From an alert, Preventing Deaths of Farm Workers in Manure Pits, issued by the American National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health: On July 26, 1989, five farm workers died after consecutively entering a manure pit on their farm. The pit measured 20 by 24 feet and was 10 feet deep. The victims were a…
Philip Resnik is not convinced that there was any “tradition of valuing other cultures as successive waves of immigrants settled in the United States”: Yup, a great tradition, exemplified so nicely by our nation’s coining the term “liberty sandwich” to replace “hamburger” during World War I … and exemplified more recently by all those good…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a highly talented Somali immigrant who started as a cleaning lady and, although still only in her mid-30s, was elected last time round to the lower chamber of the Dutch parliament on the VVD (liberal-right) ticket. She has been threatened frequently since being elected for describing Islam as a backward religion,…
Mark Liberman points to an article by Laura Durnford on the Radio Netherlands World Service site which describes how the C17th Fort Oranje on the Hudson River and the town that sprang up around it, Beverwijck, was part of just one settlement within the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The other and more famous was…
Frequently racist paranoia vis-à-vis “imperialistic cultures” like the “Anglo-Saxon and Germanic” (with particular reference to the former) has permeated political thought of most varieties here for a long time and has been particularly evident in the last year or so. Sometimes, however, conflicts of interest arise. José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was an elitist liberal…
Here, taken on this walk, is a shot of Mexican multinational Cemex‘s Sanson cement factory at Sant Feliu, where the Llobregat cuts through the coastal range: Sanson and the Molins factory were major suppliers of concrete as the region industrialised, and this particular works has continued to play a major role in recent years. The…
It’s not just the sprinkling of No al PP signs at what is meant to be an ecumenical anti-terrorism fest: I fail to understand the whole concept of marching in large groups, carrying the same placards and chanting the same slogans in order to protest intolerance of the individual on the part of ETA and…
Franco Alemán over at HispaLibertas has very kindly passed on this article. In it Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff tells the sorry tale of how, following an alert from Tim Blair, they had to get rid of Uli Schmetzer. Schmetzer had been with the paper for 20 years, but when he was caught fabricating an…