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Thread: Eye Openers

  1. #1
    vidcc's Avatar there is no god
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    50 FACTS SHOW WHY WE MUST CHANGE WORLD May 6 2004




    By Matt Roper


    DID you know that 300,000 of the soldiers fighting in conflicts around the world are children?

    Or that 70 per cent of the global population has never used a phone?

    These are just two of the facts author Jessica Williams believes are capable of changing the way we think about the world.

    "These are facts, but they are not immutable truths," says Williams. "It's not too late to change the way our world works. Some of the facts need major shifts in thinking, while others require governments to start taking their responsibilities seriously. Neither of these will be easy to achieve, but if we don't try they'll never happen."

    Here are 50 facts worth knowing about our world... will they make us want to change it?

    1 THE average Japanese woman can expect to live to 84; her counterpart in Botswana will die at 39.

    2 BLACK men born in the US stand a one-in-three chance of going to jail. For white men the odds are one in 17.

    3 ONE in five of the world's population - 1.25 billion people - is undernourished.

    4 NEARLY half of British 15-year-olds have tried illegal drugs and nearly a quarter are regular cigarette smokers.

    5 CHILDREN living in poverty are three times more likely to suffer mental illness than children from wealthy families.

    6 EIGHTY-ONE per cent of the world's executions in 2002 took place in just three countries: China, Iran and the USA.

    7 SUPERMARKETS in the UK know more about their customers than the government does. They use loyalty cards to determine your income and what your interests are.

    8 EVERY cow in the EU is subsidised by £1.40 a day - three out of four Africans have less than that to live on.

    9 SAME-SEX relationships are illegal in more than 70 countries. In nine - including Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia - the penalty is death.

    10 EVERY hour, UK households throw away enough rubbish to fill the Royal Albert Hall.

    11 THERE are 27 million slaves in the world.

    12 A THIRD of the world's population is at war. In 2002, 30 countries were fighting in 37 armed conflicts - a combined population of 2.29 billion people.

    13 THE UK has the second-highest rate of teen pregnancies in the developed world, behind the US. There are 30.8 births for every 1,000 teenagers. Teenage mothers are twice as likely to live in poverty.

    14 ONE in five people live on less than 50p a day.

    15 THERE are 44 million child labourers in India, some working 16-hour days.

    16 PEOPLE in industrialised countries eat between six and seven kilograms of food additives every year. A ham sandwich can contain up to 13 E-numbers.

    17 GOLFER Tiger Woods is the world's highest-paid sportsman, earning £44million a year, including £30,000 a day for wearing Nike caps - which Thai workers get £2.20 a day to make.

    18 EVERY week an average 88 children are expelled from US schools for carrying a gun.

    19 LANDMINES kill or maim one person every hour.

    20 THERE are at least 300,000 prisoners of conscience, often held in appalling conditions, sometimes tortured, simply for peacefully expressing their own beliefs.

    21 CARS kill two people every minute.

    22 THE US owes the United Nations $1bn in unpaid dues. Yet it spends the same amount on its military programme every 23 hours.

    23 TWENTY-SIX million people voted in the 2001 UK General Election. More than 32 million votes were cast in the first series of Pop Idol.

    24 IN Kenya, bribery payments make up a third of the average household budget.

    25 THE world's trade in illegal drugs is estimated to be worth around £225bn - about the same as the world's pharmaceutical industry.

    26 TO fly a kiwi fruit from New Zealand to the UK means five times its weight in greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere.

    27 MORE than 150 countries are known to use torture.

    28 AMERICANS spend £5.6bn on pornography every year - the same amount their government spends on foreign aid.

    29 THE average urban Briton is caught on camera 300 times a day. With 10 per cent of the world's 30 million CCTV cameras, we are the most watched nation in the world.

    30 IN 2001, 13.2 million Americans and 2.5 million Britons had plastic surgery.

    31 BRAZIL has more Avon ladies than members of its armed forces. Physical beauty is so highly prized that calling someone vain is a compliment.

