in Judaism that translates roughly into charity, but with a notion of social justice as well. According to Maimonides, perhaps the greatest philosopher among the medieval rabbis, the highest form of Tzedakah is:

Giving a poor person work (or loaning him money to start a business) so he will not have to depend on charity. This is because the person is now free from having to rely on charity. The giver has not just helped the recipient for the short while, but instead for the rest of their life.

In honor of a rather familiar passover song, we're going to try to give a family a goat, which means that the Charity of the Month is The Heifer Project. Operating worldwide, they give animals to needy families, but also teach them about sustainable agriculture and then ask them to pass along this knowledge, along with the female offspring of the animal, to their neighbors, strengthening communities worldwide.

Heifer International works to ensure that the gift of each animal will eventually help an entire community to become self-sustaining. Animals such as goats, water buffalo and camels are seven M animals- they provide meat, milk, muscle, manure, money, materials and motivation. Once its immediate needs have been met, a family is free to sell any excess at market. Heifer International provides a breeding animal along with the gift animal so that it can produce offspring. Participating families are required to "pass on the gift", that is: they must give at least one of the female offspring to a neighbor who has undergone Heifer's training. In time, that neighbor will pass along one of the offspring of its animal, and so on.

To make things more convenient, I've set up a gift registry on their website, which can be found here. In honor of passover, we have the option of giving a goat, or for the Simon's Rockers out there, you may also choose a llama. No need to buy an entire animal all at once, you can buy fractions of an animal as well (apparently, they wait until the fractions add up to a whole, rather than shipping them a leg or piece of a torso at a time). I chipped in for a share of both a goat and a llama, and I'm counting on our dear readers to finish off one of the two. C'mon people! Everyone needs a llama or goat! We can make this happen. Do it for the kids (that's a pun, y'all)!

Help us buy a llama!

All images and graphics in this post are copyright of Heifer International, of course.

There's not been a day, one hasn't gone by, when I don't think about the day he didn't die

Thankfully, while the current administration seems intent on making sure that all our news is bad news (how exactly did nuclear allegations about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea all turn out wrong anyway?...), they are as incompetent with regard to this task as they are to all the efforts they undertake. Today actually brought us two lightly related bits of good news, to offset the cratering of the stock market, the politically motivated firings of several US Attorneys, the first signs of the military taking some responsibility for the Walter Reed debacle about four years too late, etc.

It appears that there is some very encouraging news in the fight against malaria, one of the world's true preventable health crises.

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

A treatment will cost less than $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for children. Adults with malaria will take only two pills a day for three days, and the pill will come in three smaller once-a-day sizes for infants, toddlers and youngsters.
...
Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

As to the medical charity, they should be pretty familiar to you, since they are the February/March Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Médecins sans Frontières, a.k.a. Doctors without Borders. They even got the company to agree not to patent the drug, so generic versions will be legal worldwide. Let me suggest that this is an even better time to support their efforts. Your $25 may save up to 50 children's lives, by my count. Seriously, how can you not give at that rate of return on your money?

Further good news on the malaria front comes by way of a study performed in Uganda:

San Francisco and African AIDS researchers reported Tuesday that they had virtually eliminated malaria in a group of highly vulnerable, HIV-infected children simply by providing them with a daily dose of antibiotic and having them sleep under an insecticide-treated mosquito net.

The study conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in collaboration with researchers from San Francisco General Hospital found the bed net and antibiotic combination reduced the risk of malaria an astonishing 97 percent among the HIV-infected kids compared with a similar group of healthy children who did not receive the antibiotic and most of whom did not sleep under a bed net.
...
The antibiotic used in the study is cotrimoxazole -- sold in the United States under brand names such as Bactrim and Septra. The oral antibiotic is produced by generic drugmakers, and can be provided to children for pennies a day. But cost is always an issue in Africa and even the $5 cost of an insecticide-treated bed net is prohibitive for poor families.

Let's do a quick calculation, shall we? The Iraq war currently costs about $200 billion per year, once all costs are factored in. Figuring on two nets per person ($10), we could basically keep about 20 billion people from getting malaria in Africa each year...except for the fact that there are only about 6 billion people on the planet at the moment. Quite literally, in choosing to eliminate malaria or fight a war, we chose the war, and it's not even working out so well...when people try to make moral cases for war, make sure to remind them of these numbers, and then point out the millions displaced and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.

A quick update to a point I made about a month ago. Apparently, pressure is growing in Europe to require publicly funded scientific research to be made freely available to the public. According to the BBC:

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication.
...
Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world.
...
For years, the research model has remained relatively static.

In many countries, government funding agencies in the sciences, social sciences, and health sciences dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support research at national universities.

This statement is correct in many fields, but the BBC forgot to note that the revolution has already occurred in several, starting with high energy physics, and now encompassing a significant chunk of the physics world, including the entirety of astrophysics. The vehicle of change was the arXiv preprint server, to which essentially every astrophysics, high-energy physics, condensed matter, and many other disciples' papers are posted either prior to or immediately following acceptance by print journals. As an example, here is the sum of my published scientific output, short of talks that I've given but have yet to post to my personal webpage. There is not a single paper of mine for which you would have to pay for access that could not be gotten for free. Anyone in the world can read them all, not that anyone out there should really want to. Trust me, you don't want to. I don't even want to, frankly. You'll note if you check over there, or you could just take my word for it, that many of these papers appeared in reputable journals, whose editors and referees play a major role in validating the quality of papers. I'm certainly thankful that the published ones had to get an independent reader's approval. Even when the process is a pain, it generally improves the final quality (I'd note to avoid confusion that these revisions can be updated to the "preprint" after the fact, though it is not required).

