Plugged In, and Trippin’! Literally
Study finds injuries increase with the frequency of headphone use,

Serious injuries sustained by pedestrians while listening to headphones have more than tripled in six years, according to a new study published this week in the journal Injury Prevention.

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Hey, let’s bring some MERCURY into our homes!
From the Jerusalem Post,

…from this point onward, only incandescent bulbs of 60 watts and less will be retailed. This limits our choice – like it or not – to compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), those squiggly, coiled bulbs initially hailed by environmentalists as saving as much as 50 percent of energy consumption, while lasting eight times longer. In truth, some CFLs malfunction far more quickly than advertised and they remain expensive.

…

There’s more. Each CFL contains small quantities of mercury and other toxins. If a bulb breaks at home, its fragments are dangerous to bare skin and need special handling and cleaning up. Even vacuum cleaners won’t do because they might spread the contamination.

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Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?

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Homeschooled students in university science classes: strengths, and weaknesses
The points from this university science professor (HT: Old-Earth Creation Homeschool) echo my own observations and thoughts. From the post,

Desirable characteristics:

1. They are independent learners and do a great job of taking initiative and being responsible for learning. They don’t have to be “spoon fed” as many students do. This gives them an advantage at two specific points in their education; early in college and in graduate education.

2. They handle classroom social situations (interactions with their peers and professors) very well. In general, my homeschooled students are a pleasure to have in class. They greet me when the enter the class, initiate conversations when appropriate, and they don’t hesitate to ask good questions. Most of my students do none of these.

3. They are serious about their education and that’s very obvious in their attitude, preparedness, and grades.

Areas where homeschooled students can improve:

1. They come to college less prepared in the sciences than their schooled counterparts – sometimes far less prepared. This can be especially troublesome for pre-professional students who need to maintain a high grade point average from the very beginning.

2. They come to college without sufficient test-taking experience, particularly with timed tests. Many homeschooled students have a high level of anxiety when it comes to taking timed tests.

3. Many homeschooled students have problems meeting deadlines and have to adjust to that in college. That adjustment time in their freshman year can be costly in terms of the way it affects their grades.

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The face of a Post-Christian Europe?
Rest assured, while Christian churches continue to close, the Church will not disappear (until it’s time to leave).

Good morning.

1. It’s all about focus … whaddya think of this art piece?
2. I haven’t read them all yet, but I agree, a disappointing set of answers. “Action as a principle” is the best one I saw in a quick scan of replies.
3. Build a better battery and the world will beat that path to your door. How about a better FFT?
4. Stimulus then … and now on account of decades of environmental activism and barriers to construction … that wouldn’t be possible so stimulus today amounted mostly to repaving roads that didn’t need it yet. Now there’s a legacy for which Mr Obama must be very proud.
5. In praise of really bad science, and perhaps praise is deserved.
6. A partial defense of SOPA/PIPA.
7. On those who think Mr Tebow prays for victory (haven’t apparently noticed he thanks God when he loses).
8. It’s unclear what they fear, that these two Democrat majority companies might be compared?
9. Not that’s educational, let’s have a debate … and then in the aftermath one side is termed “a bully” for merely participating.
10. Losing our edge, evidence here.
11. Drones in combat.
12. Zoom.
13. Apparently every statement made by the DNC is “officially doctrine” for every Democrat.
14. History and 4 bits.

After protesting the SOPA/PIPA bills going through Congress (rightly, in my estimation) by going "dark" for 24 hours, Wikipedia is back, to the relief of students everywhere who may have never opened a real, physical encyclopedia in this post-book world. The protest brought the issue of anti-piracy vs. anti-freedom to the attention of many people.

Now, I’d like those folks who were very concerned over those bills to look up a couple of things on Wikipedia that should also have garnered their attention recently, if they’re really concerned about what government is doing without their knowledge.

Operation Fast and Furious

Solyndra

If you’ve not heard about this in the news, that’s perfectly understandable. They’ve been nearly blacked-out themselves regarding these issues. Which is odd considering F&F is responsible for the deaths of Americans.

Are you really concerned about what your government is doing, and you’re not just jumping on the SOPA bandwagon? Read up.

Back home, whoo hoo. Links?

1. Medicare and FICA aren’t taxes? FICA is 15% and Medicare 5% … so that makes 20% to start.
2. Energy and a pipe.
3. Speaking of energy.
4. Sex and discrimination and a case of abuse ignored.
5. Speaking of sex roles, looking at advice from more than a century past.
6. If this was fiction, we wouldn’t find it credible. And … by the way … we’re all just softies and wimps.
7. Cost control failure.
8. Some advice from a noted Alexandrian ascetic.
9. More from a different one here.

Indeed.

