Friday Funny – science safety run amok

Actually, not very funny.

Anthony,
I happily and safely (I have all my digits) made my own fireworks for the 4th. Today, I’d probably get arrested.
I am happy that you have all your digits, and other appendages, and also children who played around with you on the 4th are as happy for themselves.
In Greece we have crazy fireworks during easter , mainly at midnight when the priests sing the “Christ is risen”hymn. Custom has it that a lot of noise should be produced to imitate the earthquake noises from the resurection, and his is done with home made fireworks. We have fatalities every year. Yesterday a 7 year old boy died who got a misfired firework on his face which then went and fractured a stone pillar outside the church. Fortunately for the boy, because he probably would have been a paraplegic and worse for life. Two lives were destroyed because the young man who fired the firework, 25 years old, is now facing involuntary manslaughter charges.
Another child of ten has lost one eye and is in serious condition from a firework a girl of ten threw at him by mistake.
Fireworks are forbidden, the making and selling of them, but it is impossible to go against the custom without arresting a huge percentage of the male population.
In some villages it is like war. The name of a village in Chios is called Vrontou, meaning thunder, because of the noise the fireworks make. The put special covers on the roofs and windows during easter in that village.

I, too had some pretty alarming exothermic reactions with my chemistry set (which did have some basic elements, mixtures and compounds), but most were unintended!
The above “chemistry” set is yet another example of modern fanaticism in protecting kiddies lest they harm themselves. Yet how are they (poor innocents) to learn from their mistakes? It is no wonder that most children today are ignorant of the realities that life can throw their way.

Kind of like playing in an “air-band”…
As a kid, chemistry was mixing anything and everything I could get my hands on. Flammables were my fav. Empty test tubes are an attractive nuisance, probably more of a hazard than any ‘safe’ chemicals they might have provided.
Memories LOL!

Learning safety was as important as the chemistry. 50 years ago we lived in a free country and that meant some risk went with the lessons. Now we live in a police state to reduce risk. What a loss in all learning, and the prisons are over flowing. Is the “safety” worth the cost? pg

Oh, wait a minute, no temperature experiments allowed. That would require a thermometer with alchohol, or (gasp) mercury.

Well actually Anthony, if you read carefully, all the answers to your questions are in the ad. They say there’s no chemicals in the box. They didn’t say there’s no chemicals used in the experiments! In fact, the opposite:
“60 + fun activities with home science and kitchen chemistry.”
Get it? Why should they put chemicals in the chemistry set when they can dupe you into paying for the instructions (which are pretty crappy compared to what you can find with Google…) and you get the added benefit of supplying your own chemicals.
Crystals? Got salt in the kitchen?
Growing plants? they’ve supplied a nice plastic dish. all you do is add your own dirt and seeds.
As for slime, yes, most households have glue, water and borax. Now they have a chemistry set with instructions too. Or did that page just have a link to the Boston Museum of Science?
Bubbles… now read carefully Anthony, these aren’t just any sort of bubbles. They are THREE DIMENSIONAL bubbles. Way different from regular bubbles. In fact you can see the little jar of three dimensional fluid with the three dimensional bubble surface dispenser inside. The experiment of course has to do with filling the bubble skins with air, which is not chemistry per se, I would think it more in the realm of fluid mechanics.
Seriously this is well beyond a rip off, and it isn’t IMHO even targeted at 10 year olds. This piece of con artist thievery is aimed at the elderly grand parents or aunts and uncles who want to buy a present and think this is safe as well as educational. I doubt any average 10 year old would be duped by this and the marketing company damn well knows it.

The dumbing down is worse than we thought…

I can remember my first A level chemistry lab session making nitrobenzene in 1970. Boil up concentrated nitric and sulphuric acid. No mask, eye protection, gloves or suit!

Are you people insane? Look at the box closely. There is more than enough materials and supplies there to once again prove AGW is for real and Michael Mann could surely use the cardboard box as a proxy to produce another hockey stick. Its a marvelous chemistry kit! It’s the same one that’s used in Climate Research labs the world over!
I doubt its necessary but… /sarc.

