Blah Blah Flowers

Christ's fat cock. A nine-year-old Brazilian girl, sexually abused by her father (who also has abused her physically handicapped elder sister) and somehow made pregnant was given a termination. That is where the wonderful Catholic Church steps in as the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife has now announced he's going to excommunicate everyone that was involved in the abortion. Because it's much better that a girl far, far, far too young to be able to bare children be made to go through pregnancy and face the risk of dying or, if not dying, giving birth to twins who would have unguessed congenital problems due to their father and grandfather BEING THE SAME MAN because God loves foetuses more than humans.

Remember this, any time you feel the need, whoever you are, to whine about Atheists being 'mean'.

Labels: abortion, angry, atheism, atheists, Brazil, child abuse, children, Christianity, God, women

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from filtering content for UK users.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to commission a momument to Oliver Postgate, Peter Firmin and the children's TV characters they created.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to acknowledge that a large proportion of the workforce in this country is single, and that reference should be made to 'the hard-working population' of this country rather than the constant references to 'hard-working families'.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap ID cards. (again!)

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to cancel the 2012 Olympics in the face of the current recession and the country's existing debt burden.

Labels: censorship, children, Government, ID cards, internet, Internet Service Providers, Olympics, petitions, Television

Kids these days don't know they're born. Anyone who was young in the Seventies or early Eighties will have been touched by the hand of Postgate.

Labels: children, Television, YouTube

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to condemn the media witch hunt of social workers.

Labels: child abuse, children, petitions, scapegoating

The so-called "librarian" of a global internet child abuse ring has admitted a range of paedophile offences. Oh that's right, call him a librarian because he has a lot of pictures (I must say though, 241,000 images? What kind of cataloguing system did he use? Ahem...).

Labels: children, United Kingdom

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to update harassment laws to prohibit religious bullying aimed at children.

The current laws on harassment are not sufficient to protect children from the sort of bullying that religious groups use every day to coerce children into obedience and belief. Threatening an adult with eternal torture may be distasteful but is not likely to result in psychological damage. This is not the case with children. The effects of religious bullying can be long-term and serious, from nightmares and depression to anxiety disorders and even suicide.

The fact that threats of damnation, torture and other extreme punishment are used routinely is clear evidence that existing laws are insufficient. We call on the Prime Minister to clarify the existing harassment laws by adding clauses outlawing any form of threat, supernatural or otherwise, aimed at children; and to provide guidance to the police and other authorities on the enforcement of these laws.

Labels: children, Christianity, petitions

There's no news today, so a number of papers have followed The Sun on the Thomas Beatie story...

'Pregnant' man stuns medical profession.

Married 'man' claims to be five months pregnant.

American man claims to be five months pregnant with a baby girl.

Sex change bloke set to be a mum.

Interesting that it's only the Indy that feel it necessary to question his gender in their headline. They also, for some reason, quote one Margaret Somerville who also has a reputation as being down on gay-marriage.

"You're not a man, you're a woman and you're having a baby and you're actually having your own baby."

Um yes, in the way that women always have their own babies. Unless they are surrogates I suppose... Or is she trying to suggest that Beatie supplied both sperm and egg?

"Just because you put on a clown suit, doesn't mean that you don't still exist underneath.'"

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean!

Labels: children, transgenderism, transphobia

Headed towards the delightful Swiss Cottage yesterday in order to find an afternoon showing of Taking Liberties. Described by lazy people as 'a British Fahrenheit 9-11' it took us through the steps the British Government has taken, mainly since the 11th of September 2001 to create not exactly a fascist state, but a state in which anyone, including fascists, will find it gratifyingly easy to shut down any form of dissent or disobedience. We are taken through the UN human rights declaration and shown how Tony Blair, David Blunkett and John Reid have been ever so busy chiselling away the rights we were given, taking away the right to demonstrate while telling us we lived in a free country characterised by... our right to demonstrate. Mark Thomas and the Mass Lone Demos got a look-in, as did Rachel and the 7/7 bomb survivors. The demonstrations in Brighton against EDO showed the malevolence of the police, as did the War Against Terror attacking Asians in Forest Gate or Guantanamo.

This film is not a hysterical lefty polemic against authority. It's a calm, measured and sometimes bleakly funny reminder of what we have lost, taken by those that would claim that in doing so they are saving us from fanatics. Check the website, if you can find a showing you can attend it's well worth a few hours from your life to watch this film and let it anger up the blood. It also suggests some easy, low-impact ways you can start to help the fight back, some of which I intend to follow myself.

