Pendragons Princess

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJRzBpFjJS8

This song is so very true. There is a certain smugness about women and young girls who get pregnant. It’s a form of self deification, not glorification, though. I love the lyrics in the song, though, especially this part:

Don’t care if it’s brain dead
don’t care if it’s limbless
if it has a penis.

Garfunkel and Oates are Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome, a comedy and song parody team. It’s refreshing to see a funny but true song about the nature of pregnancy - that it is neither a miracle nor special if it is something that everyone can do. Pregnancy has lost its meaning a long time ago ever since humans started to deify themselves into gods when they discovered they could reproduce. Humor aside, much success is wished for Garfunkel and Oates in their career. After all, not everyone can write a song the way they did, and that is what makes them special.

This past Friday my husband and I went out shopping like we usually do and while on our way to one of our favorite thrift shops we saw a young boy, aged about 16, run across the street with his girlfriend in hand. The girl was either 15 or 16 and obviously pregnant. Surprisingly, her hand wasn’t holding up her belly though to keep the creature inside from dropping out as they ran. If that happened, that would have been quite a site to see. (Open up the cell phone cameras and let it roll!)

That incident brought my husband and myself to talk about why some women are literally in love with the idea of being pregnant, and being in love with pregnancy itself. Geez, I’d rather be in love with my husband, or chocolate, or even hiking. But certainly not pregnancy. With the first three at least I would get something positive out of it - a great cuddle, a great taste, or a great workout. Pregnancy gives a woman none of those things. Neither does a baby. Such romantic concepts of motherhood, babies, pregnancy, and children don’t benefit women much nowadays (see post below on Oprah’s recent show.) . At least I know I’m not missing a thing.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/personal/04/17/o.truth.about.motherhood/index.html?iref=werecommend

Oprah Winfrey recently did a television show on the dark side of motherhood and here is what her guests had to say:

Heather Armstrong is a mother of a 5-year-old daughter and has another baby on the way. She’s getting the conversation started by admitting the aspects of motherhood she says she could do without. “I really don’t enjoy the early mornings or the plastic toys,” she says. “I don’t do arts and crafts, I don’t do pipe cleaners, I don’t do cotton balls or scissors.”

She’d also be happy to never deal with bodily fluids again, she says. “I could do away with the liquids,” she says. “The snot and the poo. I’m not fond of those things.”

Vicki Glembocki says the most surprising thing about motherhood was that she didn’t feel maternal right away. “I swore to God that the moment my daughter issued forth from my loins that … my life would finally be complete and I would finally know my purpose. It was not like that,” she says. “I couldn’t get her to sleep. I couldn’t get her to stop crying. I completely believed that I was the only woman in the history of time who did not have the maternal gene, and I thought I was completely alone.”

Melinda Roberts, a mom of three, says she had to learn on her own that motherhood is like a 12-step program.

“You’ve got to take it one day at a time sometimes,” she says. “You feel like: ‘If I can get out of bed and get breakfast on the table, I’ll be happy. If I can get them to school, I’ll be happy.’”

One major motherhood realization that Roberts says she had with her first child was that she could no longer control everything in her life.

“You can no longer choose your activities, your down time, when you get to sleep,” she says. “No matter what you do or where you go, you’re always tethered to this other human being in this unbreakable, incredibly fragile way.

Anything you do will affect this child potentially for the rest of their life.”
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The last one by Roberts may explain why mothers have such major control issues, especially when it comes to having daughters. But these revelations of the “sacred kind” show how these ladies bought into the Baby Trap without questioning what having a baby would hold in store for them. These women deserve credit for admitting there is nothing romantic or glamorous about babies, contrary to the image our society tries to project about babies (Hurry! Hurry! Get yours today before K Mart sells out on our blue light special on babies!)

More:

Longtime friends Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile set out on the motherhood journey together. They had perfect plans — Amy would stay at work after kids; Trisha would have three children, set exactly two years apart. But, like so many best-laid plans, things didn’t work out like they thought. Motherhood, they say, was more overwhelming than they expected. “It was like a bomb hit us,” Nobile says. “I didn’t feel I had permission to talk about how hard motherhood really was.”

Eventually, Ashworth and Nobile say they reached their breaking point, and they set out to see if other mothers shared their struggles. After interviewing hundreds of women, they say they’ve heard all the dirty little secrets of motherhood. Their first book, “I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids,” was based on their findings.

One of the most interesting things Nobile discovered is that mothers are dying to open up — but it takes time. When interviewing mothers for their book, Nobile says it would take a good 22 minutes of chatting before moms would speak the truth. “We feel like we don’t have permission to admit that it’s really hard, so we’re all walking around with these smiles on our faces, but really we feel alone,” she says.

Ashworth and Nobile say they’ve heard just about everything from moms, but one admission really struck a chord. “One mom said, ‘I love being a mom, I just hate doing it because it is an impossible job,’” Nobile says. “We’ve raised the bar so high.”

