Einde Amnistie Wapenwet in België

Morgen, 30 juni loopt de verlengde amnistieperiode voor het legaliseren van wapenbezit af.

In totaal kwamen dus zowat 162.000 wapens boven water, terwijl er in het centraal wapenregister ongeveer 700.000 wapens geregistreerd staan. Naar schatting 1,5 miljoen tot 2 miljoen wapens zijn in België in omloop. (cijfers van HLN, 9 mei 2007)

• Op 30 april verschijnt een communiqué van de politie zelf: reeds 50.000 wapens gesmolten in hoogovens van Mittal Steel in Gent en Luik...


• Op 9 mei verschijnt een artikel in Het Laatste Nieuws: "Wapenwet een grote flop": er zouden slechts 10% van alle wapens in België naar boven komen, en de lokale Politie zou de toevloed niet aankunnen. 58.000 die vergunningsplichtig waren werden opnieuw aangegeven. 34.496 jacht- en sportwapens die voor de nieuwe wet niet vergunningsplichtig waren en nu wel, werden geregistreerd.


• Het centrale wapenregister van de Federale overheid zou meer dan 700.000 records hebben van reeds legaal aangeven wapens (voor de wet van Juni 2006)


• op de site van de Hubertusvereniging Vlaanderen vindt u een FAQ over de nieuwe wapenwet


• In Vollezeele eerder deze week, stond een lange rij wachtenden met "oud schroot". De Politie aldaar deed perfect hun job! ... En de mensen die niet in orde waren lieten hun gerief achter.

Het resultaat van deze operatie/hetze is dus in het beste geval twijfelachtig te noemen. 10% van alle wapens die al gekend waren worden opnieuw aangegeven. Dat wil dus zeggen dat er een grote burger-onwil bestaat. Bovendien zijn de mensen die hun wapens gaan afgeven zijn al te goeder trouw: er bestaat een groot vermoeden dat de sportschutters en jagers zich allemaal al in orde hebben gebracht - en bovendien hebben die vaak al aangiftes gedaan (vb. internationale vuurwapenpas). De paar tienduizeden particulieren die hun erfstukken gaan binnendoen zijn zonder vergoeding, waren sowieso al geen bedreiging voor de democratie. Natuurlijk wordt het nu veel moeilijker om zomaar een "wapen" te gaan kopen in een winkel. Maar worden de échte problemen wel aangepakt? Al die energie die gaat naar de registratie van "onschuldige" wapens, had men die beter niet geïnvesteerd in het aanpakken van de illegale wapencircuits? Is het niet nog altijd mogelijk om in bepaalde wijken in bepaalde steden aan vuurwapens te geraken op de zwarte markt. Men vertelt dat er nu al illegale Oost-Europeanen aanbieden om niet-geregistreerde wapens op te kopen, voor goed geld...

De criminelen onder ons die met een FN P90 rondlopen (om nog maar te zwijgen over al die overvallen op politie & militaire stockpiles van de laatste jaren) en die laden met armour-piercing ammunition; die waren natuurlijk niet te bespeuren in de voormalige rijkswachtkazerne van Vollezeele (waar trouwens nergens een logo van de nieuwe ééngemaakte politie hangt...)

Wenende Baby's: advies voor vaders

wenende baby's van 1 week: een korte handleiding

't beste wat je kan doen is proberen ...

1/ wiegen (tot je rugpijn hebt...)
2/ rondrijden in koetske?
3/ in de auto steken - dat werkt in 90% van de gevallen,
4/ zien dat ge uw pedalen niet verliest: mocht uw vrouw op zijn van de zenuwen, vermoeidheid etc... stuur haar dan eens shoppen en wees een nieuwe man...
5/ mijn ervaring is: ga er niet met 2 rond staan, maar wissel af...
6/ na 1 week zijn baby's wat aan het ontwennen... 't is te zeggen, de scheiding van de baarmoeder begint nu te wegen, en ze krijgen al snel heimwee
7/ is er stoelgang in de pamper?
8/ misschien wat last van krampen, dat gaat over, maar er zijn geen wondermiddelen
9/ zet de TV zo luid dat ge niets meer hoort
10/ baby's die huilen: fantastisch en verplicht, het wil gewoon zeggen dat ze hun stembanden oefenen en hun longen trainen... en dat is hoogst noodzakelijk (anders kunnen ze later geen joints paffen)
11/ zet de baby af bij schoonouders...
12/ probeer toch het hoofd rustig te houden en niet gefrustreerd raken ook al lijkt het of ze 24h/24h wenen
13/ TUT...
14/ als ge toch onzeker zijt, neem temperatuur en bij koorts: onmiddellijk bellen naar A/vroedvrouw van de kliniek die u altijd nog wel willen helpen of B/huisarts of C/ pediater....

