Category Archives: children

Child centered societies must go!

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Read this story:

Restaurant bans kids under 6. Discrimination or smart move?

At McDain’s Restaurant, in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, kids don’t eat free. And starting next week, they don’t get to eat at all.   Mike Vuick, owner of the Pittsburgh area eatery has just announced a ban on children under 6 at his casual dining establishment.

After receiving noise complaints from customers about crying kids at neighboring tables, Vuick decided to institute the policy, which will go into effect July 16.

In an email to customers, Vuick explained: “We feel that McDain’s is not a place for young children. Their volume can’t be controlled and many, many times, they have disturbed other customers.”

The owner of the “upscale, casual and quiet” restaurant explains to WTAE Local News, he’s got nothing against kids in general, but their endless screams at public dinner tables are “the height of being impolite and selfish.”

Last year, North Carolina’s Olde Salty restaurant made a similar decision. Owner Brenda Armes posted a sign that read “Screaming children will not be tolerated”, making it clear to parents when their kids scream, they’ll be asked to take it outside. Armes said the move has boosted business, and Vuick is confident his ban will benefit McDain’s as well.

But not everyone is on board. Some Monroeville locals are offended that they’re being singled out for having young kids, and pointing fingers at noisy adults.

“If they’re so concerned about noise, what do they plan to do about the loud people at the bar?” asks one local resident.

It’s not illegal to ban kids from eating establishments, but some parents consider the move discriminatory, and potentially a violation of rights for certain special needs kids. What do you think: are kid-free restaurants a great idea or flat-out wrong?

No, it is NOT discrimination! It would only be discrimination if the restaurant were banning all members of a certain religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. But children younger than six can always wait until they are older to go to the restaurant.

But even more telling are some of the comments that were left on the article:

Posted by IND Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:01am PDT

I think this is great. I work hard for my money and when I want to go out to a nice quite, relaxing dinner, listening to crying children is the last thing I want to hear. Also, there used to be a time that if you went out to dinner a little later in the evening, there would be no children as they would be home in bed; however, it appears that parents these days drag their kids out at all hours of the evening — no wonder they’re screaming — their tired!

Posted by Elise Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:09am PDT

Parents need to teach their children the proper behavior in public. Parents are to blame on this issue.

If kids can’t behave then yes don’t take them out. I have 5 children and they knew how to behave properly at all times . They were never banned , we received many compliments on them. It can be done.

Posted by BonnieM Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:12am PDT

I personally am driven nuts when I hear kids screaming and the parents do nothing to stop it! And it is the parents I want to strangle!

We wouldn’t have to have rules that some find offensive if people would just think of someone besides themselves once in a while. I took my kids into restaurants when they were young, and if they misbehaved they were taken outside and talked to in private. If they acted up again, we would leave. Then they would be left with a sitter the next time we went until we could be assured they would behave with manners. It isn’t rocket science, it is called consistent good parenting.

Indeed, people who have small children should not feel entitled to take their children with them everywhere they want to go. That’s selfishness, and selfish parents produce selfish children that are even more arrogant and stupid when they grow up, causing our society to enter a downward spiral. Adults who do not have children should have places reserved for them, just as there should be places set aside for parents with small children. The stigma attached so often to childless couples should be eliminated as well.

And parents, you are not loving your children when you fail to discipline them so they will be forced to behave respectfully in public. Instead, you are being cowards. And it is NEVER too early to start training them. As soon as they learn how to talk and to understand what you say, you must have an attitude of ZERO TOLERANCE for any hint of disrespectful behavior. I’m sure if enough parents do this, fewer places will feel the need to ban small children and all will be happy, including the children themselves.

Dentists, sex dolls and pedophiles, oh my!

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This story, and variations of it, are all over the web now:

http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/life/japanese-turn-sex-doll-dental-training-robot-976056

Japanese turn sex doll into dental-training robot

Tokyo university reveals realistic synthi-patient, claims “root canal” gags play no part in its appeal
By Mark Hiratsuka 1 July, 2011

Tokyo frequently presents a story that’s borderline fiction — sex dolls for cavity-filling practice, puhlease — but the pedigree of the new Hanako Showa 2 dental training robot tells us this is no product of a fevered imagination.

We previously saw big sister, plain Jane Hanako Showa, in early 2010, noting that the synthetic patient was being used in the Showa University dental school for more than simple caries-evacuation practice on her plumbed-in dentures.

