This seems clear enough
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU5YmYwNGE1ODAxN2VhMDRhOTBjNGQwNmY4Njk0YzQ=
this 2006 piece by Bruce Thornton (or, actually, just about any piece by Bruce Thornton). Every word should be memorized, but this is particularly relevant to the thinking behind the language purge:
[S]ome Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist assumptions and multicultural “we are the world” sentimentalism, wave away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior to any and every cause except the one that counts: spiritual belief. So we hear that the violence is caused by a lack of jobs, or a lack of liberal-democratic institutions, or “frustration” and insecurity about the dismal backwardness of most Muslim states, or wounded pride in the face of Western success, or resentment of Western imperialist and colonialist sins, or oppressive autocrats, or . . . take your pick. The same therapeutic mentality that thinks destructive behavior in teens results from a “lack of self-esteem” reduces the religious values of Muslims to mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxists see it, symptoms of some underlying condition rooted in material deprivation, political impotence, or psychological trauma.
The problem with Islam, however, is not a lack of self-esteem but too damned much. This is a faith fanatically certain of its truth and righteousness, the culminating vision of God’s relations with humanity, the ultimate meaning of human existence on every level, including the social and political. As such, its destiny is to spread over the whole world until the benefits, both in this life and the next, of submission to God are bestowed on all humans, and the dysfunctional man-made values–– including democracy, materialism, “equal rights,” and freedom–– are swept away. For however alluring, these do not deliver true happiness or true freedom, but mere hedonism and license that create misery and degradation in this world, and put the soul at risk in the next.
If, then, you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely certain holds the key to universal happiness in this world and the next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should you tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you “live and let live,” the credo of the spiritually moribund who stand for everything because they stand for nothing? And why wouldn’t you kill in the name of this vision, when the infidel nations work against God’s will and his beneficent intentions for the human race?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Congress can even fuck up anything.
Now it is food. I've been watching this.
As VDH said something like-My grandfather put half his acreage in production as a fuel resource for his horse. Now 100 years later we have half our agriculture growing fuel, doesn't make sense"
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTBiOTY2ZTAyMWQwYTJkMDIwMmFiZGY4YzAxM2VkNjc=
April 24, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
Global Food RiotsMade in Washington, D.C.By Deroy Murdock
To draw a phrase from the late, great William F. Buckley Jr.’s words as he founded National Review, someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled — NOW — before ethanol wreaks further havoc.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’s April 12 ouster. Haitians are sick and tired of food prices that are 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry man.”
Climbing corn prices have ignited Mexican tortilla riots. Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan — potential Muslim powder kegs — have also violently protested premium prices for basic staples. Similar instability has erupted from the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. Resurrecting the defeated “import substitution” model of yore, India and Vietnam are among the nations that lately have prohibited grain exports and imposed government price controls. Kazakhstan, Earth’s No. 5 wheat source, just halted wheat exports, hoping to hoard local supplies. One third of the global wheat market is now closed.
High oil prices and growing global food demand fan these flames, but government lit the match. Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate (5.75 percent of gasoline and diesel by 2010; 10 percent expected in 2020), America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022, including 15 billion from corn) have turned corn farms into cash cows. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn to motors rather than to mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.
Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed (which consumed 40 percent of 2007’s 13 billion bushel U.S. corn crop) has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them. (For details, click here.)
All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo. On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “
As crops are sold for alternative-energy production, food prices have soared: The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”
As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year” — assuming 1.2 pounds of grain each, daily.
In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people. That has to hurt.
“There is growing consensus that we need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda April 10, urging discussion of the issue at July’s G8 Summit in Hokkaido. “Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing,” Brown added.
President Bush announced April 14 that the U.S. would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.
If this keeps up, President Bush may have to direct some of that food to a Western Hemisphere nation called the United States of America.
As shocking as it sounds, The New York Sun reported Monday that the global rice shortage has struck home. American citizens have begun to experience food rationing in our rich, blessed country.
“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” read a sign above a shrinking rice supply at a Mountain View, California Costco store. Each customer was limited to one bag of rice. A shopper who tried to buy two bags found one of them pried from his hands and thrown back on the store shelves, in something akin to Cuban-style egalitarianism. While such scenes have yet to erupt nationwide, the Sun found that limited stocks of rice, flour, and cooking oil are causing purchase limits and hoarding by consumers trying to lock in today’s high prices (fearing even higher future prices) or simply to acquire products that soon may be unavailable.
But wait. There’s more.It would be bad enough if this human suffering and geopolitical strife were ethanol’s ransom for dramatic environmental progress. In fact, ethanol is Earth-hostile.
According to the Hoover Institution’s Henry Miller and University of California Davis professor Colin Carter, “ethanol yields about 30 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so miles per gallon in internal combustion engines drops significantly.”
It takes three to six gallons of water to grow the corn for one gallon of ethanol, thus draining rivers and reservoirs.
As farmers turn forests into corn fields, they expend energy uprooting trees that produce oxygen, absorb CO2, and store carbon. Princeton University researchers calculate that this ethanol-driven arboricide has spawned a “carbon debt” that already will take 167 years to reverse.
As Princeton’s Tim Searchinger said in the February 8 Washington Post, “We can’t get to a result, no matter how heroically we make assumptions on behalf of corn ethanol, where it will actually generate greenhouse-gas benefits.”
Meanwhile, tree killing consumes wildlife habitat. Orangutans now are in jeopardy as their surroundings fall to new, ethanol-inspired palm-oil plantations.
Nitrogen fertilizer, common in corn cultivation, yields nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas — which is no laughing matter. As Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and his scientific team concluded in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics last August 1, “the relatively large emission of N2O exacerbates the already huge challenge of getting global warming under control.”
Unless superior substitutes emerge, obeying Congress’ 2022 diktat will require a corn crop equal to 115 percent of 2007’s U.S. output, with every kernel going to ethanol, none for food. The consequences would be calamitous — from movies without popcorn, to over-farmed and under-rotated fields, to growing global starvation.
It gets worse.
As Eric Peters explained in the March 3 American Spectator, ethanol is simply ethyl alcohol. Unfortunately, “Alcohol fuels may constitute a new type of fire hazard because they are harder to extinguish than gasoline fires and require new types of fire-extinguishing equipment and training.” Peters added:
The fires are extremely hot, and the flames invisible. . . . Foams designed to combat alcohol fires are made using specific polymers that can smother the flames of an ethanol fire but carry a price tag about 30 percent higher than conventional flame-suppressing foams.
That means your local fire department has a new line item on the budget.
Enough!
Congress should abolish federal ethanol subsidies, mandates, and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imports — including Brazil’s cheaper, cleaner, sugar-based ethanol. If scientists can develop ethanol that neither starves people nor rapes the Earth, splendid. However, this enterprise must not rest upon morally repugnant, ecologically counterproductive, economically devastating, government-ordered distortions.
It’s time for emergency legislation to repeal ethanol-market meddling. The federal program began as a sop to U.S. grain growers — arguably the most pampered and endlessly entitled people this side of the Saudi royal family. It has grown into a cancer on global food markets. Still, U.S. farmers won’t surrender quietly. Since they are hooked on handouts, let’s offer them one more: In exchange for accepting a two-year federal tax holiday on any income they earn, every actual, tractor-driving corn/biofuel farmer simply would walk away and let Congress relegate state-sponsored ethanol to the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame. Compared to the global chaos that ethanol is fueling, this is a tolerable, one-time investment to pry these farmers’ and their Washington enablers’ hands off of our necks.© 2008 Scripps Howard News Service — Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.