I also learned to make gun powder, nitrocellulose and detonators by my father, in a distant past. Also had several chemistry sets (called The Little Chemist), and even back then my father used to upgrade the sets, to be able to do more interesting experiments.
Being taught this by my father, who knew what he was doing, made it safe, and no large scale accidents happened even when my father were absent. Even today, I would be able to perform dangerous chemistry in a safe way.
The problems often arise when young people today pick up recipes for explosives from the internet, and does not learn anything about safety, or understand the many complex reactions involved.

As a pre-teen in Nova Scotia, my neighbor was a was a teenage rifle champion. Accordingly, he had basically unlimited access to ammunition, which he would bring home, break off the bullets, and cache the gunpowder. After a point he had enough gunpowder to fill a plastic model of some now-defunct American aircraft carrier…into whose funnel he placed a 2-inch firecracker, and, lighting the fuse, shoved off into the waters of the reed-filled ditch along the (now defunct) railroad line. Seconds later we stood, drenched head to toe with black slime from the gyttja at the bottom of the ditch, in awe of the six-foot-diameter excavation created when the powder let loose.
Undeterred, we later fabricated a rocket out of 2-inch iron pipe with a cap screwed on one end, leaned it against a snowdrift, and set it aloft to a height of several hundred feet (at least), leaving a big black swatch on the snowbank.
The sound of ballistic discharges was a regular occurrence in my neighborhood, and we never did find the rocket. Yes, we were nuts.

Thank goodness the set does not include any of that dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide.

When I was doing A-level chemistry, in the late ’60’s, my home chemistry set was mostly supplied by the local pharmacist. It included the usual mineral acids (in 3 litre bottles), sodium and potassium metals, phosphorus, perchloric acid, ether, and even some fairly harmless things. These days the guy would have gone to jail. The PC brigade, if they read this, might even dig him up to lock him up! (see Oliver Cromwell)
I used to enjoy dropping sodium pellets into the local stream just above a bridge. The echo as they exploded was impressive. I once left a concoction in a coffee tin which exploded and took out the garage window, and the bang was heard quarter of a mile away. Fortunately, I wasn’t there at the time (nor anyone else), and, like you, still have all the digits.
Our chemistry teacher had been a WWII bomb disposal man, and he used to amuse us by blowing up parts of the playing fields.
No wonder that British kids don’t find science interesting nowadays.

Drying out gun cotton in a gas oven in the 1950’s, was, on reflection, a somewhat foolhardy occupation………
At least we gave Darwin’s theory a chance, and in the still war damaged Portsmouth of that time, consequential damage would hardly have been noticeable!

The above comments bring back many childhood memories. I got my first chemistry set in about grade 3 and I suspect that many of the chemicals that were part of the average childhood chemistry set then would be very difficult to get nowadays. It didn’t take long before my interests turned to explosives and rockets and I was soon banned from making gunpowder inside the house. All it took was a trip to the pharmacy to pick up the KNO3 and S and the primary difficulty was getting the charcoal crushed fine enough. My gunpowder rockets were epic failures but what did work well was to take an empty metal pen refill and carefully stuff it full of matchheads. Applying a flame to the open end of the pen refill resulted in gratifying flight and the first attempt embedded itself in the wooden exterior wall of my parents house. Firecrackers were easily available when I was a child and, by slightly enlarging the hole the fuse went into, one could produce rockets.
I found sodium perchlorate to be too touchy to use in home made explosives and a few unanticipated but spectacular explosions with perchlorate based mixtures convinced me to get away from explosives. It was fortunate that by this time I’d developed an interest in biochemistry and organic chemistry which lasted until the end of undergrad university. The one area I’d like to explore again if I find the time are oscillating chemical reactions now that I have the equipment to monitor them in far more detail than a film camera and stopwatch that I used the first time that I got the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction working.
The chemophobia of current society is depriving kids of valuable experiences and safety Nazi’s have far too strong a role in society now. The last thing any kid would want to do is to grow a plant. Plant growth, in the temporal perception of a child, takes forever and it wasn’t until I was in my 50’s that I had the patience for gardening. Kids like things that happen fast; perhaps that’s the reason for the universal fascination with explosives for all of us who grew up in an era when it was considered to be a normal childhood pastime to blow things up.

