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Anti-Terrorism and the Death of the Chemistry Set
An anonymous reader writes "A recent unfortunate casualty of anti-terrorism laws is the home chemistry set. Once deemed the gift that saved Christmas, most Slashdotters probably remember early childhood experimentation with one of the many pre-packaged chemistry sets that were on the market. Unfortunately the FBI has decided that home chemistry sets are a threat to national security and they are rapidly disappearing from the market entirely. Those that remain are shallow boring versions of the old kits."
The reason we see such an erosion of our freedoms is that Freedom and Trust go hand in hand. Some of that trust is to be responsible (gun safety), and some of that trust is to respect life and civil society (not a terrorist). That trust is gone, not only between the government and the people, but between neighbors. We wouldn't need all of this "think of the children" shit, if neighbors actually knew and trusted each other. We wouldn't have the highest prison population in the world if the government trusted the people.
We are all just people.
Sorry, thats far too sterile to really learn anything.
Until you burn your fingers on a hot beaker, or smell the reults of your last failed ( or successful ) experiment that catches on fire or cracks the bottom out of your flask, you never really learn. Its all theory without that sort of 'real' experience..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was lamenting the passing of the hobbiest chemistry sets long before 9/11. You can still get them in various places and you can get a fairly wide selection of chemicals from a number of sources, including e-bay. Hell, I even bought some concentrated (70%) nitric acid off of e-bay not more than a year ago.
That said, the decline in hobby-level chemistry sets, as I mentioned before, began with the rise in the "new American Dream." You know, the one where you sue somebody for a million dollars. Liability for selling chemistry sets is, without a doubt, astronomical in these days of knee-jerk litigation... Nobody in their right mind would sell something to children that they could easily kill or wound themselves with, quite easily...
From my own personal history, when I had a chemistry set as a child, it came with glass tubing and an alcohol burner. You used it to heat the tubing and bend it into shapes to connect beakers and what have you together... Well, not being old enough to know better, and not patient enough to wait for the tubing to cool down on its own after bending it, I decided it might be best to cool it off in some water. I consider it fortunate I didn't lose an eye when the glass exploded. And that didn't involve any chemicals... Not that the stuff they provided was terribly dangerous, but it's dangerous enough that it's simply not a viable business anymore, is my point...
No offense, but that's pretty lame. Chemistry sets are fun because they're hand on.
This is just getting ridiculous. I can go down the block and fill my car with 30 gallons of highly flamable/explosive gasoline, but chemistry sets are off limits because they contain a few ounces of potentially dangerous chemicals? Our government is officially retarded.
Maybe not
The thought behind this is the same as the one behind Germany's banning of certain computer security tools, and the assaults on cryptography. Dangerous tools exist in every important field, and those with no fear of falling behind will always want to ban more and more. We need another Sputnik moment to galvanize the angry reactionaries to demand more science instead of demanding more childproofing.
I disagree. I think that terrorists very much care about chemistry sets.
They care that they aren't offered and they care that people are pissed about it. They care about kids having less and less of a chance to educate themselves and they care that kids curiosity isn't being fulfilled nearly as much. They definitely care. They care that the US is becoming a more and more demoralized nation and the educated are having to fight less and less fights that matter and about more and more like this. They care that the people that think are being distracted and rendered useless. Because with them out of way, and with the idiots that are in power today, the current situation will favour them more and more and...
Take care of the thinkers of tomorrow, take care of the thinkers of today and take care that the terrorists are very very happy about this.
Bull, the chemistry sets were dumbed down long before 9-11. Anti-terrorism has nothing to do with it. It's all about chem-set manufacturers getting sued (by armies of trial lawyers) and the liberal nanny state "protecting" our kids.
What goes around, comes around. OK, I'm confused. Don't you guys, the shining light of Global Democracy, have a saying regarding governance "By the people, for the people"?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I had several chemistry sets as a kid and spent many, many hours conducting experiments, often to my own harm (poisonous gases, chloral hydrate, etc...:-) High school chemistry almost got me arrested, and led in part to my expulsion from public school.
