Lives in a Shoe

Recycling: Big Fat Expensive Waste of Time

Many people believe recycling either pays for itself or is worth the cost. Both positions are wrong. Every community recycling program in America today costs more than the revenue it generates. The value of recycled materials on the open market has declined dramatically in recent years, and in many cases there is no market at all.

Still Worth Doing?

Some people believe recycling is nevertheless worth doing because, they believe,

• Recycling conserves valuable material resources, many of which are in short supply.

• Recycling means we use less landfill space, which is also in short supply ... and unsafe.

• Recycling is “good for the environment.”

Recycling is, in fact, good only for the human psyche. We get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we recycle, even though we are wrong to feel that way.

Read the entire article.  And then go do something constructive.

Girls Have Cooties But Old Ladies Don't

In late September last year, Saudi King Abdullah opened the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), billing it as the Arab world's most advanced university on the northern shores of Jeddah.

Hoping to attract high-level international talent, the king took a gamble, announcing the university would be the kingdom's first co-educational institution, with male and female students from over 60 countries studying side by side, unveiled women driving around the 14-square-mile campus, and no religious police on site.

Then came the fatwa calling for all "modernizers" advocating gender mixing in the kingdom to be put to death. "Whoever allows this mixing allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel and this means defection from Islam," a highly influential cleric ruled. "Either he retracts or he must be killed."

...Sheikh A-Najaimi, another senior Saudi cleric who had publicly supported the Al-Barrak fatwa calling for the death of those supporting gender mixing, attended an International Women's Day conference in Kuwait last month.

A-Najaimi stands accused of eating, sitting and talking with the conference's female attendees for hours.

The sheikh justified his attendance by claiming that the majority of the women at the conference were menopausal, therefore he is permitted by Islamic law to interact with them. Islamic scholars disputed A-Najaimi's interpretation of the Sharia, Islamic law, arguing that a woman must be post-menopausal, uninterested in men, and decide on her own whether or not to announce her status.

When some of the female attendees announced that they were not, in fact, menopausal, the sheikh allegedly told them "you are post menopausal whether you admit it or not!"