June 20, 2003
(Also featured, if I have the count right so far, on Tim Blair, Damian Penny, Andrea Harris and anywhere else where there be found sickos who probably thought, "yummy, saddle of venison!" when they shot Bambi's mother.)
I always said the EU was wet.
Dr Duncan Cadd writes:One does not often gain entertainment from EU Directives, but Directive 2002/96/EC may prove to be an exception.This almost looks too silly to believe. You taking the weee?Quote page 4 paragraph 7:
"The amount of WEEE generated in the Community is growing rapidly."
No shit.
See: link
One of its objectives is banning lead-based solder by 1st July 2006. The electronics hobbyists are going to love this. Presumably, lead in all formswill be harder to find as time goes on. I just wonder if there might be some future knock-on effect for shooting?
Not that I subscribe to conspiracy theories...
In Order Not to Forget.
I was pleasantly surprised - and given the unmitigated horror of the subject of this story I should make it clear that I mean "pleasantly" in an extremely specialised sense - to see that the Guardian has given the bulk of its front page to a story about the mass grave of Saddam's victims being excavated in the Iraqi town of Hilla. It is an honest and powerful article. The title of this post came from something described halfway down: In Order Not To Forget is the title of a secret Ba'ath party book extolling the 1991 massacre and singling out for praise those men who carried out the mass murder. The title of their book has come true in a way the Ba'ath didn't expect.
Children threatened with being taken from their home for refusing to take a test
. Chris Tame posted a story in the Libertarian Alliance Forum. I can't make the link to the newspaper in which it appears work, but here are one or two highlights. I have added emphasis to passages that particularly shocked me:UPDATE: Frank DiSalle emails to say the situation has eased somewhat.
Home-schooling standoff in Waltham
By Melissa Beecher / CNC Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2003
WALTHAM -- A legal battle over two home-schooled children exploded into
a seven-hour standoff yesterday, when they refused to take a
standardized test ordered by the Department of Social Services.
George Nicholas Bryant, 15, and Nyssa Bryant, 13, stood behind their
parents, Kim and George, as police and DSS workers attempted to collect
the children at 7:45 a.m. DSS demanded that the two complete a test to determine their educational level.
..."We have legal custody of the children and we will do with them as we see fit," DSS worker Susan Etscovitz told the Bryants in their Gale
Street home. "They are minors and they do what we tell them to do."
...The Bryants contend that the city and state do not have the legal right
to force their children to take standardized tests, even though DSS
workers have threatened to take their children from them.
...Both sides agree that the children are in no way abused mentally,
physically, sexually or emotionally, but legal custody of the children
was taken from Kim and George Bryant in December 2001. The children will remain under the legal custody of DSS until their 16th birthdays.
The parents have been ruled as unfit because they did not file
educational plans or determine a grading system for the children, two
criteria of Waltham Public School's home schooling policy.
Pontes said that a possibility exists that the children will be removed
from their home, but that was a last course of action.
"No one wants these children to be put in foster homes. The best course
of action would for (the Bryants) to instruct the children to take the test," said Etscovitz.
The Bryant family is due in Framingham District Court this morning, to
go before a juvenile court judge. According to DSS, this session will
determine what their next course of action will be and if the children
will be removed from the Bryants' home.
"These are our children and they have and always will be willing
participants in their education," said Kim Bryant.
Sight unseen
I'll bet that Australian universities, like universities all over the developed world, are amply supplied with professors who advocate every variety of Marxism, Communism, Trotskyism and Maoism - systems that have slaughtered hundreds of millions of human beings. I'll also bet that Australia suffers from no shortage of anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist and "deep green" academics who beaver away to ensure that the world's poor starve in GM-free misery, or die from malaria to keep us safe from nasty DDT.It's a pity that so many academics advocate these deathly doctrines, but, of course, that is their right. It's the cornerstone of the system of academic freedom. A university that curtails academic freedom starts to sicken from that moment; if not stopped, the plague of dishonesty will first cripple obviously controversial departments like politics and economics, and then, so virulent is it, it will go on to infect the teaching of every subject.
So, given that academic freedom is a great and good thing that protects the rights of Australian professors to agitate for any doctrine, however wicked others may think it, how does that rare voice, an Australian professor who thinks that more guns means less crime, fare? The Volokh Conspiracy describes how Gun Control Australia are trying to suppress the right of an Australian professor to oppose gun control. Note I do not mean "argue vigorously against", I really do mean "suppress."
June 18, 2003
Sorry.
My promise to be back Tuesdayish slipped to Tuenesdayish then Thuridayish. Alas, I. Have. To. Work.While I think of it, be sure to update your links to include Iain Murray's new site. It's still in cut-n-paste latin at the moment, but great things are promised.
Hah!
Originally this post said almost the same as the one above. After disappearing for hours, obliging me to re-write it, it reappeared to embarrass me. So now I shall embarrass it. Nyah nyah who's a silly post then!