The headline: Canada Bans Baby Walkers, Citing Dangers
Okay, but they don't actually cite any dangers.
Baby walkers, aimed at infants who can sit up but not yet walk on their own, allow babies to propel themselves forward on their toes while held upright in the walker. But while popular with parents, the contraptions have long been associated with injuries, most of which occur when a child toddles to the edge of a staircase and crashes down the steps.
When did it become safe to leave babies unattended at the tops of staircases? A crawling baby wouldn't be safe in that scenario. Nor would a walking toddler, sans walker. This danger has nothing to do with walkers. But that's only the second paragraph. Maybe they actually do cite some dangers.
But in any mobile walker, "the kids are still given the mobility before they know how to handle it." Children on the move are able to pull hot pots off the kitchen stove or get hold of poisons, he says. In one study of 200 emergency-room visits at his hospital by children with walker-related injuries, three children had skull fractures and one child arrived at the hospital in a coma.
Nope, nothing to do with dangers inherent in walkers. If a baby can pull hot pots off the stove whilst in a walker, they could just as easily crawl over to the stove, pull themselves into a standing position, and have at it. Again, this has nothing to do with walkers and everything to do with unattended children and unattended stoves with unattended hot pots. Ditto with the poisons. In fact, it's probably harder for babies in to get to poisons. The walker limits the babies reach. An unfettered crawler would have a much easier time accessing any poisons that just happen to be stored at baby level in a house with a totally unattended child. Do Canadians throw their babies in walkers and then leave for the day or something? If so, then the ban on walkers is sensible, and all walkers should be replaced with padded cages, for the childrens' safety. What the hell are these people thinking? Hot pots? Poisons? Don't they know children aren't supposed to be left to play with that stuff?
Canadians must know about the dangers posed to infants through the use of baby walkers," Health Minister Pierre Pettigrew said in a statement announcing the ban. Canada is the first country in the world to enact such a ban.
Okay, Canadians must be educated about these dangers. Well then list these dangers, by all means. For it sounds like there aren't any to be listed. Perhaps a sticker that says that a walker is not a substitute for supervision would be in order.
A church trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.
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“The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny, it is about Jesus Christ,” Bickerton said.
Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, southeast of Pittsburgh.
Now let me start by saying that I think it's a good idea to try to instill in the youngsters a sense of what Easter is really about. They should recognize that the bunny and the eggs are secondary. But is whipping the Easter Bunny and breaking eggs really better than simply telling the story of the Resurrection? Further, does whipping the Easter bunny tell us anything about Jesus? Does breaking eggs teach us something? I think these questions are easily answered with some resounding "no"'s. Simple enough. But what really baffles me is the role of the drunken man and the self-mutilating woman in this Easter show. Can anybody explain this? If so, please drop me a line.
11:43 AM
"It's not a great deal. Individuals would be throwing away the protections of their communications for a few dollars," Hoofnagle said. "We don't see this as any different than letting a company listen in on your phone conversations and letting the Postal Service open your mail."
I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of people out there who would gladly let you listen to them calling escort services and ordering pizzas night after night if you gave them free phone service in exchange. Whether or not this is a fair exchange is irrelevant. What's relevant is that it is a voluntary transaction made after full disclosure of the terms.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google portrays the commercialization of e-mail as a small trade-off for a service that will give each user one gigabyte of storage - up to 500 times more than other leading free services - and provide a quicker, cleaner way to search e-mailboxes. Most e-mail messages opened on Gmail won't even contain ads, according to Google.
Nevertheless, critics say the free storage - roughly the equivalent of 500,000 pages - isn't worth compromising individual privacy rights.
A simple solution would be for these critics to not sign up for Google's fancy email. But that's not enough. They think it is their business to deprive other people of an option they might find appealing. If somebody thinks that having a free gigabyte-sized receptacle for their Winona Ryder pics and John Mayer mp3's is worth having some computer program reading their email, then why can't Google provide that to them? It is unbelievable that people are actually getting worked up over a FREE service that people voluntarily sign up for and where the conditions for receiving this FREE service are clearly spelled out. If a person assesses the value of not having their email scanned, then assesses the value of a gigabyte of storage and finds the latter to be greater than the former, then finds a company that belives the former to be worth more than the latter, then a mutually-beneficial agreement can be made between person and company. It's nobody else's damn business.
I find it most ironic that "privacy advocates" are so comfortable getting into other people's business.
A Priest Lake man killed his neighbor's 2-pound miniature Yorkshire terrier by kicking it into the air like a football, police said, and authorities have charged him with animal cruelty.
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The dog was dead instantly when he hit the pavement. The man police say kicked him, Chad Daniel Crawford, 23, of the 1000 block of Long Hunter Lane is now charged with cruelty to animals and felony vandalism and was free yesterday after posting $25,000 bail, authorities said.
This guy murdered a two-pound, 17 year-old dog. For no apparent reason. Death is too good for this guy, but hopefully he will come to an untimely and unusually painful end really, really soon. If he hasn't already murdered or molested some children,, his actions with this dog show that he will given the opportunity. A better candidate for crushing with a Caterpillar bulldozer I cannot imagine. Even Rachel Corrie is better than this guy.
9:06 AM
If you're in the market for a bulldozer, do make it a Caterpillar.
Activists will protest the use of Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes, at the company's annual stockholders meeting April 14 in Chicago. An "International Day of Action Against Caterpillar" demonstration will be staged April 23 at corporate headquarters in Peoria.
Perhaps I shouldn't be suggesting that people go out and buy Caterpillars because these nuts don't want them to, as Caterpillar has no real say in how it's products are used once they are sold. But at least one bulldozer proved itself most useful.
The headline: Will Users Care if Gmail Invades Privacy?
Even the headline is based on an incorrect assumption. There is NO PRIVACY in Gmail. They tell you that before you sign up. If users care, they shouldn't sign up. Gmail offers people the opportunity to give up any expectation of privacy in order to get a really, really huge free mailbox. And the lack of privacy isn't buried in the fine print somewhere. They actually announce it. This article even says so: What got nearly as much attention as the service itself was a built-in feature that Google announced: Its computers will search for certain words in its e-mail users' incoming messages, and then display text ads related to those words. The feature has triggered alarms among privacy advocates, who express concern that Google's computers will encroach on users' privacy rights and possibly expose private correspondence to government scrutiny. Why are privacy advocates concerned about this at all? Gmail is no more private than your makeup bag at an airport. Or, actually, it is an improvement over the makeup-bag-at-the-airport scenario, for Google tells you up front that your email WILL BE SEARCHED every time for keywords, etc. At the airport, the makeup bag's guaranteed to be x-rayed but whether or not some TSA semiliterate is going to paw through it looking for that perfect shade of lipstick to confiscate is up in the air, so to speak. But I digress. What part of NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY WHATSOEVER do privacy advocates not understand? Or I guess I should specify these particular privacy advocates that advocate privacy where there's no reason for it. I consider myself a privacy advocate, but I recognize what's going on with Gmail and I'm perfectly okay with it because there is no privacy at issue. For people who don't want their email scanned and are willing to forgo the extra storage space or pay for their email themselves, Gmail isn't a good option. For those who think free email with vast amounts of storage space is more important than private email, Gmail's probably the way to go. Nobody was ever hurt by having more options.
9:02 AM