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

I agree creating jobs for the sake of jobs is not always desirable (i.e. make-work, do-nothing jobs, or, as an extreme example, increasing the demand for contract killers), but this is energy we have at home that does not prop up terrorism or our enemies. The result is economic prosperity, and not just in the energy industry.

Thanks to capitalism, millions of America’s poor are paying less to heat their homes this winter. The middle class and even the rich are saving money because capitalists have found a cheaper way to drill for natural gas on American soil. That increases supply, which drops the prices — by 35% this winter over last winter — but the capitalists still profit because drilling this way dropped their costs.

Not only that, but the natural gas from this drilling has resulted in cheaper feedstock for plastics, ammonia and fertilizer.

The natural gas feedstock supplants oil-based feedstock, thus reducing our dependency on foreign oil.

And, if you continue reading, the EPA is trying to scare folks with junk science so they’ll be against drilling.

I guess this will be just another panel, like his deficit commission, that he can sweep under the rug and ignore, but bring up if anyone says he’s done nothing about the problem.

Links?

1. So, a technique popularized in narratives but proven ineffective … and now encouraged in public schools. So is that “go figure” or “color me (us) unsurprised.” And “brainstorming” isn’t skunkworks. Skunkworks techniques do work.
2. The march of bad science, how it works edition.
3. Bang!
4. A question.
5. Hall of fame or shame?
6. So the Dems think that inequality is high on that list. Apparently Gallup doesn’t even find it in the top 5 (or 10?).
7. The rigors of yoga.
8. It’s not a mild winter everywhere it seems. When the cold masses don’t come south … that isn’t because they aren’t cooling someone off.
9. Disease and resistance.
10. NYT plays the straight man to great effect.
11. Faith, science and a liberal icon.
12. Should there be an agency for that?

It’s us.

The United States now ranks the highest in terms of charity in a massive global survey that put the nation in fifth place in 2010, according to CAFAmerica, a member organization of the United Kingdom based Charities Aid Foundation International Network of Offices, providing charitable financial services to individuals, global corporations, charities, and foundations.

According to those surveyed, two out of three Americans said they donated money to charity (65 percent), more than two out of five volunteered their time (43 percent) and roughly three out of four helped a stranger (73 percent).  The new “World Giving Index (WGI) 2011” report is based on over 150,000 Gallup polling interviews with members of the public in 153 countries. The 2011 report looks at three aspects of giving behavior of individuals in the preceding month, asking if they have donated money to a charity, volunteered time to an organization, or helped a stranger. 

People like former President Jimmy Carter and singer Bono used to say that the US was "cheap", but John Stossel pointed out that that was not really true, (and Arthur Brooks noted that most charitable giving comes from the religious Right side of the political spectrum). We weren’t "cheap" then, and we’ve kept rising in this particular ranking since then.

I’m proud to be an American.

Good morning.

1. So, from the government’s point of view, is there no important difference between a person without a child and couple with a child(ren)?
2. A book noted, which I guess touches on evolution quite a bit.
3. Song.
4. Civil war or not? Does it matter?
5. The nut for the GOP to crack.
6. No. It’s not a “war crime”, or OK, maybe it’s a “war crime” (with scare quotes) but doesn’t rise to the level of war crime.
7. So, do  you want to buy some? It’s real good shit, man. (literally)
8. So, defenders. Do you want to cite some actual Washington venture capital successes?
9. The innumerate candidate. It was a tie, move on, ever hear of error bars, eh?
10. Ms Jolie’s new film and the land it portrays.
11. You know, at the beginning of the concert when they announce “turn your cell phones off” that doesn’t mean “put it in airplane mode” and now you know why.
12. Global warming silliness. Which brought a consideration to mind, it occurs to me that the AGW alarmists really think that the issue isn’t just a demographic shift moving peoples about as areas of arable land shift about on the planet, but that they think that human life on the planet is in jeopardy. That’s just nonsense. I wonder if they realize that.
13. That high risk pool, bad numbers on both ends.

Boy’s Locker Room; Girl’s Locker Room; Boy’s & Girl’s Locker Room?
From CBS Los Angeles,

Sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), AB 266 would require schools to allow students to play on sports teams according to their “gender identity” and not their biological sex.

…

However, revised language in the proposed bill would mandate that students “shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs, activities, and facilities, including athletic teams and competitions, consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records”.

Yet another reason to homeschool.

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Cereal Killer – FAIL

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3 Vehicle Ferry – FAIL
From the OC Register,

NEWPORT BEACH – A collision on board the Balboa Island Ferry shoved a minivan into the water on Friday morning, starting the clock on a rescue of two young children and their parents as the vehicle went under.

