Tory imperial measures plan ‘utter nonsense’ and will add costs, says Asda chair
I will of course be derided as a dinosaur for saying so but I believe that the Imperial/American system is much safer than the metric system. You just have to misplace a decimal point in metric for disaster to ensue. That cannot happen with Imperial measures. I still use Imperial myself. Imperial and American measures are 99% identical
Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit plan to bring back imperial measurements is “complete and utter nonsense”, according to Asda chair Stuart Rose.
In a scathing attack, the Conservative peer said the push to boost the use of pounds, ounces and other outmoded weights and measures would only “add cost” and confusion to businesses.
“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life,” Lord Rose told Times Radio on Thursday, branding it a “backwards” step aimed at pleasing nostalgic voters.
“I mean, we have got serious problems in the world and we’re now saying let’s go backwards. Does anybody in this country below the age of about 40 know how many ounces there are in a pound?” the Asda chief asked.
Lord Rose said the government was pushing ahead with the plan “just to actually please a small minority of people who hark for the past. It’s complete and utter nonsense and it will add cost to those people who have to put it into place.”
The former boss of Marks & Spencer added: “I am shocked. It’s one thing having a crown on your pint glass, which is a bit of fun and a bit of nostalgia. It’s quite another having a whole dual system of weights and measures.”
The government is set to consult industry on how to reintroduce imperial units in Britain after quitting the EU, with ministers expected to officially announce the move today to coincide with the Queen’s platinum jubilee.
The idea has already faced criticism from the Tory backbenches, with Rutland and Melton MP Alicia Kearns branding it “a nonsense”. Labour has accused Mr Johnson of trying to “weaponise nostalgia”.
Last week, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis claimed voters and businesses would be “pleased” that the government was set to open the door to greater use of imperial units.
But the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the umbrella body representing the big supermarkets, has warned that the move could be “distracting” and costly at a time when food chiefs were trying to tackle inflationary pressures during the cost of living crisis.
Ministers have argued that it would give the likes of greengrocers and pub landlords greater choice over running their businesses, as well as bringing “national culture” back into shops.
Mr Lewis said that, while the policy was “light-hearted”, there were many people who “want to go back” to using pounds and ounces, and measures such as yards and miles.
The EU weights and measures directive came into force in 2000, with traders legally required to use metric units for sale by weight or the measure of fresh produce.
It remains legal to price goods in pounds and ounces, but they have to be displayed alongside the price in grams and kilograms.
The consultation, which is being coordinated by the department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), could change those stipulations, allowing traders to choose how they price fresh items.
The Independent understands that there will not be a move away from metric units, but the consultation will look at where it makes sense to incorporate or switch to imperial measurements such as feet and yards, and pints and gallons.
A Tory minister struggled to convert imperial measurements during an interview on Sky News earlier this week, despite Downing Street claiming the system is “universally understood”.
Arts minister Stephen Parkinson gave incorrect answers when Kay Burley asked him to convert ounces and grams into pounds.
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Are Video Games Harmful or Will They Make Your Kids Very Intelligent?
There was a big debate about this in 2009. See here. Computer games were generally found to be beneficial
The debate about whether or not screen time is harmful has been around for years. Some people believe that screen time, especially for children, is bad because it stunts their development and impairs their ability to think creatively.
Others claim that screen time can actually have positive effects. A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides some evidence for the latter claim.
Researchers at Karolinska University in Sweden studied how screen time relates to intelligence. The study produced some interesting results about the effects of various screen activities on intelligence.
The study looked at thousands of US children
In the study, conducted over a two-year period, the IQ scores of a group of children aged 8–10 years were followed.
The study examined the cognitive abilities of more than 9,000 boys and girls. In the beginning, the children completed a series of tests to measure their intelligence. The tests included measures of memory, attention and problem-solving skills.
Parents were also asked how much time their child spends watching TV and videos, playing video games and using social media.
The researchers studied 5,000 of the children again after 2 years. They asked the children to repeat the psychological tests to examine how their performance changed from one testing session to another.
The researchers also controlled for individual differences in the first test, such as genetic differences that might affect intelligence and differences that might be related to parents’ education level and income. This gave them a more accurate picture of how different factors influence intelligence.
Playing video games is better than watching TV
The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by about 2.5 IQ points between the two measurements.
No significant positive or negative effect of TV -watching or social media was found. These results suggest that not all activities are equal in terms of screen time.
Playing video games appears to have a positive effect on intelligence, while time spent on social media doesn’t appear to have a significant effect.
This study provides valuable insight into how different screen activities affect children’s intellectual development.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, spending time staring at screens doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on children’s cognitive abilities, as this recent study shows.
In fact, the study found that playing video games can boost intelligence.
The researchers haven’t yet examined how screen time affects other factors, such as physical activity or school performance.
We didn’t examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
However, these findings are consistent with several experimental studies on video game playing, which suggest that this activity can improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills, and more.
