"Where is the outrage? I can guarantee the tone of Newsweek's piece would be far different if this were an Al Qaeda-funded videogame being distributed in the Arab world and advocating the murder of Christians as infidels. Just imagine the outrage at a game just like this one, but with a Muslim rather than Christian focus"
Shiloh Nouvelnotle* Jolie-Pitt(see erratum below)
Shiloh Novel Jolie-Pitt
There is a time and a place for sex education but pre-school isn't it. That's when your child should be colouring-in; learning the alphabet, to count and write his or her name.
A preschool for six-month-olds to six-year-olds is not the forum to explain sex. Not heterosexual sex nor lesbian, nor gay nor bisexual and certainly not transgender.
She refers to the early-childhood staff at a Marrickville Council pre-school as "twits", calls the Mayor "moronic", and the whole idea of a non-discriminatory family education programme as "clap-trap".
Homophobia is a persistent and ugly prejudice which maturing social values are gradually tackling on their own. It is also something a child under the age of six need not worry about. Why? Because they are in the fortunate position of being children. When all you need to know in life is that you love Bill and Ben, without questioning why two men shared a potting shed.Anita, just possibly that pre-school already has children there who have two mummies, or two daddies, or a mummy or daddy who looks different somehow from the other mummies and daddies. Do you really think pre-schoolers don't notice these things?
Next these so called "educators" at Tillman Park will want to take these pure innocent tots to Crazy Horse to watch a bit of girl-on-girl action so they don't grow up to discriminate against strippers.
Sack the lot of them.
Well, yes, I guess she does think that. Grow up, Anita.
He wouldn't shut up about his success in "challenging children's perceptions of what is normal gender and sexual identity".
As we stated on Saturday -- what perverted rot. Children do not have a perception of sexual identity, and anyone who sets out to create one is, put simply, a creep.
Lovely. Anyone who's done even the smallest amount of reading in the psychology of gender and sexual identity knows that children as young as 18 months have very strong perceptions regarding same even though they don't know what sex is, but oh no: the Tele tells us they simply do not, and that's that. No need to think about it at all. And certainly no reason to distract us from how hopelessly irresponsible Mayor Byrne is.
Yesterday, in the wake of the wholly foreseeable public outcry about Marrickville Council's childcare agenda, Mr Byrne was nowhere to be found. The Daily Telegraph telephoned him five times and even want to his home to ask him to explain himself. Not a peep.Fancy. On a Sunday, the Mayor spent the day out doing things instead of sitting at home so that the Tele journos could doorstop him. What a shock.
As ratepayers expressed anger, Family and Community Services Minister Mal Brough branded the curriculum "ridiculous". "At that age children should be fingerpainting and having fun, not learning about social behaviour which many parents regard as way beyond their years," he said.And have any of these people actually read the curriculum, I wonder? Parenting is not social behaviour that is "way beyond their years" for small children - they are parented every day, they understand that other kids have parents too. Look honestly at the toddlers you know - does anyone really think it would be totally mind-warping to mention once in a while that sometimes parents are two men or two women?
Sam Byrne's campaign in Marrickville won support from [Green] Senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle and state MPs Lee Rhiannon and Ian Cohen. As with the party's liberal drug policies -- which they did little to promote at the 2004 federal election -- this outrage shows anyone considering a protest vote should read the fine print.Now, isn't it interesting that I heard former Marrickville Mayor Barry Cotter (who is still a councillor) on the radio the other day, for the first time in ages. Is someone in Marrickville council trying to run the numbers on the mayoralty I wonder? And why's the Tele so keen on smoothing the ground for such a run?
Lose Weight the Objectivist Way With the Ayn Rand Diet
What, you want to be told what the Ayn Rand Diet is? Get off your butt and find out for yourself, you nanny-state culture-of-dependency slacker! Enough hand-holding!
28,000+ limericks and going strong.It's pure procrastinatory
We are now working on all words beginning with aa- through bz- inclusive.
"LiveJournal has always placed restrictions on default userpics, as the default userpic is visible in many public areas throughout the site, including the Directory, the Schools Directory, and the profile page."There's more details on the story and discussion on the LJ forum boob_nazis.
[...]
"Any usericon in which unclothed breasts or genitalia are visible is
therefore inappropriate for use as a default icon, and when such icons
are reported to the Abuse team, the user is asked to make that icon
non-default.