And this is the problem. It's not terrorism that is causing these things to disappear. It's the fact that we've become a nanny state, and it's not conservatives that are the cause! You can't get toys for your kids that may have pointed edge. You can't get toys for your kids that may fit down a wind pipe or break off into sharp pieces. This isn't because of GW Bush, it's because of lawyers. Any time a kid gets hurt by a toy, the company gets sued into oblivion, whether it was the company's fault or not! It becomes cheaper to settle out of court for $100,000 than it does not fight it out.
Chemistry sets are hard to find for the same reason that sling shots are hard to find. It's not because they present a terrorism threat, it's because they are dangerous. The first time some kid mixes something that he wasn't supposed to makes an explosive, corrosive mixture that "puts an eye out", the company that made that kit gets sued. If it were about terror, this would be an article about how hard it is to find good pool chemicals!
It's the same nannies that want to tell you that you can't smoke in your house, or you can't have a big mac or supersize your fries. These people don't usually tend to be conservatives. It's happens to be the people that say things like, "we are going to take things away from you for the common good."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Don't forget, that now even Jr. High School students in the US are being asked to declare their Majors so that they can be narrowly channeled into their chosen field of study.
Sorry, you wanted to be a mechanic, no home economics for you. Or, oh... too bad you selected accountant, now you can't get that particle physics minor you so badly wanted.
Today's government wants all knowledge compartmentalized so that no one, and I mean no one, outside of the government can get the clear picture of what's going on.
Want to get into a hobby? It had better be along the lines of what you went to college for, otherwise they'll start to watch you on suspicion of being a terrorist. Showing an interest in an activity outside of your major, oooh - watchout, you've made the FBI's watch list again.
Jack of all trades are a dying breed. Specialization guarantees that the government is the only entity that really knows what's going on, just the way they want it to be.
Just think, if the government had started down this path 20 years ago, most of us would be specialists who grunt when someone talks about something that we didn't go to school for. Or worse yet, we'd call the cops if someone tried to teach us something outside of our specialty.
This is how periods of history like the dark ages start. By restricting knowledge so that the masses are not allowed to be fully educated, you guarantee that knowledge will begin to stagnate (only when certain types of knowledge intermingle with others are truly radical discoveries usually possible), and eventually disappear, sometimes forever.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I've seen this trend for a while, and it predates 9-11.
I believe the issue is more of a "legal" than "security" issue. I think the high risk of lawsuits is what's killing these kits. In the old days, if you let your kids be unsupervized and they started eating the chemicals - you were considered a bad parent with a stupid kid. Now days, parents tell the kids to eat the chemicals in hopes of a winning lawsuit so they don't have to work anymore.
How many classic toys have gone the way of the dino because of our stupid frivolous legal system and lack of responsibility culture. I mean, Burger King/McDonald's (one of the two) had these flying princesses. They spin, their wings fly out and they whirl into the sky like helicopters. "Recalled and banned!" Why? Because they're uber dangerous. The fly toy might just land on the child's head. We can't have that. (Not like a baseball isn't a 100x more deadly - but we're not going to ban those.)
Bah...this plan deserves to be turned into an intergalactic entranceway.
I was at the pharmacy when an old codger asked for some Claritin for allergies. He was obviously stuffed up.
The pharmacist asked for a CA driver's license. He said he doesn't drive anymore but has his VA card. She wouldn't sell it to him. Said she had to put the CA driver's license number in the database. No other's allowed.
A veteran of WWII or perhaps Korea couldn't buy a fucking harmless medication because he doesn't have the right ID? I couldn't fucking believe it... Was he going to go back to the old-folks home and set up a meth lab with a box of Claritin? Jebus fucking H goddamn shit.
(This country disgusts me more and more. We should storm something in Guy Faulke's masks. )
I hate to rant about good intentions, but these don't even smell like good intentions any more. Terrorists couldn't care less about chemistry sets.
Right! Terrorists couldn't care less about chemistry sets. The Feds know this. First, chemistry sets were not banned, they were neutered. They were neutered long before 9-11. It has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with liability.
I understand that it's cool to bash the president and blame Bush for everything. However, this is not one of those cases. This isn't Bush's fault. If anything, it's John Edwards, or at least lawyers. Chemistry sets are hard to find for the same reason that slingshots are hard to find, because they can be dangerous in the wrong hands, kid's hands.
