Casey Anthony already having followers

Undated photo of Zinah Jennings, copied from AP's report (original source: Richard County Jail).

Let me first copy an Associated Press report from today:

"SC police: Mother won't tell them where son is

by Meg Kinnard
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — It's unknown how long investigators would have gone without any information on a missing 18-month-old South Carolina boy if his mother hadn't crashed her car Christmas Eve.
Twenty-two-year-old Zinah Jennings and her son, Amir, were reported missing by the boy's grandmother, who hadn't seen either of them since Thanksgiving.
The mother didn't turn up until police responding to the single-vehicle accident learned she was listed as a missing person.
She's now in jail, charged with lying to authorities about where the boy is, prompting a search by local, state and federal authorities spanning the Carolinas, Georgia and beyond.
Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott says Jennings immediately began giving conflicting statements about where the boy was."

This disappearance of a toddler, unreported by the single mother, finally reported by the grandmother, after which the mother started endless lying, immediately brings to mind an earlier similar case - of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony. After Caylee's skeletal remains were found in a swamp, jurors let themselves be persuaded by defence that her mother Casey Anthony was not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse.

At the Frontpage Magazine's symposium on Casey Anthony verdict last year, blogger Rob Taylor was furious: "The idea of “solid proof” is a myth. A child is dead and her mother avoided reporting her disappearance, then tried to frame someone else. Before juries were populated with armchair forensics experts this would have been an open and shut case... The disregard many people have for the victim, for Justice in the philosophical sense and for the truth is what troubles me here. The legal system worked – Anthony had a fair trial in front of a jury of her peers. That doesn’t mean Justice has been served. Caylee Anthony was thrown out like garbage, found with duct tape on her remains. We all know why people duct tape the mouths of children shut. We know why some drugged out party girl doesn’t report her child missing... The connection between who we give our sympathy to and cultural decline is clear. You can pretend that... there’s some reasonable explanation for not reporting your child missing or even that you truly believe that it’s necessary to let guilty people go free to ensure that innocent people aren’t imprisoned. What you cannot pretend is that there aren’t consequences to your pretense, one of which is the corpse of a Caylee Anthony."

Exactly. Commenting the case in my Sept. 6, 2011 post Unreasonable doubt, I wrote, "Seeing Casey Anthony acquitted and commentators praising the verdict as a victory for the US justice system, other people may be tempted to emulate her." I fear that this is what has happened in South Carolina, and while I wish very much for little Amir to be found alive after all, I have little hope that his grandmother will ever hug him again. We'll see what will follow and whether Zinah Jennings will be let, like Casey Anthony, to step over her child and continue her life as a free woman.

ADHD quackery in scientific journal, again

I was not intending to blog on scientific themes these days, but sometimes duty calls. Carelessly browsing the Web, I suddenly found a link that switched all my alarms on. Briefly, it refers the reader to an article by Pelsser et al. titled Effects of a restricted elimination diet on the behaviour of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (INCA study): a randomised controlled trial and published in the February issue of the Lancet. I have no access to the full text, but the abstract tells us that from 100 children with ADHD aged 4-8, a randomly chosen half were left as controls and the other half were put for 5 weeks on a restricted elimination diet. There is no mention what this diet was, and the results are described in such a messy way that it is impossible to understand exactly what is claimed. Happily, the same Web site directs the reader also to a LA Times article by Jill Adams discussing the study. It informs us that the restricted diet consisted of "short list of ingredients that included water, rice, turkey, lamb, lettuce, carrots, pears and other hypoallergenic foods". "At the end of the study, 64% of the kids on the limited diet showed significant improvement on a variety of standard rating scales. Though the initial scores for all of the kids in this group put their ADHD symptoms in the moderate-to-severe range, after the diet intervention their symptoms were classified as either mild or nonclinical."

Three years ago, I wrote a post titled I am skeptical about food additives - hyperactivity link. It questioned another publication in the Lancet claiming that "artificial food colous and additives" were causing ADHD symptoms. If you are interested in the subject, you can read that old post, too. In the present post, I will not try to keep the same line of composed argumentation. I am furious and not going to hide it.

Are you worried about the quality of the food you consume? Are you anxious to obtain healthy food and to give it also to your family members? And if so, what are you thinking of yourself? Perhaps you think you are a responsible person and everybody should be like you. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the truth. You are victim of a disorder which turns your life into hell and endangers your physical health - and that of any child with the poor luck to be under your care. The obsession with healthy foods is a disorder called orthorexia by some psychiatrists. It is not an official diagnosis but is easily accommodated under the umbrellas of eating disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder. My observations show that many people with real or imagined health problems, and particularly parents of chronically ill and disabled children, develop orthorexia. They swear that their or their child's condition has been caused by unhealthy eating and is currently ameliorated by some particular "healthy" diet. Here, "healthy" diet typically means one that, if given to convicted felons, will lead to prison riots and charges with inhumane treatment. The list of publications of the first author of the study in question - Dr. Pelsser, is not too impressive but clearly shows that she has orthorexic obsession about ADHD.

People of science have a saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Any claims for successful treatment of a socially important condition are extraordinary, and so are any claims based on an insane working hypothesis. If you ask me what hypothesis I call insane, I'll answer that I cannot give a definition but the hypothesis of foods causing abnormal behaviour is a brilliant example.

I would ask again, as I did in my old post, why wasn't the study done first on animal models? And if someone thinks animal models of ADHD are not satisfactory (i.e. fail to produce the crazy results wanted and expected by the researcher), why wasn't the experiment done first on adult volunteers with ADHD? Maybe because no adult, except some patients with much more severe diagnoses than ADHD, would agree to participate in such a study; but parents eager to streamline their disabled or just different children easily fall into the trap of wanting the child "either cured or dead". In the LA Times article, Dr. Pelsser says, "The children said they felt so different, as if some mad thing in their head wasn't there anymore". Eh well, if your 5-yr-old experimental subject talks of "some mad thing in his head", you should bury your own head in your hands, then abort the study and pray that your institution's ethical committee never hears of this. Has the whole world gone crazy?