Blackberry Ban in France

Various news sources are reporting that the widespread use of Blackberry devices can pose a threat to business and national security! In France, the DGSE intelligence agency has advised the new Sarkozy-Government to ban Blackberry's from their offices: the reason: the servers are hosted in the UK and the USA, which could compromise French governmental communications. Reports further indicate that nowadays, businessmen on the bring of engaging in confidential business discussions/signing of deals are pulling the batteries out of their Berries to show their absolute honesty...

• Members of the new French cabinet have been told to stop using their BlackBerries because of fears that the US could intercept state secrets ...
• US bankers would prove their bona fides in meetings by first placing their Black­Berries on the table and removing the batteries

http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/news/science/20070619-blackberry-france-french-government-spy-le-monde-nsa-US.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/dde45086-1e97-11dc-bc22-000b5df10621.html

Greywater Guerillas

Interesting blog discovered: the "Greywater Guerillas", a new movement in the USA that attempts to make the best of various water usages in your home. A clear example is to divert water from your washing bassin to your toilet to use it to flush excrements - instead of using "normal" drinking water.

http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/2007/06/greywater_guerr.html

Other links: http://graywater.net/ for in-depth coverage of techniques and tools to use Grey Water

Asian Family Empires: Clans on the Run

Wacondah is pleased to announce a new entry that will hopefully lead to a very closeknotted string of family business stories & research:

TIMEasia Magazine: Clans on the Run: "As a new generation takes over, Asia's richest business families are being forced to change their cloistered, Confucian ways"

How children lost the right to roam in four generations

How children lost the right to roam in four generations
Originally uploaded by PeterForret

Excellent graphic and comment posted by Peter. This clearly is a trend!

2 Belgian Cook Blogs of Note

As you grow older (as is our case particularly lately), you find you're drawn to other interests and that your palatal senses change drastically. A cooking frenzy ensued last weekend with traditional Belgian Entrecôte + Fries, followed by Gnocchi in fresh tomato sauce. Now, whereas Camille refuses to eat "live" (i.e. unsquashed and unprocessed tomatoes), she absolutely digs my tomato sauce! Victory for Daddy (and not so much for the washing machine...)

Anyways, 2 secretive cooks have set up quite interesting blogs of note

for a Brazilian touch: http://aboboragostosa.blogspot.com/
for greener fingers: http://www.leafy-cooking.blogspot.com/

The Invasion has Begun

Once every 17 year, these little critters emerge for a very short lifespan: their sole objective: procreation.

Question: Why do they stay underground for 17 years? (5/2004)Answer: There are a number of theories. Most likely they've developed this rhythm to avoid predators. Climate events -- perhaps the Ice Age -- are also factor.

More info here

Populations of the periodical cicada species are synchronized, so that almost all of them mature into adults in the same year. The fact that periodical cicadas remain locked together in time is made even more amazing by their extremely long life-cycles of 13 or 17 years.
Periodical cicadas are found in eastern North America and belong to the genus Magicicada. There are seven species -- four with 13-year life cycles (including one new species described in 2000), and three with 17-year cycles.

WHAT TO DO IF A NUCLEAR DISASTER IS IMMINENT!