Honestly, just about any academic field would be better served by this model. The opposition forces, which seem to consist of Nature and possible Elsevier press, are blowing smoke because they have a nice racket going and don't want to even risk it. What's most frustrating about this argument, though, is that many people discuss it as if it were some big theoretical idea, whereas the actual case is that several million scientific articles currently reside on public servers (arXiv has 400,000, and is the third largest that I found with a quick search). Thus you still see arguments like this:

Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.

even though it runs completely counter to the experience of hundreds of thousands of scientists who would be forced to spend literally minutes per paper uploading it to a public archive if they weren't industrious enough to pawn off the task on a grad student. Shockingly enough, and contra Nature if you'll pardon the pun, it is actually useful for scientists to make their work as broadly accessible as possible. In my case, UIUC subscribes to every journal under the sun, but I have no access at home or on the road to anything but the free server, an extremely common problem. This is just not that difficult an issue, frankly. Science belongs to the world, not to publishing houses.

The band played Waltzing Matilda, as they carried us down the gangway;But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared, then turned all their faces away

A few items for tonight. First of all, you may notice that the Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, located in the upper right, has changed. Dkon has suggested Doctors Without Borders for this month's charity, a wise choice indeed given their selfless mission and excellent efficiency in using your dollars for their intended results, not overhead. I'll let him say more about them, but they get $25 tonight from the other half of Rooted Cosmopolitans team.



Speaking of doctors, the Washington Post published a two part series this weekend about the horrid treatment of wounded US Veterans being treated as outpatients at Walter Reed Medical Center. Dana Priest, who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, and Anne Hull, wrote in part one of the series:

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It actually gets worse from there for several of the patients. In essence, while immediate medical care for veterans is outstanding, once they leave the hospital they are frequently caught in a Kafkaesque web of bureaucracy and confusion, left to fend for themselves even when suffering from debilitating injuries and psychological issues. It's become trite to say that we support the troops even when we don't support the war, but apparently the Republican leadership that controlled the purse strings for this operation believed in the exact opposite of that philosophy. Part two, which appeared yesterday, continued the story:

Some soldiers and Marines have been here for 18 months or longer. Doctor's appointments and evaluations are routinely dragged out and difficult to get. A board of physicians must review hundreds of pages of medical records to determine whether a soldier is fit to return to duty. If not, the Physical Evaluation Board must decide whether to assign a rating for disability compensation. For many, this is the start of a new and bitter battle.

Months roll by and life becomes a blue-and-gold hotel room where the bathroom mirror shows the naked disfigurement of war's ravages. There are toys in the lobby of Mologne House because children live here. Domestic disputes occur because wives or girlfriends have moved here. Financial tensions are palpable. After her husband's traumatic injury insurance policy came in, one wife cleared out with the money. Older National Guard members worry about the jobs they can no longer perform back home.

While Mologne House has a full bar, there is not one counselor or psychologist assigned there to assist soldiers and families in crisis -- an idea proposed by Walter Reed social workers but rejected by the military command that runs the post.

in response to the story, the military finally got off their butt and went into a full scale CYA operation (that's Cover your Ass, in case you were wondering). That's our military planning for you, screwing up the aftermath to make the failures of the battle itself seem so much more to scale.

Walter Reed and Army officials have been "meeting continuously for three days" since the articles began appearing, Weightman said. A large roundtable meeting with Army and Defense Department officials will take place at the Pentagon early this morning to continue talks about improvements in the outpatient system, he added.

Weightman said the medical center has received an outpouring of concern about conditions and procedures since the articles appeared and has taken steps to improve what soldiers and their families describe as a messy battlefield of bureaucratic problems and mistreatment.

"We're starting to attack how we'll fix and mitigate" some of the problems, he said.

Gee, good of them to only wait Five Frickin' Years !?!

To honor those who actually work their guts out for our soldiers after they return home wounded, another $25 will be going to The Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust, another charity given 4 stars at Charitynavigator.org. It's sad that the government can't even handle basic matters like these, but hardly surprising. So, if you happen to be reading this, and perhaps even served time in the military yourself, maybe in the Air Force, consider giving a donation and dropping a line in the comments.

January Charity of the Month: Kiva

Hi everybody! (Hi, Dr. Nick!)

I thought one good thing about having a blog might be to do a little good in the world. Honestly, I can blather on about politics all I want, but in the end your $25 is probably more valuable to some people out there than all my words combined. Thus, we are instituting a Charity of the Month, which will run on the right hand side all month, until dkon makes his choice in mid-February, at which point we'll move it down to the bottom of the column (BTW, dkon, think of something for February).

Of course, the world of giving being what it is, the first charity we'll do isn't even a charity at all, but rather a way to let people help themselves. We're going with Kiva, a microcredit lender that first came to my attention in a diary on DailyKos. What is microcredit and microlending, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty who are not bankable. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimum qualifications to gain access to traditional credit.

Kiva exists to give small loans, typically somewhere in the range $250-1000, to small businesses in the developing world. The funds come from people like us, and are loaned at reasonable interest, not given away. When loans are repaid, Kiva keeps the interest to fund their operations and you get your money back, though you are welcome (heck, encouraged) to reinvest your money in another business. I've already seen one of my contributions repaid in full, and currently have donations in to 5 more businesses. One of our readers has done about the same. From their website:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

Thus, the goal: make a donation of $25. You'll get it back in about a year, and whereas it may represent a good meal or a pair of shoes to you, it can represent an entire livelihood to the business being funded. Drop a line in comments, and I'll match the first two $25 donations to the charities of your choices. Anyone else willing to match donations will be effusively praised as well. Let's make a difference, folks!