If the Pope goes green
When Saint Peter laid the Vatican’s first stone, he made the innocent – at least for a Saint – mistake of not considering solar panels and geothermal pumps. As a result of this first carelessness, the Roman Church was born and prospered for centuries in the sign of waste. But now, with perfect timing, also the Vatican is going green, thus “expanding its mission from saving souls to saving the planet”, something that should actually have been in the plans since the beginning, at least according to Saint Francis’s words.
Filed Under Environment, History & traditions
KKK trial re-opened after 40 years
As we know, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of several past and present organizations in USA that have advocated racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, anti-Communism, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, and nativism. They have often used terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation such as cross burning to oppress African Americans, immigrants and other groups. Hard to believe, it is estimated that there are as many as 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide today.
During the movement of the 50-60’s, dozens of black people were killed by white people who wanted to retain racial segregation. Even though a FBI investigation at the time turned up several suspects, no one was prosecuted in most cases and few of the crimes were solved, partly because some of the perpetrators were protected by state and local officials under a conspiracy that planned and carried out the murders, or, in other words, under an integrated plan of white terrorism.
But the FBI is currently re-opening several cases from the civil rights era before suspects die. One of the most intriguing cases is the one of 71 years old James Seale; charged with kidnapping and a connection to the murders of two black teenagers, his trial has initiated now, more than 40 years after the tragic events. He was arrested in 1964, but the authorities later freed him under a “lack of evidence”.
For those who believe in evolution, we all, white, yellow, brown, black, come from common descendants. For those who are religious, we all belong to one community. Ironically enough, the KKK defend itself as the organization that brings a message of hope and deliverance to white Christian America. A Christian believes in Jesus, a non-white Jew, a defender of brotherhood, a peacemaker. Despite evolution-religion theories, most of us are immigrants somehow, an amalgam of races and a mixture of cultures. Talking about a pure race, and worst, creating a hate group out of that belief, is a proof that human being still have a long way to evolve.
If you want to understand more about KKK and other issues, click here. Michael Moore has a brief story to tell you.
Filed Under Diversity, Events, Human Rights, Politics
The Bee and the Bomb
Bees make sweet honey. Humans smell it. Humans make dreadful bombs. Bees smell them.
It sounds like a children rhyme but it’s another real (and curious) story about how nature can help mankind to solve a serious problem.
In the Croatian countryside, there’s a long tradition of beekeeping and some of the most delicious honeys we taste every day come from there. In the Croatian countryside there’s also a 1,000 sq km carpet of landmines, memory of the conflicts of the 1990s: at least 100 people have been accidentally killed by unexploded bombs since the end of the war; removing them is a slow, expensive and uncertain process.
Filed Under Environment, Research
Sexual Harassment VS Masculine Women
You would think the sweet, cute girls get it the worst. So very easy to lust after and too demure to tell you and your piggish ways off, sexual harassment in the work place just has to end up in the laps of the most feminine sort, but that’s not the case at all, according to a study titled “The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women.” Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the study tested 550 students and professionals finding that women with masculine traits were more likely to be sexually harassed than those with strong feminine personalities, which is now known as gender harassment. It’s not so much a matter of sexual desire as it is a matter of punishing assertive, ambitious, or independent women: those threatening masculinity.
So really, you can’t win: you’re either quiet, feminine, and disrespected, or you’re a real-go-getter, labeled masculine, and disrespected. I guess the real question is, which is worse?
Bonus question: how do effeminate men fair in comparison to masculine women in the office?
Filed Under Modern Life
Design for the bigger half
Vain New York designers, desperate for matching the colour of their socks with their brand new vintage earrings, will be probably upset to find out that in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue a design exhibition is celebrating their complete professional failure. Yeah, because what the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is exhibiting right now is a series of objects designed to solve problems for the world’s poor: rolling drums for transporting water for long distances, cheap computers, portable pumps to filter water, portable light mats, solar lanterns and so on. Unfortunately, this kind of items – destined to give more opportunities to the 90% people who try every day to find their way to survive and react in the developing world – represents a very small proportion of the design production. With a bit of nonsense and a pinch of fatuity, the world’s cleverest designers still prefer to fill with useless objects the houses of the “small half”, the richest 10%.
Read the original article
Filed Under Events, Modern Life
Pills for all
Brazil is the largest and most populous country in Latin America. Although its economy is progressive and regionally important, the problem of the widespread poverty is still a major barrier to furthering its development. To help with the issue of over population and its connection with poverty, as well as reducing the problem of illegal abortions, the government is supporting a program that will provide cheap birth control pills across the country, giving the poor “the same right that the wealthy have to plan the number of children they want”, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said.
Brazil already hands out about 254 million free condoms a year and birth control pills at government-run pharmacies. But not everybody have access to these places.
To diminish the problem, Brazilians can get the pills under the new program, which reduces drastically the prices at private drug stores and where anyone –rich or poor- could pay only 20 cents for a monthly package, or $2.40 for a year’s supply.
But just to add a little bit of controversy, Brazil has the largest Roman Catholic population in the world, religion that supports only natural birth control methods and rejects both condoms and pills. So, how can two complete opposites coincide, especially with such strong topics? How can our religious values disagree with our personal, intimate decisions? Are we contradicting ourselves?
The Brazilian government also plans to increase the number of free vasectomies performed at state hospitals.
Filed Under Modern Life, Politics, World Health
Straight? Stay out
When he found his neck under the same guillotine he used against his enemies, Maximilien Robespierre probably thought history was making one of its strange twists, in which persecutors suddenly become persecuted and discriminators turn into the discriminated. One of these same twists happened yesterday in Australia, where a hotel/pub won the legal right to ban the entry to heterosexual people.
Filed Under Diversity, Human Rights