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POPSGot any nude photos of your baby? Shred them. Now! Several people, all of whom I'd objectively call "innocent," have been investigated by the FBI, humiliated, arrested, and effectively destroyed by scandal when photo-developing and computer-repair shops discovered that they had photographed their young children naked. One father lost custody of his kids for taking a photo of them mooning him. The argument is: "we all have to view innocent photos through the eyes of a pedophile, for the good of the children." Effing scary. I mean, I've taken several pictures of my son in the bathtub, and according to this article, that makes me effectively guilty of child pornography. Better take those shots off of Snapfish.com.
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POPSHomosexual behavior due to genetics and environmental factors “Overall, genetics accounted for around 35 per cent of the differences between men in homosexual behavior and other individual-specific environmental factors (that is, not societal attitudes, family or parenting which are shared by twins) accounted for around 64 per cent. In other words, men become gay or straight because of different developmental pathways, not just one pathway.” For women, genetics explained roughly 18 per cent of the variation in same-sex behavior, non-shared environment roughly 64 per cent and shared factors, or the family environment, explained 16 per cent. The study shows that genetic influences are important but modest, and that non-shared environmental factors, which may include factors operating during fetal development, dominate.
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POPSFirstborn Children Are the Cleverest Be sure to read the rest of the article; it is quite fascinating. It's also interesting to note that one of the related articles listed on the side is titled "Smarter People Are No Better Off"!
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POPSShe's Her Own Twin In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells -- or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother's womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes -- two separate strands of DNA. The twin is invisible, but for chimeras the twin lives microscopically inside the body as DNA.
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POPSChildhood "ending sooner", survey finds A survey finds that today's children stop believing in imaginary creatures much earlier than their parents did, and that many children are pressured by parents to perform well in school and extracurricular activities (this is new?).
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POPSMan slaps stranger's crying child I don't care what you say about "kids today are out of control", you don't slap somebody else's child. Period. I would also say, you never slap a child across the face, period.
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POPSChildren taken away because of a breastfeeding photo in Texas The excerpt above is taken from "Oxytocin and breastfeeding - does this hormone make breastfeeding a sexual act?" on http://www.007b.com/breastfeeding_sexual.php I'd like to call attention to the central issue, that, as I suppose, is given in this quotation: "My sister couldn't breastfeed because it felt good. She thought, if it felt good with her baby it must be a sin ...." (Loco citato.) In my humble opinion, it is rather a capital sin to plant such a superstitious crap of false, hostile, self-destructive morality in girls and women.
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POPSLesbian Book "Disturbed Teens" What an interesting leap, how those young men found the book while "browsing for military academy info." I had no idea both topics were in the same section of the library. Go figure.
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POPSConditional parenting In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear. It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
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POPSThe QuiverFull movement: having babies -- lots of babies -- for God Newsweek on the "QuiverFull" movement ("Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them." Psalm 127.4f.), which campaigns against birth control, espouses a relatively fundamentalist version of evangelical Christianity, and advocates having at least six children per family.
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POPSProposed law to ban spanking Hooray for more government control. We can't be trusted to make any decisions anymore. I welcome the big inclusive handbook for Government Sanctioned Childrearing. Do you think NY and CA will get together and propose criminalizing feeding transfats to a child? Wouldn't it be safer and smarter to just take our kids away at birth and put them in a Government Controlled Childcare Facility? Why take a risk that parents might screw something up?
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POPSToday's overprotected kids need to live a little If you don't fall down and scrape your knee when you're eight, how else do you learn to pick yourself up, brush yourself off and keep on running? These are basic living skills that you'll desperately need at 22 when the rent is due, the car broke down and your dentist is telling you there's a root canal in your future.
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POPSLack of ability does not explain women's decisions to opt out of math-intensive science careers "Women today compose approximately 50 percent of medical school classes; however, despite these gains, women who enter academic medicine are less likely than men to be promoted or serve in leadership posts, the authors said. As of 2005, only 15 percent of full professors and 11 percent of department chairs were women. Non-math fields are also affected: for example, only 19 percent of the tenure track faculty in the top 20 philosophy departments are women".
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POPSIs it so different? "After the female deposits her unfertilized eggs into the male, the outer shell of the eggs breaks down, and tissue from the male grows up around the eggs in the pouch. After fertilizing the eggs, the male closely controls the prenatal environment of the embryos in his pouch. The male keeps blood flowing around the embryos, controls the salt concentrations in the pouch, and provides oxygen and nutrition to the developing offspring through a placenta-like structure until he gives birth." " in some species of pipefish, the sex roles are reversed because males become pregnant and there is limited brood pouch space. So females compete for access to available males, and thus secondary sex traits (such as brightly colored ornamentation) evolve in female pipefish instead of males."