So yeah, abortion is murder right?

[Funkenstein]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

Reading an interesting article tracking the birth to unwed mother rates and it's impact on the black community... terribly sad. I'll try to find a link and shoot it to you.

Will definitely read it. Funny to see how social mores and standards have "evolved" (LOL) into where we are now.

Used to be you got pregnant, you went away to school far away or got the shotgun wedding (to probably get divorced years later, but at least to be together for the formative years if daddy didn't run away at the sound of "I'm preg. . .").

Now it's

"I'm pregnant."
"Who's the dad?"
"You are."
"Oh. Well, I'm not ready to get married."
"Okay."
"You going to chip in for the baby?"
"I might."
Okay."

That scenario covers all races.

:bonx:

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by Funkenstein

Will definitely read it. Funny to see how social mores and standards have "evolved" (LOL) into where we are now.

Used to be you got pregnant, you went away to school far away or got the shotgun wedding (to probably get divorced years later, but at least to be together for the formative years if daddy didn't run away at the sound of "I'm preg. . .").

Now it's

"I'm pregnant."
"Who's the dad?"
"You are."
"Oh. Well, I'm not ready to get married."
"Okay."
"You going to chip in for the baby?"
"I might."
Okay."

That scenario covers all races.

:bonx:

Yes, let's go back to the days of shotgun weddings and parents who loathe each other and take it out on the kids. THAT is the answer.

And that scenario may cover 'all' races, but we both know that the proportions aren't even.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Yes, let's go back to the days of shotgun weddings and parents who loathe each other and take it out on the kids. THAT is the answer.

It isn't THE answer but its certainly an important part. Not all couples will be able to make it but they owe a duty to their children, themselves and society to bust their asses to make it work. It isn't terribly odd that those least likely to be able are probably more likely to find themselves faced with that decision but that's no reason to let them off without even trying.

[PETA]

here's the article Brian

IN late March, the Urban League issued its 2009 "State of Black America" report, which declared that "African Americans remain twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty, and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated." A week earlier, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released figures showing that in 2007, 71.6 percent of black births were to unmarried women, compared with 27.8 percent of non-Hispanic white births. The NCHS numbers came out shortly after the Census Bureau published data from its Current Population Survey (CPS). Among other things, the CPS found that in 2008, only 38 percent of black children lived with two parents, compared with 78 percent of non-Hispanic white children.

These statistics are inextricably connected. Just ask Barack Obama. "More than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled--doubled--since we were children," Obama told a predominantly black congregation at Chicago's Apostolic Church of God on Father's Day 2008. "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Indeed, while family breakdown is hardly the only cause of persistent racial gaps in areas such as income and education, it poses a major obstacle to reducing those gaps. More broadly, disparities in family environments are closely related to overall U.S. economic inequality, which has increased during the past few decades.

In their book The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that since the early 1980s, the combination of "skill-biased technological change" (the computer revolution) and "a sharp decrease in the growth rate of the relative supply of educated workers" has greatly boosted returns to education and sent the college wage premium soaring. According to Goldin and Katz, "the wage premium for college graduates relative to high school workers" spiked from 36.7 percent to 86.6 percent between 1950 and 2005, with "most of the increase" taking place after 1980.

Meanwhile, says University of Chicago economist Derek Neal, the black-white skill gap stopped narrowing around 1990, at a time when the skill premium was skyrocketing. "There's a pattern of consistent progress all through the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties," he says. But there was no discernible progress on closing the gap between 1990 and 2000; if anything, Neal indicates, the gap may have actually widened over that period.

What explains this? Neal, director of Chicago Workshop on Black-White Inequality, says there is no clear answer. But he has written that "beginning around 1980, many factors worked together to diminish the resources available to black children. Two-parent families became even more rare in the black community, and for the first time, never-married motherhood became quite common. Further, real wages for less skilled workers fell, and the real value of transfers offered by various welfare programs declined." Neal contends that "the magnitude of the overall relative decline in black family income since 1980 is related to changes in black family structure and the weak growth of household income among black single parents."