If an icon depicting the act of breastfeeding does not also depict a
clearly visible unclothed breast in which the areola or nipple is
visible, it does not fall into this category."
(email from LJ to an objector quoted in misc.kids.breastfeeding)
"...breasts exist primarily for feeding human young, and secondarily as a sensual body part. In much the same way, feet are designed for walking - but that doesn't stop the foot-fetishists. Are you going to ban photos of feet too?"But should we be so hard on LJ? After all, everybody knows Jesus was so holy he never looked at a nipple in his life:
"Ooh, a half time break. Time to reflect. Part of the reason I love the ESC is the bastard in me loving the idea of something intended to be so noble, be so base. A bit like Queen Elizabeth going on the game."Go over to The Daily Flute and read the rest. You know you want to.
Anna Reeves Jarvis was the woman who initiated Mothers' Work Days, where women who belonged to Mothers' Work Day Clubs started by Jarvis around her own town met regularly for action days regarding health and sanitation. The clubs raised money for medicine, hired women to work in families with tuberculous mothers, and inspected food and milk sold in bottles. The movement spread and during the Civil War Jarvis urged the clubs to declare their neutrality and nurse/feed/clothe soldiers from both sides.From Wikipedia:Her daughter Ann Marie Jarvis (May 1, 1864 - November 24, 1948) was born in Webster, Taylor County, West Virginia. Her family moved to Grafton, West Virginia in her childhood. A year after her mother's death she held a memorial to her mother on May 12, 1907, and then went on a quest to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday. She succeeded in making this nationally recognized in 1914. The International Mother's Day Shrine still stands today in Grafton as a symbol of her accomplishments.
By the 1920s, Jarvis had become soured on the commercialization of the holiday. She incorporated herself as the Mother's Day International Association, claimed copyright on the second Sunday of May, and was once arrested for disturbing the peace. She and her sister Ellsinore spent their family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. Both died in poverty. Jarvis, says her New York Times obituary, became embittered because too many people sent their mothers a printed greeting card. She considered it "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write."
"Anna Jarvis was confined to a nursing home at the end of her life, penniless. Her nursing home bills were paid, unbeknownst to her, by the Florist's Exchange"
Spread the word about international support for the 18-year old Iranian girl Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, who has been sentenced to death by hanging. In previous cases international activism and publicity has saved the lives of other Iranians sentenced to death for crimes which would not carry the death penalty in most other nations.
CO2: We Call it Life"Your support will help us continue our fight against global warming alarmism, and for affordable energy and economic freedom around the world."You see, CO2 can't possibly be any sort of problem, no matter how much is pumped out into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, because "We breathe it out, plants breathe it in.".
CO2: We call it life.
No, really, go ahead -- put that plastic bag over your head.
Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.
Show yourself, by word and look,
Swift and shallow as a brook.
Be as cool and quick to go
As a drop of April snow;
Be as delicate and gay
As a cherry flower in May.
Lady, lady, never speak
Of the tears that burn your cheek-
She will never win him, whose
Words had shown she feared to lose.
Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you-
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.
also worked with transgendered people in hospitals as both colleagues and patients. There's a huge difference between people making a performance which is all about laughing at exaggerated gender-stereotype reversal and people who are making a journey from cisgendered to transgendered (for brevity's sake I won't go into the challenges to the binary masculine/feminine gender construct presented by folks who are intergendered or intersexed). "Drag" is performance-art gender presentation, routine cross-dressing is gender-identity gender presentation. Referring to all trans-folk as being "in drag" not only trivialises the gender identity of transgender and intergender folks by equivalencing it with the unreality of performance art, but also reinforces stereotypes of histrionic queens and hostile bull-dykes and buys back into the whole binary gender construct all over again.Devious, ambitious, and unscrupulous men and women who don't have the strength or the wherewithall to take power for themselves directly have always known how easy it is to achieve power by latching onto and flattering and manipulating stupid and egocentric bullies.
The story is so old and familiar and true that even television writers know it.
I expected the various criticisms of AWU federal secretary Bill Shorten, whose savvy media performance at Beaconsfield was too slick by half for the composure of many people, even some of my fellow lefties. The right is busy painting him as a callous opportunist. I think it's worth remembering that Shorten cut short his vacation to go to Beaconsfield before Russell and Webb were discovered alive, when everybody was expecting the result was going to be three dead miners and the story, while important, would not be nation-riveting.