The Lancet is a top scientific journal with an impact factor of 30 (for lay people - this is sky high). Such a journal, especially if specialized in clinical medicine, is expected to have a take-no-prisoners peer review that would not let any crap sneak in. However, this journal 13 years ago published the disastrous (now retracted) study linking the MMR vaccine to autism, it published the mentioned article linking food additives to ADHD 4 years ago, and has now published another nonsense about ADHD. When will the respectable Lancet raise its bar for quacks and stop shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters?

Gypsy adoption

I have been planning for a long time to write a post about adoption of abandoned Bulgarian Gypsy children by non-Gypsy Bulgarians and foreigners. (I prefer to call them Gypsy, not the politically correct Roma.) Gypsies in Bulgaria, as in other European countries, have always occupied the low end of the socio-economic ladder. They still have a high birth rate, many of the babies are unplanned and some of them are left in orphanages. And because the abandoned "white" non-disabled babies are fewer than the families seeking to adopt a child, the overwhelming majority of non-disabled children in Bulgarian orphanages are of Gypsy origin.
You can ask why the prospective "white" adoptive parents don't take these children as well. Essentially, the answer can be summarized by a confession that we white Bulgarians are damn racists. The former Communist government in the 1980s tried to integrate (as we would call it today) the Gypsies by denying their existence as an ethnic and cultural minority. The success of this pretence was zero, and from that time is the saddest story about racism I have ever heard. A childless couple from my city adopted a baby, allegedly without knowing that he was of Gypsy origin. In the beginning, everything was wonderful. The local diagnostic and medical center had a special wall to show photos of children best cared for, and the adopted boy had his image put on this parents' wall of fame. However, as he grew, his Gypsy appearance became apparent. For that reason, the adoptive parents decided they wanted him no more and left him back at the orphanage.
Traditionally, Bulgarian couples wishing to adopt tend to have unrealistically high requirements to the child being adopted. An employee at a child protection agency ironically described children wanted for adoption as "5-6 months old, healthy, beautiful, white, blonde, intelligent, having a university student as biological mother and, if possible, her professor as biological father".
Happily, things are changing and the same employee added that more and more white families not only take the chance to adopt a Gypsy child but later call to say how happy they are and offer their services to encourage other couples to adopt a Gypsy. Couples from other countries have less racial prejudice, but there is so much bureaucracy and obstacles to international adoption that too few children can benefit by it.
Recently, a family "indirectly known" to me adopted a Gypsy toddler. A friend was a bit worried and asked whether the child was predisposed to become a thief after growing up. I was happy to assure him that this has nothing to do with the biological ethnic origin. (I mentioned the case also in my Bulgarian blog.)
Another concern of prospective adoptive parents is that their child may never grow up to be close to their level of intelligence. This reason to worry is more legitimate. I do not believe that there are significant differences in IQ between different ethnic groups, but there are other possible factors affecting the intelligence of children available for adoption. These children may have had suboptimal prenatal development (a malnourished or even substance-abusing mother), they may have had a difficult birth, and they may be already damaged by their stay in an orphanage prior to the adoption. Anybody adopting any child, especially a child coming from a disadvantaged group such as the Gypsies, must prepare himself well for the possibility that he may never brag about the academic achievements of the child.
Of course, anybody deciding to become a parent must be ready for this possibility. People become parents for selfish reasons, for their own happiness, and always have an idealized image of the future child which must gradually be adjusted to reality. So, if a parent of a younger child tells me that his child, biological or adopted, has disappointed him, I could only say - welcome to the club!
However, there is a difference between birth and adoptive parents, and let's not trivialize it. Whatever our biological children bring to us, we still see "our blood" in them. In adoption, spirit triumphs over biology. And when a white person adopts a child, he needs a bigger heart if the child is Gypsy. He has to come to terms with the fact that his baby is so much unlike him. He has to face his own prejudice, conscious and subconscious. And if he lives in Bulgaria or another East-European country, he knows that he must also confront the racist society, stand up for his child and teach the child to stand up for himself. Therefore, I admire those white people who adopt abandoned Gypsy children. They and their children are trailblazers who, I hope, will in the coming years catalyze the integration of the entire Gypsy community.

Choice of profession

Generally, a person has to choose two important things in his life: a profession and a partner.
With the exception of traditional cultures where parents arrange marriages of their children, we choose our partners freely when we are already conscious adults. This doesn't mean that we are always wise and successful in this task. We actually seem to be even less wise and successful than the parents in traditional cultures. Very often we make serious mistakes and trap ourselves in short-lived or unhappy marriages. But at least the decision has been only ours.
Things are different with profession - at least in poor countries. The decision to acquire one or another profession has to be made in the teen years, if not earlier. At this tender age, it is heavily influenced by parents and other family members. And if the young person later wants to change his profession, it comes at a terribly high cost, or is not possible at all.
The written and unwritten laws of society are based on the working hypothesis that parents wish the best for their children. Unfortunately, too often this is not the case. And even when parents try their best, they are likely to make their child unhappy. They burden him with their own fulfilled and unfulfilled desires and ambitions, while neglecting or even fighting his wishes, gifts and inclinations. Just to give an example, here at the Medical University every year we have a legion of children of doctors, dentists and pharmacists, and a considerable part of these students lack the abilities needed for the chosen profession and/or the true wish to practice it. Their parents have pushed them into the medical profession, as commanders push their soldiers into battle.
Because this phenomenon remains in the private sphere of our life, the enormous damages inflicted by it are not very visible and the problem is not discussed in public. But it is real. Happily, economic progress brings spontaneous improvement. I mean, in a prosperous society young people are more empowered and independent and less likely to let their lives be ruined this way. And they have a second chance because they can earn the resources needed to change profession, even if it means new university study. So a mistake made early in life, either by themselves or by their parents, does not mean being directed into a one-way tunnel.
An improvement of the educational system would also help. I am against too early specialization which deprives the student from knowledges and skills in many area. Education must be broad and multi-disciplinary until the end of secondary school. And if some schools issue diplomas that are not accepted by universities, their graduates must be given the chance to obtain the needed certificate by some sort of exam.
Meanwhile, I wish to quote a man unknown to me but apparently a wise and good father. Talking to his teenage son about the choice of profession, he said, "This is very important for you and I do not wish to interfere with your decision. But please keep in mind that whatever you choose, you are expected to be doing it for 40 years to come, so it must be a thing you like doing."

