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
Cool Folding Bike
One of the issues people raised when we ran our article about riding your bike to work was that there was no place to put the bike when they got there. Personally I think US cities need to step it up a bit with the bike infrastructure, but until then you can use one of these and have no trouble finding a place to put your bike.
The Tikit, by Bike Friday is a sweet little ride, and by the looks of it pretty easy to fold and unfold.
This kind of ride is great for hybrid commuts where you spend a bit of time on the train and a bit ridding around.
Global Warming You Ruin Everything
It is hard to put all the things global warming is going to mess up into a short list, but the good people over at The Center For American Progress have narrowed it down to just 100.
Here are some highlights.
Say Goodbye to Baseball
The future of the ash tree—from which all baseball bats are made—is in danger of disappearing, thanks to a combination of killer beetles and global warming.
Say Goodbye to Salmon Dinners
Get ready for a lot more chicken dinners: Wild pacific salmon have already vanished from 40 percent of their traditional habitats in the Northwest and the NRDC warns warmer temperatures are going to erase 41 percent of their habitat by 2090.
Say Goodbye to Guacamole
Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory predict hotter temps will cause a 40 percent drop in California’s avocado production over the next 40 years.
Say Hello to Poison Ivy
You’re gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion. Increased CO2 levels cause poison ivy and other weeds to grow “taller, lusher, and more resilient.”
I warn you the full list is rather depressing, but if you are glutton for that sort of thing check it out. Personally when I read this sort of thing it gives me more resolve to do something to keep all this crap from happening.
Americans Waste 78 Billion Dollars A Year Stuck In Traffic
The entire idea of the “commute” would seem ridiculous in an earlier time. People didn’t live 100 miles from where they worked. With the introduction of a large nationwide highway system and the availability of cheaper cars, the commute was born. People flush with money from the GI bill and savings from the hard times of WW2 moved en masse to new “suburbs.” Planned cities where everyone got a small yard, a garage, and the world was perfect, or was it?
With the move away from city centers, and rapid increase in the number of cars on the road, it soon became clear that no amount of roads could handle the ever growing number of cars trying to cram on to them. Ever feel like you spend your whole life stuck in traffic? Well you are not alone: with the increase in the number of cars on the road, traffic congestion continues to worsen in American cities of all sizes. This gridlock is creating a $78 billion annual drain on the U.S. economy in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel—that’s 105 million weeks of vacation and 58 fully-loaded supertankers.
Talk about waste. A gallon of gas has about 19 pounds of CO2, meaning that 2.9 billion gallons of gas wasted means 55.1 billion pounds of CO2 needlessly pumped into the atmosphere every year.
Read the rest of Americans Waste 78 Billion Dollars A Year Stuck In Traffic
Air Plus Water Plus Metal Cans Equals Electricity
This well known experiment shows that there is energy hiding in all sorts of places just waiting for us to find it. Not all of it is contained in fossil fuels. In fact a lot of it isn’t.
Is A Free And Democratic Burma Really A Good Thing?
Yes
Now go and do something about it.
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk
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