My, what a bang happy bunch of little pyromaniacs we make. My parents are also of that exclusive club whose members had to explain to neighbours why their son has no eyebrows all of a sudden.
The things you could do with burning magnesium and a few chemicals…*sigh*
I too discovered that homemade exploding rockets are far easier to make than homemade rockets……..and weather balloons filled with homemade hydrogen make tremendous fireballs in the night sky.
Ahhh, memories.

You missed the “Science Tricks” : must be a post-normal science kit.

Brings back the old story of “Stone Soup”

The intent is pretty clear. You will get sued if you provide the materials for anything useful or interesting. Much less chance of lawsuits when you provide only “literature”.
Though I hate to admit it, this may actually be a good thing. If you’re inclined toward chemistry, you’ll probably learn more and remember more when you use materials you already know. The experiments in the old “complete” chemistry sets weren’t all that interesting to me, because they didn’t seem especially relevant. Take this set of mysterious letters and mix in this other set of mysterious letters, and the litmus turns blue. Okay, so what?

Doing chemistry without chemicals? Perhaps it is another one of those “nature tricks”.

I went to a tech school and we used the lathes to manufacture rocket nozzles and nose cones. These were fitted to our 6FT rockets , filled with Potassium Nitrate and sugar these tended to go out of sight. Launched from the school ground and angled to land in a local army area. Apparently we never killed anyone or we would of heard.

I worked my way through 2 or 3 Gilbert chemistry sets as a kid in the 1960’s. While the changing-colors experiments were fun, I also became quite adept at getting excessively high temperatures out of the alcohol burner for bending/melting glass tubing, etc. The odd experiment where a pile of powder goes poof somehow wasn’t quite good enough, so one day in my parent’s basement I managed to adjust the mix just enough for a larger POOF that for some reason started a small fire. Now of course this was the time before smoke/CO/fun alarms, so it was up to me to extinguish the flames before my parents discovered what I had done. (Repercussions would be worse than any fire.) Using my chemical knowledge, I dashed upstairs for a box of baking soda, and used it to put out the small blaze. I had to answer questions under the parent’s glare, and I had to clean up the mess, but I survived! 🙂

Darn,
You folks had all the fun…all I was ever able to do was produce bad smells my mom hated…I did love that REAL chemistry set though – came in a wood box with square bottles of a bunch of stuff…ah, the golden years!
Oh, The most questions at our local planetarium are on the signs of the zodiac and the end of the world in 2012…and these are from the adults – some of the kids are more level headed.
Mike

My first chemistry set (early 1950’s) had radium included so one could study this mysterious substance!! I’m still here, for now.
In our first chem lab in undergrad school (mid 1960’s) we precipitated fulminate of mercury as a lab experiment. I’m still, still here, but the waste basket into which we threw the test tube is not.

The thing with ALL science – is that it WAS fun – and I am 51 now!
the danger, the stupidity, was least of the concerns 40 years ago – it was part of the learning. Accidents will happen – and lack of supervision and adequate teaching would no doubt have contributed – but no amount of education will prevent a schoolboy doing something stupid given half the chance (you know what I mean!)
You could say, if you were politically incorrect – that learning in the old days of danger and no health and safety was actually SAFER in the long run – because you were taught/knew the danger in a hands on way and had no choice but to hold YOURSELF responsible. These days, they never get to even SEE or get close the danger!
It might be politically incorrect, but the old addage still stands, – you cannot learn to ride a bike, without falling off occasionally!
For myself – I demonstrate the dangers to my kids as often as possible – real life experience beats dictatorial instruction hands down perhaps one day Mrs Nanny state will recognise this?

