It has long been a rite of passage for young children; the moment they first begin to grasp how to tell the time as their parents patiently explain the significance of the “big hand” and the “little hand”.
But the ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets, with their digital 24-hour clock, is threatening to make the art of telling the time from a traditional timepiece redundant.
So much so that a school in Scotland has found that pupils as old as 13 are unable to tell the time from the ‘analogue’ clocks hanging in classrooms and corridors.
. . .
Now the school, in the town of Bridge of Earn, has begun to teach pupils to read a clock the old fashioned way, without resorting to their mobile phones.
In fact mobiles and tablets have been banned during school hours to encourage the girls to look at the clocks around the school.
. . .
Mrs MacGinty insists ... that there are some skills that should transcend the generations.
“Society is changing and the curriculum should change to reflect this,” she said. “But some skills are too important to ignore.
“For example, we are still teaching pupils to read rail and bus timetables, even though it is no longer in the senior school maths syllabus, because it is important that pupils understand how to read these.”
She added: “Having the ability to understand the movement of the minute hand and the hour hand around the face of a clock gives young people a tangible understanding of the passing of time, not just numbers changing on a digital screen.”
A groundbreaking 2013 study of how mice can taste with their testicles has resurfaced online. And now social media bozos are testing the theory, first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by dipping their genitals in soy sauce for the latest bizarre TikTok trend.
The study was apparently rediscovered by TikTok user Regan, who challenged male social media users to “please dip your ***** in something [because] it’s for science and I must know.”
Go figure: TikTokers were eager to lend their scrotums to science. One viral response — posted five days ago by user Alx James — depicts an intrepid gastronomer basting his **** with soy sauce (don’t worry, he doesn’t show the actual application) while sitting in his car with takeout grub. James says he was inspired by the portion of the study that claims “the amino acids inside soy sauce can also be detected by the *****.”
James also claims his testicular taste test was a success. “Oh my God, I can taste the salt!” exclaims the ecstatic experimenter, adding “that’s ridiculous” before the clip ends.
Needless to say, the viral vid racked up more than 800,000 likes and 9,000-plus comments from the peanut gallery. “When I was younger, I thought in 2020 we’d have flying cars but no it’s just guys dipping their junk in soy sauce,” mused one social media pundit.
. . .
James wasn’t the only one to conduct the unorthodox experiment. Social media guru GayGod (a k a YouTuber Matthew Lush) seconded Alex’s findings in another viral vid, claiming to his 966,000 followers he could detect the soy sauce and orange juice.
However, much to some medical professionals’ chagrin, there’s no evidence “to back up any claims that men (of any species) can actually taste things through their junk,” Dr. Kieran Kennedy told Men’s Health.
[Some of] the biggest obstacles to shooting subcompact guns well [include] the grip size, recoil control, sight system and trigger system. Some you can improve upon such as the sights or trigger. Subcompacts are notorious for having poor combat-style sights. As these subcompacts grow in popularity, sight manufacturers continue to adapt to consumer trends and offer upgraded options. The trigger is a bit more challenging. Few subcompacts come with a smooth trigger; many have a heavy and long trigger pull that requires a decent amount of time to master. Again, as consumer trends increase so too will aftermarket options for drop-in replacement triggers. A caution on trigger upgrades. Avoid any product that can compromise the internal safeties in any way. Be cautious in your selection. If it sounds too good to be true—you know the rest.
This leaves us with grip size and recoil control. By their nature, subcompacts are small. The smaller size makes them easier to conceal, but hard to hold and shoot well. I find some are better to grip than others.
. . .
Recoil control is a difficult subject to talk about using the printed word. It has to be experienced. The lighter frames and shorter slides will mean the recoil impulse can be more noticeable or pronounced.
. . .
Shooting subcompacts does not have to be fraught with discomfort. The challenges you face are manageable if you take the right steps. The first step is the hardest step, which is practicing more. We can all benefit from more practice, more training and more education ... When the whole firing line is shooting subcompacts, you get a great perspective. You can see the recoil impulse more exaggerated in some shooters. As you pay more attention, you begin to see who is applying good technique and who is not.
It is very obvious who the people are who should be held accountable for the current mess.
At the top of the list are the premiers and ministers responsible for land management, such as it is, and bushfire policy, and the public servants in their departments with jurisdiction over forests and national parks. State governments in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have palpably failed to do the most important job they were elected to do: protect the lives and livelihoods of their citizens and the health of their environment. And their public servants have failed to do the job they are being paid to do: serve the public.
. . .
Local government authorities are also high on the list of those accountable — and here again state governments bear responsibility, as they should never have allowed them to get away with the nonsenses we have seen coming out of town halls over recent years with respect to vegetation clearing and building approvals. Some premier or minister should have cracked down hard on this foolishness, and cracked down hard.
