Quotulatiousness

December 6, 2010

British parents unable to say no, may get Nanny(state) to do it for them

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Apparently, British parents are so fearful of the disapproval of their own children that they’re afraid to say “no”:

Retailers selling sexualised products aimed at children could face new restrictions under plans being considered by the government.

An inquiry to explore whether rules should prevent the marketing of items such as “Porn star” T-shirts or padded bras to children has been set up.

A code of conduct on “age appropriate” marketing and a new watchdog are among plans being considered by the review.

Children’s Minister Sarah Teather said parents faced a tidal wave of pressure.

She said: “Parents often find themselves under a tidal wave of pressure, buffeted by immense pester power from their children for the latest product, craze or trend.

“I want this review to look at how we can equip parents to deal with the changing nature of marketing, advertising and other pressures that are aimed at their children.”

Parents need the government to step in and protect them from “pester power”? Pathetic.

December 2, 2010

It’s apparently not “wrong touching” when the TSA does it

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

Daniel Tencer says that the TSA’s guidelines for calming children are the same things sexual predators use:

An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.

Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.

Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.

Children “don’t have the sophistication” to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.

The TSA policy could “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children,” Wooden added.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

Autism may be linked to faulty mitochondria

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

A report in The Economist looks at a recent study which may explain the cause of autism:

One suggestion that does pop up from time to time is that the process which leads to autism involves faulty mitochondria. The mitochondria are a cell’s powerpacks. They disassemble sugar molecules and turn the energy thus liberated into a form that biochemical machinery can use. Mitochondrial faults could be caused by broken genes, by environmental effects, or by a combination of the two.

Nerve cells have a huge demand for energy, so a failure of the mitochondria would certainly affect them. The question is, could it cause autism? To try to find out Cecilia Giulivi of the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues studied the mitochondria of ten children, aged between two and five years, who had been diagnosed with autism. They have just published their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[. . .]

The children in question were randomly selected from a previous study on autism. They were matched with ten children of similar ages and ethnic backgrounds who were developing normally. Dr Giulivi found that mitochondria from children with autism consumed far less oxygen than those from the control group. That is a sign of lower activity. One important set of enzymes — NADH oxidases — used, on average, only a third as much oxygen in autistic children as they did in non-autists, and eight of the autistic children had significantly lower NADH-oxidase activity than is normal.

The mitochondria of the autistic children also leaked damaging oxygen-rich chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide. These are a normal by-product of mitochondrial activity, but are usually mopped up by special enzymes before they can escape and cause harm — for instance, by damaging a cell’s DNA. The level of hydrogen peroxide in the cells of autistic children was twice that found in non-autists. Such high levels suggest the brains of autistic children are exposed to a lot of oxidative stress, something that would probably cause cumulative damage.

While such a mechanism may allow better treatments to be developed, it also implies that those who already suffer from autism may not benefit as much (or at all) from such treatments, as the cellular damage will be a much tougher challenge to reverse.

On the other hand, if the pattern can be detected early enough, it may allow treatment well in advance of serious damage.

November 16, 2010

QotD: The true nature of parenthood

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:18

We have a name for people who pursue rare moments of bliss at the expense of their wallets and their social and professional relationships: addicts.

Children regularly give parents the kind of highs that only narcotics can rival. The unpredictability of those moments of bliss is an important factor in their addictiveness. If you give animals a predictable reward — say, a shot of sugar every time they press a lever — you can get them to press that lever quite regularly. But if you want irrational and addictive behavior, you make the reward unpredictable. Pressing the lever produces sugar, but only once every 10 tries. Sometimes, the animal might have to go 20 or 30 tries without a reward. Sometimes it gets a big jolt of sugar three tries in a row. If you train an animal to work for an unexpected reward, you can get it to work harder and longer than if you train it to work for a predictable reward.

[. . .]

I suspect oxytocin works the same way. The unexpected, kind, and loving things that children do produce chemical surges in their parents’ brains like the rush of the pipe or the needle. Like addicts, parents will sacrifice anything for the glimpses of heaven that their offspring periodically provide.

Shankar Vedantam, “Parents Are Junkies: If parenthood sucks, why do we love it? Because we’re addicted”, Slate, 2010-11-16

A child protection service with too many failures

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

Christopher Booker says that Britain’s bureaucracy to look out for the interests of children is badly off-mission:

For parents who fall foul of this system, often on no more evidence than malicious hearsay, the first shock is to find themselves treated like dangerous criminals. To seize children, social workers seem able to enlist the unquestioning support of the police, who arrive mob-handed, six or eight at a time, beating down doors, tearing babies from their mothers’ arms, holding parents in custody for up to 36 hours while their children are removed into foster care.

