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January 31, 2006

teen driving - rules and a humorous driving contract

When your children need to learn to drive, you should put as much time and energy ... and patience .. into that as in teaching thme how to ride a bike or swim ...

After watching my oldest learn how not to drive (and me not teaching him very well), my younger children must drive a minimum of 5,000 miles with me in the passenger seat ... on all kinds of roads ... in all kinds of traffic ... in all kinds of weather ... and through the worst intersections they will be using when they have their license ...

our humorous - yet serious - teenager driving contract here ...

Rules that will keep your teen driver safer

  • The 2-second rule is an easy way to stay a safe stopping distance behind the car in front of you, at all speeds. Choose any landmark, such as a sign on the side of the road, a bridge, or a shadow across the road. When the car in front of you passes the landmark, begin counting "one thousand one, one thousand two." Your car should not pass the landmark before finishing the complete count, i.e., two seconds. This rule works at all speeds. Increase the count for slippery conditions. Maintain the 2-seconds even in rush hour traffic, as tailgating increases your sense of anxiety. Make the 2-second a habit - over time, you will not have to count as following this rule will become automatic.

  • Stop light rule: After coming to a complete stop at a light or stop sign, you should be able to see the rear tires of the car in front of you touching the pavement. If you can't, you have increased your risk of injury as your car slams into the car in front of you in the event you are rear ended at the stop.

  • Inside the car and body parts rule: Keep your ego, voice, music and all body parts inside the car. Do not yell or point body parts or any object at other drivers.

  • Tailgate rule: If you follow the 2-second rule, you won't tailgate. If another driver is tailgating you, pull into the right lane. If the driver continues to tailgate and follow you, drive to an open business and alert the police.

  • Equipment rule: Adjust your seat belt, seat and mirrors, and put on your seat belt BEFORE starting the car. Use your seat belt and turn signals at all times - make using these tools a habit. Do not use a cell phone while driving, and do not take your eyes off the road to fiddle with the radio or sound system in the car while the car is moving.


More Resources

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January 30, 2006

Danish products

From the burning of its flag to a boycott of its brands of butter and cookies, Denmark is feeling Islamic outrage over newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
. . .
"In (the West) it is considered freedom of speech if they insult Islam and Muslims," Mohammed al-Shaibani, a columnist, wrote in Kuwait's Al-Qabas daily Monday. "But such freedom becomes racism and a breach of human rights and anti-Semitism if Arabs and Muslims criticize their religion and religious laws."
. . .
In two West Bank towns Sunday, Palestinians burned Danish flags and demanded an apology. Several Islamist groups, including the Palestinian militant Hamas party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, called for a worldwide boycott of Danish products.
. . .
President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon condemned the cartoon, saying his country "cannot accept any insult to any religion."

"Outrage Builds in Mideast Over Cartoons," by Donna Abu-Nasr, Forbes, January 30, 2006

we love that last quote ....

"Al Qaida's Jihad against Lebanese Christians," Jihad Watch, November 15, 2003

"The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon: Once free and equal, Lebanon's Christians now struggle against tremendous odds in a country dominated by Syrian politics and an increasingly Islamized culture," by Habib C. Malik, The Offical Lebanese Forces web site

"Lebanon's Christians," Center for Religious Freedom


Christians in the Middle East are fast disappearing from the area. The Lebanese Christians, who constitute the only influential Christian community in the Middle East, are fast declining in numbers and power.

"The Rise and Fall of Christian Minorities in Lebanon," by Fouad Abi-Esber BA MA, Encyclopedia Phoeniciana

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January 29, 2006

Fructose water and set point

So Roberts tried to game this Stone Age system. What if he could keep his thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals? One obvious solution was a bland diet, but that didn't interest Roberts. (He is, in fact, a serious foodie.) After a great deal of experimenting, he discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system. A few tablespoons of unflavored oil (he used canola or extra light olive oil), swallowed a few times a day between mealtimes, gave his body some calories but didn't trip the signal to stock up on more. Several ounces of sugar water (he used granulated fructose, which has a lower glycemic index than table sugar) produced the same effect. (Sweetness does not seem to act as a "flavor" in the body's caloric-signaling system.)

The results were astounding. Roberts lost 40 pounds and never gained it back.

"Does the Truth Lie Within?" by Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt, NYT Magazine, September 11, 2005

I can verify the appetite suppressing properties of the fructose water. A glass of fructose water and I can easily go without lunch. The only problem is that the sophists lure the unsuspecting to lunch anyway.

"Seth Roberts in NYTimes," by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, September 12, 2005

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"Stopping the Swings" - bipolar disorder

Pettigrew’s students rapidly alternated between seeing the horizontal and vertical stripes—it took less than 10 seconds. But when Pettigrew looked through the apparatus, he switched very slowly—10-20 seconds. This “slow hemispheric switching rate” occurs, Pettigrew hypothesizes, because bipolar people are stuck in one hemisphere of the brain at a time.