That model even incorporated the concept of being female simply so junior dentists could learn not to accidentally fondle her breasts. We kid you not.

Silicone sheath

So, a year and a half later, little sis makes her bow sheathed not in her sibling’s PVC skin, but lifelike silicone, and sporting a host of internal modifications besides.

Hanako 2 genuinely is based on a Dutch Wife-style love doll from Orient Industry in Tokyo’s Taito Ward — trust us, you don’t want to click that link at work — giving her a head start in the “realistic” stakes.

Aside from the human-feel skin on her face, mouth and tongue, she also contains robotics that allow her to mimic a range of motions, including sneezing and gagging when clumsy trainees dip their instruments too far into her gullet.

Talkative, ain’t she?

Hanako 2 also has the gift of the gab and can chat with her human companions about how she’s feeling, what ails her and, probably, how she can manage to speak with all that medical metal in her face.

Japan being Japan, there’s clearly no scope for the tried-and-trusted medical school technique of pulling passersby in off the street for a free “checkup.”

Rather, Tokyo’s finest would-be dentists get to grapple with a chimera created originally for self-gratification, but packed instead with cutting-edge robotics and put to work in the name of a nation’s oral health. It’s a beautiful thing.

My first reaction to this was, “Wow, here’s another example of Japanese technical wizardry being put to a good use! It’s certain better to train dentists with dolls that can react like real patients than with real patients that might be injured or infected due to a mistake.” Continue reading →

What’s the worst song ever written and sung?

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For a long time, I’ve been concerned about how popular music trends tend to make teenagers look stupid and shallow. Now, pop music seems to have hit rock bottom with THIS video by Rebecca Black:

There are lot of things just WRONG about her “Friday” song that together make it worthless, though those faults might be forgiven if they appeared individually in other pop songs.  Her singing is awful, the subject matter of the song is pointless, the lyrics are profoundly stupid, and the video is creepy because it features a black rapper following the white girl around (which is actually a racist stereotype; why tolerate that?).

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Laci Green, your warning is too little, too late!

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Laci Green is a YouTube personality that is known for two things: At first she was mainly interested in proclaiming and defending her atheism (she was raised a Mormon and rebelled against that religion in her teens). Later, she turned to discussing sexuality and dedicated herself to making “sex positive” videos in which she offers advice and suggestions on how to improve your sex life. But she does have her limits.

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Revert Muslims?

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After a brief discussion with a Muslim friend in Facebook about religious tolerance, I noticed she often used the word “revert” in reference to herself and certain other Muslims. I’d never heard of that term before, so I googled the phrase “Muslim reverts”. I then found this:

http://www.revertmuslims.com/glossary.html

Revert            A person who returns to a religion they previously had; Muslim custom is to apply this term to converts to Islam as well, on the grounds that Islam is the religion that every person was born into, but their parents made them another religion. (Emphasis mine)

Gee, I wonder where that delusion came from. As I stated earlier, I don’t accept that babies are born atheists either.

Some atheists have gone further and asserted that atheism merely means “lacking belief in a god”, but that is illogical since what would follow from that is all newborn babies would therefore be atheist (they are born with NO beliefs at all) and this actually makes the term atheist useless for statistical purposes as well. It is ideologically useful (you can thus argue that atheism is a child’s natural state and thus religious indoctrination violates the child’s “true” nature), but has no empirical foundation.

An empirical case against the idea that a person can be born a Muslim is that babies do not practice any of the five pillars of Islam from birth; they must be taught those rituals by their parents and others.

Why can’t babies just be considered blank slates? Then one could argue that the default religious position of any child would be the religion his parents agree to raise  him in. I was raised a Southern Baptist, so that was my default position. I later deconverted from Christianity, joined a Unitarian Universalist church, converted to the Baha’i Faith, and finally reverted to Unitarian Universalism.

But no matter what else I do in my life, my past memberships in both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baha’i Faith will always be a part of my existence. As I told my Muslim friend:  “I will pick fights with Christian extremists, atheist extremists, and even Muslim extremists. That’s because I figured out long ago that religion cannot be about objective truth, but about what fits your soul and identity. Whether there is one God, a billion gods, or no God, we all must live by what we know and can accept. To demand otherwise is to violate the very nature of what it means to be human.”