The common thread throughout Nobile and Ashworth’s interviews — whether they were talking to mothers of one or of five — was that mothers demand too much of themselves. “The expectations we have on ourselves is completely unrealistic. This generation of women was raised to believe that we should and could do it all,” Ashworth says. “And that list [of expectations] is so huge that we think if we can’t live up to that, then we’re not good moms.”

Mothers need to know that if they can’t do it all — or if they don’t want to — that doesn’t make them failures, Nobile says. “We need honesty,” she says. “We need to support each other more.”

Nobile says mothers need to accept that they cannot reclaim the person they were before they had kids. “You have to reinvent yourself,” she says.

It’s also important to remember that taking time for yourself doesn’t make you a bad parent. “Most of us feel guilty, like you have to be on the floor with them 24/7 and give them all your attention or you’re not a good mom,” Ashworth says. “Redefine it for yourself that way, like, ‘It’s okay that I’m on the computer and my kids are playing by themselves.’ Make peace with that.”

Before Armstrong had her daughter, she kept a blog that she says had about 30 readers. The week she gave birth, she says she noticed a spike in her traffic and a new audience of moms looking to connect. She chronicled her experiences breastfeeding and her bout with postpartum depression. She says her blog became her lifeline.

“So many women reached out to me to let me know that they had gone through the same crises and come out the other side,” Armstrong says. “It was the hope that they gave me that pulled me through.”

Armstrong’s blog, Dooce.com, became so popular that she’s been called the “mother of all bloggers.” The site brings in a reported $40,000 a month in advertising and has become the family business. “I think people are really hungry for that honesty,” Armstrong says.

One popular topic on Armstrong’s blog is sex and how it changes when you are a mom. “It took seven months [before I had sex after giving birth]. No one had told me that it was going to take that long after what the baby did to me,” Armstrong says. “Any guy who wants to have unprotected sex? Seven months without it. Just think about that for a minute. Let that number circulate in your head for a little bit.”

As hard as it can be to find time or energy for sex, Nobile says its an effort worth making. “We have to make sex a true investment in the marriage,” she says. “A good marriage is the backbone of a healthy family.”

Date nights and moments of intimacy send important messages to both your husband and your children about your priorities, Nobile says.

“One husband said [to me]: ‘I used to be first, and now I’m pulling up the rear. I’m behind the pet rabbit,’” she says. “Our kids are watching us. So when you go out on that date, you have to sit your kids down and say, ‘This is important for our family.’”

In a studio full of moms, one audience member says her biggest complaint regarding motherhood is the unspoken competition between working moms and stay-at-home moms.

“It is a war. It’s a kind war, but still a war,” she says. “I’m a working mom, so it’s important that my family comes first and that I still do everything that a stay-at-home mom does, plus have a career. That means every single one of my vacation days are used for [my kids] — mommy day at school, a play date or mommy and me things. … We don’t want it to seem as if we love our career more, so we try to do it all and get two hours of sleep.”

Jackson is currently a stay-at-home mom, but she was a working mother once too.

“The competition is there because we create it for ourselves,” she says. “There’s really no reason to compete, because [stay-at-home moms] are just as busy as the working mom. The working mom is just as busy as we are. We just tend to sometimes put the focus on the wrong things. We’re all busy 24/7. I consider myself an at-home working mother.”

Nobile says these wars arise out of our own uncertainties as mothers. “We’re insecure about the choices we’re making — that’s why we’re judging each other,” she says. “We need to give ourselves a collective break.”

“Have compassion for each other,” Ashworth says. “Realize we all have issues, and we’re all doing the best we can.”
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War is right. Women have always been more divided than united due to our competitive natures, and with working women, single women with no kids, married women with kids and stays at home, and working women with no kids makes it even further divided. Needless to say the difficulties of parenthood will not prevent some women from lusting for a baby of their own, and quite possibly, not even give them a “heads up” on what parenting and raising a child is all about. For example, Oprah’s guests all agreed on one thing:

Bodily fluids are a point of contention for the mothers across the board. Vicki Glembocki, a mom of two, says she had a “pee incident” recently during a seven-hour drive with her kids.

“I looked in the back, and the kids were sleeping, which was literally a miracle from God, but the problem was I had to pee,” she says. “So I’m thinking, ‘If I stop at a rest area, they’re totally going to wake up, and I do not want them to wake up.’ So I reach into the diaper bag, I pulled out a diaper and I peed into it.
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Just what did these women think babies did all day? Sit on a shelf like a Coach bag to be admired?

I guess they did.