As VDH said something like-My grandfather put half his acreage in production as a fuel resource for his horse. Now 100 years later we have half our agriculture growing fuel, doesn't make sense"
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTBiOTY2ZTAyMWQwYTJkMDIwMmFiZGY4YzAxM2VkNjc=
April 24, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
Global Food RiotsMade in Washington, D.C.By Deroy Murdock
To draw a phrase from the late, great William F. Buckley Jr.’s words as he founded National Review, someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled — NOW — before ethanol wreaks further havoc.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’s April 12 ouster. Haitians are sick and tired of food prices that are 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry man.”
Climbing corn prices have ignited Mexican tortilla riots. Enraged citizens in Egypt and Pakistan — potential Muslim powder kegs — have also violently protested premium prices for basic staples. Similar instability has erupted from the Ivory Coast to Indonesia. Resurrecting the defeated “import substitution” model of yore, India and Vietnam are among the nations that lately have prohibited grain exports and imposed government price controls. Kazakhstan, Earth’s No. 5 wheat source, just halted wheat exports, hoping to hoard local supplies. One third of the global wheat market is now closed.
High oil prices and growing global food demand fan these flames, but government lit the match. Atop the European Union’s biofuels mandate (5.75 percent of gasoline and diesel by 2010; 10 percent expected in 2020), America’s 51-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax subsidy (2007 cost: $8 billion) and Congress’ 7.5-billion-gallon annual production quota (rising to 36 billion in 2022, including 15 billion from corn) have turned corn farms into cash cows. Diverting one quarter of U.S. corn to motors rather than to mouths has boosted prices 74 percent in a year.
Eager to ride the ethanol gravy train, wheat and soybean farmers increasingly switch to corn. Thus, hard wheat is up 86 percent, while soybeans cost 93 percent more. Since April 15, 2007, pricier, grain-based animal feed (which consumed 40 percent of 2007’s 13 billion bushel U.S. corn crop) has helped hike eggs 46 percent. Got milk? You paid 26 percent more. Conversely, meat prices have dropped, as farmers slaughter animals rather than pay so much to feed them. (For details, click here.)
All this has triggered a race to the top of the grain silo. On April 9, “the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction,” the Wall Street Journal noted the next day. “
As crops are sold for alternative-energy production, food prices have soared: The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year.”
As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year” — assuming 1.2 pounds of grain each, daily.
In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people. That has to hurt.
“There is growing consensus that we need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda April 10, urging discussion of the issue at July’s G8 Summit in Hokkaido. “Rising food prices threaten to roll back progress we have made in recent years on development. For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing,” Brown added.
President Bush announced April 14 that the U.S. would provide $200 million in nutritional aid to poor countries ripped by such unrest. This may feed starving rioters, but it perversely requires that Uncle Sam allocate fresh taxpayer money to scour the mess he created by spending $8 billion in ethanol subsidies.This is like buying a new hangover cure every morning after closing a new bar every night.
If this keeps up, President Bush may have to direct some of that food to a Western Hemisphere nation called the United States of America.
As shocking as it sounds, The New York Sun reported Monday that the global rice shortage has struck home. American citizens have begun to experience food rationing in our rich, blessed country.
“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” read a sign above a shrinking rice supply at a Mountain View, California Costco store. Each customer was limited to one bag of rice. A shopper who tried to buy two bags found one of them pried from his hands and thrown back on the store shelves, in something akin to Cuban-style egalitarianism. While such scenes have yet to erupt nationwide, the Sun found that limited stocks of rice, flour, and cooking oil are causing purchase limits and hoarding by consumers trying to lock in today’s high prices (fearing even higher future prices) or simply to acquire products that soon may be unavailable.
But wait. There’s more.It would be bad enough if this human suffering and geopolitical strife were ethanol’s ransom for dramatic environmental progress. In fact, ethanol is Earth-hostile.
According to the Hoover Institution’s Henry Miller and University of California Davis professor Colin Carter, “ethanol yields about 30 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so miles per gallon in internal combustion engines drops significantly.”
It takes three to six gallons of water to grow the corn for one gallon of ethanol, thus draining rivers and reservoirs.
As farmers turn forests into corn fields, they expend energy uprooting trees that produce oxygen, absorb CO2, and store carbon. Princeton University researchers calculate that this ethanol-driven arboricide has spawned a “carbon debt” that already will take 167 years to reverse.
As Princeton’s Tim Searchinger said in the February 8 Washington Post, “We can’t get to a result, no matter how heroically we make assumptions on behalf of corn ethanol, where it will actually generate greenhouse-gas benefits.”
Meanwhile, tree killing consumes wildlife habitat. Orangutans now are in jeopardy as their surroundings fall to new, ethanol-inspired palm-oil plantations.
Nitrogen fertilizer, common in corn cultivation, yields nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas — which is no laughing matter. As Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and his scientific team concluded in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics last August 1, “the relatively large emission of N2O exacerbates the already huge challenge of getting global warming under control.”
Unless superior substitutes emerge, obeying Congress’ 2022 diktat will require a corn crop equal to 115 percent of 2007’s U.S. output, with every kernel going to ethanol, none for food. The consequences would be calamitous — from movies without popcorn, to over-farmed and under-rotated fields, to growing global starvation.
It gets worse.
As Eric Peters explained in the March 3 American Spectator, ethanol is simply ethyl alcohol. Unfortunately, “Alcohol fuels may constitute a new type of fire hazard because they are harder to extinguish than gasoline fires and require new types of fire-extinguishing equipment and training.” Peters added:
The fires are extremely hot, and the flames invisible. . . . Foams designed to combat alcohol fires are made using specific polymers that can smother the flames of an ethanol fire but carry a price tag about 30 percent higher than conventional flame-suppressing foams.
That means your local fire department has a new line item on the budget.
Enough!
Congress should abolish federal ethanol subsidies, mandates, and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imports — including Brazil’s cheaper, cleaner, sugar-based ethanol. If scientists can develop ethanol that neither starves people nor rapes the Earth, splendid. However, this enterprise must not rest upon morally repugnant, ecologically counterproductive, economically devastating, government-ordered distortions.
It’s time for emergency legislation to repeal ethanol-market meddling. The federal program began as a sop to U.S. grain growers — arguably the most pampered and endlessly entitled people this side of the Saudi royal family. It has grown into a cancer on global food markets. Still, U.S. farmers won’t surrender quietly. Since they are hooked on handouts, let’s offer them one more: In exchange for accepting a two-year federal tax holiday on any income they earn, every actual, tractor-driving corn/biofuel farmer simply would walk away and let Congress relegate state-sponsored ethanol to the Unintended Consequences Hall of Fame. Compared to the global chaos that ethanol is fueling, this is a tolerable, one-time investment to pry these farmers’ and their Washington enablers’ hands off of our necks.© 2008 Scripps Howard News Service — Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
More on CFL Bulbs
Well derr, see below...................
How about this wrinkle.
Houses last like 100+ years normally.
How much mercury will be contaminating a house over 100 years with CFL bulbs. Say one broken bulb every 4 years......
that is 25 light bulbs worth if mercury polluting the place. Who wants to raise their kids in that??