Mind you, I had my early childhood in the late 70s and 80s into the 90s. But we could still get chem sets with actual burners! And my parents allowed me to have fuel for those burners! OMG!!!
I was never really big into the whole chemistry thing. The thing I was more interested was fire and blowing up stuff. I was totally in awe when some of the older kids could get so called “Schweizer Kracher” (lit “swiss crackers”, also known as “pirate crackers”) and use them, while we had to deal with the so called “Stripsy” (essentially very small crackers usually sold in strings that would go off in a row.)
I ended up pondering “What if I would take several of them?”
There used to be an ice cream in my country that was sold in little plastic barrels (which actually looked like real barrels.) They were pretty awesome, stable little containers. I used them to store many of my plastic soldiers in them. So yeah, I got one of those, filled it up with blackpowder from the Schweizer (that took A LOT of those), made a hole into the top and used the standard ignition from a Schweizer.
I knew it would be a big boom, so me and my friends figured we’d test it in the local playground.
Now that local playground was split in two parts. One was pretty standard with all the standard stuff. The other part was called “Indianerdorf” (lit “Indian Village”), and had several Old West style wooden buildings (one was themed like a real salloon, with that typical door everybody knows from any random western movie, OMG). The town government, which was maintaining it, had also added two ovens, both very solid, about a meter or a bit more high, made of bricks.
Well. Afterwards there was only one left.
We made a fire in one of them, as it was common. Then we came to the big moment. That was when one had the idea “Hey, let’s use some spray cans as well.” Fire material was plenty, back then our garbage containers were still accessible (today they’re locked away) and we burned A LOT of paper from the recycling containers (on some fire days we’d empty at least half of those really large containers and burn it all.) And the guy had found some used spray cans.
Remember, that was in the late 80s, before “OMG! OZONE LAYER!” became the hype.
So we dumped them in and finally the mini bomb, then we hauled ass.
It wasn’t strong enough to shatter windows, and we were really glad about that, but that oven? The top was gone after it and we just ran like hell.
We also burned batteries. Basically, we burned everything we could get our hands on. I once almost accidentally burned my Scoutrooper action figure! And Princess Leia had her foot melted. Whoops.
We also jumped from those buildings after stacking up freshly mowed grass. Cracked my right ankle that way. There were also apple trees growing which produced very small, very hard apples (some were edible). That always led to “apple battles” and lots of bruises. Every autumn we’d pelt each other with those apples. It was a bloody war zone.
Today the entire “Indian Village” is gone. The apple trees have been cut down. There’s only grass left. The playground is still there, but it’s now all protected and safe. State of the art.
In the house where I lived there was also a plumber who had his store in the ground floor. In the backyard, accessible to everyone, he’d store stuff that was removed from construction sites until the large truck would come to haul it all off. There were hot water tanks, old, rugged, and used. Damaged partly. Lots of sharp metal edges!!!!!!! OH THE HORROR! And those tanks back then had mercury in their thermometers…
We played with mercury. It was amazing to watch how you could push it around on the naked earth of our fragile planet, poke it with sticks, etc.
Oh dear, we were so bad.
Today the only thing I can do is squeeze a couple of rounds down my local firing range. The reason I stayed in our “national guard” was because I could fire a 120mm cannon and get away with it!
This safety craziness is a global thing. I see it in Japan every time I’m there as well. So now I’ve taken it upon my self to teach my niece (who’s now 11) a few things about wildlife and stuff like tracking, etc. We usually get out of Tokyo for a couple of days and I try to teach her stuff (not always easy, because the fauna there is a bit different than here.) But it’s enough to turn her into somewhat of a nerd. She’s already planning on becoming a ranger up in Hokkaido (can’t say her grandma is very pleased with that idea and it’s the foreigner’s fault!) Go me.
Luckily firecrackers aren’t as badly controlled there as they are here. Well, their production is very strictly controlled, simply because Japan has some bad experiences with fires coming from incidents. But you can get smaller ones without problems and even some bigger buggers are easy to get if you know where to look (and if you make sure you’re not setting them off in the middle of Shibuya.) My 11 year old niece now knows more about black- and gunpowder than all the Safety Nazis together and I plan on doing this with my three god-daughters as well.

