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Archive for March 28th, 2009

Here we go again …

OMG! Celebrity adoption in the news … yawn … and it jump starts the backlash. Sheesh.

Okay, so it is Madonna, and although she may be named after the muthah of all mothers (in the Saddam Hussein sense, that is) there is consensus that June Cleaver she is not, but …

For Save the Children to react like this just annoys the socks I don’t wear right off my itchy feet.

Save the Children spokesman Dominic Nutt told the BBC’s Newshour programme: “For the most part so-called orphans in poor countries tend to have family still available to them, if not actually a parent still living.

“It is vital, we say, that children should not be taken abroad to be looked after but should be cared for in their own environment by their own community, ideally by their own family, particularly their extended family.”

Yeah … I do note that the guy’s a Nutt, which he proves nicely with:

“You cannot literally take every poor child who may only have one parent living, or no parent living, across the world and transport them all into Kensington in London. It’s not a solution.”

Gee … I wonder how much he gets paid to come up with such simplistic tripe?

Here’s a hint to agenda from him: “The thing to do is to support the community, to support local agencies and charities who can look after the child so that the child is at least cared for in their community.” (emphasis added)

Okay. One more time …

Malawi is in Africa. Much of Africa is dirt poor, disease-ridden, starvation-plagued, violent, corrupt and over-populated to the point where quality of life issues begin and end with millions of kids being dead before they are five years old.

Two kids who could end up in the category of dead will instead grow up in a rarefied atmosphere with an obnoxious mother who has more money than the GNP of some African countries.

This does in no way indicate that every poor orphan in the world will suffer the same fate as David and Mercy, nor does it mean that Save the Children execs are going to be put out of a job any time soon.

It may mean that the world will suffer the public personality flaws of two more publicity-hungry spoiled brats in a few years, but Paris Hilton … not an adoptee, by the way … will have faded into a Gabor sister by then and the rags will be needing new fodder.

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Writing the other day as I did on medical research that sounds hopeful, I was primed for sciency topics, so this post on my friend Grant’s blog … the ever-interesting and always entertaining Guild of Scientific Troubadours, where science meets music, shakes hands and dances … caught my eye and held it long enough to create no little despair.

Referring to an article from Science Daily titled American Adults Flunk Basic Science, Grant is apparently as bemused as I am over the results of a survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences that found that:

* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.

* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.

* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.*

* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Also worrying is the discovery that “40% of U.S. adults say they are ‘not at all knowledgeable’ about sustainability.”

Well, of course they’re not, thinking that “The Flintstones” is a documentary series and clueless about what makes a year a year and all.

Feel free to test your science savvy here … and while you’re on the site you can launch the penguin cam and learn something about monogamy … and a species that needs ours to really grasp the concept of sustainability.

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