After his discovery, Pettigrew tested the switch rates of 18 bipolar adults when they were neither depressed nor manic. Compared to 49 normal controls, the bipolar subjects had a significantly slower rate of alternation. And the more severe their disorder, the slower they switched. Individuals with less severe illness sometimes had switch rates that overlapped with the rates of normal people, so there is no cutoff level above which he can be sure someone is safe from the disorder. Still, says Pettigrew, the method works fairly well, even on kids down to five years of age whom he has tested with only slightly modified procedures.

Pettigrew’s current research uses slow switching to identify otherwise healthy young people who might be vulnerable to the development of bipolar disorder. “Having identified ‘slow switchers,’ I then follow them to see if the slow rivalry rate is a predictor of later episodes of mania and/or depression.” This research will help clarify whether switching rates can be an effective diagnostic test.

"Stopping the Swings," by Katherine Miller, Science Notes 2001

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January 27, 2006

"How the suicide bomber saved Zionism"

For my Palestinian friends, this word:

At this point you hardly need to be told that suicidal policies are, well, self-destructive. But it might be prove instructive to see the effect that the last suicide bombing of 2005 had on this country.

It was Hanukkah, and a young IDF officer stood between a young Jihadist and the celebrating children next to whom the bomber planned to detonate his 33 pounds of explosives.

The day after the bomber hit the detonator at that last-minute checkpoint, killing himself, the officer, a Palestinian taxi driver, and another Palestinian, the headlines in Israel referred to the slain second lieutenant Ori Binamo by his first name only, as if his loss was felt by nearly every household in Israel. Because it was.

This is the lesson that Palestinians would be well advised to learn about the people on this side:

You have made a new kind of martyr hero in the Holy Land, the kind who keeps the shahid from making Jewish infants and Jewish mothers into martyrs against their will.

You have demolished your cause by restoring our faith in the concept that there are those who believe strongly in the elimination of the Jewish people by violent means.

You may believe that you invented steadfastness and stubbornness. Think again.

Now is the time to decide. Hamas listens to public opinion. Make it known. You have a choice. You can play with your guns, or you can have a country.

There is a new kind of Israel, a better one, in fact, for which, perversion of perversions, we have the suicide bomber to thank.

This Israel will be harder to defeat than the enemy you faced five years ago. You have only yourselves to thank. You and your bomber.

"How the suicide bomber saved Zionism," by Bradley Burston, Haaretz.com, January 15, 2006


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January 25, 2006

You say tomatoe, I say tomatoh

the missing ingredient is that Democrats have a bigger problem than lacking a coherent theme; they've lacked a coherent program, especially on national security. Nowhere does that come across more than in the divergent approaches to Iran and Iraq. For three years, Democrats have screamed that the Bush administration has taken a "unilateral" approach to Iraq and trashed our relationship with European allies -- despite trying for five months to get them to enforce 12 years worth of useless UN resolutions. Suddenly with Iran, the Democratic front-runner claims that allowing Europe a significant role in negotiations amounts to "outsourcing" America's responsibilities, and they scream that George Bush hasn't been unilateral enough.

"Dionne Comes Close To The Answer," Captains Quarters, January 24, 2006

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January 23, 2006

Communism

Stalin once remarked that the death of an individual is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. What he neglected to add is that, for the Communist, there is no such thing as the individual. By the same token, there is no such thing as independent judgment—scholarly, judicial, or even aesthetic judgment. Our postmodern literary critics are fond of declaring that "there is no such thing as"—take your pick: intrinsic value, objectivity, disinterestedness, impartiality, even truth. It landed them in a cloud-cuckoo-land of self-contradictory nihilism. But Marx and Lenin got there before them. For the Marxist, art and literature are not human pursuits guided by their own rules of achievement but rather instruments to be used for the shifting and arbitrary ends of the Party. "Down with non-partisan writers!," Lenin wrote in 1905, "Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class!"

"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005

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January 21, 2006

"Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness."

Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.

Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. In retrospect, I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.

A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.

The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]

This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.

"What you'll wish you'd known," by Paul Graham, January, 2005 (excellent advice for young people)

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January 20, 2006

Nuclear Iran

A lot of countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The United States is another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans into this, and there are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb. However, there are only two countries that can do something about it. The Israelis don't want to get the grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid action because they are the most vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon. The United States doesn't want Israel to strike at Iran, as that would massively complicate the U.S. situation in the region, but it doesn't want to carry out the strike itself either.

This, by the way, is a good place to pause and explain to readers who will write in wondering why the United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear force but not an Iranian one. The answer is simple. Israel will probably not blow up New York. That's why the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes and does mind Iran having them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not sharing time in preschool. End of digression.

"Iran's Redefined Strategy," by George Friedman, Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report, January 17, 2006, via chiagoboyz

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January 18, 2006

"A Credit to Their Racism"

Martin Luther King's birthday is a time to celebrate the civil rights hero's commitment to non-violent social change. That's why this week it was such a shame to see liberal speakers do violence to the English language and the King legacy by engaging in inflammatory rhetoric.