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/19/green-shock-cfls-more-dangerous-than-first-thought/
Green shock: CFLs more dangerous than first thought
posted at 8:32 pm on March 19, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
The compact fluorescent lightbulb has plenty of supporters in the environmental movement, even while concerns have grown about their disposal. CFLs contain mercury, and when the glass breaks, it spreads the toxic dust in the area. Boosters had previously dismissed concerns over the issue, but now researches worry about the collective effect their massive disposal will have on landfills once they start failing in large numbers:
Compact fluorescent light bulbs, long touted by environmentalists as a more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to the incandescent bulbs that have lighted homes for more than a century, are running into resistance from waste industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs’ poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought. …
As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.
“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.
Even a single CFL could provide toxic levels of exposure for mercury. One contains five milligrams of mercury, which would be enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water. Low-mercury models have about one-sixth of the amount, but that’s still enough to contaminate 1,000 gallons. It makes the CFL one of the most toxic components of a household, one that causes kidney and brain damage when people get exposed to enough of it.
What happens when an incandescent bulb hits the floor? Simple: sweep it up, and try not to step on a shard of glass with bare feet. Here’s how people need to handle a broken CFL:
1. Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
2. Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
3. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
4. Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
5. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes and place them in the glass jar or plastic bag.
6. Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
7. Immediately place all cleanup materials outside the building in a trash container or outdoor protected area for the next normal trash.
8. Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing cleanup materials.
9. Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states prohibit such trash disposal and require that broken and unbroken lamps be taken to a recycling center.
10. For at least the next few times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window prior to vacuuming.
11. Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.
Er, that’s quite a commitment for a lightbulb. I have several of these around the house, and I had no idea that a break could require such an intense cleanup. Like others who bought these products, I hoped to save a little energy and drive down replacement costs.
And guess what — I can’t even throw these in the garbage, broken or unbroken. As MS-NBC reports, Minnesota requires that I take any CFLs to a disposal center certified to handle them. I didn’t know that until tonight, and I have no idea where such a center might be. It does make sense, though, considering the disposal issues involving mercury.
In other words, we have opted for a product that has much more impact on our environment and could turn households into toxic-waste sites to replace a product that uses a little more energy, a change driven ironically by environmentalists. What’s next — lead containers to replace Tupperware?
How about this wrinkle.
Houses last like 100+ years normally.
How much mercury will be contaminating a house over 100 years with CFL bulbs. Say one broken bulb every 4 years......
that is 25 light bulbs worth if mercury polluting the place. Who wants to raise their kids in that??
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/19/green-shock-cfls-more-dangerous-than-first-thought/
Green shock: CFLs more dangerous than first thought
posted at 8:32 pm on March 19, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
The compact fluorescent lightbulb has plenty of supporters in the environmental movement, even while concerns have grown about their disposal. CFLs contain mercury, and when the glass breaks, it spreads the toxic dust in the area. Boosters had previously dismissed concerns over the issue, but now researches worry about the collective effect their massive disposal will have on landfills once they start failing in large numbers:
Compact fluorescent light bulbs, long touted by environmentalists as a more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to the incandescent bulbs that have lighted homes for more than a century, are running into resistance from waste industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs’ poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought. …
As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.
“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.
Even a single CFL could provide toxic levels of exposure for mercury. One contains five milligrams of mercury, which would be enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water. Low-mercury models have about one-sixth of the amount, but that’s still enough to contaminate 1,000 gallons. It makes the CFL one of the most toxic components of a household, one that causes kidney and brain damage when people get exposed to enough of it.
What happens when an incandescent bulb hits the floor? Simple: sweep it up, and try not to step on a shard of glass with bare feet. Here’s how people need to handle a broken CFL:
1. Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
2. Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
3. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
4. Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
5. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes and place them in the glass jar or plastic bag.
6. Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
7. Immediately place all cleanup materials outside the building in a trash container or outdoor protected area for the next normal trash.
8. Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing cleanup materials.
9. Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states prohibit such trash disposal and require that broken and unbroken lamps be taken to a recycling center.
10. For at least the next few times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window prior to vacuuming.
11. Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.
Er, that’s quite a commitment for a lightbulb. I have several of these around the house, and I had no idea that a break could require such an intense cleanup. Like others who bought these products, I hoped to save a little energy and drive down replacement costs.
And guess what — I can’t even throw these in the garbage, broken or unbroken. As MS-NBC reports, Minnesota requires that I take any CFLs to a disposal center certified to handle them. I didn’t know that until tonight, and I have no idea where such a center might be. It does make sense, though, considering the disposal issues involving mercury.
In other words, we have opted for a product that has much more impact on our environment and could turn households into toxic-waste sites to replace a product that uses a little more energy, a change driven ironically by environmentalists. What’s next — lead containers to replace Tupperware?
Friday, March 7, 2008
polygamist asshats
put this in usa is going to sh8t catagory
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MThlZGU3MmI1OTAyNWM3ZTUyN2JlMDMxOGM1YWNhZDM=&w=MA==
March 07, 2008, 8:00 a.m.A Polygamist State of MindUnacceptable behavior in New York.By Lisa Schiffren
Big-city tabloids love puppies, kittens, almost-naked women, and babies. It’s a cliché of downmarket journalism that editors should take any opportunity to print pictures of any of the above. So perhaps my fear of creeping sharia practice right here in the Big Apple constitutes reading too much into what could be a perfectly innocent story in this past Sunday’s New York Post, accompanied with a full page of pictures, about a Malian immigrant named Moussa Magassa and his pair of two-month-old infant sons.
The adorable babies, each one shown being held by his mother, are noteworthy because a year ago — March 7, 2007 — Moussa’s house in a Bronx neighborhood full of West African immigrants burned, tragically killing four of his children (as well as another woman and her child). Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral and went all out to comfort the bereaved and mitigate the family’s suffering. As the city joined Mr. Magassa in mourning such a grave loss, it slowly became clear that, in the building he owned, he had been housing his two wives and their offspring. This seemed a little shocking at the time, though no one was rude enough to point out that polygamy isn’t legal in New York — or anywhere in this country. Those convicted of bigamy in New York can be sentenced to four years in prison.
A couple of weeks after the fire, the New York Times ran a front-page story explaining that there is now a full-blown culture of polygamous West African immigrants, most of them here illegally, who keep importing young, mostly illiterate, and therefore powerless brides from the villages of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. It’s all very hush-hush.
The women involved may be miserable, but they cannot risk complaining, since they can easily be divorced, kicked out of the community, and stranded. Because they are here illegally and their marriages are not valid in the United States (though they can serve as grounds for deportation of a polygamous husband), the women effectively have no rights. So they often put up with brutal conditions. Among other things, sharing a cramped New York apartment with 11 kids and another woman is far more likely to lead to, say, domestic violence than living in neighboring huts in a traditional village.
The Times’s exceptionally well-researched story said that social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye. The men speak for their wives. By quoting women who have left such marriages after abuse and misery, the story suggested that perhaps polygamy wasn’t quite as benign a multi-culti variant of our own cozy little practices as was being portrayed. Suffice it to say, however, that the story caused no changes in New York’s policies.
In any event, now that a year has passed since the fire, the Post decided to catch up with Moussa Magassa and his family, which is growing again. Manthia, 36, the mother of the four dead children, gave birth on January 4 to a son. Aisse, 25, gave birth to twins the very next day at the same hospital. (One of the twins, the girl, died a few weeks later.) But Mr. Magassa’s family is also growing in another way: Lo and behold, in the interim, he has taken an additional wife — and now lives with all three. The new, youngest one is named Niekale.
