Regional Geography

This video is so sad because HIV/AIDS  in the DRC and other African countries is definitely preventable and treatable but due to the immense amounts of poverty and the lack of information about contraceptives and protection, millions are infected every year.

The man featured in this video mentions that the government does nothing to help fund medical centers or any other assistance and it is truly shameful.

Unit 2

This is a big deal for me, as I'm always interesting looking into the far future for humanity as a whole. It's very important that a mistake is not made with the vast agricultural power that lays in the soil of Africa. Experiments with hybrid seeds and new technologies can yield a higher production, but at a cost we are not yet fully aware of. Many years down the line it's unclear as to what the result of this sort of farming will be, and I believe the last thing we want to do is to put all our eggs in one basket with this situation, as it could yield a worst case scenario where most of earth's farmland becomes useless for the purposes of growing due to an unforeseen long-term consequence of artificial seeds and the like. We should pursue technology with all haste and push forward without fear, but we need a reliable backup in case things go wrong.

This article first tells us about the different regions in Africa agriculturally, dealing with famine, economic, and distributive conflicts. It then tells a story about the famine killing 36 million in Chins, and how they would strategically select crops from the West in attempt to produce another "Green Revolution". Experts are saying that Sub-Saharan Africa should follow in their footsteps, but the two nations have many social, economic, and especially agricultural differences.

This write-up says a lot about how nations react to situations such as famine, and the distribution of goods aside that. Different nations have different abilities agriculturally and use these toward their peoples and social crisis's.  

This is some really cool stuff! This is a good showcase of human ingenuity. We have no need to create our own helicopters here in the United States in our backyards, but this shows that with the technical know-how, a lot of savings money, and raw supplies, it's entirely possible for anyone to build one. The impressiveness in this article lies in the ability for these individuals to make something extremely complex on their own rather than rely on pre-built, expensive models.

The article brings back memories of this past year and the Boston Marathon where the two bombers were found out to be from the Chechen region.  Due to social networks and word of mouth, many people jumped to assume that the attack was because of "the Russians".  Little was known about Chechnya and the people within the area, but it showed that in America at least, there was quite a bit of ignorance and assumption floating around.  Even political figures and in news reports there was confusion of the exact boundaries and ethnic backgrounds that the region possessed.  It shows the media gives people what they want to hear, and the listeners are seldom to do their own research to understand the truth.

Russia and its surrounding region has constantly been changing since the fall of the Soviet Union.  New countries form and more ethnicities arise constantly and with all these new developments form even newer confusion.  Many of these areas intertwine various languages, religions, cultures, and at times putting a barrier between them is nearly impossible.  As reports unravelled, they showed actual conflict between Chechnya and those of the Russian capital, Moscow.  There had been hostage situations and terrorist plots carried out by people suspected to be from the Chechen region and even the Russian president Vladimir Putin had grown angry about being apart of Chechnya.  With all these events and learnings, it shows that some countries still have people and areas within its boundaries that have little known about them.

Vladimir Putin was once a symbol of efficiency in Russia, but now that tensions are growing due to the subsidies that are being paid to Chechnya. As the article states, Putin's policies are starting to seem like a dead end and will only get more expensive as time goes on.

We don't usually hear about Chechnya subsidies usually it has to do with growing tensions or terrorism. In Russia there are so many ethnic and political divisions that it make sense the Russians feel allegiance to their ethnic group rather than Russia and there for when the government subsidizes Chechnya they see it as Russia subsidizing a population that really isn't "Russian".