I'm currently reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, which I'm finding a rather annoying read. Pitched somewhere between Frankenstein and The Omen a middle-aged woman reminisces in letters to her estranged and, I suspect, possibly dead ex-husband about her life and the upbringing of her son, Kevin. From the moment of conception he's been a little bastard causing misery and pain to all around him and somehow his mother puts up with him long enough for him to reach his teenage years and shoot up a classroom of kids at his school.

The language the mother character uses is ridiculous but thankfully calms down after a few chapters and resembles English as used by real human beings. I suspect that this book is supposed to be read by people who don't believe that children can be malevolent creatures when it suits them, it's a horror story for middle-class yummy mummys to read while their little darlings are wrapped up in bed. While Daddy is away at work all day Mummy has to put up with Kevin and his permanent malicious behaviour, Daddy minimises every single act of bad behaviour and blames Mummy for overreacting, even when Kevin starts causing injuries to other people. I've just got past the midway point in the novel and Mummy is now pregnant with baby number two. She's a lot more positive about this child and Daddy is not happy, so I expect a hundred pages of Daddy regarding the girl child as the very spawn of Satan's loins. Sadly we know already from the text that we aren't going to have both children fighting on the Golden Gate Bridge with the fate of humanity in the balance, which is the sort of level this story is going for.

I'm not anticipating the second half of this book being the part that shows me why this book won the Orange Prize several years back.

Labels: books, children, civil liberties, freedom, Fundamentalists- Islamic, movies, Muslims, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

I'm writing this in the faint hope that whoever took Madeleine McCann is reading this blog. If you're The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and you took her, could you hurry up and dump her body where someone can find it? Now that the whole Blair/Brown thing has passed the nation's media has become fixated and it's utterly revolting. The Mirror or the Mail shot it's load too soon by trying earlier in the week to suggest it was the parents fault their daughter was kidnapped but the longer we go on without any real news the more the country will let itself get wound up until families are claiming they've had Madeleine appear to them in visions and cure their granny's colic, or some fucking artist desperate to make a name for themselves will make a life-sized model of her out of dog excrement. That one missing child gets more airtime than continued official attempts to restrict our freedom is just wrong.

Oh yeah, blah blah, hope they find her alive, blah blah, not too emotionally scarred by the experience, blah blah either way Mum will be in OK! magazine by the end of the year.

Labels: children, hysterias, newspapers, paedophiles

Argh! Urge to kill rising...

A mother who goaded her toddlers to fight like dogs for a sick video said yesterday she could not understand what all the "fuss" was about.

Zara Care dismissed widespread disgust at her actions and claimed: "It's a tough world out there and they have to know how to stick up for themselves. You've got to learn to be strong." Care's tearful two-year-old son and three-year-old daughter were filmed begging for mercy as they were forced to punch each other. Despite expressing remorse in court, Care seemed unrepentant yesterday in her first interview since the case. She said: "I feel hard done by. We've had a real hammering from people. The way we see it, everyone's made a mountain out of a molehill. It's a lot of fuss over nothing." She insisted: "When we were kids we were always punching and kicking each other. My mum said it's just what brothers and sisters do and she's right. The kids were fighting normally and I just thought I would film it."

Ummm, my wrong-o-meter has just broken.

In an interview in The People newspaper, Care said she wanted to become a childcare worker "but the court banned me from working with kids".

Now that just seems sooooo unreasonable.

Labels: angry, children, Daily Mail

Had a couple of toddlers in the library. While their Mum chose books they were playing with toys and seemed obsessed with a toy shaped like an old rotary dial telephone. They were happy as anything 'making' and 'receiving' calls and, as I remarked to their Mum, it's odd that they seemed to know and recognise the toy as a telephone when telephones haven't looked like that for years, a good decade or two before they were born. Seeing as they had the handsets to their ears and were dragging the rest of the phone around, maybe the handset was what they recognised as the phone rather than the rest of the toy.

Labels: children, libraries, toys

If you're feeling a bit blue this morning then here's something to cheer you up: The Daily Mail make a hilarious 'modern life is so shit even five year olds are trying to commit suicide' report. You really should read this, it's great stuff. It's a mangling of facts that one of our national papers can feel proud for promoting.

And, rather unsurprisingly, the Tate is being sued by someone who whacked her wrist on the slides at Tate Modern.

"I am claiming for the loss of facility of my right hand ... it's been a real problem," she said. "I couldn't type, write or drive for two months. I travel extensively with work but I couldn't even carry a suitcase. Only now, three months on, am I getting back to normal."

Presumably this means that two months ago she wasn't able to sign the writ. I'm not sure why she wasn't able to carry a suitcase with her unpranged hand.

Labels: children, Daily Mail, news, newspapers, suicide, Tate Modern/Britain

Sadie and the Heckler

Labels: children, humour