P.G. Sharrow, can’t agree you more.
In the end we have forfeited both our kids knowledge and our freedom.
Yeah, sure, tell me we are safer.
I mean where the heck is the Phenolphthalein ?? I bet mom doesn’t have that in the kitchen cabinet.
That was one of my favorites. What a guy to do if he needs to pass secret messages in fourth hour? What are kids going to do if they don’t know what phenolphthalein smells like? Sigh.

I’ve been so enjoying your stories. Mine more on the accident side. Alone in the house for a while around age 7/8 and playing with the thermometer I wondered how hot the two bar electric fire was. The exploding thermometer blew back into the bars, wrecked the fire and I played with the mercury scattered around the floor. Nothing was ever said. When I took my 5 years elder brother’s pride and joy racing bike with everything for a spin, and getting to 23 miles an hour, could go faster down steeper hills, changed my mind about direction and decided to go home, taking the turning too late crashed into the low pub wall resulting in great shock, what? I wasn’t going fast enough to make it?, bruised and bloodied me and very mangled bike, which was repaired without a word of reproach.

One of the “read to pieces” treasures of my book collection is “Rocket Manual For Amateurs” by Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley (Project Officer, U. S. Army Amateur Rocket Program) from 1960. (the golden age of so many things is twelve ;;;)
With about a dozen of my friends (only one other girl though), I did about everything in it, especially the parts labeled “This should only be done by professionals with proper equipment.” We took our creations out to James Rock and shot them over the bay till the Coast Guard got mad at us. After that we moved out to the rez. Donnie was a Quinault so he could take the rest of us up there. We eventually made stuff that would go up a few thousand feet and make a nice boom when it got there. The state had some regs about that, but they didn’t apply on the rez…
I have since become a sane and sober citizen. Well, except for the continuing go ’round the OM and I have with the building dept over some of our ham antennas and a few other things like that. Our grandson knows the code but doesn’t read well enough to take the test yet. He’d probably pass if we were allowed to read the questions to him …. ..

pyromancer76 says:
April 30, 2011 at 7:12 am
“My guess is we are hearing from all the survivors, especially those without serious maiming scars! Chem sets (sic) aside, what do you provide for your children and/or grandchildren today for their edification and imaginations?”
I once sat in on a “Science Camp” that I was thinking about enrolling my daughter in. The camp councilor was demonstrating a soil testing kit to four-year-olds. I realized that instead of getting my young daughter interested in science at a young age, this boring camp would turn her off to science for good.
I was mad as heck, so I wrote up a proposal for a science camp that included things like taking apart old small appliances and building batteries from pennies and aluminum foil. I sent it around to places that might be interested. I ended up working for a children’s museum and doing daring things like lighting a candle and putting a glass over it, then watching the candle use up the invisible air. I burned steel wool with a small battery to show how the filament in a light bulb would burn if it was exposed to air. We mixed baking soda and vinegar in a bottle with a balloon on top and then played with the funny heavy balloon. These are not dangerous but they are interesting.
With my own kids, we did hydrolysis, and then exploded the tiny bit of hydrogen and burnt the oxygen. We sprouted beans… in a spinning centrifuge… to see if increased gravity would make the beans grow slower than a control. We tried to mix peroxide with anything that we could find to see if it would fizz. I even bought a Geiger counter from Russia and we tested everything in the house. The only thing that we found to be radioactive was an old radium watch dial.
Most science kits are worse than useless, they are boring, and especially kits made for girls. I think the worst one is the soap making kit. Do they give you oil and a base and you actually make soap? No they give you bars of ready made soap that you melt and pour into a mold. The kit might coast 20 dollars. Ivory soap can be purchased for a few cents. It should be called a soap molding rip-off kit. (…yes… we made soap out of wood ashes!)
I blame the emergence of Climate-Change-Science on boring science kits.

