Edward Humes Quotes
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We are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.
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Instead of spending the time and the money and the manpower on the front end, when children first transgress - and when they can be helped and guided and set straight - we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.
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The fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.
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They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.
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Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.
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These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.
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That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.
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Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.
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Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal.
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He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?
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Recycling trash, on the other hand, has a lower environmental impact and pound for pound, can save more energy than burning the same trash produces. Recycling aluminum cans, for instance, saves a whopping 96 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from bauxite ore. Recycling glass jars and bottles saves 21 percent of the energy needed to make new glass, recycling newsprint saves 45 percent, and recycling plastic beverage bottles saves 76 percent (other plastic types differ in the percentages, but the energy savings are there, too).
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Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?
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There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.
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Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what’s up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.
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If a proposition cannot be falsified, it is not scientific.
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It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.
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We’re putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.
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Science, at least as it has been practiced for the last century or two, begins by assembling facts—the data—and then seeks an overarching theory to unify and explain those facts. Whether it’s the big bang theory or plate tectonics or germ theory, from the cosmic to the microscopic, the approach is the same. Ignoring or denying inconvenient facts is not permitted. Trying to uncover facts that disprove a treasured theory is encouraged. This is part of the modern scientific method, which holds that theories should be subjected to rigorous attempts to prove them false before they become widely accepted (or discarded as incorrect). In the law, however, the process works in exactly the opposite direction.
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Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first century America and the world.
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Refusing things - and, specifically, disposable things - should not be confused with sacrifice, she says. Once upon a time, it used to require a sacrifice to buy something. You saved up, you gave up things you might want just so you could put enough money aside to purchase something big or long-lasting or vital. Now, she says, people tend to think the sacrifice is not buying. That's one reason we are swimming in waste, Bea says. In her view, not buying is never a sacrifice, It's a way of saving up for something really important, or saving time, or saving the planet. Or all three.
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Natural selection may be unconscious but, as Darwin and his successors made clear, it is the opposite of a random force. It can drive changes in an organism in a very linear, per sis tent fashion—as had been observed in the laboratory, in nature, and in simulations such as the one that modeled eye evolution. Denton was wrong about evolution’s being one big lottery. The correct analogy would be a game of darts in which the players cannot see the target. Some darts will find their mark while the majority will miss—a random process. But the rules of the game eliminate all but the best-thrown darts. Because nature tosses an im mense number of darts—the mutation rate in any single gene in an organism will run in the millions—natural selection has plenty of well-targeted darts to choose from, and the march toward new and complex forms is not so difficult to understand, after all. But presenting an accurate meta phor would not have supported an attack on evolution.
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In other words, science and religion occupied two separate spheres; in the pope’s view, Darwin might have explained where the human body came from, but that had nothing to do with the spiritual and divine aspects of human existence.
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But science is not a democracy. Science is a brutal arena where ideas are picked apart, attacked, and tested to see if they hold up. Those that do hold up live to fight another day. Those that don’t are dragged off and discarded. To survive, a theory must be supported by vibrant, meaningful, replicable research.
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Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.