The people that are banning "dangerous" chemicals in chemical sets are the same people that forced MacDonald's to stop asking you if you wanted it "super sized", and the same people that are trying to ban you from smoking in a bar, or your car, and in your home, and outside... and so on. It's the same people who make planters put a label on a bag of peanuts that says, "danger, contains peanuts". It's the people that mandate seat belts and motorcycle helmets. These people are not conservatives (although there are some conservative nannies that say I can't drink beer in a bar after 2:00am). Nope! These are the same people that say things like "We are going to take things away from you for the common good".
Googling "nanny state chemistry set" took me to this article from the NY times. It's in response to an op-ed piece about the removal of chemistry sets. The article date, May 13, 1999. About 2.25 years BEFORE 9-11 and BEFORE the War on Terror. So, please, stop blaming this on Bush or the War On Terror. This was happening long before any of that!
From TFA: [Author's Note: This article is primarily a result of my frustration in trying to acquire a few hundred grams of potassium carbonate for an electrolyte solution.] I understand the author's frustration, but he should really know who's at fault before he passes blame. If banning chemsitry sets were about keeping dangerous chemicals out of the hands of terrorists, then Clorox bleach, Windex, and pool chemicals would have been banned with it.
Sorry, but TFA is just plain wrong.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
There are still 100-in-1's out there, they're no less common (where I am) than they were when I was kid and first got one of them. Boy was that a lot of fun.
Chemistry kits can be a lot more dangerous than a lot of other toys, give one of those old ones to a kid who doesn't know what they're doing and whose parents are too busy to spend any time with the kid and they're liable to injure themselves. That's the main reason they've been going out of style, it's pretty hard for little Johnny to hurt himself with a My First (Plastic with rubber spring tip) Hammer, or Pong, the Board Game (Seriously, can anyone here tell me they wouldn't buy that if it was a reasonable price?), but with a Chemistry kit there's probably a few ways they can injure themselves at min, and the law of probabilities shows how, no matter how low the probability of any kid hurting themselves is, some kid will, and some parent will sue.
I mean, just look at what the article itself says, the author admits to having to evacuate his house because he was making free chlorine gas. Now tell me, what are the odds that any modern parent would just let something like that slide vs. suing the company for damages?
Home Chemistry kits are going away, but not because of Anti-Terrorism laws. There are plenty of chemicals that you can get without a background check that will do some fun things, but they can also be quite harmful to you and since every toy has to be made so that little Johnny slow can use it without any chance of hurting themselves. I mean, you can make Thermite without using a single background-check needed ingredient (my friend did it once for fun, pretty cool), so why isn't that in the 'pathetic' chemistry kits? Oh right, because no parent would trust their kid with Thermite and would most certainly sue if their kid could make it and hurt themselves.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Are chemistry sets getting crappier? Of COURSE they are! When I was growing up in the 1970s, the best I could get was a pale imitation of the ones my dad had in the garage. Now we're a generation along, and the ones I had look like danger waiting to be used. It has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with the obsessive culture of safety.
TFA is a big, steaming pile of shit. Read it carefully, and you'll find there's not a single 'explanation' of why things are the way they are that holds water.
It's just a grumpy twit with a computer. Nothing to see here.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
(This country disgusts me more and more. We should storm something in Guy Faulke's masks. )
Alternatively, you could, I don't know:
1) Write your representative.
2) Write your senators.
3) Organize an issues based campaign
4) Vote for someone who shares your point of view on an issue
5) Run for office yourself.
Look, all of it perfectly legal, and just as important, actually has a chance of succeeding. If you storm a federal building in any mask, you're just going to wind up dead or in prison.
Or does that sound like too much work? Would you rather piss and moan about it on Slashdot? Might feel good for a moment, but it's all sound and fury signifying nothing.
My personal feeling is good chemistry sets are hard to find because....people aren't buying them. They cannot compete with an X-box or Playstation. Don't forget today's children have incredibly short attention spans and scholarly pursuit is the hallmark of a pariah in many circles.