Why do I feel like I’m reading a post from the Free Range Kids blog? (http://freerangekids.wordpress.com)
A majority of Lenore Skenazy’s blog posts over there have something to do the irrational fear of random kidnappings; which are less likely to occur than deaths due to kitchen activities, much less likely than kidnappings by a family member (which result in the child’s return within a few hours except in very rare instances), and FAR less likely than deaths in car accidents. Almost all of the rest have to do with how the (somewhat rational) fear of lawsuits is hurting America’s children. When discussing these fears, such quotes as “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and “He who would give up liberty for security deserves neither” (Benjamin Franklin) come to mind. Though Lenore has never mentioned global warming (she is a liberal, though a reader of her blog would likely pin her as a conservative due to her stance for tort reform and against the sensationalist media), it can be said that the principle applies there as well… do not give up trillions of dollars for a plan that even the AGW advocates admit will have very little impact on global temperature.
Anyway, yes, the fear of lawsuits is the reason for the set not including any chemicals. It is also the reason for the conversion of many older American (and UK and Australian, and to a lesser extent Canadian) playgrounds, even larger ones, into “safe” structures that are no more than 6-8 feet high at any “reachable” point (not to say that the kid won’t find a way of reaching the unreachable points.. ha :P) and have little or no parts that move while the kid is on them (such as swings; seesaws; merry-go-rounds; and other such equipment, which cannot be easily found today outside of foreign nations). Poor education, childhood obesity, increased teenage crime — all of these are easily attributable to the dumbing down of kids’ culture due to fear. Countries such as South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Finland have great educations as measured by internationally standardized test scores; the USA is lacking to say the least. Going to these countries (which I have not… yet) one can see that children are more autonomous than in the United States. In fact, it becomes apparent that the idea of child overprotection is unique to English-speaking nations (with the USA being the worst offender… case in point, they are alone with Somalia in not ratifying the UN’s Conventions on the Rights of the Child, one of the few liberal-touted protocols that I agree with. If I were the Senate, I would ratify with a reservation that additional spending [such as Article 26’s “social insurance”] would not be required; however I would NOT add reservations to Articles 12-16, as they are the parts the USA needs work in). Of what I’m going to say about Germany, the vast majority applies to educational leader Finland as well; but I’m more familiar with German education, as it is more often studied and discussed. In Germany, for instance, it is very uncommon to see any child above second grade NOT walk, ride a bike, or take public transportation to school. It is often said that “[in Germany] the journey to school takes 5 minutes, but the journey back takes 5 hours” (the first figure is more likely around 20 minutes). Those who scratch their heads at this statement should recall their own childhoods or ask an older relative about theirs. If you think that this freedom is due to the lack of major urban areas, then keep in mind that things are much the same way in urbanized Japan, except the journey back takes just 2 hours due to the longer school day. German school is basically a half-day education (8:00 to 12:30), with some academically-minded high school (grades 10-13) students taking a class or two in the afternoon or evening 2-3 days a week. It is extremely common for German children as young as 5 (though more common at 8) to go to a nearby (within a few kilometers/miles) swimming pool or ski resort (depending on the season) by themselves. German playgrounds, even newer ones, are similar to American playgrounds from before 1984, and this is not a bad thing. Today such unique structures would be sued out of existence in America, or at least not built due to the fear of a lawsuit and/or the inevitably high cost of insurance. With all of the overprotection in America, kids with naturally stronger personalities tend to go overboard commit crimes when they are (often abruptly) first given the privileges they should have had many years before. The increase in depression in America can also be blamed on overprotective parenting, which can in turn be blamed on fear. To recap, children in America are being denied the basic freedoms that children in non-English-speaking countries take for granted and that even American kids had just 30 years ago. Much of this is due to irrational fear of risks which are far less likely than those that parents don’t think twice (or even once) about. In addition, lawsuits and the fear thereof are driving many fun activities out of the country (not just with the dumbing down of playgrounds, but also with the abolition of outdoor recess activities in many American school systems). Of all I’ve read on the Free-Range Kids blog, this long comment by KyohakuKeisanki has got to take the cake:
http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/when-risk-visits-the-playground/#comment-63333
Sorry if you think I sounded anti-American, but even the best of anything (whether it be video games, sports, or nations) has its faults; and it would be stupid to turn a blind eye to these faults simply because of the good things…. instead those in control (the voters in this case) should correct the faults and make things better for everyone — even those who are being restricted by government (whether it be family “government” [which most of it is], local government, state government, or federal government) more than in any other time in American history.