Good Reasons Not to Have Children

http://www.geocities.com/zpg1957/Whynokids.htm

Contrary to the popular belief that children are “blessings”, the following facts say otherwise:

3. Your child will contribute nothing of value.

a. There are so many people already that any discovery or improvement that can be made will be.

b. Opportunities for making contributions are decreasing because of the demands placed on the social system by increasing population. Tax money goes to build infrastructure and provide support for new people, not for research or philanthropy.

c. The chances of your child making any kind of major positive contribution to society are extremely slim - near to zero. Their chances of their making a major negative contribution are much greater. Three American-born scientists won 2003 Nobel prizes. That year around 100,000 Americans were sentenced to prison or probation.

d. When you have children, you breed your own competition for your job and increase the downward pressure on your own wages.

e. Opportunities for making contributions are decreasing because of the demands placed on rapidly vanishing energy and material resources by the exploding human population.

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The most important one of all:

7. You are unprepared for the task of having and raising children.

a. There is no way to know if you will be able to do a good job of raising children until it is too late to back out of it.

b. It is common for people to be unequal to the task. News reports and the experiences of people around you demonstrate that it is extremely difficult to have enough emotional, physical and financial resources to raise children well.

c. You will be consistently and constantly lied to by everyone about the demands and rewards of having children: The demands will be minimized and the rewards greatly exaggerated. Even if your situation clearly contraindicates children, most people will deny or minimize your problems and urge you to reproduce anyway. As a result, you will have no good information on what the task requires.

d. People who complain of their own parents’ failures almost always repeat them themselves, simply because they have no other model of parenting. Unless your own parents were perfect, you don’t have the tools to do a good job yourself.
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One of my friends put it succintly years ago: “People have children in order to see if they are going to be good parents or not. More than 95% of the time, they are not good parents.” Having children exhausts you, gives you no real incentive for having them, and can suck up your very life sources - not just financially but emotionally and mentally, too. More:

8. Having and raising children is emotionally debilitating.

a. Bearing children may activate mental illnesses in the mother, or may severely worsen an existing mild mental illness. Mothers of young children have worse mental health than any other demographic group. Newsweek magazine reports that 30% of mothers of young children suffer from depression. NBC says: Compared to women with no children, new mothers were four times more likely to be hospitalized with mental problems, researchers found…Mental problems included postpartum depression, but also bipolar disorder, with altering periods of depression and mania; schizophrenia and similar disorders; and adjustment disorders, which can include debilitating anxiety.

b. Otherwise mentally healthy people will suffer ongoing worry about their children.

c. Mothers, particularly will suffer from a constant sense of guilt and inadequacy, compounded by social blame. They will feel ghastly about everything that happens to their children, whether it was within their power to control or not.

d. Sleep deprivation can place parents in a state where they no longer feel sane, where they have tremendous fits of rage, and where they may harm their children, their partners or themselves.

e. Women with children often become neurotically fearful, worrying about every little thing and emotionally smothering their children because of their endless anxiety.

f. 70% of women suffer from post-partum depression, which may merely make the first two weeks of a child’s life utter hell for the mother, or may result in permanent psychotic impairment. At best this is a miserable start to what is, peculiarly, universally presented as a glorious experience. At worst it can destroy lives in the ugliest possible way.

g. Women who have had a baby often become incapable of thinking through the consequences of having more babies. They’ll deliberately get pregnant when they are unemployed, when their houses are in foreclosure or when they’re facing bankruptcy. Nothing matters to them anymore except breeding. Similarly they’ll breed repeatedly with men who are irresponsible, drug-addicted, mentally ill and violent, then disclaim any responsibility for the horrendous consequences because nothing mattered any more except their irrational drive to breed. Like all mental diseases, this baby-rabidity leaves its sufferer in a terrible position where her irrational choices have ruined her life.

h. Parents in any stage of life have more symptoms of depression than the childless. “Unlike other major adult social roles in the United States, parenthood does not appear to present a mental health advantage for individuals, find sociologists Ranae J. Evenson, Vanderbilt University, and Robin W. Simon, Florida State University. Their article, “Clarifying the Relationship Between Parenthood and Depression,” appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, published by the 100-year-old American Sociological Association.” Even “empty nesters” have been found to have more symptoms of depression than the childless, contradicting conventional wisdom that the years of grandchildren and travel are the happiest and that your kids “take care of you in your old age”. Perhaps they are too often the years of emotional upheaval for their children and kids returning home, grandchildren in tow?
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I’m not really sure who started the “But a child will take care of you in your old age” myth but chances are that person’s child did no such thing. Americans buy into the “It’s necessary to have children” myth hook, line, and sinker, finally being sunk at the end with having a child to care for. Children constantly demand 24 hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year care from the time they are born until they reach the age of 18 and sometimes even beyond that. Once an adult becomes a
parent, that parent has next to no time for himself or herself. Well, it’s harder on the mother of course since the father does not play an important role in the rearing of a child - that is primarily the mother’s job. Most parents are unwilling to live their childhood all over again, having to eat the same grub a child does, watch the same kiddie tv their kids do, and play with the same toys and games their kids do. That is not normal behavior for any true mature adult. Romance between a married couple immediately dissolves, forget about a sex life, since most pregnant women don’t even want to have sex during pregnancy or after the child is born, and the relationship quickly deteriorates. Lastly:

18. Those who encourage you to have children are not people you should listen to.

a. Those who encourage you to have children will always lie to you about it. It’s never a good idea to do what liars tell you to do.

b. The media drenches you with unrealistically positive images of child-bearing and rearing and consistently negative images of childlessness. It is never a good idea to do what the media wants you to do.

c. If you say you don’t want children, people will tell you that you don’t know what you want or that you’ll change your mind. It’s never a good idea to obey those who condescend to you and patronize you.

d. These same people will become hysterically upset and angry if you get sterilized without first having children. It is never a good idea to obey those who hate the idea that you can control your own fate.

e. These same people will push you to have children even if it is obvious that your and your child’s lives would be miserable as a result. It is never a good idea to obey anyone monstrous enough to sacrifice your life and another’s life to satisfy their own need for validation.

f. The same men who pressure their unwilling wives to have babies quickly manage to be somewhere else when the baby cries. It is never a good idea to get into a project with someone who is guaranteed to leave you in the lurch.

g. Parents always seem to “understand” why other parents abuse and kill their children. Apparently there is no difference between the emotions of abusive and non-abusive parents: they’re both sick. It’s never a good idea to do something that comes with built-in sickness.

19. Observations of the lives of people with children show how unrewarding the job of child-raising is.

a. Historically men have almost never done childcare. Since good jobs have always been allocated to men, caring for children is obviously not “the most important job in the world”.

b. Despite better job opportunities for women and despite the growing numbers of men who describe themselves as “feminists”, very few men stay at home with children or do significant childcare. A feminist writer described her “feminist” husband’s attitude toward the care of his own children as “time-wasting, faintly demeaning and better left to babysitters.”

c. The tones of voice used by people talking to children can almost always be classified as: threatening, condescending, cajoling or bored. Nothing about this kind of communication indicates that the company of children is pleasant.

d. People who have children frequently say things to their children like “I can’t wait until you grow up and leave home” that indicate how little they enjoy child-raising. These same people will suddenly forget how much they wanted their children gone when it comes to pressuring the childfree to have children. Then children are an unending source of enjoyment and fun.

e. Those desperate enough to have children that they endure the horrors of fertility treatments are fixated on one bodily function at the expense of jobs, relationships and health. This is obviously not mentally healthy.

f. One out of eight 42-year old women says she regrets having had her children. This isn’t a measure of those who would not have had children if they had it to do over. These are women who specifically regret having the children they have.

g. Parents claim they have “The most important job in the world,” but when they employ others to do that job, they hire people without education and pay them minimum wage.

h. The words most consistently used to describe the experience of mothering - even by women who claim to love their children passionately - are “sadness” and “anger”. Indeed one British woman cited in the Guardian says of her feelings about her role in the family:”about twice a year, I get so angry, I can’t sleep. I’m churned up. It seems so unfair.”

i. Women who work with children, such as teachers and pediatricians, are less likely to have children of their own because they have a more realistic understanding of what it requires.

k. People who had a lot of responsibility for younger siblings are much less likely to have children of their own, because they know what childcare entails. Eldest children are most likely to be childfree because eldest children end up babysitting.

l. Mothers, and to a lesser extent fathers, believe they should be extolled for doing the tasks of child-raising, even though they made the decision to have children, sometimes against all advice. That sense of martyrdom clearly indicates how horrible a task child-raising is.

m. Parents complain about their children constantly, particularly to other parents. They say things like “How did I get myself into this” and “I love my kids but…” “I was going insane staying at home with them” and “I need a vacation from my kids.” (All of these are direct quotes).

n. Women who had little education and had children at an early age without any experience of work adjust far better to having children than do women who have lived as independent adults. Obviously child rearing suffers by comparison with child-free adult life.

o. The more education people have, the fewer children they have, if they choose to have them at all.
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The education part is very, very important and doesn’t just end with education about birth control, either. Studies have shown that the more intellectually developed person becomes, the base desires to reproduce tend to diminish and fast. Continued:

24. Having children traps women in sexist roles and expectations

a. When a baby arrives, the woman almost always ends up with all the responsibility.

b. That responsibility fractures the focus of women so their productivity disappears. It is easy to tell when a woman author has had her first baby. Her books become confused and unreadable. The only woman Nobel laureate in science of the modern age (of six) who has children is Rosalind Yalow. She notes in her autobiography that she had live-in help with her household until her younger child was 9 years old, and has said in interviews that she was able to do Nobel-prize winning research and keep up with her household only because she requires just four hours of sleep a night.

c. Even though a woman may be holding down a full time job AND shouldering the responsibility for child care, it is almost certain that her husband will claim that he does “half,” thus depriving her of the credit for her work.

d. Once a woman has children, she becomes disempowered, tolerating being relegated to the role of household help, avoiding confrontation and “giving in” on her feminist principles rather than risk negatively affecting the children. Susan Maushart says “motherhood profoundly increases a woman’s conservatism … The presence of children almost invariably raises the stakes, making compromise more acceptable and inequities easier to rationalise.”