Begin storing water IMMEDIATELY! and more useful tips in case of nuclear disaster

Lack of clean water will devastate your family much more quickly and more severely than any lack of food. Without water for both drinking and continued good sanitary practices in food preparation and for bathroom excursions (which will inevitably be much less sanitary than normal), debilitating sickness could rampage through your household with little hope of prompt medical attention. That is a highly likely but, avoidable, disaster, ONLY IF you have enough water.
Source: http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
Note: remember to print the guide as, in the case of this scenario, your computer will no longer work...

West Antartica - NASA Finds Vast Regions Melted in Recent Past

NASA - NASA Finds Vast Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past: "NASA Finds Vast Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past"

For those of you who've seen "An Inconvenient Truth", there's a scene in the documentary where A.Gore talks about a big chunk of Antartica that's melting: here's the proof by NASA...

Where have U been?

Optimum Population Trust - a British charity wants you to have no more than 2 kids!

pic source
Being a young proud father of 2 kids and planning for #3, I found myself dumbfounded by the latest communqué from these creepy Brits - the Optimum Population Trust : on the news last night was the statement that choosing to have a 3rd kid was the equivalent of pumping additional greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere of approx. 620 round-trip transatlantic plainrides!

These creeps base their theories on Luddite, Club of Rome & Club of Lisbon post-Malhtusian freakonomics...

For more guestimates on current population size: see the US Census at http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html (it stood at 6,593,737,707 at the time of this post)

• should we feel guilty?
• should we feel guilty that we do not live in a 3rd world country?
• should we feel guilty that we're able to get up in the morning?
  

Sarkozy wins landslide French elections

Presidential elections in France have a tendency to be a high-octane political thriller with last-minute landslides - see notably our post on the 2002 elections, and especially the 2nd tour which positioned outgoing Chirac against right-wing Le Pen. This 2007 Sarko-Ségo race turned into a spectacular fight between 2 highly-coached expert communicators: the right one have the advantage/disadvantage of coming out of an outgoing government, the other being a very eye-candy camera-pleasing socialist woman who happens to be married to France 1st Secretary of the Socialist Party.

A part from the very interesting televised debate and the spitting confrontations over the last months; commentators agree that the Socialists went too far in diabolizing Mr.Sarkozy and even menacing that there would be riots if he was elected...

One should, in politics, always try to master his temper and this is exactly what Mrs. Royal lost, thinking she could outrace Mr.Sarkozy with her image of "Mariane saving the republic"...

In the end, Mr. Sarkozy on La Concorde last nigt reiterated his campaign goals:
- work work work
- pas de droits sans devoirs
- la France m'a tout donné, il est maintenant temps que je lui rende tout.

Sidenote: as a son of immigrants, Sarkozy can permit himself to adopt staunch measures on criminality etc... In this position, he is much harder to critizise than e.g. Le Pen.

Climate Change: "Six steps to hell"

"Six steps to hell"
April 30, 2007

By the end of this century, Earth could be hotter by 6 degrees centigrade than it is today, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just how bad would that be? Mark Lynas sifted through thousands of scientific papers for some answers, by degrees.

summary of the article found here

• 1° warmer: new dust bowls in the USA, a Greener Sahara (?), Alpine melt-off in Europe
• 2° warmer: plankton wiped out; increased old-age die-offs in Europe's heatwaves (remember 2003 with 30.000 surplus deaths?); Greenland icecap meltoff resulting in global sealevels rise by 7 (!) meters; Alpine meltoffs in South & North America resulting in huge water shortages and ultimately: mass deaths
• 3° warmer: tipping point where we would no longer be able to control climate warming: possible Amazon forest burndown in massive firestorm which would tip the world right away into the 4,5° warmer scenario. Sub-tropic population will migrate to mid-latitudes due to extreme wheather events that threathen foodsupply. Sub-Sahara Africa and Australia become inhabitable.
• 4° warmer: worldwide permafrost meltdown unlocking massive carbon storages to be released in the atmosphere; no more North Pole Ice; Antartica partial melt-off will result in another +5 meters increase in worldwide sea-levels. Great Trek North in Europe due to 45+° temperatures in the Southern parts
• 5° warmer: Ocean Blurp and Massive Tsunamis: methane (a more powerfull greenhouse gas) is no longer trapped in the oceans and is released into the atmosphere.
• 6° warmer: ref to the end-Permian wipeout of 251 million years ago. By the end of this calamity, up to 95% of species were extinct. The end-Permian wipeout is the nearest this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock drifting through space. major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Obesitas has reach global epidemic proportions (WHO