I am trying to think like the liberal legal scholars, anthropologists, and activists, and consider honestly — not just as a matter of my bourgeois, Judeo-Christian, American, female prejudices — what the merits of polygamy might be, now that my neighbors could be practicing it with impunity sometime soon.
To be sure, in the Post’s pictures of the Magassa women, none of them look happy. In their chadors, with their full faces revealed, they look sad and resigned, while their graying husband appears to be chortling with glee. Advocates for polygamy tell us that it breeds sororal feeling among the wives, and while it may engender normal human jealousy, it also provides domestic support and more hands to lighten the load at home. But I am wondering how that goes in the Magassa family.
After all, with two wives out of commission due to pregnancy, it would have been up to the newest one, Niekale, to do the housework, take care of the others’ offspring, and service the lord and master in bed. Would that be a sexual triumph? Or an unpleasant burden? And what of the other two? It’s bad enough to know that their beloved husband impregnated both of them within days of each other. That sure could make a girl feel just a bit less special when she should be glowing with pregnancy. Knowing that the babies are an assembly-line production might shatter the kind of emotional high that I, for one, cherished when producing my own babies, with their father there in the delivery room — not shuttling off to visit yesterday’s batch.
The Magassa arrangement illustrates perfectly the benefits and drawbacks of polygamy. As a utilitarian matter, polygamy produces more legitimate offspring from a given male, since he can impregnate many women simultaneously.
The Magassas got three new lives in a matter of two days, bringing the total number of children up to nine. Back in Mali that would have been useful labor on the farm. In New York, of course, it’s a cost that taxpayers may end up bearing.
The drawback is also apparent. Whatever the current feelings of the participants, such marriages are not love matches. According to the Times story, the women do not come to them freely, nor is any wife an equal partner with her husband. She has, at most, one-third the status that he does — usually much less — and little or no bargaining power. Given the customs of their culture, even when these women are allowed to work outside the home, they are often forced to turn their earnings over to their husband, leaving them essentially working as slave labor.
And those nine children, at least some of whom are American by birth — what do they learn of being free citizens in a democracy from the values they imbibe in this familial structure? The boys become autocrats; the girls become servants. They will never be free men and women, equal and responsible. It’s a longer argument for another day, but allowing this barbaric import to thrive in the U.S. will undermine all the advances that women have made in the past 150 years with regard to education, financial independence, and political and sexual equality. Polygamy, like slavery itself, cannot co-exist with true democracy.
It’s time for the Magassas to be sent home, and for an example to be made so we can avoid the situation the French find themselves in. France has so many people living in polygamous families — somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 — that politicians are powerless to rein in the practice, since the polygamists can vote and riot, and they have the critical mass in their own neighborhoods to elect their own representatives. Nor do they assimilate. If we allow the same thing to occur here, the next thing you know, parts of the United States will live under sharia law. Failure to prosecute is an invitation to just that.
— Lisa Schiffren is a writer and GOP speechwriter living in New York.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MThlZGU3MmI1OTAyNWM3ZTUyN2JlMDMxOGM1YWNhZDM=&w=MA==
March 07, 2008, 8:00 a.m.A Polygamist State of MindUnacceptable behavior in New York.By Lisa Schiffren
Big-city tabloids love puppies, kittens, almost-naked women, and babies. It’s a cliché of downmarket journalism that editors should take any opportunity to print pictures of any of the above. So perhaps my fear of creeping sharia practice right here in the Big Apple constitutes reading too much into what could be a perfectly innocent story in this past Sunday’s New York Post, accompanied with a full page of pictures, about a Malian immigrant named Moussa Magassa and his pair of two-month-old infant sons.
The adorable babies, each one shown being held by his mother, are noteworthy because a year ago — March 7, 2007 — Moussa’s house in a Bronx neighborhood full of West African immigrants burned, tragically killing four of his children (as well as another woman and her child). Mayor Bloomberg attended the funeral and went all out to comfort the bereaved and mitigate the family’s suffering. As the city joined Mr. Magassa in mourning such a grave loss, it slowly became clear that, in the building he owned, he had been housing his two wives and their offspring. This seemed a little shocking at the time, though no one was rude enough to point out that polygamy isn’t legal in New York — or anywhere in this country. Those convicted of bigamy in New York can be sentenced to four years in prison.
A couple of weeks after the fire, the New York Times ran a front-page story explaining that there is now a full-blown culture of polygamous West African immigrants, most of them here illegally, who keep importing young, mostly illiterate, and therefore powerless brides from the villages of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. It’s all very hush-hush.
The women involved may be miserable, but they cannot risk complaining, since they can easily be divorced, kicked out of the community, and stranded. Because they are here illegally and their marriages are not valid in the United States (though they can serve as grounds for deportation of a polygamous husband), the women effectively have no rights. So they often put up with brutal conditions. Among other things, sharing a cramped New York apartment with 11 kids and another woman is far more likely to lead to, say, domestic violence than living in neighboring huts in a traditional village.
The Times’s exceptionally well-researched story said that social-service workers have learned not to make an issue of polygamy in handing out benefits and guiding applicants, legal and otherwise, through the bureaucratic mazes of the welfare system. Doctors at hospitals turn a blind eye. The men speak for their wives. By quoting women who have left such marriages after abuse and misery, the story suggested that perhaps polygamy wasn’t quite as benign a multi-culti variant of our own cozy little practices as was being portrayed. Suffice it to say, however, that the story caused no changes in New York’s policies.
In any event, now that a year has passed since the fire, the Post decided to catch up with Moussa Magassa and his family, which is growing again. Manthia, 36, the mother of the four dead children, gave birth on January 4 to a son. Aisse, 25, gave birth to twins the very next day at the same hospital. (One of the twins, the girl, died a few weeks later.) But Mr. Magassa’s family is also growing in another way: Lo and behold, in the interim, he has taken an additional wife — and now lives with all three. The new, youngest one is named Niekale.
I am trying to think like the liberal legal scholars, anthropologists, and activists, and consider honestly — not just as a matter of my bourgeois, Judeo-Christian, American, female prejudices — what the merits of polygamy might be, now that my neighbors could be practicing it with impunity sometime soon.
To be sure, in the Post’s pictures of the Magassa women, none of them look happy. In their chadors, with their full faces revealed, they look sad and resigned, while their graying husband appears to be chortling with glee. Advocates for polygamy tell us that it breeds sororal feeling among the wives, and while it may engender normal human jealousy, it also provides domestic support and more hands to lighten the load at home. But I am wondering how that goes in the Magassa family.
After all, with two wives out of commission due to pregnancy, it would have been up to the newest one, Niekale, to do the housework, take care of the others’ offspring, and service the lord and master in bed. Would that be a sexual triumph? Or an unpleasant burden? And what of the other two? It’s bad enough to know that their beloved husband impregnated both of them within days of each other. That sure could make a girl feel just a bit less special when she should be glowing with pregnancy. Knowing that the babies are an assembly-line production might shatter the kind of emotional high that I, for one, cherished when producing my own babies, with their father there in the delivery room — not shuttling off to visit yesterday’s batch.