e. It is almost always the woman’s career that is allowed to suffer in order to provide child care – almost never the man’s.

f. Women who declared they would never put their fate in a man’s hands will become stay-at-home moms, taking a terrible risk, and putting themselves in the role of chattel to their husbands because it is the only way their children can be provided with adequate care.

g. Women who end up divorced after staying home with children are relentlessly shortchanged economically in almost every possible way. Their lifetime earning power has been eroded by their time out, their retirement savings have been severely affected, and they may not be able to go back to their former work if they are no longer current.

h. Women who end up doing all the childcare and household tasks model powerlessness and subservience to their daughters.

i. Women will have to watch their husbands enjoying hobbies and free time while they slave at the household tasks.

j. Women who were once activist will find themselves unwilling to challenge the status quo any more, because they have become dependent on it.
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Sadly, it is sexist for women to become mothers first and foremost, sacrificing their own needs for those around them, especially children. They are the property of their husband’s with no social rights to have their needs met first. Indeed, once women do have children, they usually go hungry since that precious little baby takes food right out of her mouth. That is not something I exactly envy, and it is nothing to be envied.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7996230.stm

Attenborough warns on population

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was “frightening”.

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

The Trust, which accuses governments and green groups of observing a taboo on the topic, say they are delighted to have Sir David as a patron.

Fraught area

Sir David, one of the BBC’s longest-standing presenters, has been making documentaries on the natural world and conservation for more than half a century.

In a statement issued by the Optimum Population Trust he is quoted as saying: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more.”

The Trust, which was founded in 1991, campaigns for the UK population to decrease voluntarily by not less than 0.25% a year.

It has launched a “Stop at Two” online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family’s size.

Other patrons include Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and Dame Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall institute.

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said population was a fraught area of debate, with libertarians and some religious groups vehemently opposing measures by governments to influence individual fertility.

In turn, the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a “silent lie” that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects.

In January 2009, Sir David revealed that he had received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes.

His most recent documentary focused on how Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution and why it remained important.

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I’ve always liked David Attenborough - he is a very smart man. Nature has its way of balancing itself, whether it is through people being born sterile, or at its worst, natural disasters. At some point, the plant we call home will run out of fertile land for growing food on, clean water to consume, and clean air. We have arrived at a point in human history where it is unnecessary for humans to be having lots of babies that will just further consume resources. In fact, clean, consumable water on earth is only 0.003 percent of all water sources - and that is for every living person on the planet. It may come to a point where nations will be forced to implement a policy along the lines of what China presently has - only one child per family - if we are to save this planet and make it liveable for future generations.

Only approved by morons everywhere. Keep reading:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163717/baby_shaker_app_approved_then_removed.html

Baby Shaker App Approved, Then Removed

Jim Dalrymple, Macworld.com

Apr 23, 2009 10:30 am

Flatulence applications are one thing, but sometimes you really have to scratch your head and wonder how certain apps could possibly make it through Apple’s approval process. The release (and subsequent removal) of an iPhone app called Baby Shaker this week has Apple in hot water with angry parents and children’s groups, who are demanding answers from Apple.

Developed by Sikalosoft, Baby Shaker features a crude drawing of a baby, and the object of the game is to stop the baby from crying by shaking the iPhone until red X’s appear over the baby’s eyes. The description of Baby Shaker read: “On a plane, on the bus, in a theater. Babies are everywhere you don’t want them to be!

They’re always distracting you from preparing for that big presentation at work with their incessant crying. Before Baby Shaker there was nothing you could do about it.”

Patrick Donohue, founder of the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation (dedicated to children suffering from Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury) was so upset with the app, he wrote a letter to Steve Jobs and other Apple executives.

“As the father of a three-year-old who was shaken by her baby nurse when she was only five days old, breaking three ribs, both collarbones and causing a severe brain injury, words cannot describe my reaction,” said Donohue. “You have no idea the number of children your actions have put at risk by your careless, thoughtless and reckless behavior!”

Macworld spoke with Jennipher Dickens, the communications director for the Sarah Jane Brain Project, about the app being removed from the App Store.

“I’m very relieved that it’s been taken down,” said Dickens. “I would still like clarification from Apple on how it got up there in the first place. It’s horrifying that they were selling it.”

Dickens is well aware of the dangers of Shaken Baby Syndrome. Her son Christopher was shaken by his biological father when he was only seven weeks old. Her son, now 2, has irreversible brain damage.

We tried to contact Sikalosoft, but the company’s Web site is currently offline.
Representatives from Apple confirmed that the app had been removed today.

We’ve openly wondered at Macworld how some iPhone apps make it through the approval process at Apple while others have been rejected. In this case, common sense lost.