Senator Hillary Clinton offended even many blacks by using Al Sharpton's MLK Day celebration to say the Republican House of Representatives has been run "like a plantation -- and you know what I'm talking about." Apparently, she meant that GOP House leaders were the modern-day equivalent of slavemasters, but she declined to elaborate to reporters afterward.

Then there was New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a once promising reformer who has now descended into racial demagoguery to disguise his failure to properly evacuate his city as Hurricane Katrina approached. He used his MLK Day speech to say: "I don't care what people are saying Uptown. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day." He added that "God is mad at America" and said it was the Lord's will that the city retain a black-majority in its population.

When Martin Luther King was alive, the elite media were perfectly aware of which reactionary forces were blocking racial progress in this country. Today, charlatans like Al Sharpton, demagogues like Mayor Nagin and manipulative politicians like Senator Clinton are the major obstacles to letting the country get beyond race. If GOP Senator Trent Lott was forced to step down from his post as Majority Leader in 2002 for insensitive and thoughtless praise of the late Strom Thurmond, those on the left who deliberately exploit race for political gain deserve at least similar scrutiny and condemnation.

"A Credit to Their Racism," by John Fund, OpinionJournal's Political Diary, January 18, 2006

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"Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions"

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion.

"The Beautiful People vs. The Dutiful People," by Michael Barone, Commentray, January 16, 2006

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January 17, 2006

What racist party?

We knew it was coming; that is, the attempt to impugn Sam Alito by using the race card against him. You see, it’s a given in Washington, New York, Hollywood, and other liberal enclaves that conservatives are, by nature and philosophy, racist. And conservative presidents, as a matter of course, nominate racists to the bench — Bob Bork, Clarence Thomas (even though he is black, but that didn’t matter), Charles Pickering, Bill Pryor, and, now, Sam Alito. They’ve all been targeted this way.

Ironically, the party that defended slavery in the 19th century and segregation for much of the 20th century is the Democrat party. The governors who stood in schoolhouse doorways were all Democrats. The segregationist senators who filibustered the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts were all Democrats. The party that elected former Klansman Bob Byrd as its leader in the Senate for a decade was the Democrat party.

These are just some of the highlights of the Democrat party’s embrace of racism. That’s certainly not to say that every Democrat is a racist, or every Democrat during these periods was a racist. Indeed, many fought their own party. Many were involved in championing abolition and civil rights. But that’s not the point. The argument proffered by Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy, among others, makes no such distinction

During today’s Alito hearings, Leahy’s smear went something like this: Alito’s membership in a college group, in which an individual member wrote an absurd article about blacks, taints Alito as a racist. This is contemptible demagoguery, no matter how many times the Democrats use it against Republican judicial nominees.

"The Race-Card Fallback Position," Mark Blevin, January 10, 2006

Not to mention former KKK'r Robert Byrd (D-VA) ... "Byrd's KKK Alibi Comes Unraveled"

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January 15, 2006

"Revenge of the Chinese lesbians"

"Revenge of the Chinese lesbians" is mister snitch's headline for a post noting "The Chinese policy of favoring male births (read: killing female embryos) will lead to an imbalance of something like 20-30 million men in the next few years."

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January 14, 2006

"Complainers rarely mate with other complainers"

Complainers seek non-complainers as mates. This makes perfect sense because complainers need the sympathetic ear of the upbeat, i.e. the victim, in order to do their thing. Otherwise the whole system breaks down. Statistically speaking, if your mate is upbeat, there’s a very good chance that you’re a huge pain in the ass.

Sometimes two upbeat people mate. But I suspect that in those situations the one who is slightly less upbeat morphs into a complainer over time just so they have things to talk about. Otherwise you get a lot of this:

Upbeat person 1: How was your day?

Upbeat person 2: Great! How was yours?

Upbeat person 1: Great!

"Men Versus Women (part II)," Dilbert Blog, January 14, 2006

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January 13, 2006

Hypocrisy all around ...

The mainstream media love it when notable conservatives get caught not practicing what they preach concerning personal behavior. Prominent liberals often pride themselves on being morally superior to conservatives. Liberals don't admonish others to lead virtuous personal lives, but they constantly excoriate corporations and businesspeople for being greedy, racist and/or heartless, soullessly putting profits before people, fouling our environment and shamelessly exploiting one and all. Liberals are adamant about imposing policies such as affirmative action; they declaim the virtues of labor unions and the need for ever-stricter environmental regulations. As this book engagingly documents, however, these lefties are in many respects even bigger hypocrites than are fallen conservatives.

"Liberals' Limitless Hypocrisy," Fact and Comment, Forbes, by Steve Forbes, January 30, 2006

...


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January 10, 2006

Leaving the American cultural left

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

"Leaving the left - I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity," by Keith Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005

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January 05, 2006

Ben Franklin

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead & rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.

-- Benjamin Franklin

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January 01, 2006

Canada

Canada is the perfect place for American quitters, as it evidences self-loathing masquerading as self-congratulation.

"Welcome to Canada, The Great White Waste of Time," by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard, March 21, 2005

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