Witnesses said the family – visiting from Taiwan — had only a few minutes to escape before the van sank in about 15 feet of water. A ferry worker jumped into the water and swam to help as two boaters pulled alongside the sinking van and helped the family out.

The “ferry” only holds 3 vehicles, in series, as can be seen in the image per this link. Evidently the minivan was the # 1 vehicle to board and, before the driver could engage it into Park, the # 2 vehicle accelerated too fast, pushing the minivan into the drink.

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University of California system bans Chaw, among other things
In yet another instance of nanny-state nonsense, the University of California system is banning tobacco products from its campuses, including the advertising and sales, and including even chewing tobacco. Now, while I can recall sitting in university classes (with the California State system) and having an instructor or student light up, do we really need to government’s muscle in this area? From CBS Los Angeles,

The University of California has banned smoking and the use of chewing tobacco on all ten of its campuses.

…

The ban will also prohibit tobacco sales and advertising in all buildings owned or rented by the university.

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Are you too drunk to homeschool?
Oh, no… wait… Are you too drunk to teach 3rd graders in a public school?

A third grade teacher in Winchester was arrested after allegedly showing up to class drunk.

Theresa Davis was removed from her classroom by administrators at Susan LaVorgna Elementary School just after noon Thursday when co-workers discovered she was seemingly intoxicated.

Let’s hope it was a medication mix-up and not alcohol related.

Note: at New Covenant (my personal blog) I occasionally post a photo of food I’ve been served, at restaurants around the U.S., giving my impressions – essentially, a review. Not wanting to limit these delicious tidbits to my personal blog readers, I’ve decided to post at SCO as well.

Formerly known as Friday Food Foto, I have too much of a backlog of pics to limit posting to just Fridays! So this post launches the new title, Fabulous Food Foto (yes, I know, my alliteration skills are not Lincoln-esque by any stretch of the imagination).

Let’s start off with the classic Breakfast Burrito at The Filling Station, in Orange, California. Set near the “historic” and “old” downtown, where some scenes from Tom Hanks’ movie That Thing You Do were filmed, this former gas station serves up excellent breakfasts. The breakfast burrito is no exception and in it we find a healthy portion of eggs, onions, black beans, cheese, potatoes, and bell peppers, with a meat addition optional (bacon, in this example). Guacamole and salsa are served on the side. I really like this burrito, although I’d substitute pinto beans for the black beans. The serving size is large and, even though it’s big, it’s not so wet that it falls apart (in my opinion, burritos are designed to be handheld!).

Inside or patio dining is available. Get there early if you don’t want to wait for a table!

Enjoy!

– image © 2010 A R Lopez

Good morning.

1. A slight change in the aerodynamic profile there.
2. Let’s see, a Democrat recipe for business success, the taxpayers will be loaning money to startups, but require they can’t advertise or market, can’t negotiate with vendors, and can’t hire people with prior expertise. That’s a bucketful of beltway stupid if there ever was one.
3. Those who think this man committed war crimes are picking up more of them buckets (of stupid). We gave him a Medal of Honor for a good reason.
4. So while considering crossing the Rubicon … in stealth. The only remaining trick is with term limits and elections, eh? One wonders how Mr Obama now feels about his participation in efforts to block appointments by passive aggression.
5. Sex and the Song of Songs in modern context.
6. If you can consider spending $45k on a wristwatch … money means something different to you than the rest of us. On the other hand, it is an interesting piece.
7. A common (but I think silly) modern neurological objection to free will noted.
8. A global economic indicator to consider.
9. Hah! Take him out back and beat the snot out of him. That’s the solution.
10. That’s English they’re speaking. Amazing. I wonder if I’m as incomprehensible to them as they are to me.

Good morning.

1. Taliban/Al-qaeda embassy?
2. It might be faith in the system, but do you really take civil breach of contract disputes to the police?
3. Hosana-Tabor … asking the question why Mr Obama’s White House didn’t think the 2nd Amendment figured in the picture.
4. Those anti-human activists.
5. Property rights and digital content.
6. One hard way to make a living, an example from the animal world.
7. Human’s in the zoo for fun and profit.
8. A supporter of the platitude man himself (Mr Obama) questions the soft content of GOP speechery. At least they (the GOP) haven’t picked up (to my knowledge) the Obama tactic of saying one thing to one group and the opposite the next day to another.
9. China girding its loins for what purpose?
10. Race that bike!
11. Our anti-business White House in action.
12. “No legal recourse” … oops, not true alas.
13. Law without morals, not so good, in fact completely ineffective.

The Firearm as a Tool
In Washington state, a National Park Ranger was shot dead by an Iraq War vet with post traumatic stress syndrome. In Oklahoma, an 18 year-old widowed mother shot and killed an intruder in her home.

