These are the topics we will debate on factory farming:
Professor Jeffrey Brantigan thinks they just might:
Honeybees and hyenas stake out territory over a pretty obvious scarce resource: food. But why might gangs do the same? Brantingham and colleagues Martin B. Short, George E. Tita and Shannon E. Reid suggest in a paper published online this week in the journal Criminology that they’re motivated by a similar limited resource: reputation.
“Ultimately, what’s being competed for is your good name, or street credibility, your street rep,” says Brantingham, who was the lead author of the paper. “If people recognize you as the toughest person around, then that has all sorts of benefits.” (And, of course, more tangible benefits accrue from reputation, too.)
Nick Kristof, writing in the New York Times, describes an incredibly depressing aspect of poverty in America—parents deliberately pulling their children out of literacy programs to ensure continued government assistance:
THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
He continues:
Of American families living in poverty today, 8 out of 10 have air-conditioning, and a majority have a washing machine and dryer. Nearly all have microwave ovens. What they don’t have is hope. You see it here in the town of Jackson, in the teenage girls hanging out by the bridge over the north fork of the Kentucky River, seeking to trade their bodies for prescription painkillers or methamphetamines.