Columbia social scientist Jane Waldfogel reckons that black-white skill levels began converging again in the late 1990s, citing evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend tests. "When you look at the period from 1999 to 2008, you see the gap starting to close again, particularly in reading for 9- and 13-year-olds," she says. Waldfogel notes that "there was a big decline in black child poverty in the late 1990s," which she attributes to a booming economy, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare reform. She also credits school-accountability initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act with helping to trim the black-white skill gap. Neal is less optimistic. "I'm not convinced that progress has started again," he says.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer emphasizes that blacks and whites enjoy the same rate of return on their educational investments, yet blacks aren't investing at the same rate as whites. He points out that the black-white skill gap emerges before children enter kindergarten. After analyzing data from the Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Fryer and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt concluded that the racial achievement gap among incoming kindergartners could be virtually eliminated by controlling for several background characteristics. However, even "observationally equivalent" black and white students diverged once they were in school.

Neal has written that the early appearance of a black-white test-score gap "is consistent with the idea that the black-white skill gap among young adults can be traced, in large measure, to black-white differences in the types of investments made in children at early ages." And "at the dawn of the 21st century, black-white differences in family environments are by far the most important source of black-white differences in levels of resources devoted to children."

Economist James Heckman, Neal's University of Chicago colleague, has conducted related research on the development of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. He believes there is a divide emerging between the children born into disadvantaged family environments and those born into better family environments. "The proper measure of disadvantage is not necessarily family poverty or parental education," Heckman explains. "The available evidence suggests that the quality of parenting is the important scarce resource."

This has implications for anti-inequality measures. "In designing policies to combat inequality," Heckman writes, "it is important to recognize that about 50 percent of the variance in inequality in lifetime earnings is determined by age 18. The family plays a powerful role in shaping adult outcomes that is not fully appreciated by current American policies."

The more we appreciate the linkage between family environments and inequality, the more we appreciate the significance of out-of-wedlock birthrates. "All measures of childbearing by unmarried women rose to historic levels in 2007," the NCHS reports. The overall out-of-wedlock birthrate in 2007 stood at nearly 40 percent, while the rate among Hispanics passed 50 percent.

In his controversial 1965 Labor Department report calling for "a national effort" to stabilize African-American families, Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had jumped from 16.8 percent in 1940 to 23.6 percent in 1963 (over that same period, the rate among whites had increased from 2 percent to just over 3 percent). At the time, 23.6 percent seemed startlingly high--but compared with 71.6 percent (the black rate in 2007), it seems relatively low. The rate among non-Hispanic whites in 2007 was higher than the rate among blacks in 1963.

What if black family composition had not changed between 1960 and 1988? Under those conditions, according to sociologists David Eggebeen of Penn State and Daniel Lichter of Cornell, the black child poverty rate in 1988 would have been 17.2 percentage points lower. Eggebeen and Lichter detailed their findings in a 1991 American Sociological Review article. They wrote that "the changing family structure among black and white children has clearly exacerbated long-standing racial differences in child poverty. Indeed, in the absence of widening racial differences in family structure, the 1960-1988 period would have brought substantial convergence in racial differences in official, deep, and relative child poverty."

Among others, Urban Institute economist Robert Lerman has done valuable work on the economic benefits of marriage. "The apparent gains from marriage are particularly high among black households," he wrote in a 2002 paper. In a separate report coauthored with Israeli economist Avner Ahituv, Lerman demonstrated that, on balance, married black men earn higher wages and work longer hours than never-married black men. In a more recent study of middle-class households, Lerman estimated that between 1989 and 2004, the net worth of "middle-income married parents" increased by 52 percent while that of "middle-income unmarried parents" actually decreased by 15 percent.

President Obama is now in a unique position to shape black attitudes toward marriage and fatherhood. His 2008 Father's Day message was clear: "We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--it's the courage to raise one." That is a message well worth repeating.

[Funkenstein]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Yes, let's go back to the days of shotgun weddings and parents who loathe each other and take it out on the kids. THAT is the answer.

And that scenario may cover 'all' races, but we both know that the proportions aren't even.

The term "Baby's momma" didn't start in Japan, so yeah. I'm not blind (legally).



