10% of girls under 20 are raped. Is this civilisation?

About 120 million girls around the world – slightly more than one in 10 – have been raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 20, a UN report says.  The children’s agency Unicef also says 95,000 children and teenagers – most of them in Latin America and the Caribbean – were murdered in 2012 …
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Stand up to bullies …

Monica and Eddie are amazing people.  They work hard and do good.  They have raised 6 children of their own and fostered others.  They have successfully home-schooled their children. Now, when the Irish state asked them to fill in forms, they refused.  Partly because it was an unnecessary bureaucratic pain – everyone knew their exemplary …
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Regulation doesn’t work, but what else is there when people don’t care?

A report by the watchdog Natural England says many farmers responded  to impeding grassland protection laws by digging up their meadows before the tighter rules could be introduced.  Some 98% of English meadows have already been lost to intensive farming and the rate of loss nearly doubled after announcement that rules would be changed. Rules …
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Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for everyone else.

Well that’s an unexpected idea, but it makes some sense. Banks and big business benefit hugely from the state, through subsidies, bailouts and privayisations.  That’s like socialism. Everyone else deals with market forces and have little chance to influence the law or regulations or taxes. That sounds a lot more like the truth, although it …
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Millions of classic images, free online.

Kalev Leetaru has uploaded a searchable database of 12 million historical copyright-free images to Flickr.  Most of the images that are in the books are not in any of the art galleries of the world – the original copies have long ago been lost.  The pictures range from 1500 to 1922, when copyright restrictions kick …
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Eating The Planet: ecological debt is over 4 months of human consumption.

The Global Footprint Network reports that humanity has already exceeded the ability of nature to absorb our waste.  Our demand for recycling CO2, O2, H2O etc via natural processes, like weather, carbon cycle, etc exceeds the ability f natural systems by 50%.  So the GFN has helped us get a perspective by pointing out that …
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Another billion poor people arrived on earth today.

According to the Asian Development Bank, 1.5 billion people live below the poverty line, not the “official figure” of 0.5 billion., so the Asian poverty rate is 41.2% not 12.7%. The explanation is that the officially set poverty line of $1.25 a day is too low and by increasing it by 25 cents, to $1.50 …
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Waste hemp for cradle-to-cradle and biomimicry

Research shows that “Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’”.    Scientists have made graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and with waste.   They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors, high-performance energy storage devices, which are “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard.  Graphene is too …
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