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Many American men are not OK
A characteristic common to suicides and mass killings is that the perpetrators are disproportionately men.
Men—generally young men—commit indiscriminate mass murder, and men take their own lives at a rate almost four times higher than women.
So, men demonstrate in a most unpleasant way another truth that our liberal friends want to deny. Men are different from women—not just in physical makeup but also in spiritual, psychological makeup.
For whatever reason, our increasingly Godless, materialistic, morally empty culture seems to take a particularly heavy toll on men.
American Enterprise Institute scholar Nick Eberstadt has looked into the recent phenomenon of prime-age men—ages 25-54—who have bailed out of the labor market. These are men who have stopped working and seeking work. The official label is NILF—not in the labor force.
According to Eberstadt, the total number of NILF men held steady in the 1940s and 1950s at around 1 million. Then in the late 1960s it exploded. There are now 7 million prime-age men who have withdrawn from the workforce.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the labor force participation rate of men—the percent of working age men in the work force—was 86.2% in January 1950. In April 2022, it was 68%.
The labor force participation rate for women has almost doubled over the same period—33.4% in January of 1950 to 56.7% in April 2022.
We’ve gone from a culture centered on church to a culture centered on government.
According to Gallup, in 1950 over 70% of Americans belonged to a church. In 2020, it was 47%. Among those born between 1981 and 1996, it’s 36%.
Over the same period, take of all levels of government from our GDP went from 22.6% to 43.4%.
Sanctity of life was devalued with Roe v. Wade. Military conscription was abolished around the same time, erasing any personal responsibility, beyond paying taxes, that men have to serve.
In this vacuous culture of entitlement and meaninglessness, lost young men periodically make their presence known through violent expressions, sometimes directed at others, sometimes toward themselves.
I do not pretend that this is simple. I certainly agree that security measures should be taken, particularly in schools.
George Washington warned the nation in his farewell address that there is no freedom without faith, tradition and personal responsibility.
The same liberals that have helped wipe this out now want more government in the way of new gun laws to solve what is a cultural and spiritual crisis.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/01/gun-laws-wont-fix-a-problem-of-culture-and-spirit
*****************************************************LGBTQI+ Pride Month Caught in Its Own Contradictions
June marks LGBTQI+ Pride Month—a month honoring those who are “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex.”
This ever-expanding rubric revolves around a particular value system entirely embraced by the modern left: the notion that a person’s core identity ought to lie not in the relationship between individual desires and societal duties, but instead ought to revolve around a subjective sense of self, unverifiable by the world at large and justified against all societal roles and rules.
President Joe Biden has said as much from the White House. In a proclamation urging Americans to “wave their flags of pride high”—it is worth noting that an entire side of the political aisle in the United States now finds the so-called pride flag far less controversial than the American flag itself—Biden stated, “This month, we remind the LGBTQI+ community that they are loved and cherished. My administration sees you for who you are—deserving of dignity, respect, and support.”
Of course, seeing people for who they are typically requires some sort of objective standard; it is literally impossible to see someone for who he is based on his own internal self-perception. This means that Biden is using perfectly Orwellian euphemisms to say that we all ought to validate the self-perception of any he, she, xe or catself.
This perspective is absolutely incoherent. Ironically, this incoherence is exposed by the conflict between the different letters within the alphabet soup of the supposedly sexually marginalized. The case for tolerance of lesbian and gay Americans used to be that biological drives should not be regulated by society at large, because such drives were inborn and innate; that idea at least had the merit of internal consistency.
Now, however, that idea has been jettisoned for its logical opposite, the belief that biology has no hold on us whatsoever, and that we ought to be free to define ourselves in opposition to our own biology, changing our gender and sexual orientation at will.
Homosexual orientation relies on the continued distinction between the sexes—after all, why prefer males or females if those sexes are mere social constructs? Transgenderism relies on the absolute malleability of sex. This is the reason that so-called TERFs—“trans-exclusionary radical feminists”—are so bewildered by the suddenly mainstream view that women’s rights ought to be extended to biological men.
And yet here we are, told by the White House that we must ignore the internal contradictions of left-wing sexual ideology, and simply pretend the incoherence away. We are told that we ought to stand for women’s rights by the same people who insist that Lia Thomas is a woman; we are told that one need not be a biological female to be a lesbian; we are told that biology dictates behavior, but that biology must never be used as an identifier.
None of this makes one whit of sense. But we ought to be proud of it, because after all, it liberates us to celebrate our inner sense of authenticity, free of society’s strictures.
There is only one problem, of course: This sort of illogic quickly devolves into anarchy. There is no way to speak coherently with one another absent objective meaning, let alone to reach consensus.
Suggesting that the world at large owes each of us validation for our innermost desires is a recipe for complete chaos. Unity can only come from opposition to something—and in this case, that means opposition to tradition, institutions, and the roles that actually facilitate human flourishing.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/01/the-anarchic-philosophy-behind-lgbtqi-pride-month
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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