And to the end of my life, I know that my soul and my identity always will be linked to:

  • Agnosticism (my view of God)
  • Unitarian Universalism (my religious allegiance)
  • and Honorable Skepticism (my ethical philosophy)

NOT ISLAM OR ANY DOGMATIC GOD-CENTERED RELIGION!

The Irish people must abandon Catholicism!

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It is painful for me to proclaim that, despite being a non-theist who was never a Catholic. I know all too well how deeply embedded Catholicism is in the spirit of Ireland; a major theme of past Irish rebellion against English domination was the British being Protestant and the Irish being Catholic. Without the support of the Catholic Church, Ireland might never have won its political freedom. But now the time has come for the Irish people to seek their spiritual freedom as well, and so they must throw off the Catholic dogmas and institutions too!

Why? Because of this report:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110118/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse

Continue reading →

No Fun with Dick and Jane

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See Johnny read. Johnny reads about Dick and Jane. Read, read, read Johnny. Boring, boring book. Johnny hates to read. Johnny can’t read the newspaper yet.

Seriously, the people who created and published the classic Dick and Jane Readers of the 20th Century should have been banned from working in any school or publishing company! I wonder how many young minds were ruined by those idiots!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane

I am a champion of phonics, and hope we never repeat the mistakes made in dumbing down our education via a long discredited method of teaching reading. Rudolf Flesch is one of my heros.

Attacking homophobia and bullying in the Fort Worth City Council

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Having lived in the Fort Worth area all my life, I was never prouder of that than I was when I saw this video on YouTube. For the people of Texas, there is hope for greater enlightenment as long as people like Joel Burns and myself are around!

Such courage may cause him to be voted out of office, but it may also lead to a revolution. Let us keep up the pressure to stop the hate, the violence and the ignorance.

I’ll add this much older voice to Mr Burns’ as well:

Because bigotry is evil no matter where it comes from, and even if religion or social standards support it.

Ten Reasons the Quiverfull Movement is Idiotic

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In case you’ve never heard of the Quiverfull movement in Christianity, here is its website:

http://www.quiverfull.com/index.php

We exalt Jesus Christ as Lord, and acknowledge His headship in all areas of our lives, including fertility. We exist to serve those believers who trust the Lord for family size, and to answer the questions of those seeking truth in this critical area of marriage.

Whether your quiver is large or small, you are welcome. Come browse our articles and resources. Also, be sure to check out the QuiverFull Digest, our email discussion group that was started in 1995.

Dedicated to providing encouragement and practical help to those who are striving to raise a large and growing, godly family in today’s world!

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The “Health Ranger” attacks vaccines

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Imagine the horror of giving a baby a vaccination to protect his health, only to have him become violently ill. Sadly, such things may happen if the vaccines are defective. But when a product is defective, the logical response is to stop using the product for a short time, do an investigation to determine what went wrong with the product, and then replace it with an improved version of the product, NOT ban the product completely and tell people to never use it! But that is exactly what anti-vaxxer loons in Australia are doing!

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The Spice Girls were frauds from the beginning

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One of the greatest failures of the public in the world was reflected in how the Spice Girls, with their slogan “Girl Power” became such an overwhelming success. If enough people had applied skepticism to the matter, they would have rejected the pop group en masse and they would have had only minor hits, if any at all.

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A damning statement about public schools

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Occationally I find a statement by someone so stunning in its brilliance, yet so obvious, that I feel the need to spread it around. Such as this:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/i_am_the_wrong_person_to_answe.php#comment-2702235

Posted by: skeptifem Author Profile Page | August 3, 2010 10:28 PM   #9

Public school isn’t meant to genuinely educate. It never will. They dole out skills that increase the value of the lowest rung of workers. That is the purpose of it. Having customers and workers who can read and do basic math is something that power structures need, so we have it.

