Why not equip all vehicles with back-up alarms?

In parking lots, while walking behind vehicles back to my own, I have almost been struck by some whose drivers couldn’t see me till they were just starting to back up, as I was reaching the back end of their vehicles. I have also been in the same situation as a driver, with someone walking behind my car just as I’m starting to back up.

Thinking about this, I wonder, why shouldn’t all vehicles, not just large vehicles such as tractor-trailers and heavy machinery, come with back-up alarms? I’m sure it would save a few lives, and drivers’ licences.

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Notes on “The True History of the American Revolution”

Sounds like a worthwhile read. As a reactionary Canadian, and therefore a partisan of the Redcoats and the United Empire Loyalists, this sounds a lot more balanced than the usual hagiography from American historians about the American Revolution.

Uncouth Reflections

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

If, like me, you’ve always had a hard time squaring the narrative of the American Revolution with the requirements of common sense, you might get something out of Sydney George Fisher’s “The True History of the American Revolution.” Writing around 1900 (i.e. before the establishment of the American Imperium), Fisher tackles the conflict by going back to the original sources, and divesting himself of the bullshit. In Fisher’s telling, the Revolution was an extension into the New World of Whig-Tory political jockeying, one which allowed the Patriot colonists to opportunistically impose their will on their countrymen. In this version of the Revolution the Patriots come off not as noble idealists, but as proto-SJWs. They can’t be appeased, because they don’t want to be appeased, and all of their spoutings about the Rights of Man are resorts to the most self-serving kind of sophistry. Fisher:

Before I…

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Quote Du Jour: The Most Useless and Unproductive of All Forms of Reflection

Great quote from a great book.

Uncouth Reflections

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

It is the natural result of the whig historian’s habits of mind and his attitude to history — though it is not a necessary consequence of his actual method — that he should be interested in the promulgation of moral judgements and should count this as an important part of his office. His preoccupation is not difficult to understand when it is remembered that he regards himself as something more than an inquirer. By the very finality and absoluteness with which he was endowed the present he has heightened his own position. For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective. His concerns with the sphere of…

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Why bother bringing along a child too young to retain long-term memories with you on a vacation?

I was just reading a story at CBC News about a bad-behaviour-air-travel-passenger-shaming website, and I came across a couple of amusing comments, the second in response to the first:

I like Nick’s idea, but I love Werner’s tongue-in-cheek response.

I have long wondered why people bother taking their very young children, say, above still-nursing age but under three years old (and if your kid is talking, he / she shouldn’t still be nursing), on vacations with them, rather than leaving them with family. Since we don’t generally do ‘wet nurses’ in our society any more, and haven’t for many, many years (and it was mostly only rich who could have those, anyway), I can’t fault a mother who is still nursing for obviously wanting to feed and look after her young child herself, though I also wonder why it’s really that important for her to travel, esp. if it’s a vacation rather than a trip to visit family.

But if the child isn’t still nursing, but is still too young to be able to retain any lasting memories of the trip, I fail to see the benefit to the child of bringing it along, rather than leaving it in the care of a trusted relative or close family friend, assuming the kid wouldn’t be prone to screaming his/her head off and/or crying endlessly for his parents. (If not, then maybe the parents should wait till the kid is older to travel together with them.)

For example, when I was not yet 2 years old, my parents took me on a road trip to a distant part of Canada.

I naturally remember nothing of that trip, whatsoever. (When they took me again in my teenage years, as far as I’m concerned, that was my first trip there. BTW, to be clear, I bear them no grudges; I’m just noting that for all the trouble of travelling with a young infant, said child retained nothing, no memories of that trip at all.)

I do remember some bits of trips across and outside of Canada from between age 3 and 7 or so, say, and I remember most of a trip to the U.K. when I was 9, so clearly I was retaining everything by then.

But what benefit did I derive for being on that trip in my earliest years?

It’s not like I have any memories of the trip; wouldn’t it have been easier for my parents to leave me with my grandmother, or close family friends?  (Possibly cheaper; almost certainly would be so for those taking planes, trains, or ships…)

Or waited a couple years until I could remember it?

I know those who are parents might tell me, “You’re not a father, Will; you just don’t get it.”

That’s right; I retain the ability to approach such matters rationally, coolly detached rather than emotionally.

So yeah, I don’t ‘get it’, if you mean I haven’t unconsciously just accepted that things are the way they are with parenting, and that there are no other possible ways of doing things, in such regards. Yeah, I don’t get it. 😉

Oh well; whatever. Your money, your kids, etc.; not mine.

But please think of others, when you’re flying / taking a train / ship, and your kids are screaming. Give them a bit of cough syrup with DM or codeine, and opiate them a little, please, for the sake of the rest of us. 😉

 

Happy All American Family Stock Photos

For fun, being Canadian, I decided to try the same thing but replacing ‘American’ with ‘Canadian’; instead of mostly blacks, I got mostly Asians.

Uncouth Reflections

Sir Barken Hyena writes:

Try it yourself!

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BBC Dey Gon Down Shitta

!

ReactionaryThought

We used to educate the ignorant.

But in today’s enlightened (i.e. benighted) age, up is down, black is white, etc. We now know that to educate the ignorant is to denigrate them. Now, we dumb down everyone else instead.

Many years ago, I spent some time in the Caribbean. I was fascinated by the dialect. If there aren’t words for nuanced ideas, there can be no nuanced conversation. Put another way, if “yay mon” means just about everything, it also doesn’t mean very much at all.

The BBC is now publishing and broadcasting in Pidgin.

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Sin begets Sin

memoirandremains

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

A Tale of Two Cities

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