In short, I think it is simple economics. If kids developed a craze for chemistry, manufacturers would most assuredly find a way to sell advanced sets, lawyers be damned. If we can give johnny a hunting rifle (we can), we can give him a Bunsen burner. All you need is demand. Also don't forget many parents today are the same mouth-breathers you sat next to in class years ago. Why would these people seek science toys for their kids when many barely got out of high school?
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Have fun in your little made-up universe where the government comes to round you up and you manage to fight it off.
In the real world, fascism is when the corporations and governments work as a single entity, and you can wander around with your fucking gun all you want. In fact, you'll have to wander around, because the government/corporations took your house and your car, and no one will hire you.
At which point you'll be arrested, not as some big anti-government hero by jackboot thugs, but for stealing bread to live on, by a perfectly normal cop who's just doing his job, a job that absolutely no one except you disagrees with, so when you shoot and kill him you're getting the electric chair and no one thinks you're a hero at all.
There are different types of totalitarian governments, and assuming a fascist one operates like a communist one is faulty. Fascist governments don't put troops in the streets...they work with corporations to make sure 'the wrong sort of people' do not have any economic power, and do not have anywhere to peddle their ideas.
Modern fascist states don't even bother to kill those people, and pretending they're going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane. They'll show up with a court order to evict you from your home because you failed to pay your mortgage, because pressure came from the top at your company to let you go. Or they'll just sue you and ruin your finances.
America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.
And a fascist state isn't going to 'assume control', you asshat. There's not going to some insane coup, there's a going to be a slow change, which has, in fact, already happened, or have you not looked at the telecom immunity stuff? That's classic fascism. The government breaks the law, the government gets private companies to break the law, the government gives said companies huge amounts of cash, the government attempts to make such behavior legal retroactively. We've got government officials and AT&T officers leaping back and forth between each other in an incestuous loop. Your government spying on you, sponsored by AT&T. It's not 'totalitarian' yet, as evidenced by the fact Democrats managed to stop the immunity, but it is fascism, at least the start of it. (And the same thing's happened with Blackwater.)
Oh, and before you start ranting about gun control some more, be forewarned I'm against it. I'm just not stupid enough to think that the US government being slowly corrupted by business is something that can be fought off with gunpowder. Guns are useful to deter crime and to deter invasion. They aren't useful against a corrupt government in any meaningful way.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You small minded, ignorant fool.
Freedom has nothing to do with trust. Freedom is that which you grant yourself. Nothing can take your freedom unless you capitulate. Of course you can debate that without life freedom is meaningless but life without freedom is not worth living. I mean true freedom not some legally imposed cage that you deem large enough.
The government should continually live in fear of the people. It only exists because the people allow it and fund it. The current state of affairs in the US is one of the saddest in recorded history. A country built on the ideals of freedom and liberty is being destroyed. Not as Orwell predicted by an over bearing state but rather as Huxley predicted because the citizens do not care about anything except being entertained. The collapse of Rome will be nothing compared to the implosion of the United States.
Understand this, the current situation is preciseley because the government does not fear the people. They have shown themselves to be cowards and sheep afraid even to ask questions let alone think of answers. Think back to how Bush et al obtained power. Think about 10% of the population owning 90% of the wealth. Think about what the constitution says of government and how government has undermined the constitution at evey oppurtunity. Trial without peers, lawyers, due process, habeous corpus. etc. etc.
And you, parrot some trite shite you probably heard on PBS. Freedom and trust go hand in hand, I'd call it moronic except morons know better.
Or you could do what actually works and use your own media network to influence people, systematically evaluate which candidates will vote the way you want them to, and fund/advertise the more pliant ones.
You just need a few billion dollars to get the ball rolling. Good luck.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I think your comment indirectly says it all. America, land of liberty, where it's dangerous to buy a child's chemistry set, but an enshrined right to buy a gun.
Yet Another Benjamin Franklin Quote (YABFQ)...
"In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, -- if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
The corporatisation of America has played a big part, the question is, Is there a way back? What will make the average person decide to stand up for their freedom when all they have to do is vote, not die or fight, just understand the issues and vote. War used to be a thing the entire nation had to make a sacrifice for, now it's a distraction funded by other countries in the form of loans.