The Magassa arrangement illustrates perfectly the benefits and drawbacks of polygamy. As a utilitarian matter, polygamy produces more legitimate offspring from a given male, since he can impregnate many women simultaneously.
The Magassas got three new lives in a matter of two days, bringing the total number of children up to nine. Back in Mali that would have been useful labor on the farm. In New York, of course, it’s a cost that taxpayers may end up bearing.
The drawback is also apparent. Whatever the current feelings of the participants, such marriages are not love matches. According to the Times story, the women do not come to them freely, nor is any wife an equal partner with her husband. She has, at most, one-third the status that he does — usually much less — and little or no bargaining power. Given the customs of their culture, even when these women are allowed to work outside the home, they are often forced to turn their earnings over to their husband, leaving them essentially working as slave labor.
And those nine children, at least some of whom are American by birth — what do they learn of being free citizens in a democracy from the values they imbibe in this familial structure? The boys become autocrats; the girls become servants. They will never be free men and women, equal and responsible. It’s a longer argument for another day, but allowing this barbaric import to thrive in the U.S. will undermine all the advances that women have made in the past 150 years with regard to education, financial independence, and political and sexual equality. Polygamy, like slavery itself, cannot co-exist with true democracy.
It’s time for the Magassas to be sent home, and for an example to be made so we can avoid the situation the French find themselves in. France has so many people living in polygamous families — somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 — that politicians are powerless to rein in the practice, since the polygamists can vote and riot, and they have the critical mass in their own neighborhoods to elect their own representatives. Nor do they assimilate. If we allow the same thing to occur here, the next thing you know, parts of the United States will live under sharia law. Failure to prosecute is an invitation to just that.
— Lisa Schiffren is a writer and GOP speechwriter living in New York.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
interesting parental perspective here
wonder if the islamic immigrats go to classes?
Since they kill their teen daughters, I'm guessing they don't follow the corporal punishment rule.
http://www.thelocal.se/10282/20080305/
Swedish parenting: Back to a traditional future?
Published: 5 Mar 08 14:09 CETOnline: http://www.thelocal.se/10282/
Four years on from the start of the great “curling” and “helicopter” debates, the issue of parenting is back in the news. This time round, the focus has switched to the unprecedented popularity of state-sponsored parenting classes. Peter Vinthagen Simpson takes a closer look.
Kid-friendly Sweden aims to better record with parenting classes
(7 Jan 08) In the spring of 2004, Sweden was awash with debate about the growing prevalence of so-called “curling parents”. Drawing an analogy with the sport of curling, the phrase refers to parents who rush ahead of their children, frantically sweeping their path clean of even the most minor obstructions.
The phrase was coined by Danish child psychologist Bent Hougaard in a challenge to the perceived status quo. Parents had become slaves to their children, who ruled the roost, rejecting adult authority in all its forms.
The discourse was joined later by “helicopter parents,” a term describing parents who pay very close attention to their children, hovering around them at all times.
In recent months, parenting in Sweden has again been under the microscope, with some 20,000 parents turning to state-sponsored parenting courses for help last year. But the courses are controversial and experts fear a traditionalist backlash.
Critics argue that the courses signify the return of shaming and the naughty step. Advocates however contend that the courses, which focus on behaviour, work.
Is Sweden, proud of a more “enlightened”, cooperative approach to parenting, losing faith in itself and rediscovering a more “traditional”, hands-on approach to raising its children?
Lars H. Gustafsson, paediatrician and author of several books on children and youth, is critical of the broad application of parenting courses and writes that many of the methods taught in courses such as Komet and Cope are not suitable for the average family. Many of the methods are designed for families with serious problems and could be counterproductive when applied universally, he argues.
“I want to emphasize that I am positive to the idea that parents should meet and discuss parenting, but there should be more of a menu of courses that parents can choose between. It is the content that I react against. There is an important distinction between treatment therapy for families with serious problems and the majority of parents that can manage perfectly well,” says Gustafsson.
Agneta Hellström at Cope, just one of the courses available to parents in Sweden, argues that attitudes have changed over the past thirty years and that state-sponsored courses are not as controversial as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The courses are offered to parents and not imposed upon them. In my experience there has been a professionalization of parenthood. In the same way that the owner of a boat wishes to learn to sail, parents wish to learn to develop in their new roles. The courses are very much part of an 'empowerment programme' and it is the parents and not the course leader who shape the content.”
Gustafsson agrees that the courses are not as controversial and parents are less sceptical towards authorities today. “They should be though,” he warns, adding that “the recent vigorous media debate is perhaps an indication that there remains a healthy scepticism to being told by society how to be a parent.”
He reacts against the behaviour focus of many of the modern courses and would like to see courses focused more on “interplay,” “teamwork” and “parental dialogue.”
“Along the lines of a French language study circle.”
Methods such as “time out” and ignoring the child have been the focus of much of the debate. The “time out” method is argued by Gustafsson to be reminiscent of the “room arrest” that was once common in parenting. “Room arrest” was cited by the government in 1979 as an example of what could be considered a “prohibited violation of the rights of a child” and thus equivalent to the use of corporal punishment and thereby prohibited by the new legislation.
Sweden was the first country in the world to outlaw the corporal punishment of children, in 1979. In fact the right of parents to beat their children was removed in 1966.Hellström argues that the “time out” method has been misunderstood. The method, she emphasizes, should be used selectively and only to “break a vicious circle,” in extreme cases, such as when the child is hitting another child. “Time out is part of the 'positive reinforcement' taught in Cope's courses and does not mean room arrest,”
Hellström explains. “It is important that parents remain in control.
Time out is a so-called 'sharp tool' - a means of breaking a more negative situation and reinforcing a positive one,” she adds.
It was not until after the end of the Second World War that physical punishment and shaming began to be questioned as methods of parenting in Sweden, Gustafsson writes in 'The return of the naughty step.'
Children's author Astrid Lindgren created the characters of Pippi Longstocking, Emil, Madicken and Ronja and was influential in embedding new attitudes towards children and parenting in the Swedish popular self-identity that led to a re-think in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“I was part of the process to develop parenting courses in the beginning of the 1980s. The thought was that we would develop a three-stage process taking the child up to school age, but financial concerns came in the way. Even then we were careful to avoid the word 'education' and we went for 'parent groups' instead,” Gustafsson tells The Local.Hellström argues that today's parents are not familiar with the 1970s tradition and seek “concrete, pedagogical methods for improving their daily lives with their children.”
One such “concrete” method is the so-called “balance of trust.” Deposits are made, in the form of praise, gold stars or “quality time” and, later, withdrawals in the form of punishments. Hellström emphasizes that it is important to consider what we mean by punishment.
“If I turn off the TV because it is time for my child to get to bed is that really a punishment? - It doesn't fit the Swedish definition.”
Hellström compares this “balance of trust” to an employment contract that most adults at some point enter into. “Built on an agreement and most importantly, renegotiable”
The National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet) has developed parenting courses in a Swedish cultural context. Sven Bremberg at the institute explains to The Local that “foreign” methods such as “time out” have been consciously omitted from its new parenting course material which has an emphasis on “warmth and limits.”
The popularity of parental courses could be argued to be a result of a period of introspection by parents prompted by the curling and helicopter debates. So what of the children?