    32 EIGHTY-TWO per cent of the world's smokers live in developing countries.

    33 THE world's oil reserves could be exhausted by 2040.

    34 MORE than 70 per cent of the world's population has never heard a dial tone. In Africa just one in 40 people has a phone.

    35 A QUARTER of the world's armed conflicts of recent years have involved a struggle for natural resources.

    36 ALMOST 30 million Africans are HIV-positive. By 2050 the disease may have claimed as many as 280 million lives.

    37 TEN languages die out every year.

    38 MORE people die from suicide than in armed conflicts. In the past 45 years, suicide rates have grown by 60 per cent worldwide.

    39 SEVEN million American women and one million American men suffer from an eating disorder.

    40 THERE are 67,000 people employed in the lobbying industry in Washington DC - 125 for each member of Congress.

    41 SINCE 1977, there have been 80,000 acts of violence or disruption at abortion clinics in North America.

    42 THERE are 300,000 child soldiers fighting in conflicts around the world.

    43 MORE people can identify the golden arches of McDonald's than the Christian cross. The same goes for the Shell oil logo, the Mercedes badge and the Olympic rings.

    44 A THIRD of the world's obese people live in the developing world. Campaigners blame Western countries for dumping cheap, processed, fatty foods on poorer nations.

    45 IN 2003 the US spent $379bn on its military. This was 22 times the combined military spending of the seven "rogue states" - Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

    46 MORE than 12,000 women are killed in Russia every year as a result of domestic violence.

    47 SIXTY-ONE per cent of British teenagers believe aliens have landed on Earth, while 39 per cent have any belief in Christianity.

    48 TWO million girls and women are subjected to genital mutilation every year.

    49 IN China, as a result of the preference for sons over daughters and the country's one-child-per-family law, there are 44 million fewer women than men.

    50 SOME 120,000 women and girls are trafficked into Western Europe every year. The UN estimates the trade is worth £4bn a year.


    numbers 6,23,28 & 40 stood out for me

    it’s an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the union, where rich candidates pay $35 for your votes. Or, as Republicans call it, their vision for the future.

  2. The Drawing Room   -   #2
    Sounds like a huge load of carebear feces to me. Could we please get a more emotive list of tripe, at all?

    The bottom line is human nature, and that cannot be changed.

    The author needs to buy a clue and realize that people are selfish motherfuckers by nature. I anticipate that the author is a well off Christian who really cares.


    You can go back through history and see that the same crimes against humanity have always existed, the only difference is the names of the players.

    15 THERE are 44 million child labourers in India, some working 16-hour days.- This was the US during the industrial revolution. Now to avoid the very Unions which were created and fought to give workers rights, and which now essentially exploit their power, corporations have just outsourced the labor to places they can still exploit. Same story.

    Absolute power corrupts absolutely.


    21 CARS kill two people every minute.

    And? Cars allow us so much freedom, it seems that everyone who is able gives up the bus and bike in a heartbeat. Are they trying to harken back to some blissful time when man and nature communed? Please!


    34 MORE than 70 per cent of the world's population has never heard a dial tone. In Africa just one in 40 people has a phone.

    And this is bad? Could I please just drive 2 miles to work without watching women babble into their phones and forget about the stoplight. Perhaps if phones were less available, and it took an effort to communicate, we might hold our tongues until we had something worth saying.

    In the US, car will soon be called, mobile phonebooths.

    43 MORE people can identify the golden arches of McDonald's than the Christian cross. The same goes for the Shell oil logo, the Mercedes badge and the Olympic rings.

    I am physically ill at this platitude. Tells me all I need to know about the author.

    Honestly, many of these things have no point at all, they are just there to make some vague emotive implication. Thanks for a list of platitudes, I think Oprah will jump on this straight away. (:x).

    Honestly, we all want a utopian world, but the naivete of the author and the bizarre hodgepodge of "facts" makes me wonder if her head is screwed on tightly enough.
    Aren't we in the trust tree, thingey?

