Rant of the week is California’s Broke And I Don’t Care by Sippican Cottage.
Rant of the Week: 11/23/08-11/29/08
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Monthly Archives: November 2008
Essay of the Week: 11/23/08-11/29/08
This week’s essay of the week is the Mowing of the Field by Hilaire Belloc.
What is the most populated Baptist state in the world?
Nagaland is known as “The most populated Baptist state in the world”. The state’s population is 1.988 million, out of which 90.02% are Christians[2]. 75% of the state’s population profess the Baptist faith, thus making it more Baptist than Mississippi (in the southern United States), where 52% of its population is Baptist
Can you guess where Nagaland is with out following the link?
Here is a overview of Nagaland from Global Security.
Here is a YouTube clip from Nagaland.
The US has nuclear weapons that depended on vacuum tubes to work
From The Wall Street Journal….
The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. “We’re the only ones who aren’t,” Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.
From later on in the article…
Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. “This is a component of a V-61” nuclear warhead, he says. It was in “one of our gravity weapons” — a weapon from the 1950s and ’60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal’s conference table. “I remember what these things were for. I bet you don’t. It’s a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and ’60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them.”
And here comes the punch line: “This is the technology that we have . . . today.” The technology in the weapons the U.S. relies on for its nuclear deterrent dates back to before many of the people in the room were born.
I am not sure what to make of this. Sometimes old school works far better then the new fangled stuff. On the other hand, I would really hate to see the safety mechanisms degrade. The only thing worse than having a nuclear weapon go off on purpose would be for one to go off by accident.
Are Saudis playing hard ball by proxy?
Islamist fighters have warned pirates holding a Saudi oil tanker they may launch an attack unless the ship and her crew are released.
Why have the Somali Islamist groups come out and demanded that the Saudi oil tanker be released? Perhapses this quote from later on in the article reveals the answer…
“Every Somali has great respect for the holy kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have nothing against them but unfortunately what happened was just business for us and I hope the Saudis will understand,” the pirate said.
The Pirates seem to think that the Saudis are behind the Islamist threat. Wonder if they know about a connection between the two that is not common knowledge?
A price will be paid
Yet the latest birth figures tell a story. In the state of Punjab, only 798 girls were born for every 1,000 boys. Haryana was next up the list with 819, followed by Chandigarh with 845 and Delhi, the national capital, came in fourth with 868. The Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, which recently surveyed the worst-affected parts of Delhi, estimates that 10 million girls have been lost to female foeticide in India over the past 20 years.
Most alarming for those monitoring the figures is the fact that the gap appears to be widening. Today the national average for births is 933 girls to 1,000 boys; in 1991 it was 945. ‘The low numbers in a state like Delhi tells us the enormity of the situation,’ said Anju Dubey Panbey, of the Centre for Social Research. ‘In India today, if you are blessed with a son you are almost revered, and if you are the mother of daughters you are made to feel guilty and your status in your family goes down. It is very, very disturbing.’
As India’s wealth and power grows, its sex unbalance gets even worse. The emerging Hindu middle class in India are more determined to kill their daughters than the more backward Hindu farmers in rural areas. This is one of the reasons that the sex imbalance is far worse in urban areas then it is in rural areas.
Remember this when you hear people predicting that India is going to become one of the next world powers.
The Hidden Dangers Of Red Meat
Surgeons thought Rosemary Alvarez had a brain tumour, but on operating they discovered the worm.
Dr Peter Nakaji said Mrs Alvarez probably picked up the worm after eating undercooked meat.
If you are really sick, there is a video clip if you follow the link. I was too chicken to watch it though. There are some things in this life that I just don’t want to know.
The War in Afghanistan Comes To Life In These Pictures
Good Question
From The Telegraph….
What irks officials in Puntland most, though, is the failure of the multi-national force now patrolling the Gulf of Aden to take a robust approach to the problem. In a land where rule has seldom been by anything other the gun, few have been impressed by British and European officials’ talk of pirates having “human rights” that spare them from more traditional punishments like hanging.
The case in September, where a Danish warship dumped 10 arrested pirates back on a beach after deciding they lacked the jurisdiction to prosecute, caused widespread bemusement here. “Where is the deterrent for people to join the pirates, if they think they might not even get arrested?” asked Dr Abdirahman Bangah, Puntland’s acting fisheries minister.
Please Tell Me This Is Not True
The other day I took my seven-year-old son Louis to buy some running shoes. “Pick something with Velcro,” I said, as he trotted off to roam the racks.
A clerk, hovering nearby, gave me a jaundiced look, “You know we get high school kids in here who have to buy Velcro because they never learned to tie their shoes. Every year their parents would just buy them Velcro because it was easier than making them learn how to tie laces.”
I stared at him and he went on.
“The other day we had to special order a pair of shoes for this kid’s high school graduation because he couldn’t tie his laces, and he needed a pair of Velcro formal shoes.”
I put the shoes Louis had chosen back on the shelf, and picked out a pair of lace-up running shoes. It wasn’t just that I’d been shamed into compliance by the salesman, but something Jane Jacobs had written about in her last book about the coming dark ages hit home. The loss of knowledge, she said, once vanished, is so difficult to regain — even if it’s something as mundane as tying your shoes.
In case you think this episode is an isolated example, the other day I heard a youth worker, whose job it is to help teens at risk, say that almost none of them know how to tie their shoes. I’m sure this isn’t a causal relationship — wear Velcro, go to jail — but it made me think. What else have we lost, or failed to pass along, to the generation of kids about to inherit an increasingly compromised planet?
I have long argued that my generation is by and large worthless. But I have a hard time believing that kids are growing up without even learning how to tie their shoes.