I Wonder If This Is How They Role At The Federal Level?
Ever wonder how such obviously idiotic laws get passed? Perhaps this is why. (Before you leave a comment, I know the real reason idiotic laws get passed is because of lobby groups, and lack of citizen involvement in the process, but still this sort of thing has to have some sort of impact)
Welcome To Euphemism (UK) Ltd
Every day I walk my children the half a mile to their school. We chat, laugh, sometimes get wet, sometimes get splashed by drivers, sometimes nearly get knocked over by parents driving their children to school. It got me thinking, that this thing we call the ‘School Run’ has become a School Drive in many areas, and how inaccurate the phrase School Run is. It implies running, a healthy activity that doesn’t involve motor vehicles, but the School Run now only seems to mean driving the kids to school in a sense that it is a regular, essential activity.
Essential, my arse!
So I started to think how many other phrases and words have become euphemisms, to cover up the environmentally destructive or otherwise harmful nature of activities. Here is one that really winds me up: ‘Road Accident’. I cannot describe the inconsistency between the way individuals off the road and those on the road are subject to the law better than this:
We as a society seem to have decided that motor vehicles are quasi-autonomous beings, and the driver is almost never at fault when the vehicle mysteriously lashes out and kills someone.
When something happens that involves a motor vehicle, and that vehicle is being driven (even in the loosest sense of the word), then someone, somehow is to blame. It is not acceptable to say “oh, but that turns us into a blame culture”, because if there is blame to be apportioned then it should. When a person is killed on a pedestrian crossing, and that person had right of way, or someone is killed while walking on the pavement because a careless driver mounted the kerb, then that isn’t an accident. It is a killing.
And here is another one, beloved of readers of those morally bereft British newspapers The Daily Mail and The Daily Express: ‘Speed Traps’. Speed traps! What! How dare the speeding motorist be trapped by the loutish behaviour of authorities who are trying to reduce the speed of vehicles, and thus save lives!
I jest, of course. The aforementioned newspapers spend a great deal of column inches writing about the ‘euphemistic’ phrase Safety Cameras, when that phrase perfectly describes their role. They are there to impose rules on vehicle speed in order to reduce deaths.
The euphemisms I have mentioned here are just three in a huge range of phrases that protect the destructive tendencies of our culture from closer analysis. We are told of ‘Externalities’ instead of the environmental damage caused by companies that affects non-company property; we hear of ‘Standards Of Living’ rising rather than material consumption and thus environmental damage; we are brainwashed with ‘Technological Improvements’ that mask the need to sell essentially the same products again and again to raise profits.
We are wallowing in a culture that has forgotten how to talk clearly about itself - because if we were to do that, then maybe we would think again as to whether we should just shove this culture up our ‘rear ends’.
Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And proud member of The Sietch
TED Talk Solar Powered Plane And Other Wonders
Paul MacCready who recently died, talks about his life, his inventions, and the flexible solar plane he built with NASA. This is the same guy who built the human powered planes. Thats right, planes powered by bicycle. What a cool guy.
Crazy Bikers
One of the things I like most about Bicyclists is just how crazy they can be some times. Here is a case in point. A couple days ago I wrote about a device that will take you and your bike up a steep hill, sounded pretty cool.
It turns out that in California, the steepest paved road is Fargo street, a 33% grade (that means for every 100 feet you go forward you go up 33 feet). Every year the L.A. Wheelmen hosts the Fargo Street Hill Climb, where these madmen and women try and climb up and down this monster of a hill as many times as humanly possible in a day. I can tell you from going up steep hills, this can be brutal, your legs burn, your breath is short, and you feel like at any moment you might fall off your bike, and these yahoo’s do it over and over! The record set this year was 91 times (omg!) up this beast. To put that into perspective that is 14,000 feet in only 15 miles or so.
More pictures and video below the fold.
How To Recycle CFL’s
Guest author Chris Baskind from Lighter Footstep brings us the handy guide to recycling your cfl’s.
If you’re the sort of person who reads articles like this, you probably think pretty much everyone knows about CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs) by now.
Think again. Despite widespread availability and dramatically lower prices — name brand CFL bulbs go for about two dollars these days — CFL adoption in the United States remains around 6 percent. The rate is much higher in Europe and parts of Asia. Still, in the largest single consumer market in the world, CFL awareness remains in single digits. Contrast this with a recent survey suggesting up to 34 percent of all Americans believe in UFOs.
Mercury in CFLs
It’s not unreasonable to think that even fewer people know CFLs contain mercury. A small amount, sure: the National Electrical Manufacturers Association recently capped 25 watt CFLs at 5 milligrams per bulb. But as adoption rates rise, so does the importance of sending CFLs to a recycler, rather than the landfill.
Read the rest of How To Recycle CFL’s
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