  3. The Drawing Room   -   #3

  4. The Drawing Room   -   #4
    vidcc's Avatar there is no god
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    notice i put speach marks around the fact part of the title.
    Hobbes, i agree some of the points are emotional points but you just basically say "so what. we all know what human nature is like", you pointed to that yourself, however do you think that excuses it?
    Perhaps you don't like the "fluffy" world where people believe that we can change certain things for the better. I don't think you would accept many things that affect you directly in an adverse manner by just saying " oh well it's just good old human greed"..... Half the battle of curing a desease is diagnosing it and it's cause in the first place is it not?

    15 THERE are 44 million child labourers in India, some working 16-hour days.- This was the US during the industrial revolution. Now to avoid the very Unions which were created and fought to give workers rights, and which now essentially exploit their power, corporations have just outsourced the labor to places they can still exploit. Same story.

    Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
    and you think this is ok? or do you think that something could or should be done about it?

    34 MORE than 70 per cent of the world's population has never heard a dial tone. In Africa just one in 40 people has a phone.

    And this is bad? Could I please just drive 2 miles to work without watching women babble into their phones and forget about the stoplight. Perhaps if phones were less available, and it took an effort to communicate, we might hold our tongues until we had something worth saying.

    In the US, car will soon be called, mobile phonebooths.
    i don't see why this is bad either

    21 CARS kill two people every minute.

    And? Cars allow us so much freedom, it seems that everyone who is able gives up the bus and bike in a heartbeat. Are they trying to harken back to some blissful time when man and nature communed? Please!
    but we can make driving standards tougher and reduce the amount of drink/drug related deaths surely. The UK has made drink driving as anti-social as smoking in a lung cancer unit. I'm not saying that there is no drink driving there however they have cut the injury and fatalities level significantly. We don't have to give up our driving freedoms to reduce this total

    43 MORE people can identify the golden arches of McDonald's than the Christian cross. The same goes for the Shell oil logo, the Mercedes badge and the Olympic rings.

    I am physically ill at this platitude. Tells me all I need to know about the author.
    i agree but it is a valid point for believers to be sad about. (of which i am not one)

    I surely agree that some points are irrelevent, but the list is not exhastative. I'm sure we could all come up with our own lists that we feel have more important aspects and others would disagree with them

    it’s an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the union, where rich candidates pay $35 for your votes. Or, as Republicans call it, their vision for the future.

  5. The Drawing Room   -   #5
    I am saying that human nature is a constant, and, yes, we should all strive for, and hope for, better conduct for a greater good for us all, but the unfocused "shot gun" approach and the sequestered naivete of the author makes me dismiss her as an idiot, who has no idea why these "facts" exist and equally no clue how to combat them.

    Her "facts" in some cases are so ridiculous as to make me question her sanity.

    She must be some Daddies little girl who wants to talk about "important" things and hug puppy dogs, praise God, and feed the poor.

    She is an inconsequential twit, with a book of IQ challenged blather. I think her real name is "Barbie".

    I would never question that things could be better, but to take advice from this clueless dolt is insulting, to say the least. She has no connection to the "source".

    26 TO fly a kiwi fruit from New Zealand to the UK means five times its weight in greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere.

    What does the above even mean?
    Aren't we in the trust tree, thingey?

  6. The Drawing Room   -   #6
    I think it means the poms should just grow their own kiwi fruit.

    Yeah, some of the "facts" are a bit wishy-washy, but assuming thay are correct they are not presented in any context, and as such are interesting statistics.

    The one about more people being able to recognise the McDonalds M than the christian cross was interesting. Maybe the Vatican should get a better PR company...


    vidcc - don't worry about hobbes, he's just a grumpy old bugger.

    hobbes - I didn't mean that.

  7. The Drawing Room   -   #7
    vidcc's Avatar there is no god
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    Originally posted by Alex H@6 May 2004 - 20:31
    vidcc - don't worry about hobbes, he's just a grumpy old bugger.

    i agree.. He's the origins of the phrase "not a happy bunny"


    Hobbes you seem to be using the same arguement to a degree as you did with the diplomats letter thread. whatever your views of the author isn't it concievable that she raises some points? It doesn't matter if she understands why something happens one way or the other, or even that she may not know how to cure the problem. I don't need to be a mechanic to know my car won't start. I don't need to know why it won't start or how to fix it, i just need to know to call a mechanic.
    What is suggested is not how to fix things but rather there are some thing that need to be fixed and we possibly need to look at the problems from a different angle than we are at present.

    the original post
    "These are facts, but they are not immutable truths," says Williams. "It's not too late to change the way our world works. Some of the facts need major shifts in thinking, while others require governments to start taking their responsibilities seriously. Neither of these will be easy to achieve, but if we don't try they'll never happen."

    it’s an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the union, where rich candidates pay $35 for your votes. Or, as Republicans call it, their vision for the future.

