To be successful, a woman has to be much better at her job than a man.
—Golda Meir
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We were getting a bit tired of chaperoning our older daughter to her school and back. A 4th-grader should be able to make the five-minute trip by herself and lo and behold, she can. In fact, she positively oozes ENTITLEMENT. I did follow her at a far distrance for a few days and met her halfway back, but she’s doing just fine. Over-cautious if anything, but this beats the alternative. She now also has her own key and yesterday she was home before myself and the younger sprout. It looks like this new arrangement is a win-win.
On a less pleasant front, what to when there’s nice folks with horrible kids? Their small one resembles a savage, the older one is a rude, reckless, inconsiderate, and self-absorbed brat. We feel that we have to follow our kids around to make sure they don’t hurt by the brat and the last time around, Geekmom had to actively step in. My impression is that their older’s behavior is worse each time we visit. I don’t know how to handle this other than to simply stop going there. I really like the parents, but it’s not worth the aggravation to keep going there. A pity.
And an example on how to not be a parent: Mother pedals naked toddler through chilly Munich
Authorities recently stopped a lawyer on her bicycle when they noticed her riding through town in chilly weather with her naked baby in the child seat, Munich police said on Thursday.
The one-and-a-half-year-old appeared miserably cold, according to police reports, with her “nose running down to her lips” and her “mouth blue at the corners.” A police car thermometer read 11 degrees Celsius (52 degrees Fahrenheit) at the time, with what the report describes as “an unpleasant wind chill.”
The mother, a 32-year-old lawyer from Schwabing, told officers her daughter had refused to let anyone dress her, explaining that children have individual rights as well, which is why she accepted her daughter’s wish to remain undressed.
There is indeed a school of parenting that she seems to subscribe to. They think it’s okay if their kids jump off the rooftop—it’s their own free will and a learning experience. Personally, I believe these folks to be criminally nutty.
Dumbfounded officers directed the woman to put clothes on the girl, and she complied without further discussion. The pair was then allowed on their way.
“The officers were clearly surprised, but the mother did have a thick winter jacket with her, plus pants and shoes, so officers only had to ask her to put them on the girl,” Munich police spokesperson Gottfried Schlicht, told The Local on Thursday.
A complaint has been filed against the lawyer for child neglect and abuse. According to Schlicht, the Munich Youth Welfare Office is also set to investigate whether the woman is fit to raise children.
If you ask me, she isn’t. A 1.5-year-old is in no position to make decisions like not to wear clothes for a bicycle ride on a cool day. You dress that kid the same way you would and if the kid’s fussy about it then that’s just too bad.
Somebody is stepping way out of line: Liechtenstein prince calls Germany ‘Fourth Reich’
he Prince of Liechtenstein, Hans-Adam II, has labelled Germany “the Fourth Reich” amid a dispute with Berlin over efforts to hinder tax evasion in the tiny Alpine statelet.
The tiny Alpine principality of Liechtenstein has already suffered through “three German Reichs” in the last two centuries, he told Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger on Thursday, adding that the country hoped to survive the fourth.
His comments were included in a letter to the Jewish Museum in Berlin that explained why Liechtenstein no longer wanted to loan artwork to Germany. The prince wrote that his country did not want to expose its art collection to selective use by the German state.
It looks like the prince is royally ticked off about somebody leaking files of LGT bank exposing tax evaders to German intelligence, which ended up being shared with nations far and wide. If Wikipedia is to be believed, “LGT (Liechtenstein Global Trust[citation needed]) is the private banking group of the princely House of Liechtenstein.” This would explain why prince is so upset—the scandal, PR, and increased scrutiny has probably lost LGT (and therefore himself) a lot of customers and assets, and like a spoiled brat he’s not sharing his toys anymore.
Salomon Korn of the Central Jewish Council in Germany told the Tages-Anzeiger that the prince’s remarks were “totally absurd.”
“The prince belittles the crimes of the Nazis by putting the (current) Federal Republic on the same level as the Third Reich,” the 1933-45 period when dictator Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were in power, he said.
Good for Mr. Korn. Tough luck that the Prince’s tax cheats got exposed by the score and fell over themselves turning themselves in before they were roped in and that the scandal was a blow to one of his businesses (is there any other business in Liechtenstein other than banking?), but it’s beyond the pale to compare getting busted with the atrocities of the Third Reich.