The parents must then wrestle with a Kafka-esque system rigged against them in every way. They find themselves in courts where every normal principle of British justice has been stood on its head. Social workers may give written evidence to a judge which the parents aren’t allowed to see. The most outrageous hearsay evidence may be accepted by the court without the parents even being allowed to cross-examine on it.

A key part is played by evidence from supposed “experts”, psychiatrists or paediatricians who may be paid up to £35,000 for their reports, and who receive regular work from the social workers involved. Parents are forbidden to call their own independent experts to challenge a case made against them. They are, all too often, pressured into being represented by lawyers who, again, work regularly for the council, who fail to put their case and who turn out to be just part of the same system.

Parents may be forbidden to testify on their own behalf, but must listen for hours, even days, to everyone else involved — including their own lawyers — putting what amounts to a case for the prosecution. The guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child may never have met the child and merely endorses whatever the social workers say.

Not surprisingly, these bizarre practices are so geared to the interests of a corrupted system that, in the latest year for which we have figures (2008), of 7,340 applications for care orders made by social workers, only 20 were refused.

Meanwhile, the children themselves are handed over to foster homes, which receive £400 a week or £20,000 a year for each child, and where many are intensely unhappy and not infrequently abused. Foster carers and social workers routinely conspire to tell bewildered children that their parents neither love them nor want them back. Children and parents meet at rigorously supervised “contact sessions”, where any expression of affection or attempt to discuss why the children have been taken from home may be punished by termination of the session or denial of further contact.

November 15, 2010

New on A&E: Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family

Filed under: Media, Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:32

Another link from Chris Myrick: Bad move, A&E.

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

November 13, 2010

Some music just doesn’t belong in commercials

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:44

By way of @muskrat_john (John Kovalic), who wrote “Love the Pogues. Love my Subaru Forrester. Saw Forrester commercial use Pogues song. Surprisingly, I died a little inside.”:

November 12, 2010

New book for kids about to fly for the first time

Filed under: Humour, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Mark Frauenfelder has the book to give to your child before going to the airport:

Got to start ’em early . . . by the time they’re full-grown, they’ll accept any intrusion from government officials as a matter of course.

The original version (in French) is here.

November 7, 2010

See? Anti-drug education is finally working

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:37

Now that we can get kids to turn in their parents for pot possession:

Two parents are facing drug charges after their child took their drugs to school and told a school officer his parents were breaking the law.

WBTV is not releasing the names of the parents or the name of the school to protect the child’s identity.

The 11-year-old student is in 5th grade at a an elementary school in Matthews. Police say he brought his parents’ marijuana cigarettes to school when he reported them.

Matthews Police say he reported his parents after a lesson about marijuana was delivered by a police officer who is part of the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches kids about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.

Well, thank goodness that this kid’s parents have been saved! I’m sure they’ll just get a stern talking-to from Officer Friendly, they’ll see the error of their ways, and everyone will go out for ice cream sundaes afterwards!

Poor kid. A brief moment of “doing the right thing” may well have ruined three lives. Nice work, Officer Friendly!

Police say both the 11-year old and a sibling have been removed from the parents’ house by social services. Police say they are staying with relatives.

If there were no relatives handy, the two children would probably become wards of the state. And that is something to wish on nobody.

October 29, 2010

An alarming argument against DNA testing

Filed under: Health, Law, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

The actual article is behind a paywall (“Who’s the Daddy?” by Melanie McDonagh), so I haven’t read all of it. Andrew Stuttaford quotes a most disturbing paragraph, however:

DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves . . . Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them. The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not . . . Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter . . . in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.

So, she’s against DNA testing to determine paternity because it reveals the truth? I’ve always discounted stories about women deliberately choosing to lie about who the father of a child is, but if this opinion is common, I’ve been mighty naive.

October 27, 2010

Are you ready for the scariest day of the year?

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Yep, I’m talking about Halloween, but not because it’s scary for the kids, it’s because it’s too scary for the parents:

Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it’s probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.

Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

October 23, 2010

“How Many Australian Politicians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?”

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

None:

The (tangential) Free-Range issue here is this: Why are we increasingly subject to rules and regs that have nothing to do with REAL safety and everything to do with litigation, worst-case-scenario-fantasizing and good ol’ CYA? It’s a time, money and morale-waster, with the added benefit of turning competent people into incompetent cowards. Just like so many rules and regs are implementing with kids: No, children, you CANNOT ride your bikes to school. No, children, you CANNOT do your own chemistry experiments. No, children, you CANNOT babysit/whittle/get a paper route/smile at a stranger. It is all TOO DANGEROUS.

And someday we will wonder why no one in the world (except, perhaps, electricians) can do anything.

H/T to Walter Olson.