More artwork by my son

(Non-parents are advised to skip this post.)

On Sept. 3, 2007 I posted some drawing by my elder son on his doodle. Let me now show some more, though fairly old - from last November when he was 4. These works were prompted by my husband, because my son doesn't like drawing very much (except on walls and furniture).

A bird.

A helicopter.

A steamship.

A house flanked by two trees, with sun and grass.

Concept for unity of life, kindergarten-level

At the beach, I collected a handful of seaweed and showed them to my son.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked.
"Fish," was the answer.

I am skeptical about food additives - hyperactivity link

I've just read in Yahoo News that EU is urged to ban food additives over child hyperactivity fears. Quoting: "main consumer watchdog called Thursday for an EU-wide ban on six food colourings which a scientific study has linked to hyperactivity in children... A study published in September in the British science review, The Lancet, found that a cocktail of artificial colours and the commonly-used preservative sodium benzoate are linked to hyperactivity in children." The study mentioned is apparently the one by McCann et al., 2007, though the publication date given in PubMed is November, not September.


I am nobody to judge the study, but still I would like to recomment utmost caution about its results and any actions based on them. (And if you are not happy about what I am writing here, please keep in mind that this is my blog and I can write whatever I want.)


It is so tempting to pick an ubiquitous environmental factor that can be avoided only at an incredibly high cost (if at all) and blame on it some public health problem. Or a presumed problem - because I suspect that with today's unnatural child raising methods and paradigms, much of what is inside the normal range of childhood behaviour is stigmatized as hyperactivity.


Children's hyperactivity is sometimes blamed on another ubiquitous environmental factor - television. Not so far ago, a team led by an anti-television crusader published a study showing that television viewing in toddlers was associated with attention deficit at age 7. A skeptic immediately commented that "the message resonates in a society seemingly obsessed with public health villains", critisized the authors' methods and, with a language unusually sharp for a scientific journal, concluded that "the statistics are being used, in the words of Andrew Lang, "... as a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination." " Later studies, e.g. this one, did not confirm the TV - attention deficit correlation. However, the jin had been let out of the bottle. The initial message reached the public while its disprovals, as usual, didn't. Just search the Google University and you'll find numerous pages warning you that you'll make your toddler ADHD if you let him in the same room with a TV. (Disclaimer: I am not saying that the best for a toddler is to let the TV babysit him.)


Returning to the main subject of this post, I ask myself - isn't it a bit suspicious that so many unrelated chemical substances in small doses are reported to have the same effect on behaviour?


Why didn't anybody try to conduct a study on animal models? At least, I cannot find such an article in PubMed. Animal studies are generally more standardized and hence more reliable than human ones. I know that in many countries it is easier to obtain a permit to experiment on humans than on animals, but still, why not get to the work seriously and do first the paperwork required and then the animal study itself?


Why was the study done only on children, after hyperactivity problems, when present, are thought to persist for life? Is it because adults are generally happy with their own flawed selves but demand perfection from their children, relentlessly drawing the little ones to some superhuman standards of intelligence and behaviour?


What are we going to do now? Consumers demand the culprit substances to be removed from food. While I don't like the presence in our food of so many chemical substances, often with unknown effects on human health, shall we now have to pay more for food protected from deterioration by methods more expensive than a preservative? Or we'll accept greenish food products and bacteria-caused food poisoning as a part of our lives?


Is it a minor issue to deprive kids of junk food? A person on the receiving end of this treatment testifies that it isn't. In conclusion: The sky won't fall on us if we postpone any action for several more years, so let's wait until independent research teams in other facilities confirm the study's findings, as the scientific method requires.


10 years ago, the same Lancet journal published an article (subsequently retracted by almost all of its authors) claiming that MMR vaccine caused regressive autism in children. Although subsequent studies disproved this work in entirety, the world still cannot recover from the enormous damage done by it. Why not learn from our past mistakes?


Update: At Quackwatch, there is a page titled Twenty-Five Ways to Spot Quacks and Vitamin Pushers, by S. Barrett and V. Herbert. Item No. 6 is: "They Claim That Diet Is a Major Factor in Behavior. Food quacks relate diet not only to disease but to behavior. Some claim that adverse reactions to additives and/or common foods cause hyperactivity in children and even criminal behavior in adolescents and adults. These claims are based on a combination of delusions, anecdotal evidence, and poorly designed research."


Update 2: Interverbal blogged about Feingold diet in 2007.