Crikey! points out that some poisoning the well for our rescued miners Russell and Webb has begun as well. With the bidding for the rights to their stories hitting astronomical levels, it appears that some media groups who are concerned that they might miss out have already started writing stories implying that Russell and Webb are greedy, that the real heroes are the rescuers not the survivors (the rescuers have been speaking freely with no media contracts in place), and hinting that the next level of backlash escalation will be that if Russell and Webb hog the media payout to themselves they will be selfish bastards. Peter Fitzsimons in the Sun-Herald (no link, sorry) wrote:Can anyone remember anyone in the Granville train disaster asking for a dollar for intimate details of what it was like? In 2006, however, the nation as a whole seems to be right behind the miners getting every dollar they can. Equally, there is no doubt that even while they were in the cave, "Todd'n'Brant" were acutely conscious of the value of their story. Asked by their rescuers to take pictures of each other and their surrounds, they agreed, but only if they could retain the copyright - which was agreed to!There's no argument from me that the true heroes of the story are the rescuers. They volunteered, and that example of bravery is humbling. But what the world salivates for is the story of survival. We all know damn well that not all of us can be heroes, but by damn we hope that if we're ever trapped in a disaster that we too might survive. There's no denying the power of a survivor narrative.
... one can't help but wonder how a Beaconsfield rescuer who'd risked his life to get to the trapped miners - and who now doesn't have a mine to work at for at least several months - might also be feeling.
March by Geraldine Brooks. The adventures and travails of Mr March, father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy during the year that the events of Little Women take place, and the memories of times past that led him to be there. The romantic veil torn away from the rhetoric of the Civil War, to smell the stink of blood and pus, sewage and arson: abolitionist idealism betrayed by pragmatism and prejudice.Dean "Macca" Mackrell, 37, spent much of the past fortnight in the mine's "morale group", talking to the men.
He spent a lot of it "shit-stirring", he says at the Club Hotel in Beaconsfield, which opened just after dawn and was soon filled with miners. One of the first things he asked Russell and Webb when a communication line was established was how the Jenny Craig diet was going.
After rescuers managed to get a 9cm PVC communication pipe through to the men, which became their lifeline, delivering food and water, and later little luxuries such as iPods, Mackrell says he could hear Webb singing.
He put his mouth down to the pipe and in a low voice said: "This is Big Brother. You are singing without a microphone. That is a $5000 fine." He says Webb and Russell "roared with laughter".
[...]
Darren Flanagan, an explosives expert from Nowra in NSW, described how during blasting stages of the rescue, he and Russell and Webb would do their countdowns together, the two trapped miners bracing for impact while Flanagan held a phone in one hand and a firing box in the other. He says that at one stage, Russell, knowing he had 1000 tonnes of rock on top of him that could bury them both, called him "a big girl" because he thought the explosives he was using were too weak.
[...]
Despite nine days of anticipation, no one was prepared for the moment when Russell and Webb walked unassisted out of the minehead. Or when Webb yelled as he left the mine in the back of an ambulance: "You can't kill me - you can't kill me." Or, four hours later, when he simply checked himself out of Launceston General Hospital.
An interesting thing about growing up and living in the United States for your entire life, as I have, is that you really do believe all the things that Americans say about America. You believe that the United States is one of the most progressive countries in the world. You believe that we're at the forefront of technology, of women's rights, of human rights. You believe that people here have access to the best and most comprehensive medical care and information.
Then you find out that you were sorta wrong. And that's a fantastic disappointment.
I can already here the conservatives saying, "But look at how good you have it! You could be living in Iran!" Sure, and women in Iran could be living in Afghanistan. See how lucky they are?
The insularity of the USA makes it easy for their leaders to tell they're world leaders in every field when that is simply not so - they're the richest, sure - that doesn't mean they provide their citizens with the best. And particularly what US citizens don't get the best of is sex education at the most crucial time - pre-teen and teen years. And the anti-choice/contra-contraception activists want it to stay that way, and they deceive people in order to carry out their agenda.