October 18, 2010

QotD: The primary achievement of modern schools

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

They were right — although I had to see it for myself before I fully grasped the magnitude of the phenomenon — children are learning machines, more or less in the same sense that sharks are eating machines.

The only phenomenon more astonishing than that is the way the public school system manages to kick, stomp, and crush a child’s inherent curiosity and love of learning, often destroying it altogether by the third or fourth grade. Yes, children are learning machines. The fact that government schools have managed to condition them against learning is an astonishing — if wholly negative — feat, achieved at the unspeakable cost of countless hundreds of billions of dollars.

Nobody has any choices in the matter. The government’s schools are underwritten by the kind of theft we call taxation, and nothing good can ever come of that. Their little desks are filled by a kind of conscription. The entire institution is administered and operated by unionized net tax consumers, who savagely resist any attempt to objectively assess their work and reward (or punish) them on that basis.

I’d like to have a nickel for every time I’ve had to listen to school administrators inviting parents to participate in the education of their own children — and then complaining when parents actually do it.

They want you to participate, all right, but only on their terms. They don’t want you questioning their policies and practices. They want you to validate whatever they do to your kids, to provide them with what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim”. And if you won’t do that, or if you won’t sit down and shut up — or better yet, just go away — then they identify you as “problem parents” and “trouble-makers”.

L. Neil Smith, “Salt on the Ruins: A Chapter from the Forthcoming Where We Stand“, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-16

October 15, 2010

Elie Mystal on why bullying should not be a crime

Filed under: Law, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

As someone who was bullied in my time, I found Elie Mystal’s story resonated for me. I had no real problem with bullies until I was about 10 or 11, when I didn’t grow as fast as the other kids. I was also non-athletic, addicted to books, and had a funny accent — I was probably a gift to the budding thugs in higher grades at school.

My experience was nowhere near as bad as Elie’s, however:

It needs to stop. No, not the bullying — which is unavoidable when more than one male competes for whatever status/prestige/sex is on offer — but the tragic overreactions to the bullying, and the accompanying rush to the courthouse steps.

I say this not as an alpha-male with a caviler attitude towards the feelings of others. I say this as a former omega-male who got the crap beat out of me like I stole something from the age of 7 through the point I realized that no girl would ever mate with a guy who couldn’t basically stand up for himself….

I wasn’t always this big or this strong. As a kid, I was a polite, articulate little boy who did well in school. Or “Oreo fa**ot,” as my friends liked to call me. I’ve shared some of my childhood scrapes before — and I still hate Halloween.

My best story (it’s funny now, I think) involves me trying to walk a girl home from school when I was 12. She was walking, I was walking and rolling my bike, and then the bullies spotted us. As they approached, she said, “It’s okay, you can run.” And I did — I hopped on my bike and booked out of there. They were on foot, so I easily put some distance between us. I looked back and flipped the head bully (we’ll call him “Lewis” because his name is Lewis and he’s in jail now so he can’t read this) the finger. But that took my eyes off the road — and the tree branch in front of me. Bad times. I tumbled, they caught up, and then five kids proceeded to twist my flimsy bike around me. They got both wheels around me, and I had to waddle the rest of the way home. I was a latchkey kid, and I couldn’t reach my keys since my arms were effectively pinned to my body and I couldn’t reach my pockets. I had to sit on my stoop for hours (which felt like days), until my parents came home to let me inside (and take me to the bike shop to free me).

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

October 6, 2010

Montessori school raided by New Mexico drug cops

Filed under: Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

You can rest easy, knowing that a potentially dangerous grow op has been investigated by New Mexico Schutzstaffel drug cops:

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.”

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative.

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

Ms. Pantano must have nerves of steel . . . most schools would have gone into emergency lock-down at the sight of all those paramilitary types deploying in the driveway.

The comments on BoingBoing were good, and this one was great:

The War on Organic Produce continues to go well. Each of those tomatoes cost the taxpayer $75.00 US! WE WILL NOT BE SATISFIED UNTIL THE DRUG CZAR IS RUMOURED TO CURE GOUT BY WASHING THE FEET OF THE AFFLICTED.
—
Seriously: What the fucking fuck fuck happened to Probable Cause in this day and age? “We’re spending $20,000 on this operation because we herd thai leik mudkips, so we kipped in thair mud so thai can mud whail thai kip.” In the immortal words of Plato, NON FUCKING SEQUITUR is NOT a RIVER in EGYPT!

“What else floats the same as a Cannabis Sativa plant??? – er, WOOD! – Good, what else? – well, tiny rocks. – OH! A DUCK! – Right! So if the suspects are raising ducks — THEN THEY’RE RAISING POT! – WELL /DONE/!”

Law Enforcement by Superstition is horse-shit.

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