By the way, when I was working in Switzerland years and years ago, one of my accounts was another bank in Liechtenstein which ran the market data platform of the company I worked for. It was the only pure IBM shop I’ve ever seen and their network was melting down. Small wonder they had issues with the market data software. I’m trying to remember how large Liechtenstein is. It’s a bit of a walk from one end to the other, but only a few minutes by car.
I recall a related story that would put this one in context: Family advocates shun juvenile court hearings
Here’s what I can piece together:
Texas Family Support Services is, as stated in the article, a group contracted to support children at risk of being removed from their homes in Travis County. I don’t know who they’re contracted by, but the important bit is that the group is supposed to represent the children.
During a juvenile court hearing, the judge ordered two representatives of TFSS, a parenting coach and a child mentor, as well as a Child Protective Services supervisor and caseworker (don’t know if this refers to two persons or one and the same) to be held in a holding cell for 20 minutes, because the judge was upset that this group (which is supposed to work for the children) recommended that the judge order a 14-year-old girl locked up in juvenile detention while awaiting trial.
Meurer (the judge) said the group spent 20 minutes in the cells, something she likened to a voluntary site visit rather than a punitive measure. She said she wanted them to understand the emotional toll that being jailed takes on children.
All of this leaves me a bit befuddled. I don’t know the details of the 14-year-old’s case, but since she’s scheduled for trial there’s probably a reason for it. The fact that the representative(s) of the CPS recommended that she’d be held in juvenile jail is rather suggestive, though. The article doesn’t say if the girl might do some time if convicted, but it’s not easy to conceive that this group conspired against the girl. I don’t doubt that doing time, even in juvenile jail, does take an emotional toll, but perhaps that’s what it takes to knock some sense into some tough cookies. Failing that, it may be a taste of what’s in store for them later in life.
I am not impressed by the judge’s rhethoric, though. Her ordering the group to be detained in a holding cell is certainly not a voluntary site visit, but an involuntary detention.
The head of TFSS is understandably upset and is refusing to let his employees attend any further court proceedings. Perhaps this is an overreaction and it’s certainly not good news for some kids, but I can’t really blame him.
Braving the world wide pr0n: Acting chief says firefighters viewed porn at work
Two firefighters suspended, up to 36 employees might be disciplined; controls could be installed on computers.
One Austin firefighter has been suspended for viewing pornography on city computers, and another was suspended after investigators said he lied about how many times he had opened an e-mail containing sexually explicit images. Acting Fire Chief Jim Evans said Tuesday that as many as 36 firefighters might be disciplined in coming weeks for accessing pornographic Web sites at work on city computers.
First, why is this a surprise? In any male-dominated line of work, the guys will visit naughty sites if they can. Where the firefighters lead, the cops can’t be too far behind—nudge nudge, wink wink.
Second, what part of “watch pr0n at home and not at work” is so hard to get?
Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life
A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.
It’s not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.
Szostak’s protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn’t anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.
While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn’t wholly autonomous, so it’s not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.
Very very interesting. Disquieting too if you’ve you read Peter Watt’s Rifters tritetralogy.
Anybody ever read Terry Pratchett’s The Postman?
Frankfurt postman arrested for hoarding truckloads of letters
A Scottish postman working in Frankfurt has been arrested after he was discovered to have hoarded an estimated 20,000 letters at his parents’ house where he lived, police said on Tuesday.
The 23-year-old told police that for the past year he had hidden and thrown out the letters instead of delivering them because he was overwhelmed with work while taking night courses to earn his high school diploma equivalency.
A neighbour saw the man tossing letters into a bin and alerted police on Monday. The authorities searched his parents’ home and found letters ferreted away in closets, a bedframe and closets. There were so many letters that police had to use two small trucks to transport them all.
Apparently mail disappearing by the truckload doesn’t raise any flags with Frankfurt’s postal service. And all these poor letters wanted is to be delivered.
I didn’t make it past this headline: Pope condemns ‘pagan’ love of money, power.
As opposed to the Catholic Church’s love of money, power—which is perfectly fine in his book, right?
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