Poem of the week is Rich Mullins song “We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are.”
Poem of the Week: 4/27/08 – 5/3/08
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Category Archives: Front Page
Rant of the Week: 4/27/08 – 5/3/08
Who’s going to step up and defend a cult that practices polygamy? Who is going to argue that children should be raised in such an environment? We must confess that we cannot find it in ourselves to defend either point.
But we must confess that it seems to us that Vox Day has a point when he argues that raid on the compound of a Mormon sect was hypocritical and immoral. His comparison of instances of underage pregnancy within the sect to rate of population at large in Texas is particularly damming. But we must imagine that he could have strengthened his argument even more if he had laid his hands on statistics showing how children in the tender embrace of child protection agencies turn out.
Essay of the Week: 4/27/08 – 5/3/08
Our essay of the week comes from our very own Ape Man. He uses some recent remarks by Obama as a spring board to offer up some thoughts on rural culture.
North Korean News
The YouTube Clip below has been in the news a lot lately. If you have not seen it, you might want to watch it. It is the CIA’s explanation of the target that Israel destroyed in Syria awhile back. It publicly accuses North Korea and Syria of conspiring together to make atomic weapons.
In related news, The Times reports….
An airbase inside a mountain is the latest sign that North Korea, whose links to Syria’s nuclear programme came to light last week, is cranking up its military machine
North Korean military engineers are completing an underground runway beneath a mountain that can protect fighter aircraft from attack until they take off at high speed through the mouth of a tunnel.
The 6,000ft runway is a few minutes’ flying time from the tense front line where the Korean People’s Army faces soldiers from the United States and South Korea.
The project was identified by an air force defector from North Korea and captured on a satellite image by Google Earth, according to reports in the South Korean press last week.
It is one of three underground fighter bases among an elaborate subterranean military infrastructure built to withstand a “shock and awe” assault in the first moments of a war, the defector said.
Three Links to Brighten Your Day
The first link comes from Soma. Now before you click on the link a little context is in order. Soma advertise itself as the only English language Kurdish newspaper around. We shall have to take there word for it as we don’t really feel like fact checking that fact. According to the blogger over at Live a Life Worthy…..
On the back page of every paper, these two men have a chat about…well, everything. Their conversation rambles and jumps and rabbit-trails, never to return.
But we think that anyone who has ever followed a conversation in the Ethereal Land will have no trouble following the logic of conversation on the back page of Soma.
Our second link comes from Doctor Bob. Let us just say that some people should not self medicate.
Our third link does not really need to be read in its entirety. We are just brining it up because it articulates a philosophy that we share. Namely….
See, I can be reasonable. All I ask is that the bureaucrats paid to harass me and violate my privacy do it with a bit of irony, and I’m willing to play ball. Irony about the crappitude of the situation gets me in a good mood. Giving orders and pulling the loyal citizen BS gets me in a bad mood.
Unwarranted cynicysm is hard to find
Two of the most notable changes made by the A-Team were imposing a strict separation of duties between assemblers and material handlers and the sharp increase in the number of material handlers. They felt we would gain more efficiency by not letting the assemblers more so much as an inch away from their posts to Click Here to continue reading.
A child’s sex is associated with a mother’s diet
The report, from researchers at Oxford and the University of Exeter in England, is said to be the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with a mother’s diet. Although sex is genetically determined by whether sperm from the father supplies an X or Y chromosome, it appears that a mother’s body can favor the successful development of a male or female embryo.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, shows a link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The difference is not huge, but it may be enough to help explain the falling birthrate of boys in industrialized countries, including the United States and Britain.
The reason food intake may influence the development of one sex of infant rather than another isn’t fully understood. However, in vitro fertilization studies show that high levels of glucose encourage the growth of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.
Someone in the comments wondered if this meant that diabetic mothers had more male children.
