This week’s rant of the week comes from my favorite British police officer who calls himself Inspector Gadget. He captures the feelings that I have when my path crosses with those lost souls that I can’t really do anything to help.
It is a shame that the works and life of Vaclav Havel are not better known. We are so use to what politicians are that we are unprepared for Havel. A politician who can actually think and has principles seems like something out of a fairy tale. We find it hard to believe even as we are face to face with the evidence.
This week’s essay of the week is short speech that Havel gave on what he thought were the deficiencies in the modern western political consensus. I don’t agree with him in every respect (you can see some of my thoughts on the same issue here and here) but I have to admire the evident thought he put into the problem.
If you want an idea of how well Havel’s philosophical thought translated into his politics you can read this piece from Reason Magazine.
This guy is demonstrating his computerized physics drawing board. He can draw objects and they will behave realistically. It would be cool to be able to play around with something like that.
The New York Times has an article that suggests that interval training is the best way to lose weight.
After interval training, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent, said Jason L. Talanian, the lead author of the study and an exercise scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Cardiovascular fitness — the ability of the heart and lungs to supply oxygen to working muscles — improved by 13 percent.
It didn’t matter how fit the subjects were before. Borderline sedentary subjects and the college athletes had similar increases in fitness and fat burning. “Even when interval training was added on top of other exercise they were doing, they still saw a significant improvement,” Mr. Talanian said.
The study is hardly definitive, but it makes intuitive sense to me. After all, interval training is just mimicking the natural way we work.
Life brings its share of surprises. But few things have surprised me more in life than finding out that almost everyone in America who is not white fears rural areas. I never would have thought the only areas of the country left where people do not lock their doors would inspire such fear, but apparently Click Here to continue reading.
First off, the Dutch are basically going to do away with prison sentences…
Most criminals in the Netherlands should be able to serve their sentence at home in the future. Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin is to introduce house arrest as a new main punishment. Criminals can then also visit friends or a mosque for two hours a day.
Now I am not a big fan of prison sentences. I think there are lot better ways of handling criminals. But letting people sit at home and paying them welfare checks does not strike me as being better then prison. This from the same article…
Those under house arrest will receive welfare payments. Only if they run a company from their living-room or do other work that yields sufficient money will they receive no financial support from the minister. They can also do a home course.
“House arrest is experienced as a real punishment,” according to a spokesman for Hirsch Ballin. “At the same time, social networks remain in place.”
But the Dutch have their priorities straight at least. They fined a dude for calling an animal rights group terrorists….
Leeuwarden appeal court has sentenced a vet, J. Plantema, to pay damages of 200,000 euros to animal rights group WakkerDier. He called them terrorists. It is unique for abuse of freedom of speech to lead to such a high fine.
And who runs WakkerDier?
Wakker Dier is headed by Sjoerd van de Wouw. At another action group, VMO, he was the right-hand man of Volkert van der Graaf, who assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn with gunshots in 2002. Currently, Van de Wouw is assistant to the Party for Animals (PvdD), which has two seats in the Lower House.
From time to time I read blogs such as The Gates of Vienna and The Brussels Journal that are devoted to the “coming culture clash between Moslems and the West.” I go to these blogs because sometimes they alert me to interesting stories and issues that I would otherwise miss. Yet they always leave Click Here to continue reading.
There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that people in this world are burning perfectly good corn for heat and putting coal products into feed. From a New York times article….
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
All I can say is that I hope none of my chicken feed comes from China.
This week’s rant of the week has inspired me to choose T.S Eliot’s poem Buirnt Norton as poem of the week.
I wish that this rant by Megan had been available to me last week. It would have gone way better with last week’s essay of the week. But we have to take what we can get when we can get it.