One might ask whether these parenting courses aren't more for the benefit of parents struggling to find a balance to “life's puzzle” in the high-stress, “I want it all” 2000s, than for their children. Children are one more piece of the puzzle needing to be effectively managed; squeezed in alongside a career, a rewarding social life and free-time activities. Hence the focus on controlling behaviour, or perhaps more accurately, output. Gustafsson agrees:
“The definition of normality has narrowed in today's society. That which was once considered normal is now considered to be deviant. Take sleep for example. Small children sleep badly, that's normal, but parents today live with such tight schedules they cannot run the risk of their child having a bad night's sleep.”
“I miss the children's perspective,” he concludes.
Since they kill their teen daughters, I'm guessing they don't follow the corporal punishment rule.
http://www.thelocal.se/10282/20080305/
Swedish parenting: Back to a traditional future?
Published: 5 Mar 08 14:09 CETOnline: http://www.thelocal.se/10282/
Four years on from the start of the great “curling” and “helicopter” debates, the issue of parenting is back in the news. This time round, the focus has switched to the unprecedented popularity of state-sponsored parenting classes. Peter Vinthagen Simpson takes a closer look.
Kid-friendly Sweden aims to better record with parenting classes
(7 Jan 08) In the spring of 2004, Sweden was awash with debate about the growing prevalence of so-called “curling parents”. Drawing an analogy with the sport of curling, the phrase refers to parents who rush ahead of their children, frantically sweeping their path clean of even the most minor obstructions.
The phrase was coined by Danish child psychologist Bent Hougaard in a challenge to the perceived status quo. Parents had become slaves to their children, who ruled the roost, rejecting adult authority in all its forms.
The discourse was joined later by “helicopter parents,” a term describing parents who pay very close attention to their children, hovering around them at all times.
In recent months, parenting in Sweden has again been under the microscope, with some 20,000 parents turning to state-sponsored parenting courses for help last year. But the courses are controversial and experts fear a traditionalist backlash.
Critics argue that the courses signify the return of shaming and the naughty step. Advocates however contend that the courses, which focus on behaviour, work.
Is Sweden, proud of a more “enlightened”, cooperative approach to parenting, losing faith in itself and rediscovering a more “traditional”, hands-on approach to raising its children?
Lars H. Gustafsson, paediatrician and author of several books on children and youth, is critical of the broad application of parenting courses and writes that many of the methods taught in courses such as Komet and Cope are not suitable for the average family. Many of the methods are designed for families with serious problems and could be counterproductive when applied universally, he argues.
“I want to emphasize that I am positive to the idea that parents should meet and discuss parenting, but there should be more of a menu of courses that parents can choose between. It is the content that I react against. There is an important distinction between treatment therapy for families with serious problems and the majority of parents that can manage perfectly well,” says Gustafsson.
Agneta Hellström at Cope, just one of the courses available to parents in Sweden, argues that attitudes have changed over the past thirty years and that state-sponsored courses are not as controversial as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The courses are offered to parents and not imposed upon them. In my experience there has been a professionalization of parenthood. In the same way that the owner of a boat wishes to learn to sail, parents wish to learn to develop in their new roles. The courses are very much part of an 'empowerment programme' and it is the parents and not the course leader who shape the content.”
Gustafsson agrees that the courses are not as controversial and parents are less sceptical towards authorities today. “They should be though,” he warns, adding that “the recent vigorous media debate is perhaps an indication that there remains a healthy scepticism to being told by society how to be a parent.”
He reacts against the behaviour focus of many of the modern courses and would like to see courses focused more on “interplay,” “teamwork” and “parental dialogue.”
“Along the lines of a French language study circle.”
Methods such as “time out” and ignoring the child have been the focus of much of the debate. The “time out” method is argued by Gustafsson to be reminiscent of the “room arrest” that was once common in parenting. “Room arrest” was cited by the government in 1979 as an example of what could be considered a “prohibited violation of the rights of a child” and thus equivalent to the use of corporal punishment and thereby prohibited by the new legislation.
Sweden was the first country in the world to outlaw the corporal punishment of children, in 1979. In fact the right of parents to beat their children was removed in 1966.Hellström argues that the “time out” method has been misunderstood. The method, she emphasizes, should be used selectively and only to “break a vicious circle,” in extreme cases, such as when the child is hitting another child. “Time out is part of the 'positive reinforcement' taught in Cope's courses and does not mean room arrest,”
Hellström explains. “It is important that parents remain in control.
Time out is a so-called 'sharp tool' - a means of breaking a more negative situation and reinforcing a positive one,” she adds.
It was not until after the end of the Second World War that physical punishment and shaming began to be questioned as methods of parenting in Sweden, Gustafsson writes in 'The return of the naughty step.'
Children's author Astrid Lindgren created the characters of Pippi Longstocking, Emil, Madicken and Ronja and was influential in embedding new attitudes towards children and parenting in the Swedish popular self-identity that led to a re-think in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“I was part of the process to develop parenting courses in the beginning of the 1980s. The thought was that we would develop a three-stage process taking the child up to school age, but financial concerns came in the way. Even then we were careful to avoid the word 'education' and we went for 'parent groups' instead,” Gustafsson tells The Local.Hellström argues that today's parents are not familiar with the 1970s tradition and seek “concrete, pedagogical methods for improving their daily lives with their children.”
One such “concrete” method is the so-called “balance of trust.” Deposits are made, in the form of praise, gold stars or “quality time” and, later, withdrawals in the form of punishments. Hellström emphasizes that it is important to consider what we mean by punishment.
“If I turn off the TV because it is time for my child to get to bed is that really a punishment? - It doesn't fit the Swedish definition.”
Hellström compares this “balance of trust” to an employment contract that most adults at some point enter into. “Built on an agreement and most importantly, renegotiable”
The National Institute of Public Health (Folkhälsoinstitutet) has developed parenting courses in a Swedish cultural context. Sven Bremberg at the institute explains to The Local that “foreign” methods such as “time out” have been consciously omitted from its new parenting course material which has an emphasis on “warmth and limits.”
The popularity of parental courses could be argued to be a result of a period of introspection by parents prompted by the curling and helicopter debates. So what of the children?
One might ask whether these parenting courses aren't more for the benefit of parents struggling to find a balance to “life's puzzle” in the high-stress, “I want it all” 2000s, than for their children. Children are one more piece of the puzzle needing to be effectively managed; squeezed in alongside a career, a rewarding social life and free-time activities. Hence the focus on controlling behaviour, or perhaps more accurately, output. Gustafsson agrees:
“The definition of normality has narrowed in today's society. That which was once considered normal is now considered to be deviant. Take sleep for example. Small children sleep badly, that's normal, but parents today live with such tight schedules they cannot run the risk of their child having a bad night's sleep.”
“I miss the children's perspective,” he concludes.
Danish drinking age
Thought this was worth a post
http://www.cphpost.dk/get/105943.html
Despite a 2004 law change raising the minimum age for purchasing alcohol to 16 from 15, one in three 15-year-olds, and one in seven 14-year-olds say they have bought alcohol, according to a National Board of Health study. When confronted about their age, young drinkers say they either lie or tell store workers they are buying for an older person. Stores say part of the problem is that they are not permitted to ask customers to present a picture ID when purchasing alcohol. Stores can be fined up to DKK 10,000 for selling alcohol to an underage customer.
http://www.cphpost.dk/get/105943.html
Despite a 2004 law change raising the minimum age for purchasing alcohol to 16 from 15, one in three 15-year-olds, and one in seven 14-year-olds say they have bought alcohol, according to a National Board of Health study. When confronted about their age, young drinkers say they either lie or tell store workers they are buying for an older person. Stores say part of the problem is that they are not permitted to ask customers to present a picture ID when purchasing alcohol. Stores can be fined up to DKK 10,000 for selling alcohol to an underage customer.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Mark Steyn is spot on
So what would it take to alarm you?