US blogger subpoenated for writing against quackery

On Feb. 1, I wrote that quacks want freedom of speech for themselves but deny it to opponents. Now, we have a fresh example of this phenomenon. Kathleen Seidel who blogs against the vaccines-cause-autism quackery reported on Apr. 3 that she was subpoenated by Clifford Shoemaker, a lawyer representing Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes in their $20,000,000 personal injury lawsuit against Bayer company. The Sykes think that vaccines have caused their son's autism and want big money from vaccine manufacturer Bayer as compensation. (The vaccines-cause-autism urban legend is discussed in my Jan. 14 post.)
I am surprised that the event described above happened in the USA. You expect such things in places described by the broad term "east of Belgrade", e.g. here in Bulgaria. In fact, the story reminded me of Bulgarian blogger Michel who was subpoenated and warned by police last summer because of his writings about the Strandja protests (see my July 19, 2007 post).
I guess, US legislature allows laywers to directly subpoenate people thought to have information useful for their clients' cases. However, Kathleen Seidel had no such information; in fact, she had more than once written against the Sykes' claims. So the only explanation is that Mr. Shoemaker abused his right to subpoenate in order to harass and intimidate Kathleen. In fact, the subpoena came shortly after Kathleen's post The Commerce in Causation, describing how Mr. Shoemaker uses the disproved vaccines-cause-autism theory to nicely fill his pockets via never-ending litigations. So it clearly looks like a revenge: you blog against me - I intrude into your life by a subpoena. Although not compatible to a lawsuit, a subpoena such as this one is, to say the least, unpleasant for those on the receiving end. Bulgarian blogger Michel reported the experience to be traumatizing.
One of the absurd aspects of the overall absurd subpoena is the demand that Kathleen should provide copies of "all her communications with... religious groups (Muslim or otherwise), or individuals with religious affiliations". Kathleen has written Serving the Guest, a cookbook with essays and anecdotes about the role of food in Sufism. I do not know whether she has actually converted to Islam, but even if she has, whose damn business is this? Has Mr. Shoemaker ever heard about freedom of religion?
It is important to defend rights and freedoms of everybody, including our opponents and even enemies. A Russian writer once said that freedom isn't like a blanket - take it from your neighbour and you'll have more of it. It is rather like air - take it from anybody and there will be less of it for everyone, including you. In this respect, I (like many others) was delighted and surprised to see that two distinguished quackery-promoting journalists have expressed their support for Kathleen Seidel.
Let me now say a few words about Mr. Shoemaker's clients (who are unlikely to be unaware about their lawyer's methods) and particularly about Rev. Lisa Sykes. For those who don't know what "Rev." (abbr. from reverend) means, it is a title of a clergy member (Bulg. prepodoben). Generally, religious people earn my respect by their attitude to disabled children. They think that there must be a reason for God to send children with disabilities to this world, so their parents must feel honoured and meet their extra responsibilities with dignity and compassion. This is e.g. the view of Jenny, mother of 3 children (2 with special needs) and, let me remind, seller of a wonderful home in the city of Anniston. However, Rev. Sykes (shown here with her son) has a different attitude. She apparently thinks than nothing can be "wrong" with her or her husband's genes, and that God couldn't be so cruel or stupid to dump a non-perfect child on such a wonderful person as her. So she blames vaccines for her son's autism, sues a pharma company to rob it of its honestly earned money and, by her own admission, does on her son a quack "treatment" which castrates him chemically. I ask, why is this pompous person, greedy gold digger and abusive mother still a pastor? What is the human resources policy (if any) of today's churches and what do they think they are doing by employing people such as Lisa Sykes, Jeremiah Wright and Rowan Williams, to name just a few? Thank God I am an atheist :-). Read also the excellent Janna's post on this subject.

Our genetic hardware

More than a century after Mendel's laws of inheritance were rediscovered, it is ridiculous to remind educated people that our traits are determined by - surprise, surprise - our genes.
However, it seems necessary because some folks just refuse to ackkowledge the limitations of our genetic hardware. So they overestimate the environmental factors or, to put it more bluntly, seek whom to blame when children don't turn out to be exactly what society and their loving parents want.
Yesterday, April 2, was World Autism Awareness day and CNN viewers received a median lethal dose of Jenny McCarthy (if you don't know who she is, then (1) you are lucky and (2) see my Jan. 14 post). However, CNN managed to present some good stuff as well. The quote below is from their story Autistic children linked to same sperm donor, by Randi Kaye. It is a must-read for the above mentioned Ms. McCarthy, for Sen. John McCain and all others who blame autism on vaccines, TV, the hole in the ozone layer or alien abductions. I learned about the story from Aspergian, who feels (to say the least) offended because children with his phenotype are not wanted.

"Dylan loves Italian music and draws pictures... He also happens to be autistic.
Gwenyth Jackaway, Dylan's mother, is a professor at New York's Fordham University. She's single but had always wanted to have a child. So she contacted California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm donor banks in the country.
Cryobank doesn't reveal the identities of donors but allows people to choose based on the traits they'd like their child to have. Jackaway decided on "Donor X" because he appeared philosophical and intelligent on paper...
What she couldn't know then is that her son would have autism. So she started to wonder whether Donor X might carry a gene that could have contributed.
The cause or causes of autism are not known and are hotly debated. Most experts believe that genetics are a component...
Researchers have found some genetic areas associated with autism, but it could take years before the gene or genes that cause autism or contribute to it will be determined.
Until then... there's no way to screen for those genes and prevent them from being passed to a child...
Jackaway says she went into a period of mourning when Dylan's autism was diagnosed at age 2.
"When you're handed a diagnosis of some sort of developmental disorder, you have to let go of the child you thought you were going to have," Jackaway said. "There's a sense of loss of the child, a grieving process. There's denial, there's rage, and then there's the tremendous sadness, and hopefully you get to a place of accepting."
Jackaway says she had to accept that "I don't have that child I thought I was going to have. But I have this child instead, who's right here in front of me."
Through a Web site called Donor Sibling Registry, she reached out to other women who used Donor X. She found six families who had used the same donor.
Two years ago, she visited Theresa Pergola in the New York area; she had given birth to triplets using sperm from Donor X. Just minutes into their meeting, Jackaway noticed Pergola's son, Joseph, 2, exhibiting some of the same behavior as her son...
"She told me that she saw characteristics of autism, and it was very upsetting to me at that time," Pergola said... She was afraid because she had an image of autism in her head and believed her son would be "in the corner and rocking and not talking."
She says Jackaway reassured her that wouldn't be the case.
One month later, a test confirmed what Pergola already knew: Joseph was autistic. The diagnosis brought her to tears, and now these two women whose sons share a father were immediately connected by another bond: autism...
In six families Jackaway contacted that had used Donor X, three of the children are autistic, and one is showing signs of autism.
But would Jackaway be happier today if there had been a way to screen Donor X for an autism gene?
"I've done a lot of thinking about this, and to say yes to that is to say that I wish Dylan isn't Dylan," Jackaway said. "I love my son and everything about him, and that means loving his autism also. Loving your children means loving everything about them. Our children don't have autism; they are autistic. It's part of who they are."...
Since the discovery of autism in some of the families that used Donor X, Cryobank had this to say about his samples:
"... per CCB policy, the donor's samples were removed from the general catalog. These vials may only be sold to a client who has previously used specimens of this donor and is interested in ordering additional specimens. In this case the client is made aware of the new medical information and potential issues ..."
The families don't blame the sperm bank. In fact, Theresa Pergola says she's still uncertain about an autism screening process, if and when it ever becomes available..."