From Massad Ayoob,

In each case, the death weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. Some in the anti-gun camp have already blamed the law that allows ordinary, law-abiding citizens to be armed in parks like the one where the ranger was killed, for the depredations of a madman who had already violated every law from the Sixth Commandment on down before he reached the park. I try not to use words like “idiocy” when speaking of the other side, but in this case it fits. The firearm is a tool, which carries out the will of the owner. Evil in the first case, good in the second. Yes, it IS that simple.

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On that anti-gun hysteria
From the news report on the Park Ranger who was shot and killed,

It has been legal for people to take loaded firearms into Mount Rainier since 2010, when a controversial federal law went into effect that made possession of firearms in national parks subject to state gun laws.

That controversial federal law actually applies to the concealed carry laws which, to the best of my knowledge, do not apply to the carrying of 12-gauge shotguns.

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The True 1%
From Consumer Reports,

Only 1 percent of all mobile subscribers are guilty of gobbling up 50 percent of the world’s bandwidth, according to a new report by the British company Arieso, which advises mobile operators in Africa, Europe and the U.S.

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Quiet
Please.

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Coddling replacing spanking?
From The Atlantic,

But crotchety as I am, I find it sort of creepy–and anecdotally, as the first generation of what David Brooks calls “Organization Kids” enters the workforce, employers are apparently complaining that they have an outsized sense of entitlement combined with a difficulty coping with unstructured tasks.

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Apathy about religion and spiritual matters in America?
And this is surprising? From the article,

Most So Whats are like Gerst, says David Kinnaman, author of You Lost Me on young adults drifting away from church.

They’re uninterested in trying to talk a diverse set of friends into a shared viewpoint in a culture that celebrates an idea that all truths are equally valid, he says. Personal experience, personal authority matter most. Hence Scripture and tradition are quaint, irrelevant, artifacts. Instead of followers of Jesus, they’re followers of 5,000 unseen “friends” on Facebook or Twitter.

This is not surprising given our culture of peace, prosperity, and self-infatuation… the sorry thing is, we perpetuate this mentality in the church and in how we think we are evangelizing.

Rick Santorum and his wife went through the tragedy of a stillborn baby. Normally, pundits on the Left would be silent or respectful. Don Surber points this out.

JACQUELINE Kennedy suffered the three worst outcomes of a pregnancy.

She suffered a miscarriage in 1955. Her daughter, Arabella, was stillborn in 1956. And in 1963, her son, Patrick, died two days after his birth.

I don’t remember a newspaper columnist or television commentator making light of her personal tragedies.

That was then, this is now.

Nearly 50 years after the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, some liberal commentators made political use of the death of Gabriel Santorum, who died within two hours of his birth.

As his mother, Karen, wrote in 1998 in her book, “Letters to Gabriel,” she and her husband brought him home before his burial. She had to explain to two young children the death of the baby brother they had expected.

His father is a Republican who now is running for president.

After Rick Santorum won the Iowa primary, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Alan Colmes of Fox News decided to make fun of how the Santorums handled this death.

“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird,” Robinson said of Santorum.

“And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put.

“Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

Peter Wehner, writing at Commentary, finds this rather unwierd.

On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended.

Wehner cites recommendations from the American Pregnancy Association. Going back to Don Surber, he notes one particular circumstance why taking the stillborn child home to the family might not be done.

Charles Lane, editorial writer for the Washington Post, responded to the Santorum controversy by recalling his family’s loss of a son whose heart stopped two hours before birth.

“I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time,” Lane wrote.

“When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?”

“I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory — too abstract.

“In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.”

Perfectly understandable, but to go ahead and do it is most certainly not "weird".

So what’s the difference between then and now? Back to Wehner:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum?; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.

Some of this may be attributable to "the times" in general, to be sure. But I would like to note the blatant hypocrisy of liberals who claim to care more than their conservative brethren. This from the ideology that, as Wehner so aptly puts it, "champion[s] abortion, even partial-birth abortion". That is a culture of death, one that does not value life or give it the proper reverence, especially for the least of these.

I always find the term "Christian Liberal" as something of an oxymoron. I understand why Christians might be drawn to some of the Left’s rhetoric and positions, but this sort of behavior belies much of what goes on beneath, and it’s not something I could bear to support. I can still love my fellow man, give to good charities, and care for the poor without having to support a political party where this sort of attitude is barely beneath the surface.

Woohoo, normal schedule, today at least.

1. Why the notion that the choice is either not both?
2. Hand and mind.
3. Models and testing.
4. Unintended consequences on the way.
5. Joan of Arc.
6. Hitler as man not monster.
7. Somebody’s failing to notice that winning an election isn’t anything like the position which winning yields.