As to the aforementioned, a loving mother and father/ mother/mother / father/father is what children need. Marriage makes it easier access to guidance and love, but as I admitted earlier, sometimes it can't/shouldn't happen.

Thinking people (should) consider about these things mostly before going to the fast money round with kids in their life.

QUICK EDIT:

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

It isn't THE answer but its certainly an important part. Not all couples will be able to make it but they owe a duty to their children, themselves and society to bust their asses to make it work. It isn't terribly odd that those least likely to be able are probably more likely to find themselves faced with that decision but that's no reason to let them off without even trying.

This is the short version of my argument. How the hell is the lawyer more brief than me?

Shenanigans.

Giving the article a read now, Xian.

[Funkenstein]

"She (Columbia social scientist Jane Waldfogel)also credits school-accountability initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act with helping to trim the black-white skill gap."


I have to take this to task (yes, even being black). This across the board really didn't sort things out and actually made it tougher within the school system to get things done due to weighted standards. I'd love to hear John Vella's wife talk on this.

Falling behind that here in our own home state was that Robin Hood Plan bullshiz. All that did was create a huge cluster-f that changed out the allocation of dollars for funding. Private schools became the new home for "White flight" and more and more there was fighting (see San Antonio's School District circa 1993-1999) for dollars that weren't even present for education.


"We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--it's the courage to raise one."

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Funkenstein

"She (Columbia social scientist Jane Waldfogel)also credits school-accountability initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act with helping to trim the black-white skill gap."


I have to take this to task (yes, even being black). This across the board really didn't sort things out and actually made it tougher within the school system to get things done due to weighted standards. I'd love to hear John Vella's wife talk on this.

Good or bad it was an attempt to help by creating standards. From my pov the feds have no business in our schools but that's just a political opinion.

Originally Posted by Funkenstein

Falling behind that here in our own home state was that Robin Hood Plan bullshiz. All that did was create a huge cluster-f that changed out the allocation of dollars for funding. Private schools became the new home for "White flight" and more and more there was fighting (see San Antonio's School District circa 1993-1999) for dollars that weren't even present for education.

People select homes carefully. A primary consideration is school. When taxes are pooled and sent elsewhere to spread the wealth you've robbed the home owner of the benefit of that selection.

FTR - my daughters are in private school and a distinct minority.

Originally Posted by Funkenstein

"We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--it's the courage to raise one."

Agreed. Well spoken words. He has a tremendous opportunity, one we've never seen and I hope he is able to have a significant impact on this.

[Funkenstein]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

Good or bad it was an attempt to help by creating standards. From my pov the feds have no business in our schools but that's just a political opinion.

Integration? Absolutely.

How monies are spent? Not so much. That should be the job of locals.

If schools fuck up and PARENTS and ADMINISTRATION actually CARE, they should do enough to correct the issues or face being closed down (just like a business).

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

People select homes carefully. A primary consideration is school. When taxes are pooled and sent elsewhere to spread the wealth you've robbed the home owner of the benefit of that selection.

Understood and now you see why it became a cluster-f. The Heights didn't want to pay for schooling in the barrio and the barrio schools didn't really get better (in regards to San Antonio).

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

FTR - my daughters are in private school and a distinct minority.

In the minority in relationship to American genotypes or Euro/Asian persuasion? Never saw that coming.

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

Agreed. Well spoken words. He has a tremendous opportunity, one we've never seen and I hope he is able to have a significant impact on this.

For my people's sake, I hope so as well.

[vinnie97]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Irony = vinnie telling me not to speak for the whole forum, then follows it by speaking for me on partial-birth abortion(incorrectly, no less).

You started this tit-for-tat. And thanks for delineating your position on PBA.

However, if you're going to throw out judgments as to who is deemed worth debating and who isn't, it's pretty partial of you to ignore another participator here who got hung up on the use of "blessing" as some kind of religious indoctrination.

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by vinnie97

You started this tit-for-tat. And thanks for delineating your position on PBA.

However, if you're going to throw out judgments as to who is deemed worth debating and who isn't, it's pretty partial of you to ignore another participator here who got hung up on the use of "blessing" as some kind of religious indoctrination.

Maybe I'm ignoring him too?