Sad.
For my son’s science class ‘volcano’ project this year we used potassium nitrate and sugar in an inverted plastic cup lit by a remotely triggered Estes model rocket engine embedded within a clay volcano submerged in water to simulate the Ring of Fire.
The science teacher saved the video to his personal drive.
No child growing up on the above chemistry kit will ever have their project saved to the teacher’s personal drive.

Some really great comments about how children need to learn and grow and do so by making mistakes. The idea that all children are to be placed in a hermetically sealed clean room with padded walls or must be strapped up in child seats really makes you wonder how we ever will produce people with backbones or any kind of leadership qualities in our society?
A country full of homogenized little purple Barney characters is the last thing we need in this very complex world in which were are in fact desperate for people with great leadership qualities to get great things done. It was inspiring to hear so many great stories about childhood chemistry sets and the contrast of how such a ridiculous chemistry set shown really nails everything that’s so wrong in our society today.
One of the MOST important aspects of the AGW movement is how we finally realized the connection between the socialist movement and the green movement. When the wall came down in Europe, all of the socialist people did not pack their bags and disappear, but simply morphed into the global warming movement. It is the same anti-west and anti-business garbage that they been preaching all along but with a different name. Socialism had became a dirty word, but green had not.
I should note that now we’ve pretty much destroyed and showed up the gig of the green movement being a bunch of leftists and socialist people pushing their agenda in message of more government control over everybody, they are now jumping ship and landing in what we call the safety movement.
Just like the socialist movement or the green movement, the whole safety movement is exactly the same thing all over again!
We can’t use nuclear reactors due to safety! We cannot drill for offshore oil due to safety! We cannot burn coal due to the un safe health effects! We can’t let people drive their own cars, and they must use certified public officials and must use public transit due to safety. And to ride a bicycle, you better get the bicycle licensed with lots of red tape from more government officials so you do not hurt yourself, and of course you also have to wear that helmut in the name of safety.
So was with heartfelt warming that is post about the chemistry set was posted here, and now that we made the connection between the green movement and socialism, we forcing them to jump ship into the safety movement. Once again it is high time we also call these new safety Nazis what they are: Good old fashioned busy body leftist socialists.
Super Turtle

Not only are chemistry sets neutered, so are science classes. In my son’s general science class his sophomore year in high school, only the teacher was allowed to do the experiments, he wouldn’t let the kids touch the stuff, they could only watch and take notes.

Recently on our domestic news was a story of a badly stung amateur beekeeper who had fallen when carrying a beehive up a ladder, the ladder sunk on one side and he and the bees crashed.
The punchline came when he was described as a “Health and Safety Officer” 😉

“Myrrh says:
April 30, 2011 at 12:24 pm
I’ve been so enjoying your stories. Mine more on the accident side. Alone in the house for a while around age 7/8…….”
Ok – I think could be time for a visit by social services and police……
Your parents need jail time, quite clearly.
This entire thread has been brilliantly entertaining, and it is almost certainly the case that most/all of the posts have been by people over the age of about 40. I dont know when exactly our society got so totally risk averse, but we do seem to have a generation for whom any notion of risk/uncertainty is just too much for their over-protected brains to comprehend.
The generations who have been through school in the last 30 years seem to have a need for absolute certainty in everything, and they cannot work things out for themselves. Hence the slavish adherence to the AGW message. Don’t question it, you might have to think. Don’t do anything which isn’t completely “safe” according to the mantra, something might happen to the planet and we will all die….
This chemistry set is a perfect example