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in T.O.? Yawn. Nothing to see here.
MARK STEYN February 14, 2008 MARK STEYN-->
Since Maclean's got into a spot of bother with Canada's "human rights" pseudo-courts, I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of our media confreres who don't think it should be a "crime" for magazines to publish excerpts from books by yours truly. Nevertheless, in defending free speech in general, they usually feel obliged to deplore my exercise of it in particular:
"Maclean's published an alarmist screed by Mr. Steyn . . ." (The Economist)
"While the book may be alarmist . . ." (CFRB)
"Steyn's argument is indeed alarmist . . ." (The Guardian)
And, oh dear, even:
"The fear of 'a Muslim tide' was alarmist . . ." (Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in Maclean's)
Okay, enough already. I get the picture: alarmist, alarmist, alarmist. My book's thesis — that most of the Western world is on course to become at least semi-Islamic in its political and cultural disposition within a very short time — is "alarmist."
The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia — Islamic law — to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up — say, the day before your operation?
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they're conceding now and then try to figure out what they'll be conceding in five years' time.
The other night at dinner, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you're with Muslim women who were at college in the sixties, seventies or eighties. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on "women's issues," of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the "moderate Muslim" chair of the meeting: "authentic women" — by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their 20s they were the "authentic women": the covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees — that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal. If you had said to her in 1968 that Westernized Muslim women working in British hospitals in the early 21st century would reject modern hygiene because it required them to bare their arms, she would have scoffed with the certainty of one who assumes that history moves in only one direction.
In another of those non-alarmist nothing-to-see-here stories, a British government minister tentatively raised the matter of severe birth defects among the children of Pakistani Muslims. Some 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, and this places their progeny at increased risk of certain health problems. This is the only way a culturally relativist West can even raise some of these topics: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the old health care budget. It's not the polygamy, it's the four welfare cheques you're collecting for it.
But this is being penny-wise and pound-blasé. What does it mean when 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins and 70 per cent are married to relatives? At the very least, it tells you that this community is strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites and whatnot. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order. There are now towns in northern England where cousin marriage is the norm: Pakistanis aren't assimilating with "the host community"; the host community has assimilated with Pakistan. Again, if you had told a Yorkshireman in 1970 that by the early 21st century it would be entirely normal for half the kindergarten class to be the children of first cousins, he would have found it preposterous.
But it happened. By "alarmist," The Economist and Co. really mean "raising the subject." Last year, the British novelist Martin Amis raised the subject of my book with Tony Blair and asked him if, when he got together with his fellow prime ministers, the Continental demographic picture was part of the "European conversation." Mr. Blair replied, with disarming honesty, "It's a subterranean conversation." "We know what that means," wrote Amis. "The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable." The "multiculturist ideologue," he added, "cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every 35 years, and b) this entails certain consequences."
Whether or not it's "alarmist" to ponder what those consequences might be, under Canada's "human rights" kangaroo courts it might soon be illegal. All Section 13 cases brought to the federal Human Rights Commission end in defeat for the defendant, so, if Maclean's fails to buck the 100 per cent conviction rate, it would be enjoined from publishing anything that might relate to the "hate speech" in question — in other words, we would be legally prevented from writing about Islam and the West, demographic trends in Canada, and many other topics.
What would we be permitted by the state to write about? How about Nazis? It's been years since I've run into one, but apparently they're everywhere. A British blogger, pooh-poohing my book, said there are more Nazis than Muslims in England. Really? In Canada, meanwhile, defenders of Section 13 of the Human Rights Code — the one that makes "criminals" of Maclean's — warn that if the private member's motion of Keith Martin, MP, proposing its repeal were to succeed, Nazis would be free to peddle their dangerous Nazi ideas to simple-minded Canadians who might lack the fortitude to resist. As evidence of the Nazi tide waiting to engulf the Dominion once Section 13 is repealed, Liberal spin doctor Warren Kinsella posted on his website a photograph he'd taken in a men's room stall showing the words "WHITE POWER" and a swastika scrawled on the wall at knee height. Why Mr. Kinsella is photographing public toilets on his knees I don't know, but every guy needs a hobby. At any rate, Warren sees this loser's graffiti as critical evidence of the imminent Nazi threat to the peaceable kingdom.
I'm something of a phobiaphobe. I don't subscribe to the concepts of "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." They're a lame rhetorical sleight to end the argument by denying it's an argument at all: you don't have a political disagreement with me over gay marriage or sharia, you have a mental illness. But don't worry, we can give you counselling and medication and your "phobia" will eventually go away. Yet "Naziphobia" is the real thing — an irrational fear of non-existent Nazis. And so Canada's leading "human rights" hero is Richard Warman, a man whose Naziphobia is so advanced he hauled the "Canadian Nazi Party" before the "Human Rights" Tribunal even though, as the tribunal was eventually forced to rule, no such party exists.
Our heroes pursue phantoms as the world transforms. Is sharia, polygamy, routine first-cousin marriage in the interests of Canada or Britain or Europe? Oh, dear, even to raise the subject is to tiptoe into all kinds of uncomfortable terrain for the multicultural mindset. It's easier just to look the other way, or go Nazi-hunting in the men's room. Nobody wants to be unpleasant, or judgmental, do they? What was it they said in the Cold War? Better dead than red. We're not like that anymore. Better screwed than rude.
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in T.O.? Yawn. Nothing to see here.
MARK STEYN February 14, 2008 MARK STEYN-->
Since Maclean's got into a spot of bother with Canada's "human rights" pseudo-courts, I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of our media confreres who don't think it should be a "crime" for magazines to publish excerpts from books by yours truly. Nevertheless, in defending free speech in general, they usually feel obliged to deplore my exercise of it in particular:
"Maclean's published an alarmist screed by Mr. Steyn . . ." (The Economist)
"While the book may be alarmist . . ." (CFRB)
"Steyn's argument is indeed alarmist . . ." (The Guardian)
And, oh dear, even:
"The fear of 'a Muslim tide' was alarmist . . ." (Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in Maclean's)
Okay, enough already. I get the picture: alarmist, alarmist, alarmist. My book's thesis — that most of the Western world is on course to become at least semi-Islamic in its political and cultural disposition within a very short time — is "alarmist."
The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia — Islamic law — to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up — say, the day before your operation?
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they're conceding now and then try to figure out what they'll be conceding in five years' time.
The other night at dinner, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you're with Muslim women who were at college in the sixties, seventies or eighties. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on "women's issues," of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the "moderate Muslim" chair of the meeting: "authentic women" — by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their 20s they were the "authentic women": the covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees — that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal. If you had said to her in 1968 that Westernized Muslim women working in British hospitals in the early 21st century would reject modern hygiene because it required them to bare their arms, she would have scoffed with the certainty of one who assumes that history moves in only one direction.
In another of those non-alarmist nothing-to-see-here stories, a British government minister tentatively raised the matter of severe birth defects among the children of Pakistani Muslims. Some 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, and this places their progeny at increased risk of certain health problems. This is the only way a culturally relativist West can even raise some of these topics: nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the old health care budget. It's not the polygamy, it's the four welfare cheques you're collecting for it.
