Yinxing Township Central Primary School,

Safe for the first time

Singing from the playground

fills an empty Beichuan sky,

The hardened troops

cheer like schoolboys

This one is alive!

-

The men in white helmets

work without delay,

to reach a silenced cry

they heard on Saturday.

-

“It’s coming from the birds”

says a man wiping dirt from his eyes,

It happened during school time,

“It’s only the birds!” he cries.

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1

The Saddest King

by Christopher Wormell

102

Once there was a country where the people were always happy. They would smile and laugh when the sun shone down, when it poured with rain and even when the snow fell and their teeth were chattering. Nothing ever made them sad or cross.

But this is the story of a small boy who breaks the law. He cries! He is taken straight to the King who, it is said, is the happiest person in the land. Can the boy convince the King that it’s all right to be sad sometimes?

This billboard was displayed all over Milan for fashion week.

Here is a very moving interview with Caro (English)

Here is another (Italian)

This billboard features Isabelle Caro, a 27-year old French woman with anorexia. She weighs just 31 kilos and has suffered from anorexia since she was 13.

–

Caro says,

I’ve hidden myself and covered myself for too long. Now I want to show myself fearlessly, even though I know my body arouses repugnance. I want to recover because I love life and the riches of the universe. I want to show young people how dangerous this illness is.

The 30,000 - 40,000 people with anorexia in France are mostly women

PLEASE KEEP READING …

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It does not fortify my soul in the least to know that after I die all unmarried men will still be bachelors, that 37 will still be a prime number, that the stars will continue to shine, and that forever I will have been just what I am now. Away with these fake immortalities! They mean nothing to the heart. Better to say with Bertrand Russell: “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.**

**Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, New York: Quill, 1983.

EXCELLENCE AS A GUIDE TO EDUCATIONAL CONVERSATION

by Nel Noddings Stanford University

When people use the slogan, “All children can learn,” what exactly do they mean? Many probably mean that children of all minority and oppressed groups can learn as well as those of the privileged and dominant classes. Used this way, the slogan is a reminder to treat all students with respect and to promote their growth equally…

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For farmers this is devastating. For us city-slickers it depresses us to watch our garden’s wilt away. We don’t like our rushed, short showers… We anxiously await even further water restrictions….

But for over one billion people this is not even imaginable. Their reality is incomparable. Each day 4,000 children die as a consequence of drinking contaminated water. 2.4 billion people have no access to proper sanitation facilities. Half of the hospital beds in developing countries are occupied by people suffering from sanitation and water-related diseases.

some important links: the recent World Water Day

UN Water initiative, THE BIG ISSUE on Health: SANITATION

The Tragedy

Pablo Picasso 1903.

Peter Singer argues that the injustice of some people living in abundance while others starve is morally indefensible. Singer proposes that anyone able to help the poor should donate part of their income to aid poverty and similar efforts. Singer reasons that, when one is already living comfortably, a further purchase to increase comfort will lack the same moral importance as saving another person’s life.

Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”
Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 229-243

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From the radio script for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn’t the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

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