The current cirriculum in schools does not prepare students for huge portions of living, perpetuating privilege and disadvantage. People come out of school knowing nothing about how to go further than HS, medicine, the law, economics, and history. Children are taught obedience and discouraged from thinking critically. The liklihood of a state institution portraying the state honestly (which is to say, in a negative light) is unlikely. So it isn’t as though everyone who grew up in public school isn’t pumped full of ridiculous lies in the same way the homeschoolers are, it is just a different set of lies.
Real knowledge and the ability to think critically is kept to classes of people who are conditioned for obedience. The number and variety of meaningless hoops a person typically has to jump through in order to make it far in education weeds out radical people. Even on the K-12 level, people are branded “behavior problems” (of course there are genuine ones as well), or put into “slow” or “advanced” groups based on what people should know by a certain age, as if minds don’t vary wildly in that respect. It divides em, often along race/class/sex lines. It teaches learning is a chore (that takes place between 7 and 3), and you learn what other people say, and that you unwind by doing a bunch of non thinking by buying products or staring at screens all day. It kills the motivation to learn. Children don’t see the past or future of the world they are in, shut in with only people their own age except for authority figures.

SO yeah, I unschool. I don’t see the supremacy of public school at all. Crappy homeschools literally move school into homes- that is what creationist homeschoolers do in spades. School would have to be radically rethought for me to approve, and they have been before. Voluntary skill swaps, anarchist free schools from the early 1900s, that I would approve of in a school. As is public school is a crock of shit.

I must note that I was brought up in public schools, even in college. I guess I was lucky I learned to think as critically as I do. But I am not against public schools. But P Z Myers, who wrote the blog entry skeptifem was commenting on, said at the beginning:

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal.

I am glad that P Z is not a dictator over us, then. Not all homeschoolers are religious fundamentalists. That’s an urban myth we need to stamp out.

There are indeed secular homeschoolers. Here are some of their websites:

http://www.secularhomeschool.com/

http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/

http://www.secularhomeschoolers.net/

http://www.atheistview.com/secular_homeschool.htm

There are also Unitarian Universalists who homeschool:

http://www.uuhomeschool.org/

Public schools may provide a valuble service, but no one should rely on them exclusively to educate their children. Parents and other adults also have a responsibility to be teachers, now and forever. Let it be so.

There is still hope even for those who are brainwashed

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Check out this blog:

http://nolongerquivering.com/

It is a protest against men using religion to train women to be little more than breeding machines.

http://nolongerquivering.com/about/

by Vyckie

I am a single mother of 7 wonderful kids. I am a former “Quiverfull” mother who dedicated my life to bearing and raising up “Arrows for God’s army.”

My pregnancies nearly killed me on several occasions, but I was so dedicated to the ideal that I continued to risk my life. I left the movement and my Christian faith, so that’s led to learning a whole new way of thinking and living. My kids and I are really having a blast and enjoying the freedom to be ourselves rather than ordering our lives according to some predefined roles based upon an ancient patriarchal society.

I am a former Christian homeschooling mother of seven who finally walked away from fundamentalism after our radical extremism drove my oldest daughter to attempt suicide. I was so convinced of, and committed to, the Biblical family ideals espoused by what has been termed the “Quiverfull” or “Biblical Patriarchy” movement.

Mine is a candid story of one who was seriously sucked into a hate-filled worldview and was so committed that I was willing to die for the cause – and now I am equally bold in speaking up to say that the Quiverfull worldview and lifestyle overburdens women, enslaves the daughters and destroys families.

Of course, this is the sort of evil that trapped Andrea Yates and killed her five children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates

Why some people commit suicide

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There are many cases I’ve heard of in which a young person, raised in a good family, suddenly commits suicide. Usually, the parents and friends of the victim do not forsee the event and cannot explain it afterwards. But I think I have an explanation.

The person may still be a teenager raised in an extremely religious family who decides not to follow his or her parents’ faith. Once he decides to leave it, he realizes that he may lose his parents’ love and that is a burden no child should have to endure. This is especially bad if the child is raised in a close knit community where the religious extremism is strongly enforced by nearly everyone in it. The attempts to keep the child’s deconversion a secret while going through the motions of religious life must be a constant source of stress on the child.

Issues like homosexuality, racism, and other forms of prejudice may also be factors, but I naturally think religious bigotry is the most serious one of all.

Sarah Palin, living a lie

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Let me be frank and blunt about this matter of the Republican Vice-Presidental nominee of 2008: She is an IDIOT and a disgrace to all responsible women in America, if not the entire world!

She has five children and her oldest daughter Bristol, only 17, is already expecting a child of her own. So in essence, Sarah Palin illustrates that women, even highly achiveing ones like her, are still expected to be breeding machines as well.

I find that absolutely disgusting!

