Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:
- at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
- more environmental damage, and
- a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.
How is this possible?
...Regulating death is terrible politics. And so death goes unregulated. But the dearth of debate and discussion doesn't eliminate assisted suicide. Instead, it pushes it into the shadows, where doctors will only admit anonymously to helping patients end their own lives.
Surveys of oncologists show that some cancer doctors, when asked anonymously, will admit to helping patients die. A heavily-cited 2000 survey of more than 3,000 doctors, published in the Lancet, found one in seven oncologists had "carried out euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide."
After years of costly delays and political infighting, the crown jewel of the new World Trade Center complex will finally be open for business Monday, welcoming its first wave of workers.
About 175 employees from anchor tenant and publishing giant Condé Nast — whose employees include Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, Vogue’s Anna Wintour and the New Yorker’s David Remnick — will move into offices on floors 20 through 44 of the 104-floor “Freedom Tower,” officially 1 World Trade Center.
I'd love to see a comprehensive review of "privacy" in this country.
The next two years should be interesting. Now that the GOP controls Congress, will they step up to the challenge of legislating?
The man who ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years fell from office a few days ago, and the contours of the transition that will follow remain unclear. The Early Warning Project’s statistical risk assessments suggest that this tumult has roughly doubled the risk of an onset of state-led mass killing in Burkina Faso for the next year or more, likely pushing it into the top 30 when those estimates are next updated in early 2015. The several area experts we consulted in the past 48 hours, however, all indicated that this worst-case scenario was highly unlikely to happen. Instead, they seemed guardedly optimistic that Burkina Faso would find its way to a competitively elected civilian government without substantial civilian bloodshed before 2016...
Saez and Zucman show that, in America, the wealthiest 160,000 families own as much wealth as the poorest 145 million families, and that wealth is about 10 times as unequal as income.
I have nothing against some people earning and owning more than others; there's good evidence for positive incentive effects, as well as economic dynamism. But that general rule competes with another, which, I'm increasingly convinced is more important to focus on: power corrupts, and the more power one has, the worse it can be abused.
Money and power feed off each other:
Taxes aren’t just a means to raise funds: they influence how the fruits of our economic enterprises are distributed, and they point toward a way of structuring our economy that doesn’t simply enrich the very top.