  8. The Drawing Room   -   #8
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    hobbes

    The source appears to be The Mirror, one of our redtop tabloids. In essence a comic as opposed to a newspaper. The author is identified as Matt Roper, tho' you will be as aware as I that Matt Roper could well be just a name used by them when publishing trite tripe like this.

    It is classic "fill a slow news day" material. It is the written equivalent of "library photograph".

  9. The Drawing Room   -   #9
    Originally posted by J'Pol@7 May 2004 - 09:37
    hobbes

    The source appears to be The Mirror, one of our redtop tabloids. In essence a comic as opposed to a newspaper. The author is identified as Matt Roper, tho' you will be as aware as I that Matt Roper could well be just a name used by them when publishing trite tripe like this.

    It is classic "fill a slow news day" material. It is the written equivalent of "library photograph".
    Jpol,

    It is a book written by Jessica Williams, but it makes sense that a tabloid would do a feature on this silliness.



    Hard-hitting facts and incisive analysis in this vivid picture of the inequalities and absurdities of our world.

    "A fearless and compelling work. You need to know what's in this book." Monica Ali, author Brick Lane


    Order Here



    Vidcc, I must say that the author has an excellent grasp of the obvious. Sorry, I stole that from the late Howard Cosell.



    I was a wee bit on the grumpy side last night, I must admit, in rereading this thread today.
    Aren't we in the trust tree, thingey?

  10. The Drawing Room   -   #10
    vidcc's Avatar there is no god
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    Originally posted by J'Pol@7 May 2004 - 00:37
    hobbes

    The source appears to be The Mirror, one of our redtop tabloids. In essence a comic as opposed to a newspaper. The author is identified as Matt Roper, tho' you will be as aware as I that Matt Roper could well be just a name used by them when publishing trite tripe like this.

    It is classic "fill a slow news day" material. It is the written equivalent of "library photograph".
    there you go with that superiority complex again When i lived in England my daily paper was the telegraph, however one has to register to be able to read the online version so i tend to use the "open source" papers to find story sources so people can actually read the source without having to register.
    so pointing out that things such as Landmines kill or maim one person every hour or that almost 30 million Africans are HIV-positive. By 2050 the disease may have claimed as many as 280 million lives is "trite"?

    i agree the story would be a "filler" but...so what...are you denying that anything published in a tabloid could be true or factual ?. You have failed to contribute anything of any worth to this thread, please go away and don't return until you can come up with something constructive to say about the issues


    Hobbes, i sometimes view you as the rabbit guarding the cave in monty pythons holy grail however i always thought you tried to bring balance to your posts but here you seem more intent on attacking the authors credibility than the issues raised ( are you running for congress? ). I haven't read the book so i don't know what her suggested solutions are if any, but if you feel you could come up with better ideas than the author to help improve certain issues then please feel free to do so, i would love to read them (this is a genuine request and not sarcasm) I pointed out about the deaths on the road that you quoted. We shouldn't accept this figure because cars give us freedom, we will never stop all deaths but we could reduce the number significantly without giving up our cars.
    We both know there are some "fluffy" points but there are some darn disturbing points as well.
    I don't live in a perfect world, i know this all too well, however to quote the article again
    "These are facts, but they are not immutable truths," says Williams. "It's not too late to change the way our world works. Some of the facts need major shifts in thinking, while others require governments to start taking their responsibilities seriously. Neither of these will be easy to achieve, but if we don't try they'll never happen."
    Even from "barbie" i think that statement has sensible though behind it.

    it’s an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the union, where rich candidates pay $35 for your votes. Or, as Republicans call it, their vision for the future.

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