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 …
Continue reading Regulation doesn’t work, but what else is there when people don’t care?
Category:Risk and Terror
“You might want to stay off the internet for a while”
Mmmmmmmm. That doesn’t sound good. Especially since its from a credible source whose enterprise is entirely concerned with privacy and anonymity on the internet. From the Tor website: OpenSSL bug CVE-2014-0160 Posted April 7th, 2014 A new OpenSSL vulnerability on 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f is out today, which can be used to reveal memory to a …
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Weird weather is a symptom of worse to come.
The IPCC released the second report on climate change. It is more very bad news, but even so might still be insufficient to stimulate action from leaders or followers. Last September a summary on the physical science of climate change showed that climate change is real, and humans are the “dominant cause”. Now the IPCC …
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The list you don’t want to be on.
Capital punishment is a sign of failure. Failure is a part of learning and improvement, but if you continue to fail in the same endeavour, there is a problem indicating that the system needs to change. So, capital punishment should have long been expunged from a system that is “civilised”, “advanced”, “modern”, “space age”, “rich”, …
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Sad but true: Violence against females is pervasive.
A broad based survey indicates that 1/3 of women in the EU are affected by violence. That should surprise you, but if you’re female, maybe it doesn’t. Clearly unfair prejudices still dominate modern, rich cultures. For example, it is saddening to still see and hear behaviour which puts down women. Clearly there are economic differences …
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The troubling word is “doomsday”.
As the weather plays games with us, blowing, freezing, heating at the wrong times of year, it is somehow reassuring to read about a vault for seeds now preserving 800,000 species. It is dubbed the “Doomsday Vault”. The preservation vault, started 6 years ago, was built in the Arctic and requires little intervention to do …
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Sex, drugs, rock and roll, while we play with nuclear weapons.
It’s not that people should be restricted from making lifestyle choices, but there’s a time and a place for everything. And boozing in the nuclear silo is not one of them. Sadly, the story is not even that funny. Senior employees responsible for nuclear weapons were found to be dealing drugs, gambling and cheating on …
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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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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 …
Continue reading You are twice as likely to pay a bribe if you live in a poor country