Of all the things that perplex me about the current mess the most significant is this: the blatant ignoring by premiers, ministers and agency bureaucrats of the warnings of bushfire scientists that a disaster was imminent and, on top of that, their failure to study bushfire history. Our climate, even the ‘pre-climate-change climate’, our vegetation and the abundant sources of ignition mean that we are inherently a bushfire-prone country. And even on top of all that, our governments and bureaucrats have been provided, over and over and over again, with evidence that killer bushfires will occur in Australia unless pre-emptive action is taken. Not just here, but in California, Canada, Greece and Portugal — anywhere in the world with hot dry summers, periodic droughts and flammable vegetation.
Yet despite the science, the evidence presented by bushmen, the dramatic history of this continent’s relationship with fire, and the findings of numerous inquiries, successive governments in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria over the last 25 years have consistently failed to prepare potential firegrounds in the expectation of the inevitable. Not only this, they seem to have actually go out of their way to make things worse: the cut-backs to fuel reduction burning, the closure of access roads and trails in national parks, the decimation of professional forestry and fire management expertise, the turning of the blind eye to the creation of residential subdivisions in capable of being defended, the funding of “research” in the universities that is aimed at making the job of the firefighter more difficult, and the erection of a complex bureaucratic edifices that hinder sensible bushfire preparedness and make fuel-reduction burning almost impossible.
. . .
And what of the greenies and the ivory tower academics from Murdoch, Curtin and Wollongong universities? The anti-fuel reduction burning academics have no understanding of practical bushfire management. They are misguided, misinformed and, by my reckoning, dangerously mischievous. But they have not been running the show. The premiers, ministers and senior public servants overseeing the land-management agencies could have, and should have, simply rejected the academics’ green ideology and its foolish precepts. Bitter experience should by now have made it blindingly obvious that the green approach to bushfire management can end only in tears. Instead, those who shirked their responsibility to protect their communities kowtowed and pandered. They played political games — Greens preferences in inner-city electorates can make or break governments, don’t you know — so they swallowed the utter bilge of academic theorists, people who have never in their lives had to fight a fire, let alone take responsibility for the design and implementation of an entire fire-management system. In genuflecting before the intelligentsia (the word is used advisedly), our governments knowingly sacrificed the community and the bush. The phrase “criminal negligence” comes to mind.
[Chuck DeVore, vice president of national initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation] recalls that as a freshman California assemblyman in 2005, he visited forest product industry professionals in Northern California. They told him of a "worrisome trend" that had begun many years before, where "both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs." Mainly, the problem was that "[a]s timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work." As the "timber industry gradually collapsed," the "combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared," because forest management professionals stopped "clearing brush and thinning trees."
The process of clearing forests in California had begun long before industrialization, with the native populations in California prior to the Gold Rush — but for different reasons then. Photographic evidence of the Sierra landscape in the 1850s and 1860s presents "open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and scattered oak trees," largely because the natives "shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population."
When the Gold Rush took hold and California grew, forests were a vital resource for both construction and fuel. "The landscape filled with trees," DeVore writes, "but the trees were harvested every 30 to 50 years." Increasing federal and state regulation "disrupted" that cycle in the 1990s, however, "especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government."
. . .
The reason for the regulations curtailing logging and the use of biofuels as an energy source is predicated upon environmental concerns. Specifically, "wood doesn't burn as cleanly as natural gas," and the "wood waste from timber operations" that used to be burned in biomass generators became scarcer. As such, there have been mass closures in recent decades of the biomass generators that once provided readily available and affordable energy. "What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires," DeVore writes.
It’s not that fires are more devastating in the natural sense. The problem is that human beings insist on putting their property in places where fires have long destroyed the landscape, over and over again.
. . .
The Los Angeles Times editorial board, for example, complains that “Land-use decisions are made by local elected officials and they’ve proven themselves unwilling to say no to dangerous sprawl development …”
But government prohibitions aren’t necessary. If people insist on building and selling homes in fire-prone areas, let them be the ones to cover all the costs. This includes the cost of fire mitigation and rebuilding after fire. This in itself would limit development in these areas.
And yet, while California pundits are complaining that policymakers aren’t doing enough, California politicians are actively taking steps to keep the market from correcting the excessive building in fire-prone areas ... California regulators prohibited insurance companies from dropping the homeowners’ insurance policies of homeowners in fire prone areas.
. . .
By stepping in to force insurance companies to cover these homeowners, California politicians are doing two things:
They’re continuing the cycle of encouraging homebuyers to buy homes in areas likely to fall victim to wildfires. At the same time, regulators are increasing the costs incurred by insurance companies, and this will likely have the effect of driving up the price of fire insurance for homeowners who more prudently declined to purchase a house in fire-prone areas.
. . .
In a more sane political environment, however, those who insist on living in the way of wildfires would have to assume the risk of doing so, rather than demanding politicians force the cost on insurance companies and taxpayers.