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I don’t know whether to be amused or disgusted at this bizarre piece, but here is the original news item:

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090423/tc_pcworld/

appleapprovestastelessbabyshakeriphonegamethenremovesit_1

Apple Approves Tasteless Baby-Shaker iPhone Game, Then Removes It

By Daniel Ionescu, PC World - Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:41AM EDT

Apple has landed in hot water with children’s groups and angry parents after temporarily approving the Baby Shaker game in the iPhone App Store on Monday. Under pressure and criticism, Apple has now removed the application from its store.
The Baby Shaker iPhone app, developed by Sikalosoft, featured multiple drawings of a baby. The player had to stop the baby from crying by shaking the phone until red X marks showed up over the baby’s eyes. Baby Shaker reportedly appeared in the App Store on Monday and cost 99 cents. The app was later removed on Wednesday night.

Child advocates were at the core of the app’s removal, claiming the Baby Shaker game is saying that killing babies is acceptable. Apple caved in to requests to remove the app from its store. But the surprising thing is that Apple actually allowed this app to make it in the AppStore, while other less offending apps have been previously banner — see South Park and many more.

However, there is another side to this story. Although Apple has been very strict in the past with what kind of applications make it into its App Store, the approval of Baby Shaker — just black humor in some people’s views, could be seen as a relaxation in those strict rules. But the app’s removal might signal that these relaxed standards are not in the company’s best interest.

Still, would we want Apple to be able to dictate which apps are ethical or too offensive for the public? In comparison, the iTunes Music Store sells music with both sexual content and strong language, of course, with a system in place for parents to control what their children can buy. Maybe a similar system for the App Store could be a good idea, and we would be able to judge for ourselves what is offensive and what is just sick humor…

Apple’s App Store success has inspired other manufacturers and developers like Research in Motion, Nokia, Microsoft, and Google to release their own version of the store. Meanwhile Apple’s store is counting down to 1 billion application downloads.
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What Apple initially created for its iPhone here is a game where one can shake a baby in order for it to stop crying. Once the baby stopped crying, red X marks showed up over its eyes, designating the baby was dead, and not just silent (stopped crying.) It sounds like the creator of the game was probably shaken as a baby to the point of brain damage to come up with this idea. While Apple is to be commended for removing this retarded game from its iPhone, I’m thakful my own cell phone is used for making phone calls and not as a toy. My toy is my computer. Even so, the only games I play very occasionally are solitaire and backgammon.

As for shaken kids, I wonder if any of the creators of the stupid game conceived their idea while hanging around the Tucson Mall on weekends whene everyone in the city drags their kids inside the mall and start playing with them, holding them upside down, throwing them up in the air then catching them, and shaking them all around. Yes, I’m sure they have.

There is just so much wrong with this piece of news on a lot of levels. Keep reading:

http://news.aol.com/article/baby-killed/441671

Boy, 12, Charged With Murdering Baby

By Juan A. Lozano

April 23, 2009

HOUSTON (April 22) - A 12-year-old suspended from school for fighting killed a 10-month-old baby by throwing him to the floor at a home where several young children were unsupervised, officials said Wednesday.

The preteen boy, whom authorities won’t name because of his age, was charged as a juvenile with capital murder. A judge Wednesday ordered him held in juvenile detention.
The 10-month old, Deandre Washington, was injured on March 12 and died two days later at a hospital, said Child Protective Services spokeswoman Estella Olguin.

Authorities still are trying to determine how many children were in the house in a working class section of southeast Houston when the mothers of the two sets of siblings left them alone. They also don’t yet know whether the 12-year-old, who was the oldest in the group, was specifically left in charge.

The boy was not in school that day because he had been suspended for fighting.

“It’s not clear whether the mothers told the 12-year-old, ‘You are in charge,’ and left with the intention of coming back. He would have been the oldest so more than likely you would think he would be in charge,” Olguin said.

The 12-year-old has nine siblings, and all but two live with their mother, Tawanna Scott. Deandre’s mother has three other kids.

The two mothers came home after the 12-year-old boy called them to say Deandre was not breathing, calling 911 after they got home, Olguin said. She said the other children witnessed the 12-year-old throw the baby to the floor.

Deandre suffered two skull fractures and bleeding in multiple organs.

Scott, the 12-year-old’s mother, told Houston television station KHOU-TV that police told her the boy confessed, but that her son denied that to her. She also insisted that if he did throw the baby, it was an accident.

Attempts by The Associated press to reach Scott were unsuccessful Wednesday. Authorities have not released the name of Deandre’s mother.

CPS has not taken custody of any of the two mothers’ children. It is legal to leave children alone as long as one child is 12 or older.

If convicted, the boy could receive a maximum 40-year prison sentence, probation or commitment to the Texas Youth Commission system, said Bill Moore, the chief of the juvenile division for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

The minimum age to be certified as an adult in Texas is 14.