This is a good jumping off point for me on a particular piece of anti-choice misinformation that's been bugging me for a while. As in the quote below about the 43-day-old-fetus from the NYT article on Contra Contraception:
A December 2004 report on federally financed abstinence-only programs conducted by the office of Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, charged that the major programs presented misleading information about health (one curriculum quoted in the report stated that "condoms fail to prevent H.I.V. approximately 31 percent of the time"), state beliefs as facts (the report cited a curriculum that refers to a 43-day-old fetus as a "thinking person") and give outmoded stereotypes of the sexes.Another post I recently read on a website called ProgressiveU.org, posted by a purported high-school student CrystalJ, gives here reasons for believing abortion is wrong (fine, don't have one), where she also argues that science supports her view (misspellings hers, italics emphasis mine):
There are also many medical arguments against abortion.
One argument is the definiton of life and death. Death is looked at there being no heartbeat, but when you really think about it, once a child is formed in the womb, you will here thier heartbeat by 18 days old. You may say no death is described as when there is no brain waves. Babies have functioning brains at 40 days old. The unborn child also feels pain as early as 8 weeks old. The fetus also has a genetic patterns different from the mother and a set a fingerprints all to its self.
The assertion is made over and over again that "fetal brain activity" has been observed or "fetal brain waves" have been measured at 40, 43, or 45 days, or at 6 weeks after fertilization. You can find the claim in "pro-life" and sometimes even nonmedical pro-choice literature. Sometimes a reference is cited, but most often not. This false information has passed into the general understanding about fetal development and is simply stated as fact. It is however a factoid instead, which is the name for a statement repeated often enough that people accept it as truth, though it's not.
At only 40 days after fertilization electrical waves as measured by the EEG can be recorded from the baby's brain, indicating brain functioning47, 48.47. Hamlin, H. (1964), "Life or Death by EEG," Journal of the American Medical Association, October 12, 113.
Brain function, as measured on the Electroencephalogram, "appears to be reliably present in the fetus at about eight weeks gestation," or six weeks after conception.Sykes dissects the misuse of these citations (both should strictly mention the status as convention proceedings/letters rather than research papers), showing that both of these opinion pieces incorrectly summarise science that is now either discredited or obsolete (and always refers to "electrical activity" rather than "brain waves"), then goes on to detail what medical science actually does show about the development of a functioning human brain:
J. Goldenring, "Development of the Fetal Brain," New England Jour. of Med., Aug. 26, 1982, p. 564
When people, including physicians, talk about "brain waves" and "brain activity" they are referring to organized activity in the cortex. While no embryo or fetus has ever been found to have "brain waves," extensive EEG studies have been done on premature babies. A very good summary of their findings can be found in Pain and its effects in the human neonate and fetus," a review article (often cited by "pro-lifers" writing about fetal pain, but not about brain development) by K.J.S. Anand, a leading researcher on pain in newborns, and P.R. Hickey, published in NEJM:The irony of citing Hamlin and Goldenring as anti-abortion apologetics is that both of them mentioned fetal brain activity casually and tangentially in any case - both opinion pieces were arguing for the wider acceptance of the EEG as the final arbiter of the death of the individual, as without a functioning brain the body is just a collection of tissue. Indeed, Sykes notes that this is the crux of the point the anti-abortionists are arguing in their promulgation of this factoid:
"Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and neonatal electroencephalographic patterns...First, intermittent electroencephalograpic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks."
all authorities accept that the end of an individual's life is measured by the ending of his brain function (as measured by brain waves on the EEG), would it not be logical for them to at least agree that individual's life began with the onset of that same human brain function as measured by brain waves recorded on that same instrument? (in Willke's Abortion: Questions and Answers)
Physicians now use a more rigorous criterion for death: brain wave activity. A flat EEG (electroencephalograph) is one of the most important criteria used to determine death. If the cessation of brain wave activity can define death, could the onset of brain wave activity define life? Individual brain waves are detected in the fetus in about 40-43 days. Using brain wave activity to define life would outlaw at least a majority of abortions.Anderson provides no references for his fetal brain waves claim. Notice then how CrystalJ leaps from "individual brain waves" to "functioning brain" in her summary of the medical arguments.
Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."
"[...] some who work in the public health field acknowledge that the social conservatives have a point. "I think the left missed something in the last couple of decades," says Sarah Brown, president of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which positions itself as a moderate voice in the heated world of reproductive politics. "With the advent of oral contraception, I think there was this great sense that we had a solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy. But that is a medical model. I think the thing that was missed was that sex and pregnancy and relationships aren't just a health issue. They are really about family and gender and religion and values. And what the right did was move in and say we're not just talking about body parts."