Only clean obedient children qualify for love

At the local playground, I have recently heard a mom talking to her 2-year-old son after he came out of the sandbox:
"Come here and let me beat the sand out of your clothes. See how dirty you have made yourself. Come here quickly, or I won't love you anymore!"

Expanding toys are hazardous

If you feel like eating candy, and by coincidence there is some candy right in front of you and you know that it is a present for you, will you take it and put it in your mouth? Or will you first explore it by all your senses and seek a second opinion in order to be sure that it really is candy, because some evil cosmic conspiracy might supply you with objects that look like candy but actually aren't? David Hume would vote for the thorough exploration. His philosophy states that our experience cannot teach us about regularities in the real world, so we are only deluding ourselves that what looks like apple will always taste like apple, while in reality it may next time taste like cheese. Hume's ideas, although defying common sense, useless in science and as depressing as Hell, are impossible to disprove. And I have discovered that they can be true in any sense you like.
On Sunday, we were at a party on the occasion of a family member just returned from the USA. As the host was shuttling between the dining-room and the kitchen, the other adults were sitting at the dinner table and my 4.5-year-old son was exploring the presents. They were piled on another table 3 meters away from us. I was watching him from time to time, but didn't pay much attention because he is already quite reasonable. I mean, he has passed the stage when children break or put in their mouths everything they touch.
I saw my son finding some chocolate and helping himself. Then, he took some packed coloured capsules that looked like candy. I thought they were and didn't intervene. Happily, my husband went to the table with the presents. As he told me later, he also wanted a candy.
However, when he looked at the package with the product description, it turned out not to be candy at all. The objects were "toys comprising of foam plastic which have been compressed and placed in a gelatine capsule that expands when placed in liquid" (quote from an act banning this product in Australia; for Bulgarian readers, "foam" here means "dunapren"). There was a warning on the package, "Not a food product. Do not swallow." WTF?! You manufacture an expanding foam object looking quite like a food product, you intend it to be used by children too young to read and you think you have done all your duties to public safety by putting a warning label?
By this time, my son had unpacked 3 capsules. Two of them were found in a cup, apparently spitted out after some chewing. My son referred to them as "chewing gum". However, the third one was nowhere to be seen and when we asked the child whether he had swallowed it, he said "yes".
We put the other two capsules in warm water to see what would happen. They expanded into animal shapes with maximum sizes about 5:1:1.5 cm. There was a doctor among the guests. He said that a soft, compressible object of this size would pass through the digestive tract uneventfully. Happily, he was proven right, at least in this case. Several hours ago, my son had a bowel movement and I found there the foam object. Another blogger recently asked his readers to define happiness. I could tell him that happiness is when you see the foreign body ingested by your child passed naturally without complications.
I'd wish to keep the story to myself and my closest friends, because it doesn't speak well of my parenting. However, I feel obliged to make it public in order to warn other parents. The expanding toys may be amusing but they are surely dangerous. Stay away from them, don't give them to any child. I hope that governments of USA and other countries will follow Australia's lead and ban these hazardous toys before some child suffers an accident with not so fortunate outcome.

Day care failures

This year, for the first time children in Sofia will apply for day care online. The system had to open at 9.00, i.e. 5 minutes ago. However, when I tried to open the site 30 minutes ago, it loaded only partially. I restarted everything and tried again. Then, the site failed to upload at all. A minute ago, it loaded partially, but when I tried to register, I saw just a message, "ERROR. Service unavailable. The requested service is unavailable. Try again later."
Not only I but also many other people had anticipated troubles with this site. They can be expected every time when a Bulgarian site is to be "attacked" by thousands of users simultaneously, especially if this is tried for the first time. But the Sofia Municipality and the site designer kept reassuring us that everything would be OK. Eh well, it isn't.
I was also afraid that I would have problem with my Internet - this happens sometimes. However, my ISP didn't fail me this time. The connection with Blogger is notoriously sensitive, and it is excellent now. So it must be the site's fault.
As I am writing this, I keep trying at another window to register, and the system is tossing me out again and again.
In a normal situation, I wouldn't have to be so upset. What, if the system is overloaded now, I could try in the afternoon or tomorrow. However, there are too few positions in day care. Thousands of children will inevitably be left out and I am afraid now that my toddler will be among them, because the positions will go to those registered first. This situation is very wrong because municipality day care centers are heavily subsidized. I always get mad when I am told that some taxpayer-sponsored facility has "insufficient" capacity. Do you know why? Because, when I have to pay my taxes, nobody ever asks me whether I have "sufficient" money to pay. So, if I always manage to find the money government asks from me, I feel entitled to expect something in return.
Bulgarian citizens and authorities always lament that too few Bulgarian babies are born. This is the definition of hypocrisy. I can tell first-hand why they are so few: because they are not welcome. You don't encourage parents to have more children by making them crazy about the children they already have.
My rant is ready for publishing now, and I still cannot register!
Update: It was almost 1 PM when the system let me in.
Update 2: In fact, I have been lucky. Other parents have failed to register all day and now demand the registrations of people like me to be cancelled. The system must send us e-mails confirming the registration but nothing of this kind comes to my Inbox. And nobody tells us what we must do if we do not receive the confirmation e-mail.
Update 3: I received the e-mail on Tuesday night. However, its Cyrillic text had been transformed into a string of meaningless "monkey" symbols, e.g. the first word was "Здравейте". I had to perform full-scale deciphering, it is good that Harold Jacobs's Mathematics: A Human Endeavor had taught me how to do that. The above cited word turned out to be "Здравейте", i.e. "Hello". For Bulgarian readers interested in deciphering, I have explained it on my Bulgarian blog.
The Web site designer blamed the Monday failure on hacker attacks. Nobody believes this too much. First, hackers have no special motivation concerning this particular site, and second, when you design a site, you keep in mind that not all people in cyberspace are nice, don't you? The Gyuvech Web portal today publishes the following joke on the subject:
"Police press center reports that the hackers who attacked the day care application site have been caught. The suspects I.P. (2.5) and B.B. (3) were motivated by their unwillingness to attend day care."

