Sunday, May 28, 2006

THE INCORRECTNESS OF WINNING BIG

High school football coaches in Connecticut will have to be good sports this fall - or risk a suspension. The football committee of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports, is adopting a "score management" policy that will suspend coaches whose teams win by more than 50 points.

A rout is considered an unsportsmanlike infraction and the coach of the offending team will be disqualified from coaching the next game, said Tony Mosa, assistant executive director of the Cheshire-based conference. "We were concerned with any coach running up the game. There's no need for it," Mosa said Wednesday. "This is something that we really have been discussing for the last couple of years. There were a number of games that were played where the difference of scores were 60 points or more. It's not focused on any one particular person."

Some have dubbed it the "Jack Cochran rule," after the New London High's football coach, who logged four wins of more than 50 points last year. In New London's 60-0 rout of Tourtelotte/Ellis Tech, Cochran enraged the Tourtelotte bench by calling a timeout just before halftime. Tourtelotte's coach was arrested on breach of peace charges after police say he struck a security guard and an assistant New London coach.

Leo Facchini, New London's athletic director, called it unfair to single out his coach. Facchini said he and Cochran tried to pull in the reins during New London's 90-0 drubbing of Griswold last season by trying to get both sides and the timekeeper to agree to run a continuous clock. Some states, including Iowa, continuously run the game clock in the second half if a team has a 35-point lead. The Connecticut committee rejected a similar proposal because members thought it would unfairly cut into backups' playing time.

Source

If a school's team stinks, maybe they shouldn't field a team! How is it the other side's fault if they do? A big loss is probably a lesson they need. And is it fair to the stronger team that they are given so little of a challenge? It is coaches fielding hopelessly weak teams who should be treated with contempt and penalized for wasting everybody's time



SHOCKING RACISM IN MISSOURI

The police allow blacks to get away with heaps because of the colour of their skin. Since blacks commit crime at roughly 9 times the white rate, the police should be stopping blacks roughly 900% more than they stop whites. In fact, it is only 42% more

The disparity gap between the number of white and black drivers who were stopped by Missouri police last year grew wider, according to a report that Attorney General Jay Nixon released today. The report, delivered to the General Assembly and Gov. Matt Blunt, tracks the demographics of more than 1.5 million police vehicle stops made by 624 agencies across the state in 2005. It shows that African-American drivers were stopped at a rate 42 percent higher than expected based solely on their proportion of the driving-age population. That number increased from 34 percent in 2004.

When compared with whites, African-American drivers were 46 percent more likely to be stopped. The 2004 report showed that African Americans were 38 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers, based solely on their proportion of the driving-age population. "The information in this report serves as an important basis for dialogue between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve," Nixon said in a release.

In the St. Louis area, several of the largest departments saw the disparity gap shrink between black and white drivers stopped. The Jefferson County Sheriff, St. Charles County Sheriff and St. Louis County Police departments were among them. St. Louis city police saw nearly no change in its statistics. Nixon noted that the overall number of vehicle stops recorded increased by 10 percent, to more than 1.5 million stops from 1.37 million from 2004. A change in the law that took effect in August 2004 requires law enforcement to report on a wider variety of stops, including investigative stops.

The 2005 report also showed that an African-American driver who was stopped was 78 percent more likely to be searched than a white driver. Statewide, Hispanic drivers were stopped at a rate about three percent less likely than their proportion of the population. Those Hispanic drivers who were stopped, however, were almost twice as likely to be searched as white drivers who were stopped.

Racial profiling can neither be proved or disproved by statistics alone, Nixon said in a statement. The statistics do not prove that police decide to stop a driver based solely on his or her race. "Missouri law enforcement should continue their constructive efforts to eliminate any perceptions that traffic stops are being made solely on the basis of race, rather than for legitimate reasons," Nixon said. State law requires every Missouri police agency to adopt a written policy regarding racial profiling, provide annual training to officers and promote the use of effective, non-combative methods for carrying out their duties in a racially and culturally diverse environment.

More here



BRITISH GOVERNMENT DISCRIMINATION AGAINST FAT KIDS

Apparently, prejudice against fatties is OK. There is no public health basis for it -- as moderately overweight people live slightly longer

In the past, fat kids only had to worry about the playground bully. Now the politicians, the doctors and their teachers are all out to get them - and their parents. In the next few weeks children aged four and ten are all going to be lined up at school for measurements of height and weight (1). This is necessary because the government, having already set a target for reducing childhood obesity, has realised that nobody knows how many children are overweight. The plan is to repeat these measurements in 12 months' time and then to write to the parents of obese children to warn that they risk long-term health damage unless they lose weight.

Even the government's own health advisers have warned that the mass weigh-in will inevitably stigmatise overweight children and will provoke widespread anxiety and distress among both children and parents. Public health doctors are well aware that it is illegitimate to diagnose individual health risks on the basis of population statistics and that there is no scientific justification for this approach. But, having fostered the obesity panic by promoting scares about fast food and snacks, they are ill-equipped to resist the zealots now driving government policy.

The politicians are now gripped by the dogma that exhorting people to eat less and exercise more will banish obesity. One of the few things that emerges clearly from half a century of research is that this approach simply does not work. While the scale of the problem of childhood obesity remains controversial - and both its causes and consequences are uncertain - it is widely recognised that no form of intervention has been found to be effective.