Clearly your comments illustrate that you are a rational person, with the ability to sense reality for what it is. That is why you will be one of the first sentenced to sedition and shot. Of course that reminds me of YABFQ...
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
I mean, really, just look at the awesome power of the voting public. In a country where two-thirds of the population feel that the "leader of the free world' is doing an unsatisfactory job, we have the power to
A method that would allow us to choose between more than two players would, of course, be too complicated for us wielders of Ultimate Democratic Power to comprehend, as would the possibility of making choices directly related to the issues at hand, instead of merely choosing the least-undesirable candidate and hoping that he or she likes reading your letters. (Referenda don't solve the problem that many things shouldn't be legislated, but should instead be defined by custom and upheld by the community, but that gets even further afield...)
This is the friggin' best post I've read in a long time.
The only thing I'd like to add is some general tips on What-to-do(TM)
Get involved. Write your congressman about invasion of privacy. Sponsor EFF. Develop that über-safe anonymizing program, make it widespread.
Get Informed. Read stuff (for example Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine"), get unbiased news (NOT FOX!), analyze what's being done rather than what's being said. Ask questions (who benifits from this?)
You need to overcome the denial of what the parent post said about fascism. Just saing "I't ain't so", instead of asking "how do we fix this" - that's a path down a very dark road. Do Something!
"If it can be thought up, there exists at least one person trying to make it happen for real" - Phil
really this is off-topic. The GP is referring to guns making you safe in a conceptual sense, as in Free. You have all the guns you want but that hasn't stopped any administration from suspending or, in Bush's case, destroying habeas corpus or tapping phones or whatever else illegal bullshit they're doing under the cover of executive privilege. In other words, unless you actually use the guns against the government you're pretty much a paper tiger, and, as another poster said, just another arsehole gun-owning nut-job.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You are missing the point. I AM a chemist. I probably understand orbitals and electronegativity better than most on Slashdot, but I do not fault chemistry sets for not being so directly educational.
At the age when kids would use chemistry sets (I started when I was about eight), so much underlying information is absent that it is unrealistic to teach real chemistry. You can't truly understand orbitals without quantum mechanics, which in turn requires linear algebra and multivariate calculus. So don't bother! When I played with a chemistry set I didn't understand pH or activity coefficients, but I still appreciated acid-base reactions. Nor had I ever heard of redox reactions or the Nernst equation, but electroplating was cool. Chemistry sets inspired me to study and learn at the meager level I could, and as I grew older and more knowledgeable they undoubtedly played a role in me going into science - and into organic chemistry in particular (with its heavy emphasis on experimental research).
Chemistry sets are motivators, not educators. They have historically done for chemistry what "Star Trek" has done for physics.
I agree DynamicPhil, best friggin post all year.
Hitler was a hero before people realised it was too late.
America has only just started on the road to true fascism. First there will be the economic crash, and the enusing chaos and poverty.
Thats been in the works since the 60's when the USA went off the Gold standard and became a fiat currency.
You embraced globalisation, and your manufacturing has disapeared.
Notice whats happening to your infrastructure, your dollar, your mortgages.
Terrorism is the biggest con yet. USA does not have a terrorism problem. 9-11 was not done by Arabs with stanley knives.
9-11 was the excuse to take away your freedom.
Dynamic Phil is right, go make some noise.... but you know what.... it won't happen. While the general populace has food in their bellies and their mind numbing TV, nothing will change.
46137
No. Primaries are part of the problem.
Officially, the US is not a two-party system, we are a no-party system. Political parties have no official role under the Constitution. The Democrats and Republicans are private organizations. If they - or the Boy Scouts or the ACLU or whomever - want to get together and put forth candidates, fine; but they ought not be allowed to use public resources to do so, and ought to have to play by the same ballot access rules as everybody else.
Primaries and other special treatment for parties are gross violations of the equal protection clause.
No primaries, no party affliations on ballots, no Congressional (or state legislative) rules that recognize party lines. Let's elect men and women, not parties. Add instant-runoff voting, and we could actually start to get decent candidates.
Do I expect to see this? Not anytime soon. We're going to have to fall even farther before real change is possible.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
WTF? It's the "War on drugs" that is filling our prisons, for the most part. It doesn't have anything to do with immigration.