“We will get all the information we can on the facts of the case and at that point we will get together and decide if we should present it to a grand jury or go to juvenile court and we’re not there yet,” Moore said.
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I have to disagree that twelve year olds are mature enough to look after other younger children. I don’t see how throwing a baby to the floor amounts to an accident. Just how does one accidentally throw a baby? Also, why were there no adults in this private home “day care”? Where are the fathers of these kids? The mother of the 12 year old has a total of ten kids, with eight that live with her - assuming the other two live with their fathers. Tawanna Scott has some major problems to contend with, and not just a juvenile delinquent who is accused of murdering a baby, either. I recommend Essure for her, a long jail sentence for her 12 year old angel, and some real hobbies instead of breeding. As for the other kids - if she slips up again, the state of Texas to confiscate them from her.

Well, it’s nice to know that breeders don’t exist in just one part of the globe. This post regards the recent Somali pirate attacks:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_re_us/piracy_suspect

Somali pirate arrives in NYC, awaits court hearing

By Associated Press Writer Virginia Byrne, April 21, 2009

NEW YORK – The sole surviving Somali pirate from the hostage-taking of an American ship captain arrived in New York on Monday, smiling for a gaggle of cameras and reporters as federal agents led him into custody to face charges in the attack.

Abduhl Wali-i-Musi (AHB’-dul wahl-ih-MOO’-sih) was handcuffed and had a chain wrapped around his waist. His left hand was heavily bandaged from the wound he suffered during the skirmish on the ship two weeks ago.

The smiling teenager seemed poised as he entered a federal building in a rainstorm, but he didn’t say anything in response to reporters’ shouted questions about whether he had any comment about the pirate episode.

Wali-i-Musi is the first person to be tried in the United States on piracy charges in more than a century. He was flown from Africa to a New York airport and taken into custody ahead of a court hearing Tuesday.

A law enforcement official familiar with the case said that the teenager was being charged under two obscure federal laws that deal with piracy and hostage-taking. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the charges had not been announced.

The teenager’s arrival came on the same day that his mother appealed to President Barack Obama for his release. She says her son was coaxed into piracy by “gangsters with money.”

“I appeal to President Obama to pardon my teenager; I request him to release my son or at least allow me to see him and be with him during the trial,” Adar Abdirahman Hassan said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from her home in Galka’yo town in Somalia.

The age and real name of the young pirate remained unclear. The mother said he is only 16 years old and is named Abdi Wali Abdulqadir Muse. The law enforcement official says he is at least 18, meaning prosecutors will not have to take extra legal steps to put him on trial in a U.S. court.

His worried family asked the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center to help get him a lawyer, said the organization’s executive director, Omar Jamal.

“What we have is a confused teenager, overnight thrown into the highest level of the criminal justice system in the United States out of a country where there’s no law at all,” Jamal said. Wali-i-Musi speaks no English and may never have attended school, he said.
The suspect was taken aboard a U.S. Navy ship shortly before Navy SEAL snipers killed three of his colleagues who had held Capt. Richard Phillips hostage.

The U.S. officials said the teenager was brought to New York to face trial in part because the FBI office here has a history of handling cases in Africa involving major crimes against Americans, such as the al-Qaida bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.

Ron Kuby, a New York-based civil rights lawyer, said he has been in discussions about forming a legal team to represent the Somalian.

“I think in this particular case, there’s a grave question as to whether America was in violation of principles of truce in warfare on the high seas,” said Kuby. “This man seemed to come onto the Bainbridge under a flag of truce to negotiate. He was then captured.

There is a question whether he is lawfully in American custody and serious questions as to whether he can be prosecuted because of his age.”
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No, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: on a pirate ship floating in the Indian Ocean. Apparently Wali-i-Musi wasn’t bright enough a pirate to not let himself be captured. Well, if he gets off free, he can always apply for welfare checks and maybe get a free stay in the United States at taxpayer expense. After all, he’s the unintended victim of injustice. A child who is not quite yet an adult, he can live in Minnesota right next to where Shirwa Ahmed, the infamous Somali terrorist, is now buried. Pamper the pirates and terrorists up the wazoo. The ACLU may love it but I doubt the rest of American society will. Wali-i-Musi’s parents know how to play the game so it’s not as if Somalia is in some remote part of the world where there is no access to how the western world works - they can and will try to work our system.

This isn’t really big news - more of common knowledge - but worth posting just the same:

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/local/114314.php

Study: Illegal immigrants having more kids in US

April 14, 2009, 8:43 a.m.

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Growing numbers of children of illegal immigrants are being born in this country, and they are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty than those with American-born parents, a report says.

The study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center highlights a growing dilemma in the immigration debate: Illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States are American citizens, yet they struggle in poverty and uncertainty along with parents who fear deportation, toil largely in low-wage jobs and face layoffs in an ailing economy.

The analysis by Pew, a nonpartisan research organization, estimated that 11.9 million illegal immigrants lived in the U.S. Of those, 8.3 million were in the labor force as of March 2008, making up 5.4 percent of the U.S. work force, primarily in lower-paying farming, construction or janitorial work.