While a staggering number of people are living on less than 1 dollar per day, an increasingly large number of large people is sufferin from obesitas... According to the World Health Organization, the obesity problem has reached epidemic proportions. The statistics are alarming:

• Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them obese.
• Worldwide, 22 million children under age 5 are estimated to be overweight
• Obesity and overweight pose a major risk for chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. (World Health Organization)
• Although many think of obesity as affecting only industrialized societies, over 115 million people in developing countries are estimated to suffer from obesity-related problems. Among the affluent and the impoverished alike, the obesity epidemic is an extreme manifestation of the problem of malnutrition.

Plant a Billion Trees Campaign 2007 (UNEP)

Happy to announce that we've completed our pledge of planting 10 trees (salix alba - knotwilg)in 2007. Camille proved to be very resourcefull: we know enjoy our weekly "aperitieverkes" near them, come rain or shine !

“The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.” Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign, people, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to enter tree planting pledges online with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide during 2007.

Facts & figures: Forests cover 30% of land

World Environment Day 2007

World Environment Day 2007, June 5

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II has released its Summary for Policymakers

Extract for EUROPE from the IPCC WG II Report (April 2007)
Nearly all European regions are anticipated to be negatively affected by some future impacts of climate change and these will pose challenges to many economic sectors. Climate change is expected to magnify regional differences in Europe’s natural resources and assets. Negative impacts will include increased risk of inland flash floods, and more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion (due to storminess and sealevel rise). The great majority of organisms and ecosystems will have difficulties adapting to climate change. Mountainous areas will face glacier retreat, reduced snow cover and winter tourism, and extensive species losses (in some areas up to 60% under high emission scenarios by 2080).

Earth Day Special: stepchange!

April 22, 2007 is EARTH DAY
Find out what you can do on http://www.sierraclub.org/earthday/

What We Will Do next Sunday (and the rest of the year)

• turn off electrical equipment and kill the "sleep" modus on a number of appliances
• share rides (amazingly, this morning again, the proportion of the vehicles that I've spotted in my usual traffic jams that had a sole occupant was +85%)
• buy a new bike soon for every member of the family
• eat more "local" food
• recycle more

Schwarzenegger to enviros: Make the environment SEXY !

at a recent meeting in Washington, Austrian-Californian Gubernator Schwarzenegger told a gathering of environmental activists: "stop nagging, make it sexy... just like bodybuilding"...

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told environmentalists Wednesday they
needed to stop nagging and make their cause sexy, likening it to bodybuilding's
evolution from a weird pursuit to mainstream.

"Bodybuilding used to have a very sketchy image," the former bodybuilding
champion told an environmental forum at Georgetown University. "... It had
fanatics and it had weird people. ...But we changed that. ... It became sexy,
attractive."

"Like bodybuilders, environmentalists were thought of as kind of weird and
fanatics also, you know, the serious tree huggers," Schwarzenegger said.

Ipod FM Transmitter: no longer illegal in Belgium!

Net binnen: het BIPT heeft een aantal maatregelen genomen waardoor het niet langer onwettig is om een fm-transmitter op uw IPOD te installeren zodanig dat je je autoradio erop kan afstemmen... Dit was dus regelrecht illegaal!!! en nu niet meer. voor de geïnteresseerden, op 88,5 FM kan je in Brussel nog rustig zenden, enkel wat storing in de buurt van het Madou-plein, maar voor de rest picobello ontvangst...

P.S. Het BIPT zou er beter iets aan doen om de ontvangst van radio's in de Brusselse tunnels te verbeteren, of in elk geval de verkeersinformatie wat beter te laten doorstromen. (Enfin, die zou eigenlijk beter ook eens deftig geregulariseerd moeten worden...maar dat is stof voor een volgend artikel)