h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"The girl and the sprog, ( <oh dear &gt Hass"

Dream on toxx, and that's nothing to do with societies whims.
unless you're talking on a purely biological level and forget the rest.

The rest Hass! That's the system. The system needs changing, not the girl and the sprog. So what else are you saying it's to do with then?

Ahhh....the sweet smell of shark poon!

Wurf. Why don't you start your own cold-blooded, olfactory thread. I don't see that your last post adds much to this one!

We DO use 100% of our brain. Just not to it's full capacity. The brain has no appendix- no purposeless tissue. It's one of pop psychology's most widespread falsehoods that we only use 10% of our brains. Interestingly enough, the brain can learn to modify certain neural connections, bypassing damaged nerves, so u can take a bullet in the brain just stay away from the reticular formation!
...i can't wait to try it!...holiday fun for the whole family!

Just re read the ayaat that says about having awitness that if there is not two males then it is ok to do it with a man and two women in Arabic.
Right firstly it is only referring to buisness contracts (Where money is involved) and the actual word translate more accuratly as helper. So it means that if she over looks some thing then the other woman can we ind her because it is considered that men are more used to making contracts etc. So it is actually making sure a woman is not discremenated because of lack of undersranding. Plus it also stops the man intimidating the woman like he could do if she was alone.

Adib

What? You mean like "Carcharhinidae, Fact Or Fiction?"...for me it will always be about the myth...(pensive oblivion)...

Suggested child raising system. Toxx.

Babies born to a male /female couple with a commitment to each other.
and the idea of a child ( remove glamour of job !) not earlt teens, this is too young to make any kind of commitment to anything.

Children are reared by grandparents ( whose own children have been reared by their parents.)
The two young couple carry on working/careers/education. which is also what the now grandparents did. which makes then financially viable, experienced in the ways of the world and happy to pass on the knowledge they have accumalated to the young generation.
Meanwhile the parents of the new generation get to enjoy extended family life and look forward to the time they can spend life with their grandchildren and persue none work based pleasures.
The current system means that just when you've learnt how to use child skills you don't need then anymore !
Plus I think parenthood is a full time job for one member of the marriage and the world we live in is currently designed for no 'parenting' outside the creche, because the life styles we chase mean two wages usually.
i've shortened this idea so no doubt i've missed something

Well, I can't see that your proposed question is particularly contentious, but the carcharhinidae must be of interest to some researchers here.

Seems rather happily positive to me, Hass. People are just too conservative. I wouldn't say early teens. Probably I should really have said early twenties, but I wanted to stir a bit. The point is, as you clearly appreciate, that it's the system that tends to create the problems, not the parents and kids. I daresay the kids wouldn't become such little horrors if they were brought up by grandparents to a greater extent. Interesting to see if there's any research data on that.

Not if they've been molested by one, then i'm rather sure that person would have great reason to believe in a higher power.

Oh. I see. At a time where girls are just developing, mentally and physically, they should be dealing with sex. And boys aren't going to take advantage of 14 year-old girls, as if... No toxx, it's healthier /physically/ - not mentally. Teenage girls are going through enough without having to be used by unscrupulous boys and compelled to look after a child. A 16 year-old? Are you seriously suggesting that a child is going to be adequately supported by a girl of that age? And it's hardly likely the boy is going to stand by her, that flies in the face of all the evidence.

Whatever the physical advantages are bestowed through early pregnancies, can they really be considered above the child's right - yes, RIGHT - to be brought up in a family that is adequately equipped to look after hir?

Sorry, I really can't see it!

If I sound a little snappy/tense, I've been having a hard time in RL. I apologise if I seem to be letting it get the better of me.

- Jordan

Oops, in my blindness I missed a page of stuff. Doh. FYI, I was partly brought up by my grandparents.

- Jordan

"Probably I should really have said early twenties, but I wanted to stir a bit."

You certainly managed that! I should call you a troll, but I haven't got the violition.

"I daresay the kids wouldn't become such little horrors if they were brought up by grandparents to a greater extent."

No idea, I only have myself to look at. I do recall that people often remarked on how polite and well-spoken I was - the latter is because of my grandmother for the most part (she use to give me a word whenever I went to her house, and we did crosswords and quizzes/puzzles together, starting roughly when I was six) and the former is because of both her and my mother.

- Jordan

I don't think an element of trolling goes amiss. Complacency and mutual congratulations too easily set in on some of these threads. My style is to be extreme and then back off a bit if I'm impressed by the arguments against.

My main point is that society has distorted a biologically happy situation. It used to be worse, when pregnant single girls were thrown out of the parental home. You can insist that the CSA ensure that the father provide financial support, at least. Schools should have free creches and contraception services. This picking on teenagers is a heap of garbage. Why shouldn't they have a choice?

A teacher who lives round the corner from me must have had her first when she was about 15. Number two daughter has done the same. They seem to do OK. The teacher is still working, and shacked up with yet another boyfriend. She's much more intelligent and interesting than most of the neighbours. Kinda attractive too in a somewhat matronly way.