The crusade against childhood obesity has become dangerously irrational. Like most of the government's most cherished initiatives, it is exempted from the requirements of evidence-based policy. It is driven by the most desperate imperative of New Labour: the need to connect, with at least that section of the electorate that has responded so impressively to the charms of the celebrity TV chef Jamie Oliver. In the childhood obesity panic, the insecurities of the nation's elite are projected into our primary schools, reflecting, as American academic Paul Campos observes, a culture that is `ultimately all about fear, self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction'.

Once again this week, the tired metaphors of `epidemic' and `time-bomb' have been mobilised to raise the emotional temperature. Obesity is presented as a modern plague, as a source of contagion and risk, which therefore justifies the sort of authoritarian measures considered necessary to protect society from extreme danger. These metaphors provide new forms of expression for deep-rooted prejudices against ordinary people, particularly against poorer people, who are more likely, in most Western societies, to be overweight. As the Australian educationalists Michael Gard and Jan Wright observe, `the idea of the"obesity epidemic" appears to lock commentators into a view of people as childlike in their stupidity, short-sightedness and utter self-centredness'. To be overweight is to be regarded as being `out of control, undisciplined, deviant, dangerously unhealthy'.

The label of obesity legitimises the public monitoring of behaviour and provides a licence for ridicule and harassment. For politicians and pundits, public health advocacy groups and popular television programmes, parents are a particular focus of condescension and contempt. According to Tam Fry of the Child Growth Foundation, `parents are very ignorant about what a healthy weight is'. In truth, within wide limits, there is no such thing as a healthy (or an unhealthy) weight - a simple fact parents know much better than these self-appointed experts.

The shift in focus of the obesity panic towards children is a particularly invidious development. A younger generation is now being indoctrinated with a deeply misanthropic and neurotic attitude towards the joys of life, such as eating, drinking and playing. As Tom MacMillan of the Food Ethics Council observes, health `neither is nor ought to be [the] main criterion in rational lifestyle choices'.

Eating and drinking are modes of sensual enjoyment and social engagement, ways of expressing individual and group identity, which are impoverished by the narrow preoccupations of the health fetishists. But instead of learning the pleasures of eating and sharing a wide variety foods, children are being coerced into consuming `five-a-day' fruit and veg, even though an authoritative study confirms that this yields no significant reduction in the development of chronic disease. Playing sport for pleasure is now being reduced to taking exercise for health, despite the fact that `no link between school physical education and either the long-term health, body weight or physical activity of children has ever been established'. The crusade against child obesity is likely to produce, not healthy outcomes, but miserable children and anxious parents and epidemics of dieting and eating disorders.

Source



Australia: 'Gay-friendly' child care slammed

Little kids being harassed over sexuality -- out of the public purse

A council-run childcare centre is teaching toddlers that gay, lesbian and "transgender" parents are normal in a bid to "challenge the perception" of young children about sexuality. The Tillman Park Children's Centre in Tempe - which receives council and government funding - has devised the gay-friendly curriculum for children aged six weeks to six years. Marrickville Mayor Sam Byrne said the centre had "successfully adopted several strategies to encompass lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sex issues". These included ensuring images were reflective of "diverse families" and "actively affirming the identity of lesbian and gay families". He said the centre challenged "children's perception of what is 'normal' gender and sexual identity".

The centre uses controversial Learn to Include books, which feature Jed and his Dads and The Rainbow Cubby House. Mr Byrne applauded staff and families at the centre for "broadening the minds of our future generation". "At Marrickville we believe in offering children and families an inclusive program based on social justice," he told The Saturday Daily Telegraph. "These are reflected through an open environment where alternative perspectives, values, beliefs, lifestyles and people's identities are respected and accepted."

The Daily Telegraph last year revealed the books - produced by a non-profit program run by the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service of NSW - were funded by the Attorney-Generals Department, which provided $33,000 over two years. The Saturday Daily Telegraph can reveal the Learn to Include books are also being used in private childcare centres across the state. Child Care New South Wales president Lyn Connolly said there was no book list for centres to draw from, but in order for centres to meet "high quality" they relied on a variety of resources, including the Learn to Include books.

Marika Kontellis, whose three-year-old daughter Jasmin attends the centre, said although she was in a heterosexual relationship she had no issue with the material being taught. She said she could understand how some families might find the topics confronting or uncomfortable "but for us it is important to know that families come in different shapes and sizes and that's okay and that's good". "Every day the kids are being told that it is okay that you are black, it is okay that you are gay, it's okay that families don't all look the same," Ms Kontellis said. [I guess all families are the same then?]

National Party Leader Andrew Stoner - who last year forced former premier Bob Carr to investigate the use of the books in public schools - said yesterday he was opposed to children being "brainwashed by a political correct agenda". "It's just crazy. Children that young have no concept of these issues of sexuality," he said. "Whether it is heterosexual sex or homosexual sex, it is the choice for parents to talk about it with their children - not for an institution to start some political correct campaign."

Psychologist Lorraine Corne said yesterday it is essential the concept of gay and lesbians was introduced to young children in a proper way. "You would introduce the concept like you would introduce the concept of sex," she said. "It would be done at a level that they understand. It could be as simple as some people have a father and a mother and some people have two mothers and some have two fathers. "It would have to be put in a very simplistic way otherwise it is beyond their comprehension and it would go above their heads," Ms Corne said.

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