Anonimity on the internet.

It’s not that you want to be a spy, it’s not that you want to hide under a rock, it’s just that you feel threatened by the invasiveness of data tracking by Big Co (eg Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc) and Big Brother (the government and banks know more about you than you know about yourself). …
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Watch out for pinkies in your pork.

It was pretty disgusting before, but since the further deregulation of health and safety standards the level of contamination in the US meat delivery system has become even more vile. BloombergBusinessweek features a report on The Truth About Pork and How America Feeds Itself.  Their graphic reproduced below gives a glimpse of the problem. The …
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Obama: The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking

Barack Obama gave a speech in Washington DC which described economic themes for the rest of his term. “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” he said. “The idea that so many children …
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Biosphere destruction is being ignored but happening fast and time is running out.

In Dangerous Global Warming Closer Than You Think, Climate Scientists Say, Scientific American outlines two reports encouraging immediate and extensive action, before it’s too late. The message of the reports is that climate volatility is already here, species extinction is close to a critical level, as are levels of toxic concentrates.  They are now talking …
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You are twice as likely to pay a bribe if you live in a poor country

That’s a simple summary of Transparency International’s 2013  Corruption Perceptions Index. A big headline this year was the drop in Spain’s ranking because of a number of public scandals.  But do not imagine that corruption in Spain has actually gone up or down, just because perception has changed.  Actual corruption is pretty much the same …
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People said no to GMO, so now big agroindustry and pharma-chem businesses are engineering mutagenic food. Yum!

Mutagenesis isn’t new: Breeders have relied on it for decades to produce thousands of varieties of lettuce, oats, rice, and other crops.  Pharma-chem companies sell high volumes of mutant breeds, ranging from wheat to sunflowers, in markets that reject genetically engineered seeds.  It just doesn’t sound very nice and might even be a dangerous idea. …
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It’s not easy to do the right thing.

So, I must confess that for three years we let a field to a neighbour for use in conventional tillage farming.  Previously, that field had been managed organically for over a decade, but we found we could not use it and the rent money would be welcome.  Now, we’re regalvanised to protect the environment and …
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Biotech is gonna eat you for lunch!

If you don’t live in America you almost certainly haven’t heard about the strong arm tactics of big biotech firms like Monsanto, Novartis and Dupont.  Even if you live in the States you might think that genetically engineered food is “gonna save the world”.  Well it isn’t.  And 90% of Americans want to know whether …
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GMO (genetically modified food) is not good. Don’t assume it is.

Another comprehensive, scientific report on genetic engineering in the food web concludes that it is dangerous, uneconomic and counter-productive.   From our perspective as consumers the worst aspect is danger to health.  From the producers’ perspective the worst aspect is the prospect of being under the thumb of biotech giants. The report GMO Myths and Truths …
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Sadly, evidence proves privilege breeds corruption.

It is convenient to assume that people without resources are prone to unethical behaviour, especially if you’ve got lots of stuff.  You might imagine that someone who lives in a cardboard box is likely to steal, simply because they need to eat. But the opposite is true.  If you’ve got the stuff, prepared to be …
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