"Don't judge harshly because you/your people can one day be in the same shoes"

Left: Katherine "Katie" McCarron, copied from Not Dead Yet, originally supplied by her family. Right: her mother and murderer Karen McCarron, copied from HoiNews, original source unknown.

About a week ago, I had an argument with a relative about the Mideast conflict. It naturally brought me to saying that Palestinians were such and such (let's not repeat adjectives unnecessarily, I have explained my opinion in detail in the post Mideast Conflict: The Dire Consequences of a "Deadly and Disgusting Bias").

Then, my relative replied, "The same things you are saying about the Palestinians have been said by (West-) Europeans about our Bulgarian revolutionaries in Macedonia."

Well, I know that some of these revolutionaries, while not doing quite the same things as today's Palestinians, weren't the sort of person you want for your son in-law, either. The best example perhaps is Yane (Jane) Sandanski (1872 - 1915). He has been unduly euphemized by historians (see e.g. his Wikipedia page) and today has a resort town named after him. Consider, however, how he raised funds for his cause: "In 1902 Yane Sandanski, together with some of his companions, kidnapped the Protestant missionary Ellen Stone and exacted ransom of 14 500 TRL for her, which initiated the so-called Miss Stone Affair. Despite the persecutions, they managed to take the ransom and use it for weapons, which were needed for the revolutionary struggle. Miss Stone was released and later she read lectures for the Macedonian cause in America" (source: BGglobe).

I have read details about this kidnapping in For Freedom and Perfection, a sympathetic biography of Yane Sandanski by Mercia MacDermott. Miss Stone had a pregnant companion (her name was Tsilka, if I remember correctly). The kidnappers seized her together with her mistress and didn't release her despite her pregnancy advancing to term. She gave birth literally in Stone Age conditions, in a cave, with only Miss Stone to help. It was sheer luck that she and the baby survived and did well. So I have no kind thoughts and words for Sandanski and his gang of terrorists, no matter how Bulgarian they were and what noble causes they claimed.

The Scripture says, "Judge Not Lest You Be Judged". We have a proverb with a similar meaning, "Laugh only at a priest, because you will never become one." It is true that we shouldn't indulge in excessive and hypocritical judgement of others. But this doesn't mean that we must never judge anybody in order to avoid being judged ourselves. Would you like a society where everybody would let others do as they please in order to enjoy the same "freedom"? I think that we not only can but should demand others to keep some norms - and of course apply the same norms to ourselves, our families and our community.

This reminds me of an event that was the central subject at Autism Hub ten days ago. On Jan. 17, Illinois physician Karen McCarron was convicted of first-degree murder of her 3-year-old daughter Katherine "Katie" McCarron (see above photos). Karen had smothered the little girl to death with a plastic bag. The motive: Katie was autistic.

Society showed mixed reaction to the murder and the verdict. Some people, notably disability advocates and parents, strongly condemned Karen McCarron. However, as Wikipedia puts it, "news articles and weblogs have emphasized the difficulties in raising a child with autism, and some suggested that McCarron may have been stressed by lack of support and dealing with Katie's autism." In fact, Karen had no reason to be stressed so much, because she hadn't even cared for her daughter after the diagnosis. As you can read in the same article, Katie had been taken by her father Paul to North Carolina, where the educational opportunities for autistic children were better, and was reunited with her mother only ten days prior to the murder. Paradoxically, the fact that Karen had been free from care was also used by some to exonerate her. Quoting the HoiNews article from where I copied the photo: "Authorities are not commenting as to her motive, but people who know Karen McCarron said the challenges with autism can be too much to handle... Her husband took Katherine to North Carolina, Karen stayed with their other child at their home in Morton. “And that had to be overwhelming in itself, because now your support's not there, you're both separated, you know... she was an excellent mother and she was out there to help her daughter the best that she could,” (therapist and autism mother) Floyd said." (However, see also the outraged comments to this article by parents of both special-needs and typical children.)

Blogger "Doubting Thomas" touches another aspect and so brings McCarron's case to the subject of this post. He writes, "Prosecution attorneys say she was mentally stable. However, they are attorneys, and not doctors, and should not diagnose on the fly. She also just killed her daughter. How stable is that?... But here is the big money question, and ultimately, my point: Do any of you realize that **your autistic child** could be in the same position as Karen McCarron someday?"

Eh well, every murderer, with or without a disability, has parents. And I am sure that in quite many cases they have been good parents. We know well "where children come from", but we do not know, and never will, where their souls come from. I pity Karen McCarron's parents. However, we cannot keep our pockets filled with excuses for all sort of criminals, just in case some of our children happen to become criminals when they grow up.

In a sense, every murderer is "not normal". I always wonder when I watch on Discovery channel programs about how murderers' brains have different wave patterns and their attorneys use this to demand a lighter sentence. I mean, why is a murderer's brain expected to be exactly like a non-murderer's brain? However, from this "difference" there is a long way to "mental illness" pronounced enough to account for a lighter sentence. And unlike Thomas, I don't think McCarron (who had no previous diagnosis) qualified for "guilty but mentally ill" verdict. People like her are so dangerously close to us, to "good normal" people. Had Katie happened to be a typical child, nobody would ever know about the monster hidden inside her mom.

Our civilization has reached a stage when diseases, disabilities, accidents and wars are a rare exception, rather than rule of life, as they have been in previous centuries. However, this has had the unpleasant effect of making us intolerant to everything depriving our lives of the comfort we feel entitled to. Have a non-perfect child? - Get rid of him. We want perfect children only. As autistic blogger Joel Smith put it, "Being a parent of an autistic child gives you a special right: a “Get Out of Love Free” card."

In a society where so many people can blame a disabled child for her own murder (just read some of the above quotes), too many parents may be tempted to follow Karen McCarron's footsteps. This, to my opinion, gives "high degree of public danger" to her crime. The concern that we, or somebody of our circle, may some day be in a criminal's shoes should not be a reason for lenience. On the contrary, in such cases the sentence must serve to ward off future similar crimes by scaring potential criminals. I think the jurors have done their job well and while nothing can bring Katie back to life, their verdict has likely saved the lives of some other children.