Roughly three out of four of their children — or 4 million — were born in the U.S. In 2003, 2.7 million children of illegal immigrants, or 63 percent, were born in this country.

Overall, illegal immigrants’ children account for one of every 15 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Illegal immigrants also have become more geographically dispersed, increasingly passing up typical destinations like California in favor of jobs in newly emerging Hispanic areas in Southeastern states like Georgia and North Carolina.

In 2008, California had the most illegal immigrants at 2.7 million, double its 1990 number, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey. Still, California’s 22 percent share of the nation’s illegal immigrant population was a marked drop-off from its 42 percent share in 1990.

The latest demographic snapshot comes as President Barack Obama is preparing to address the politically sensitive issue of immigration reform later this year, including a proposal to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

Though their numbers have soared over the past two decades, the total number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has declined or remained flat in the last few years. Demographers attribute that to slower rates of migration into the U.S. caused in part by the recession, as well as to deportations and stepped-up immigration enforcement during the Bush administration.

Among the findings:

• One-third of the children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the rate for children of U.S.-born parents.

• Illegal immigrants’ share of low-wage jobs has grown in recent years, from 10 percent of construction jobs in 2003 to 17 percent in 2008. They also make up 25 percent of workers in farming and 19 percent in building maintenance.

• The 2007 median household income of illegal immigrants was $36,000, compared with $50,000 for U.S.-born residents. In contrast to other immigrants, illegal immigrants do not earn markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.

• About 47 percent of illegal immigrant households have children, compared with 21 percent for U.S.-born residents and 35 percent for legal immigrants.

• About three-quarters, or 76 percent, of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are Hispanic. The majority came from Mexico (59 percent), numbering 7 million. Other regions included Asia (11 percent), Central America (11 percent), South America (7 percent), the Caribbean (4 percent) and the Middle East (2 percent).

Children of illegal immigrants hold a delicate place in the U.S. On the one hand, the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that these children — whether they were U.S. citizens or not — were entitled to a public school education. California and a few other states also provide some college tuition breaks to illegal immigrants.

At the same time, the immigrants and their families are among the poorest people in the U.S., easily exploited by employers and subject to arrest at any time. Children who are U.S. citizens cannot petition for their parents to become legal U.S. residents until they are at least 21.

Earlier this year, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that more than 100,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported over the decade ending in 2007, prompting the department to say it would gather more information about families before deporting immigrants.

The Pew analysis is based on census data through March 2008. Because the Census Bureau does not ask people about their immigration status, the estimate on illegal immigrants is derived largely by subtracting the estimated legal immigrant population from the total foreign-born population.

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The average number of children per Mexican couple here in AZ is 4 to 5 kids. While I realize some of these families are here legally, others are not; the others just make more babies in order to get that free welfare check from the government. At this time, it is unwise for these immigrants to even make more babies with the present shape of the economy, as more babies just exacerbates the problem. It should be illegal for the immigrants to send the American money they earn back across the border to their families and anyone caught doing so, to be deported.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090408/sc_livescience/kidscurbmaritalsatisfaction

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

April 8, 2009

Parents all know that children make it harder to do some of the most enjoyable adult things.

Bluntly put, kids can get between you.

Now scientists have attached some numbers to the situation.

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

“Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time,” says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. “However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child.”

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don’t get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

There are key variables to note in the new study.

Couples who lived together before marriage experienced more problems after the birth of a child than those who lived separately before marriage, as did those whose parents fought or divorced.

However, some couples said their relationships were stronger post-birth. They tended to have been married longer or had higher incomes.

Children don’t ruin everything, Stanley points out.

“There are different types of happiness in life and that while some luster may be off marital happiness for at least a time during this period of life, there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building,” he said. “This type of happiness can be powerful and positive but it has not been the focus of research.”

The new research, funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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A few notes here: according to Ellen Peck’s 1971 book “The Baby Trap”, people who have had children in the past, during the 1950’s to 1960’s, had to get better paying jobs in order to feed their children and provide better for them. It cannot be assumed that just because a married couple has two or more children have a higher income by coincidence, but because they have to have that income because if they do not, they wind up living at the lowest rung of the social ladder. Also, the only reason such marriages last longer is because many times they have to for their kids. It can be very taxing for a married couple to consider separation or divorce if they have children. Second, childfree couples, married or not married, know the value of closeness in a relationship: they do not just automatically assume that because they are close, that closeness will last even if they did have children. Third, and most importantly although never brought up due to the extreme taboo of the matter, children, like that potential affair lingering at the office or elsewhere, are a third party. Marriages as defined by our society are between two people and monogamous. Most people do not consider children to be third paries like that adulterous affair but guess what: they are. Both have the potential to destroy marriages in the same manner. Maybe some people will think this over before they decide to have children. If they can’t tolerate a potential adulterous affair, it is perhaps better that they should not be making babies on any level. And forget about adoption, too.