But this is being penny-wise and pound-blasé. What does it mean when 57 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins and 70 per cent are married to relatives? At the very least, it tells you that this community is strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites and whatnot. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order. There are now towns in northern England where cousin marriage is the norm: Pakistanis aren't assimilating with "the host community"; the host community has assimilated with Pakistan. Again, if you had told a Yorkshireman in 1970 that by the early 21st century it would be entirely normal for half the kindergarten class to be the children of first cousins, he would have found it preposterous.
But it happened. By "alarmist," The Economist and Co. really mean "raising the subject." Last year, the British novelist Martin Amis raised the subject of my book with Tony Blair and asked him if, when he got together with his fellow prime ministers, the Continental demographic picture was part of the "European conversation." Mr. Blair replied, with disarming honesty, "It's a subterranean conversation." "We know what that means," wrote Amis. "The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable." The "multiculturist ideologue," he added, "cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every 35 years, and b) this entails certain consequences."
Whether or not it's "alarmist" to ponder what those consequences might be, under Canada's "human rights" kangaroo courts it might soon be illegal. All Section 13 cases brought to the federal Human Rights Commission end in defeat for the defendant, so, if Maclean's fails to buck the 100 per cent conviction rate, it would be enjoined from publishing anything that might relate to the "hate speech" in question — in other words, we would be legally prevented from writing about Islam and the West, demographic trends in Canada, and many other topics.
What would we be permitted by the state to write about? How about Nazis? It's been years since I've run into one, but apparently they're everywhere. A British blogger, pooh-poohing my book, said there are more Nazis than Muslims in England. Really? In Canada, meanwhile, defenders of Section 13 of the Human Rights Code — the one that makes "criminals" of Maclean's — warn that if the private member's motion of Keith Martin, MP, proposing its repeal were to succeed, Nazis would be free to peddle their dangerous Nazi ideas to simple-minded Canadians who might lack the fortitude to resist. As evidence of the Nazi tide waiting to engulf the Dominion once Section 13 is repealed, Liberal spin doctor Warren Kinsella posted on his website a photograph he'd taken in a men's room stall showing the words "WHITE POWER" and a swastika scrawled on the wall at knee height. Why Mr. Kinsella is photographing public toilets on his knees I don't know, but every guy needs a hobby. At any rate, Warren sees this loser's graffiti as critical evidence of the imminent Nazi threat to the peaceable kingdom.
I'm something of a phobiaphobe. I don't subscribe to the concepts of "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." They're a lame rhetorical sleight to end the argument by denying it's an argument at all: you don't have a political disagreement with me over gay marriage or sharia, you have a mental illness. But don't worry, we can give you counselling and medication and your "phobia" will eventually go away. Yet "Naziphobia" is the real thing — an irrational fear of non-existent Nazis. And so Canada's leading "human rights" hero is Richard Warman, a man whose Naziphobia is so advanced he hauled the "Canadian Nazi Party" before the "Human Rights" Tribunal even though, as the tribunal was eventually forced to rule, no such party exists.
Our heroes pursue phantoms as the world transforms. Is sharia, polygamy, routine first-cousin marriage in the interests of Canada or Britain or Europe? Oh, dear, even to raise the subject is to tiptoe into all kinds of uncomfortable terrain for the multicultural mindset. It's easier just to look the other way, or go Nazi-hunting in the men's room. Nobody wants to be unpleasant, or judgmental, do they? What was it they said in the Cold War? Better dead than red. We're not like that anymore. Better screwed than rude.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Silencer Temps
Here are the temperatures in degrees F of various materials at the point in which they have about 10,000 PSI of yield strength remaining:
Inconel 718.......... 1600F+ (Surefire?)
316L .......... 1600F (AAC)
304 .......... 1500F+ (AWC, Ops Inc)
4130 .......... 1100F+ (YHM, SoundTech)
6-4 Ti .......... 850F (AAC bolt action rated 338 Lapua Magnum can)
Ti-Grade-2 ..........650F (Gemtech G5?, Jet?, STW M4 can)
Inconel 718.......... 1600F+ (Surefire?)
316L .......... 1600F (AAC)
304 .......... 1500F+ (AWC, Ops Inc)
4130 .......... 1100F+ (YHM, SoundTech)
6-4 Ti .......... 850F (AAC bolt action rated 338 Lapua Magnum can)
Ti-Grade-2 ..........650F (Gemtech G5?, Jet?, STW M4 can)
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008
civilization factories
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTk1MmZiOTJkNmFlZjFhNjBmZGZjNjdmZjJhMDg3ZTg=
But here I get back to my daughter. She is a barbarian, or at least she was when she was born. And I mean this fairly literally. Political theorist Hannah Arendt once said that, every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them “children.” Today’s babies aren’t meaningfully different from those born 1,000 or 5,000 years ago. A Viking baby magically transported to 21st-century America might grow up to be an accountant or a bus driver. A baby born today and sent back in time might become a Hun, Visigoth or Aztec warrior, whatever his parents expected of him.
Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others. One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are “taught to hate.” This is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why. And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their kids.
As a conservative, I’m a big believer in the importance of tradition, which writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed “democracy of the dead.” But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society, the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.
Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity. Indeed, someone once told me that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives. Of course, that joke’s only funny if you’ve heard of Santayana in the first place.
But here I get back to my daughter. She is a barbarian, or at least she was when she was born. And I mean this fairly literally. Political theorist Hannah Arendt once said that, every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them “children.” Today’s babies aren’t meaningfully different from those born 1,000 or 5,000 years ago. A Viking baby magically transported to 21st-century America might grow up to be an accountant or a bus driver. A baby born today and sent back in time might become a Hun, Visigoth or Aztec warrior, whatever his parents expected of him.
Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others. One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are “taught to hate.” This is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why. And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their kids.
As a conservative, I’m a big believer in the importance of tradition, which writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed “democracy of the dead.” But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society, the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.
Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity. Indeed, someone once told me that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives. Of course, that joke’s only funny if you’ve heard of Santayana in the first place.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
silencers
We'll put this in the good to know category.
Basically HTG designs are among the more quiet silencers. They don't weld their rifle silencers, and I would never buy an unwelded rifle silencer as it is too easy to blow up. As for their pistol silencers -- again -- they can sound good. However, he has not figured out how to make a booster properly and it might break your pistol. It is one of those things were a more experienced silencer company could make a good silencer using some of his technology if they combined it with better construction methods and booster design.
A welded can simply can have a higher strength to weight ratio. So for any given strength, a welded can will be lighter. Case in point -- SRT cans are generally quiet but they are not light and they are not welded. However, as you say -- they should be durable enough for most uses.
Basically HTG designs are among the more quiet silencers. They don't weld their rifle silencers, and I would never buy an unwelded rifle silencer as it is too easy to blow up. As for their pistol silencers -- again -- they can sound good. However, he has not figured out how to make a booster properly and it might break your pistol. It is one of those things were a more experienced silencer company could make a good silencer using some of his technology if they combined it with better construction methods and booster design.
A welded can simply can have a higher strength to weight ratio. So for any given strength, a welded can will be lighter. Case in point -- SRT cans are generally quiet but they are not light and they are not welded. However, as you say -- they should be durable enough for most uses.
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