Takes a lot to kill a European

At least it takes a lot to kill a European in a car. Let’s say we wanted to kill one by starvation. We could always trap a man in a car, at -30°C and leave him there for two months without food or water. Turns out that happened, not deliberately, to a man in Sweden and he managed to survive! No water will kill you in a few days but this man was able to drink melted snow. Generally you can last about four weeks without food but in this case doctors think the man went into something resembling hibernation. I’m pretty sure the cold, which would slow his metabolism, probably helped too.

If a slow death won’t work let’s do something extreme. Let’s go the cartoon route and drop a 20 tonne boulder on a car. That happened to a man in France and somehow he survived as well! Obviously he suffered severe injuries but he did survive being flattened by a massive rock and that’s not something one would expect.

The moral of the story is, if you want to kill a European, wait until he gets out of the car.

The best parenting style?

First off, I don’t know what it is. I don’t have kids, don’t particularly like them, and am not hugely familiar with parenting. However I’ve seen some parenting stories online and found the contrast to be worth bringing to people’s attention. On one side we have extreme, and abusive, parenting as promoted by a Chinese women and on the other end we have a Canadian study showing that physical punishments cause long-term harm.

The abusive incident occured in New York, where a Chinese couple forced their, almost naked, son to run around and lie down in the snow. The video got onto Youtube and attracted a huge amount of attention. Just as terrifying as the parents actions were the rationalisations which includes trying to give the son a “masculine temperament” and claiming that the child’s intense training, of which this snow incident was just one aspect, had cured his health problems. The first reason is sexist and contains harmful gender stereotypes while the second can’t be claimed from the available evidence.

P.L.U.C.K

It would be wrong to say that you can’t learn anything from music or video games or any sort of pop culture. Indeed it was through the music of System Of A Down that I was first introduced to the Armenian genocide. The song P.L.U.C.K, standing for politically lying, unholy, cowardly killers, from their self-titled album was dedicated “…to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Turkish Government in 1915.” This means something to the band as the members all have Armenian ancestry and the genocide of their people is something that is still denied by the Turkish government to this very day. Not everyone denies the labelling of the atrocity as a genocide, at least 20 countries have formally recognised it as a genocide, and France has now gone so far as to make it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide.