This one is even worse. Again: warning. The cough goes on and on and on and on and she cannot get her breath.

I’ve done that gasp a few times as an adult, just from a regular cough with a cold – that dragging thing where you desperately try to haul in the air by force, and you make that sound. It’s awful. A tiny child doing it all day every day for months…deargod.

Updating to add: she’s fine now. She’d had all her shots, but got it anyway – but probably a milder dose. (That’s a milder dose? Oy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIV460AQUWk… Read the rest

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Warning: hard to take.

Nevertheless should be widely shown so that people will know THEY NEED TO GET THEIR CHILDREN  VACCINATED.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3oZrMGDMMw… Read the rest

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Wait wait, before you buy tickets for Braco in New York, I missed something I should have warned you about.

Please note for ALL GAZING EVENTS: Must be 18 years of age or over to attend and pregnant women are not allowed to attend after their third month of pregnancy due to the intensity of the experience for some. People with illnesses are advised to follow the recommendation of their doctor before and after attending a gazing session.

It is recommended to bring a photo of your child or a person needing help who cannot attend, as this method has been proven to be equally effective and the most balanced way for some to receive help who cannot attend.

Pregnant … Read the rest

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Thanks to Josh, who was invited to partake and will not be taking up the invitation, I have learned about a person called Braco, who gazes. Braco’s gaze is said to do magical things.

Braco’s gaze touches his visitors with peace, silence and hope. Amazing transformations happen, and many find new power, vitality and a zest for life resulting from their experience. Braco does not teach, talk or diagnose to give treatments—he simply gazes in silence and offers his gift to visitors—independent from religion, ideology, race, color and culture.

Cool gig, don’t you think? He does nothing – he teaches not, neither does he talk, and he doesn’t diagnose either. I conclude he also doesn’t dance, or turn somersaults, … Read the rest

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RNS reports via the Washington Post -

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Monday (June 2) warned married couples against substituting cats and dogs for children — a move that he said leads to the “bitterness of loneliness” in old age.

Fraaaaaaaaaaaaaanciiiiiiiiiiiis – aren’t you forgetting something? You’re substituting a bunch of celibate priests for children, so who are you to tell other people to have children instead of dogs?!

Also, it’s none of your business. It wouldn’t be any of your business even if you had 18 children, which for all I know you do, given the funny ways of your funny church. It’s none of your business; your church doesn’t get to tell us what to do any … Read the rest

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You know who developed the whooping cough vaccine? No neither did I until I looked it up. Pearl Kendrick.

In 1893, when Pearl Kendrick was a three-year-old growing up in Wheaton, Illinois, she was struck with a case of whooping cough – known as pertussis to scientists, named after the bacteria (Bordetella pertussis) that causes it. Four and one-half decades later she would have her revenge, developing the first effective vaccine to combat the ravenous disease.

Measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio… These are all dreadful diseases, but none claimed as many young lives in the United States in the 1920s as whooping cough.

…

At its height, whooping cough claimed over 6,000 lives each year in the United

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California is being hit with a massive epidemic of whooping cough. Of whooping cough – one of those diseases for which there’s been an effective vaccine for more than 70 years.

California is being hit hard with a whooping cough epidemic, according to the state’s public health department, with 800 cases reported in the past two weeks alone.

The agency says that there were 3,458 whooping cough cases reported between January 1 and June 10, well ahead of the number of cases reported for all of 2013.

This is a problem of “epidemic proportions,” the department said. And the number of actual cases may be even higher, because past studies have shown that for every case of whooping cough

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Rachel Holmes in the Guardian names 10 feminist classics. In her introduction to the list she makes the important point that feminism is far from new or exclusively modern.

Gender-based inequality remains the greatest global injustice and the struggle against it spans millennia and continents. These books make us more impatient for change, but they may also be turned to in dark hours when it feels change might never come. Feminism is no impulse or outcome of modernity. As these books show, it has been around for centuries. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel, or number what “wave” we are now riding; we need to harness an atomic rocket to it.

Yes to that.

The list itself is … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Robert Smythson on Meeting the needs.

“At the end of the day we have a school that has 90 to 95% Muslim children, we meet their needs”.

This statement is really the key to the whole issue. I’ve lurked here for a fair old time, but I hope I might be able to contribute something, having taught workshops at one of the “Trojan horse” schools in Birmingham.

I found that in a nominally secular school where the majority of pupils are Muslim, the efforts made to “meet their needs” created a culture which accepts these “needs” as normal and this had conspicuous effects on the relationship between male and female pupils. When we “meet the … Read the rest

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Bess’s house. You can see her name at the top.

You have to click on it to get the real effect of course.

Credit GoogleEarth… Read the rest

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Al-Shabab is busy making Somalia a better place by stuffing women into heavy black bags in a hot climate.

Somalia’s al-Shabab militants have rounded up around 100 women and ordered them to comply with a strict Islamic dress code or risk being whipped.

The women were arrested in Buale, about 300km (185 miles) south-west of the capital, Mogadishu.

“Arrested” is a funny word for it. The women didn’t do anything wrong, and Al-Shabab are criminals. Al-Shabab didn’t arrest the women, it unlawfully grabbed them.

The women were arrested in the market, taken away and warned before being released.

Because it was their first offence, they were not punished but they could be whipped in public if caught again.

It wasn’t … Read the rest

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An imaginary walk, via GoogleEarth.

… Read the rest

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The Guardian reports on two schools in Bradford “under suspicion for practices similar to those seen in Birmingham during the Trojan horse investigation.”

The BBC reported that the previous headteacher of Carlton Bolling college, a state secondary resigned in 2012 after disagreements with the school’s governors, while minutes of governors’ meetings suggest that efforts were made to segregate boys and girls in sex and relationship education classes and in after-school activities.

The head, Chris Robinson, resigned because she felt her integrity and leadership were being questioned by governors, according to documents seen by the BBC.

Faisal Khan, the chair of governors at Carlton Bolling, denied the allegations and said the governors’ aim was to improve academic standards and meet the

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Richard Ackland explains about canon law in the Sydney Morning Herald. Why is the story always the same, always a matter of “protection of clergy against whom allegations of paedophilia have been made and giving victims the most incredible run-around”?

Why has the church taken that course of action instead of expelling these creepy “groomers and touchers” and sending them off to the police with a file note listing all the complaints against them?

It is puzzling, until you read Kieran Tapsell’s just published book, Potiphar’s Wife.

Tapsell is a retired Sydney lawyer who also studied for the priesthood, with canon law as his special interest – and it is here that he locates the problem.

You have to go

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Wow. Jane Hamsher’s comments on that awful “The New Republic publishes a hit piece on Chris Hedges” post are so flippant and irresponsible they need a post of their own. Ethics, people! Journalistic ethics! This isn’t rocket surgery (to plagiarize a phrase I saw a few days ago and don’t remember the source of). Writers and journalists should tell the truth, and they shouldn’t put their names on other people’s work except in the standard way with proper attribution.

Hamsher comments on a suggestion of litigation.

Hedges is a public figure, and they’re pretty careful about what they say so I doubt a suit would get very far. But it’s a piece that they should be ashamed to have published.

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Another refugee from the 9th century is running for office.

Scott Esk is running for House District 91 state representative.

On his website, he says he is a conservative who wants to apply biblical principles to Oklahoma law.

But some are saying his views are extreme.

But? What do you mean but? Anybody who wants to apply biblical principles to any kind of law is extreme by definition.

Morris said, “This guy posted on Facebook that homosexuals should be stoned to death. My first response was you’re nuts, nobody would be stupid enough to do that.”

Morris says he found those postings from last summer on Facebook.

At the time, Esk had commented on a story about the pope

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Jacques Rousseau pointed out a jaw-dropping item from South Africa.

Traditional Venda chiefs have given SABC acting chief operations officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng a wife, a cow, and a calf.

That should be a woman, a cow, and a calf. Traditional Venda chiefs gave some guy a woman along with a cow and a calf.

The Sowetan reported on Friday that women were lined up in Thohoyandou, Limpopo, on Wednesday for Motsoeneng to choose one. He and other SABC executives were in the area for a meeting with Mudzi wa Vhurereli ha Vhavenda, a lobby group of traditional leaders and healers.

“The girls were around 10 and they paraded for him to choose. He chose the one he liked,” Mudzi

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Speaking of gender segregation…have an incident in New York from last fall.

Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota did not object Wednesday when three women in his group — a Daily News reporter, a campaign aide and a member of his NYPD security detail — were asked to leave a Brooklyn synagogue during a campaign stop.

The Republican mayoral hopeful entered the ultra Orthodox Shomer Shabbos synagogue, in Borough Park, trailed by a gaggle of aides, reporters and security officers, as part of a walking tour of the neighborhood.

A synagogue official hurried over to the three women in the group — a Daily News reporter, a Lhota campaign aide, and a member of his security team — and asked

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