Little Changes Can Save Big Money
UPS says that in 2007 it saved itself 3 million gallons of gas by routing trucks using a technology that emphasizes safety and efficiency — meaning delivery routes are planned as a series of loops with as few left turns as possible. UPS says it’s a safer driving practice because drivers aren’t turning in front of oncoming traffic as often, and it saves fuel because they spend less time idling in left-turn lanes waiting to turn.
I am for the industrious little man myself
I read this at On The Level….
It is the little industrious man in the brand new Toyota Sienna Minivan taking the aluminum from my and all of my neighbors’ recycling bins a block ahead of the city’s recycling truck. The way I see it, if I had put my cans in with my trash because I was lazy or didn’t care about the environment then he would have every right to take the cans from my garbage container. But since I sort the recyclables and put them in a bin specifically for the recycling truck, I believe he is stealing as well as harming the environment. Here is why: The aluminum(arguably the most expensive item in the recycling bins) is used to offset the cost of my refuse bill. Without the aluminum, it may cost more to pick up the recycling than the materials themselves. If the city loses money, my bills go up. Second, by having both his minivan and the city truck stopping at every recycle bin in my neighborhood, he is putting more carbon in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
I don’t have any sympathy for this line of argument. Trash pickup should be for trash pickup. If you are not willing to throw it out don’t put it out. And if you are willing to throw it out, don’t worry about who is picking it up. This is like somebody complaining that they left a bag full of soda cans out for the garbage man and someone else came by and turned them in for a redemption. If it is not worth it to take care of it yourself, don’t worry about it.
If this person was that worried about rising refuse bills, he could save his own aluminum up for year and turn it in for cash himself. That would offset his rising bill. Back when aluminum was cheap, nobody was doing this. But when aluminum was cheap, how could the city use it to off set the garbage bills? I don’t see how he has any real right to complain.
I suspect that his concerns about having a minivan and a city truck stopping at every recycling bin in the neighborhood is also bogus. Extra weight increase fuel consumption so by having less weight the recycling truck will save some energy. This will partially offset the minivan. Moreover, the recycling center will have to additional material handling to get the aluminum to where it needs to go. Our industrious little man is probably taking it directly where it needs to go. So on the whole, I suspect that it is a wash. I don’t have any proof, but then neither does he.
The Rich World Is Not Facing A Food Crisis Yet
A lot of people are getting unreasonable freaked out by the fact that Sam’s Club and others are limiting the amount of rice you can buy. The reasoning tends to run like this, “Rationing in the breadbasket of the world? The end of the world must be neigh.”
But the fact of the matter is that there is no shortage of rice in the US. The reason that Sam’s Club and other discount stores are limiting rice sales has more to do with the rampant speculation that is going on than it has to do with the state of the rice supply. For a little background on the scale of speculation going on in the grain markets read this post from Naked Capitalism called “Commodity Volatility Creates Problems for Farmers (and May Explain an Inventory Mystery). This quote from the post pretty much says it all…..
Aside from the difficulties that the farmers are facing, the article does contain signs that speculation is overwhelming fundamental activity. One big warning sign mentioned in passing: trading has outgrown the delivery system. If I read this correctly, it means that the volume of futures contracts is so large relative to the actual deliverable commodity that arbitrage (via taking physical delivery) won’t force convergence of futures prices to cash prices at contract maturity.
People with money are so disparate to find safe havens for their money that they are pouring cash into any area that might possible do well even in an economic downturn. Grain is one of those areas because their are real shortages in the world grain market. As a result poor people in third world counties are going to starve.
But the fact that poor people are going to stave does not mean that America faces some kind of grave crisis that threatens are ability to eat. It is a fact that even with the recent run up in prices, rice and other grains are extremely cheap relative to even the poorest of American’s income. If we ate like the rest of the world ate (i.e little or no meat and nothing in the way of processed food), food costs would be fraction of the poorest third of American’s population even if prices doubled from the current high prices. Contrast that with many third world countries where food cost tend to equal 50 to 60 percent of average income even before the recent spike in prices. They can’t cut back on the meat because they never ate much of it to begin with.