Size matters

Social pressure is difficult to endure, even for adults. We make much sacrifices so that, as Anglo-Saxons say, "to keep up with the Joneses". For children, it is even more difficult. Many years ago, before I had a family of my own, I walked in the city center with a friend who had. She stopped to buy for her son some bright-coloured, patterned socks that costed ten times more than ordinary socks. I questioned the purchase and she explained, "All children in his kindergarten wear patterned socks."
The 2006 Christmas party at my elder son's kindergarten was easy for the parents. We were asked to pay some money and employees used them to buy "Santa's" presents. Each child received some treats and a toy (in my son's case, a small plastic military car). However, in 2007 it was strictly forbidden for kindergartens to collect from parents any money other than the tuition fee, so we were asked to bring a toy and some treats in order to be given by Santa at the Christmas party.
Because I didn't want to go long distances with the baby, I was confined in my choice to what could be found in the district. I liked most a metal model of a MIG-29 plane. Indeed, it was small (to be precise, 20 cm in its maximum lenght), but this didn't bother me, because the present at the 2006 party was also small and I thought this tradition would be kept.
However, my mother in-law who brought the present to the kindergarten told me nervously in the evening, "I saw other parents bringing such big parcels...". It was Dec. 14 and I still had time to take measures, but I left things as they were.
After the Christmas party at Dec. 19, my mother in-law picked the child from the kindergarten. She said, "The other children had such big presents that they were unable to lift them, so each child was accompanied on his way downstairs by an employee carrying the parcel. Only our boy was walking on his own. At one point, he wanted to go back up the stairs in order to meet and talk to Santa, as he said; but ultumately he came down, holding the bag with the treats in one hand and the little plane in the other."
"We must prepare for him big Christmas presents. They may be junk but apparently they must be big," said I when I heard the story. But I still couldn't realize the magnitude of the disaster. Instead of supplying a big present immediately, I was going to wait until Christmas.
Dec. 21 was the last school day before the holidays. As my mother in-law brought my son from kindergarten, I said happily, "Indeed, this term was shortened because of the teachers' strike, but still it is remarkable that he didn't miss a single day because of disease!"
There is a superstition that if you say such a thing, you are pulling the devil's tail. Next morning, my son awakened at 6 AM with a fever of Celsium 39.1. His cheeks and ears were bright red. He talked much better than usually, saying perfect sentences in a row, "Switch off the lamp!," "I want to drink water," "My throat aches." After we brought his fever a little down, he curled in his bed, saying "nice bed" and "doctor", apparently reminding us that he must see a doctor. Then he said, "present". I brought him the plane but he threw it aside with disdain. I promised to bring him another present and left the room. My mother in-law heard from him a last remark, "A small present, right?".
After completing the urgent tasks (seeing a doctor, buying the prescribed antibiotic and giving him the first dose), I left both children with their Grandma and went to seek a present. I chose a plastic toy bicycle. It costed only EUR 2, much less than the plane, but was bigger - maximum length 33 cm (no joke, I've just measured it). My son appreciated it. He said many times, "nice present". He even tried to ride it.
When I told my mother the story, she said, "You were right! The other parents are parvenus. At home, they may put under the Christmas tree presents as big as half the room, if they like. But it is bad manners to bring gigantic presents at kindergarten."
I hope she is right, but still I couldn't feel happy.

A study proves, again, that institutions are harmful for children

Posts consisting entirely of large quotes from a single source don't speak well of a blogger, but a report I've just read in Yahoo! News is so important, especially for us in Bulgaria in the context of the current debate about institutions for abandoned children, that I feel obliged to repost it.

Study says foster care benefits brains
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer, Dec 20
Toddlers rescued from orphanages and placed in good foster homes score dramatically higher on IQ tests years later than children who were left behind, concludes a one-of-a-kind project in Romania that has profound implications for child welfare around the globe.
The boost meant the difference between borderline retardation and average intelligence for some youngsters.
Most important, children removed from orphanages before age 2 had the biggest improvement — key new evidence of a sensitive period for brain development, according to the U.S. team that conducted the research.
"What we're really talking about is the importance of getting kids out of bad environments and put into good environments," said Dr. Charles Nelson III of Harvard Medical School, who led the study being published Friday in the journal Science.
The younger that happens, "the less likely the child is to have major problems," he added.
The research is credited with influencing child-care changes in Romania, and UNICEF has begun using the data to push numerous countries that still depend on state-run orphanages to start shifting to foster care-like systems.
"The research provides concrete scientific evidence on the long-term impacts of the deprivation of quality care for children," UNICEF child protection specialist Aaron Greenberg said. "The interesting part about this is the one-on-one caring of a young child impacts ... cognitive and intellectual development."...
In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest's six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.
The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.
By 4 1/2, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.
Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.
Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster-care kids...
Nelson tells adoptive parents, "The older the child is when they leave the institution, the more likely that child may have some developmental problems and the more difficult it may be to ameliorate those problems. ... The message to parents is simply to go into this with their eyes open, but not to give up."
For the U.S. and other countries that depend on foster care instead of orphanages, the study has implications, too, because it used high-quality foster care that is not the norm in many places, Nelson noted. Studies comparing the impact of foster care of varying quality are under way.
The Romanian government requested the study and began its own foster care program shortly thereafter. Early study results are credited with influencing Romania's recent prohibition on institutionalizing children under 2 unless they are severely disabled.

My lullaby page

One of the things I was working on is ready. A collection of translations of popular lullabies from around the world is uploaded on my site at http://www.mayamarkov.com/kids/lullabies/. I translated them because there seem to be very few Bulgarian lullabies (though numerous good songs for older children) and I wanted to have some to sing to my baby.
The WAV and MP3 files of longer lullabies are truncated because Sound Recorder offers you only a minute to record. There must be an option to lenghten the time but I didn't find it. I am quite challenged by computer technology (in fact, to be honest, by any technology). I struggle with programs the way a pig struggles with a pumpkin.
I am afraid that by these musical files, I created too much work for my brother who is Webmaster of my site (and also pays the fees for the domain name and the hosting). But he did a great job. I like very much the way he allowed listening to the songs and downloading them. He also found for me the program MidiPiano which allows you to create instrumental MID files right on the computer, without the trouble to play on an actual instrument and record. If I knew this option, perhaps I wouldn't bother to sing and record. Especially after I am such a poor singer. (When I was in 1st grade, after singing a song in front of the class for the first time, a classmate said, "Maya, how is it possible that your parents are musicians yet you are unable to sing?" This was quite rude of course and discouraged me to develop my singing abilities. On the other hand, listening to some popular singers, I often regret that they apparently hadn't such a frank classmate in 1st grade.)
The MID files will be uploaded soon, most likely next week.