That doesn't seem very fair toxx. i believe Wurf was responding to Jordan and my own ramblings on Shark porn. you shpould smack our wrists too

I stand chastised, Hass. I just waffle on in my own moronic way; oblivious to what's really going on around me. Gets me into heaps of trouble (I'm before his honour in the Crown Court in March!). Ah well, free accommodation from her majesty's grace and favour dungeons might not be so bad. Oh what a naughty boy I am!

Stirring us up, I see? Good show! I shall ignore this microscopic breach of the House Rules. (Just as I ignore far bigger ones, come to think of it!)

And do you think that the happy ones are in the majority? Come on, toxx, the teacher who lives around the corner is hardly a representative sample! My mother is quite happy with me, and wouldn't give me up for the world. However, our financial situation was dire because of her early pregnancy. We're happy, but nowhere near as well off as we could be.

Is it right that a teenage girl should (a) have to look after a child whilst studying for her future, or (b) expect her parents to give up their lives once more to look after her child? Should we have to chase up the boy and make him pay?

I know that the divorce rate is through the roof. Perhaps this says a lot about the breakdown of ingrained social attitudes. Perhaps this says a lot about the breakdown of maturity and willpower. There's no way of telling, so I won't speculate too much. However, a child shouldn't have to come into the world to be looked after by someone who is entering, academically, socially and physically, a time of her life which precipitates enormous changes - all these factors ought to be looked after and minimised. A child deserves a stable, loving family, not a girl who was worrying only a few weeks before conception about finding herself a good boyfriend. It's downright cruel to suggest that girls should cut their lives short for a child (and many do, no matter how many turn out 'all right'), and it's unthinkable that anyone could /choose/ to put the future of a child into such a person's hands.

The first few years of a child's life are some of the most important to the child's long-term development, and if you muck them up there's no going back. That's why they /should/ wait. A child needs to be provided for financially and temporally, and should expect to live out these early years in a stable loving environment. It's foolish to expect the majority of teenagers under 18 to provide this, and downright idiotic to imagine that most 14 year-olds are equipped to do so.

Evidence? Look at the study by Isobel Allen and Shirley Bourke-Dowling - 'Teenage Mothers: Decisions and Outcomes'. Quoth professor Allen: -

‘Teenage mothers should not be stigmatised and treated as a universal problem. They are not all lone mothers living on benefits in council housing. But our research shows that this does happen to a substantial number of them and there is certainly a need for better education in sex and personal relationships to help dispel romantic views of life as a teenage mother. Young men need to share the responsibility for teenage pregnancy and motherhood.’

For more details, see: -

http://www.psi.org.uk/press/Tm.htm
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/social/population-and-household-change/10_allen.html

Here, you'll find a summary of the key findings, which were pretty dire. And, unfortunately, education doesn't seem to have any effect on cutting them: -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2043093.stm

I've always found the notion that sex education would help people behave more responsibly rather counter-intuitive - strange why anyone would think otherwise given the predilection of most youth to rebel against perceived authority. But that's just speculation. Speaking of which, your statement about how much 'healthier' teenage pregnancies are doesn't necessarily go without saying - it seems like one of those potted statements that people state because it looks so obvious, and even I was happy to yeild to your potentially superior knowledge. However, it might just be another of those conclusions propounded by the Walden Two camp to suit a hypothesis - see the evidence presented here: -

http://www.healthecommunities.org/summaryhealth.asp

Apparently, teenage pregnancies are healthier for neither the mother nor the sprog, if we accept that perhaps maths has any value. Or do you choose to argue that five is less than three? (A subtle dig at our Discrete Maths lecturer, Alexandre Tiskin - you can find out about his fame from this site: -

http://www.geocities.com/istiskinevil/

It's not the only one, either...)

And finally, on the maths front: another thing I remember was that, if we made a false assumption, we could prove anything. Whatever the contradiction, whatever the statement you wanted to prove, you could prove it. The very fact that nothing in mathematical logic is both true and false is a very definite indicator that it is not arbitrarily formulated; as a matter of fact, whole fields of mathematics (such as set theory) have been redeveloped for this very reason. Thus, the number of assumptions that can validly be made is limited by truth and consistancy. For now, I choose to believe that if I eat two sweets and another two sweets, it makes four sweets. You can digress if you want to, but the mathematics of infinity are quite well defined. I could even explain some of it if you choose to question it - though if you know better than me and can point to particular examples of poor reasoning, I will concede.

- Jordan

'He stuck in a thumb, and pulled out a plum...'

Yes, he was talking about our shark-porn fantasies.

(I confess, Rachmaninoff's music arouses more in me than humans do - I'm sure that the heights of passion that I reach when listening to the Paganini Variations followed by his Third Piano Concerto can't be entirely wholesome... Not to devalue chocolate, of course. )

- Jordan

'...education doesn't seem to have any effect on cutting them...'

I am, of course, referring to teenage pregnancies. Pedants.

- Jordan