If governmental policy allows IDs to contain false, misleading, confusing, or unverified information, a chain reaction of adverse societal consequences will result. Those formerly comfortable in relying on the information disclosed in IDs will be compelled to undertake their own costly, time-consuming, and difficult investigations in order to verify the true nature of the person presenting an ID.
. . .
Inability to rely on the accuracy of the ID information will be of serious, if not critical, concern to most of the population. Examples of those adversely affected by government identification of males as females (and vice versa) are:
1. Parents when vetting potential playmates for their children and when vetting the parents and siblings of proposed playmates. Most parents would not consent for a teen daughter to go overnight camping with a teen transgirl. Parents understand the adverse medical, social, and economic risks and consequences and the social contagion and indoctrination attending the transgender lifestyle.
2. Parents when vetting potential babysitters and companions for their children and when vetting parents of such babysitters and companions. Most parents would not consent for a teen transgirl to babysit a daughter nor permit their daughter to spend time at the home of a transgirl.
. . .
4. Employers (especially medical providers) who desire to confirm the biological sex of prospective employees (when such is a legally permitted qualification). A female patient requested a female nurse for an intimate procedure and was summoned by an “obviously male” staffer with stubble and tattoos, who claimed, “My gender is not male. I’m a transsexual.” The woman declined the procedure.
5. Persons, for whatever reason, seeking relationships only with persons of the same biological sex or only with persons of the opposite biological sex, i.e., a male desiring to date and marry a female who can bear him a child.
6. Persons considering intimate involvement wanting to know the biological sex of the sexual partner because of the extraordinarily high risk of HIV infection attending the transgender lifestyle.
The use of soybean oil has increased dramatically over the last few decades, to the extent that is has become the most widely consumed edible oil in the US and other Western nations. However, its rise has coincided with an alarming escalation in metabolic conditions like diabetes, insulin resistance, and obesity, and a new study indicates that this may be down to the way that soybean oil causes genetic changes in the brain.
. . .
Writing in the journal Endocrinology, the study authors explain that soybean oil was found to modify the expression of around 100 different genes in the hypothalamus, affecting processes such as metabolism, neurological disease, and inflammation.
Among the altered genes were some that are associated with schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease, although by far the most affected was a gene that codes for the production of a hormone called oxytocin.
. . .
Future research will now need to focus on determining which ingredient is responsible for these genetic changes, although study author Poonamjot Deol of the University of California, Riverside says that while many questions remain unanswered, some very concrete statements can be made off the back of this study.
"If there's one message I want people to take away, it's this: reduce consumption of soybean oil," she said in a statement.
Between November 18-21, 2019, just days after winning the majority, several anti-gun bills were pre-filed in Virginia. These would criminalize ownership of AR-15s, outlaw ‘militia’ activity with the term now broadly defined, ban ‘high-capacity’ magazines and more.
Virginia voters - not just gun owners, but anybody who cared about the rule of law and checks and balances - were rightfully outraged. More than 90% of the state voted themselves a Second Amendment Sanctuary. News articles and Facebook forums were openly talking about voting out every single Democrat in the state in the next election.
The Democrats shot back: they filed bills that repeal voter ID, would allow felons the vote, and more. A LOT more. Senate Bill 399 would give Virginia’s electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. SJ 29 would change election law so that the governor would be elected by majority of votes in congressional districts, not by statewide majority. Basically, what D.C. says goes and the rest of you be damned. SJ 14 would restore voting rights to convicted felons. SJ 8 would allow felons and those declared mentally incompetent to vote. SB 65 - Eliminates photo ID requirement for voting. SJ 6 - Increases the term limit of the governor from 4 to 8 years.
So Virginians wised up. They’re not going to lose another election to dead voters, illegals, and felons. They decide to start a recall petition for several key Democrats. They’re not waiting for another election. And they’re sure as hell not waiting two years for a sham rigged election if all these new bills become law.
But the Democrats aren’t playing a gentleman’s game, anymore. They are in this for total domination, and they don’t have any scruples about playing in the mud!
Virginia’s Democrats replied swiftly. They had Representative Paul Krizek introduce HB 842, a bill that changes how a candidate is recalled. Instead of needing 10% of the prevailing vote to recall their seat, now you need 25%. Oh, and instead of having 120 days to file all those petitions for a recall, they’ll only have 60 days.
If you live in Virginia, you’ve got some tough options in front of you. You’re losing your state and way of life if these things go though.
If you live in another state, it’s time to wake up, and fast before you find yourself pinned like these Virginians.
If they succeed, then, in so many words, what President Abraham Lincoln called "government of the people, by the people, for the people" shall indeed perish from the Virginia earth. What's more, those responsible for the death of democracy in Virginia will do their best to spread it from there, and places like it, to the rest of these United States.
If it boils down to that, then what some are calling "Civil War 2" will probably become inevitable.
1 - Allegro moderato 00:00
2 - Andante 09:08
3 - Scherzo (Vivacissimo) 18:19
4 - Largo 28:34