Drawing faces

Non-parents are often amused or annoyed by the habit of parents to issue long speeches about the most banal activities and achievements of their children. But I assure you it is difficult to resist it all the time. So parents will appreciate this post. Non-parents are advised to skip it, they won't understand it anyway.
My elder son, who has just turned 4, has learned to draw recognizable faces during the last several months. Some of the drawings were spontaneous, some prompted. Unfortunately, he couldn't describe the details of his drawings himself.












Son and dad? Or two friends? (May 18)









A spiky-haired boy? (June 25)


















A humanized baloon? (June 29)













The artist sitting in my lap (May 24).

Parents aren't justly evaluated by society

Many years ago, I read (in Bulgarian translation) the book "Children who are different" by Gerda Jun. It included the stories of 11 children with special needs, told by their parents. One child had cerebral palsy, one had attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, the others were mentally retarded and often with other conditions as well.
A narrator father of a girl with mental retardation (of unknown origin) had also two younger, typically developing children. Once, the school where they were studying sent to his workplace a letter that his children were awarded for success in the socialist school (this was in the German Democratic Republic). As this letter was read aloud in front of all colleagues, the father in question had a strange feeling. He knew his two children were doing well in school without any help from him. The situation was different with his eldest daughter, who couldn't attend a regular school. He had put much efforts to help her achieve the best development she could, yet nobody praised him. So he asked, "Does society acknowledge most the parents who really deserve most?".
Although my parental experience is still short, I can confirm first-hand that this father was right: the public opinion is utterly unjust when judging a parent. And one of the reason is that the child is regarded as a white sheet of paper and the parent as a demigod in full control of what will appear on this sheet. People underestimate the fact that a child's development follows its own built-in program that often couldn't, or shouldn't, be changed from outside.
During the last month or so, my elder son has been praised 4 times for his reading skills. (He doesn't really read yet but he knows the entire Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin letters without analog in the Cyrillic alphabet and can read short words.)
Praise was also addressed to me, although I have done almost nothing. Yes, about 3 months ago I spelled words to him, to help him understand that this is what letters are for. But his interest to letters, numbers and other printed symbols emerged at age 18-20 months without any help from me.
At the same age, something less pleasant happened. My son stopped saying the few words he could say ("mama", "dada" and several of this kind). He also became somewhat alienated from us and the world in general. This regression was followed by a plateau period of more than a year during which his skill development was almost zero. During this period, I of course was very unhappy and anxious. I was wondering what was happening to the child, thinking of all sorts of conditions from impaired hearing to mental retardation. Some of the people around encouraged me and urged me to believe in the child. However, others reacted in a way that only made matters worse, blaming me for all problems. According to them, my son stopped developing properly because I:
- wasn't paying enough attention to him;
- was working too much on my PhD thesis and too little on him;
- returned to work;
- wasn't talking to him all day (as if later in life we learn a foreign language by turning on a radio to listen to it all day);
- wasn't bringing him out to spend long enough time playing with other children;
- was often bringing him to my mother and leaving him alone with her (this is the favourite theory of one of my husband's relations who hates my mother and thinks she will surely damage any child in her custody).
At some time after my son's 3rd birthday, his speech slowly reappeared and resumed its development. The kindergarten has surely helped this, but I have the impression that most of his new talk was as spontaneous as his earlier silencing.
I recently learned that there are other young children (usually boys) who have strong interest in printed symbols, learn to read early without much training from outside and often are speech delayed. This phenomenon is called hyperlexia. Moreover, as many as half of children with hyperlexia regress at age 18 months and nobody has any idea why.
So I was blamed that my child wasn't talking and now I'm praised because of his precocious reading skills. Neither was my guilt/merit, unless in the sense that my genes were involved (I was also a late talker and early reader). My son was the same child and I was the same parent 2 years ago as we are now. So I would advise other parents, regardless of whether their child's development is typicall or not, to do what they think is best for him and not to listen to irresponsible talk by people who have nothing better to do than judging others.

The mixed blessings of speech

These days, I was walking my sons in the nearby Western park and stopped at a playfield. There were many other children. Looking at them and hearing them speak in sentences, I admit I felt some envy. My elder son, now 3.5, has language delay. I am of course delighted that he finally made up his mind to join the speaking world, but his current speech is appropriate for a child half his age.
A 3-yr-old boy came to me to ask to play with my son's toy tractor. Then he obviously felt like having a little conversation. He pointed at one of the playfield's devices, a construction of stairs for children to climb (I don't know the English word for this).
"They have repaired it," he said. "Some Gypsy had broken three or four of the steps."
"How do you know it has been a Gypsy?" I asked. "It may have been some white, blonde Bulgarian."
The boy answered nothing, but I could read his thoughts - young children are so transparent. He knew I was wrong, because I was saying the opposite of what his mom or dad had said. He knew he couldn't win in an argument with an adult, so he didn't object to me, but he didn't look very happy - he was feeling some guilt for not defending the right opinion.
This made me remember another indoctrinated 3-yr-old - a Muslim girl convinced that "Jews are apes and pigs" (http://www.sandmonkey.org/2005/11/27/3-and-a-half-year-old-girl-jews-are-apes-and-pigs/ and http://freedomforegyptians.blogspot.com/2006/06/hitlerism-on-saudi-islamic-channel.html).
My God, how delayed indeed my son is! Still speaking in single words while his peers fluently express racist statements! Or perhaps he is right? Perhaps it is better to develop critical thinking first, speech second?

Baby photos

Thanks to all who wrote congratulations in their comments to the previous post. These photos of my baby (both from Dec. 7) are in response to Highlander's request.