How can anyone, knowing the vast environmental destruction humans have caused around the world, because of our growing populations, ever put their trust in anyone that herself contributes to the problem?

How can anyone think that her assumptions about birth control and abortion are in any way applicable to places that are overcrowded, just because they seem justified in lightly populated Alaska, the state Palin is governor of?

How can anyone, claiming to be Christian, be so damn materialistic as to favor the exploitation of Alaska’s mineral resources to make people richer, at the expense of the wildlife that live there? Jesus constantly denounced that attitude! So do I, despite being non-Christian.

How can anyone, having so strong sexual urges herself that she would crank out five babies, seriously think that abstinence before marriage is an option for teenagers with their own raging hormones, including her own daughters? One of them has obviously rejected that. If those values didn’t work for the Palins, why should they be applied to anyone?

Nevermind that Bristol, the pregnant daughter, is planning to marry her baby’s father. Statistics show that the overwhelming majority of teen marriages end in divorce. In any case, she is at a disadvantage in moving on with her education, and even if she does that, many teen mothers, lacking financial resources, would not be so fortunate.

Nature made our sexual urges strong for a reason, that being that REPRODUCTION, the purpose of sex, is what perpetuates all species. Unless we eliminate those urges, we will inevitably give in to them when opportunities present themselves. I think anyone who says otherwise is a LIAR.

Therefore, the Roman Catholic Church, advertising its priest and nuns as celibate and therefore “pure” and totally dedicated to the church and nothing else, is lying to us all. And so is Sarah Palin.

Her daughter Bristol is living proof that her values on sexuality are a failure. And that being the case, her values about economics and the environment, issues which are affected by human population growth, are also discredited.

We need to BURY this loon before she destroys us! IMMEDIATELY!

This should be called PROSTITUTION!

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No child should have to endure this sort of nonsense!

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/13-yr-old_says_no_to_marriage_in_Rajasthan/articleshow/3110142.cms

13-yr-old says no to marriage in Rajasthan

JAISALMER: A 13-year-old girl is revolting against a hoary tradition that has crushed many a childhood in Rajasthan – child marriage.

Refusing to crumble under social pressure, Asu Kunwar from Sedhana village, near Pokhran, stood up to her father who was bent on marrying her off to a 40-year-old for Rs 49,000 and a gold chain.

Bhom Singh now has to return the money to his prospective son-in-law in the face of resistance from Asu, who sought police protection.

Bhom Singh struck the deal with Sawai Singh two years ago, promising to give him his daughter’s hand when she was older. He was forced to send back his prospective son-in-law after Asu put her foot down.

Soon she had won her mother over to her side, but the father, who had already taken the bride price of Rs 49,000 tried to push her into wedlock this April, saying a date had already been fixed and a Rajput had to honour his word.

Confronted by the empowered mother-daughter duo, Sawai Singh, meanwhile, reached out to the larger male-dominated community and village panchayat of Sedhana. He also went to the local police to seek their help, but they refused to intervene.

Petitioned by Sawai Singh, the village panchayat met and decided it was only fair that the man be allowed to marry the 13-year-old. Villagers then gathered around the girl’s house and tried to force her to agree to the wedding.

Seeing the community against her, Asu’s mother went to Indu Chopra, a woman official of the local women and child development department.

That’s when the official organised protection for the mother and child and warned the villagers to back off. A police force, which had till then stood as mute spectators, was then forced to step in and caution Asu’s father about the consequences of violating the ban on child marriage.

Bhom Singh, villagers said, has now borrowed money from various sources to pay back the bride price.

It’s illegal to sell babies in most parts of the world and for women to have sex for money (prostitution). Why is it acceptable in ANY society, tradition bound or not, to take money from an older man and then force your daughter to marry that man when she is still a child?! That father should be locked up, along with the prospective groom, and the girl and her mother should be honored as heros for human rights.

Do NOT beat your kids!

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The saying “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is a tragic misunderstanding of a passage of the Book of Proverbs (Proverbs 13:24). The rod referred to that used by shepherds in ancient times to guide sheep to go in a certain direction, but NOT to ever BEAT them! Beating children with anything should be considered abuse, because adults are stronger than children. Therefore, the only thing kids can learn from being beaten is that bullying is acceptable and thus they can get ahead by bulling weaker and smaller people!