[tricky]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

even though true the remedy for stupidity isn't termination of life functions in utero


and... morans Jonny.... morans



when we subsidize bad behavior we get more of it

also, it becomes a family tradition... grandaughter is born to 16 y/o mom and 32 y/o grandmother. And, just ftr, while we do have an unwed mother problem that's only half of the issue. We also have a large unwed father problem. Their bad behavior continues the problem.

CDC numbers:

Nearly 72 percent of the births to black women were out of wedlock. Mothers were unmarried in about 51 percent of Hispanic births and 28 percent of non-Hispanic white births.



Just wanted to show off your big bag of nothing again huh? Maybe you should look the word up next time.

Main Entry: bless·ing Function: noun Date: before 12th century 1 a: the act or words of one that blesses b: approval, encouragement
2: a thing conducive to happiness or welfare
3: grace said at a meal


Even if we presume the word to mean, "gift from God" I'd ask, "so what?"

Are you suggesting you are too feeble minded to withstand such terrific frontal assualts and are afraid you may fall to your knees and repent your foolishness?

Lastly, I said babies were a blessing. That's not a value or standard. However, let's work with that too, shall we. You would have us believe that only Christians value children. That's patently absurd but considering the source...

So, to recap... I should be careful using the word blessing lest Tricky converty to Christianity and begin thinking that babies are good things. I think as a matter of personal safety it is necessary for you to stop reading my posts.

So I looked the word up for you.

Originally Posted by wiki

A blessing, (also used to refer to bestowing of such) is the infusion of something with holiness, divine will, or one's hopes.

Etymology and Germanic paganism

The modern English language term bless likely derives from the 1225 term blessen, which developed from the Old English blǣdsian (preserved in the Northumbrian dialect around 950 AD).[1] The term also appears in other forms, such as blēdsian or bldsian (before 830 and derived from Proto-Germanic *blōðisōjanan), blētsian from around 725 and blesian from around 1000, all meaning to make sacred or holy by a sacrificial custom in the Anglo-Saxon pagan period, originating in Germanic paganism; to mark with blood.[1] Due to this, the term is related to the term blōd, meaning blood.[1] References to this indigenous practice, Blót, exist in related Icelandic sources.
The modern meaning of the term may have been influenced in translations of the Bible into Old English during the process of Christianization to translate the Latin term benedīcere meaning to "speak well of", resulting in meanings such as to "praise" or "extol" or to speak well of or to wish well.[1]

oh snap.



I should just stop reading your posts due to your penchant for asinine illogical arguments backed up by nothing more than your pathetic ego.

Sorry for pulling a xian and getting hung up over word choice. You do that about 8 times a day....yet apparently you're mocking me for doing it.

kudos douche

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Maybe I'm ignoring him too?

That's too bad

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by tricky

That's too bad

Meh, I'm usually not ignoring you. I just don't travel as far left as the zone in which you reside.

[Roos]

I thoroughly enjoy reading some of the debates on here with you guys, even though I don't get involved much.

But mother fucker... you guys need to learn how to spell. It's brutal reading intelligent debates in which the words are slaughtered.

Oh, and for whomever said 'that every person who is involved in abortion will regret it'... you are wrong.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Roos

I thoroughly enjoy reading some of the debates on here with you guys, even though I don't get involved much.

But mother fucker... you guys need to learn how to spell. It's brutal reading intelligent debates in which the words are slaughtered.

Oh, and for whomever said 'that every person who is involved in abortion will regret it'... you are wrong.

"Every" is certainly too strong of a claim and we can only use subjective terms to describe that situation however its no stretch to say that regret is very common.

Originally Posted by tricky

So I looked the word up for you.



oh snap.



I should just stop reading your posts due to your penchant for asinine illogical arguments backed up by nothing more than your pathetic ego.

Sorry for pulling a xian and getting hung up over word choice. You do that about 8 times a day....yet apparently you're mocking me for doing it.

kudos douche




That's too bad

I make an issue of word choice when it is central to the discussion. You were trying to play gotcha with something irrelevant to the discussion and looked silly doing so. I wasn't kidding when I suggested you stop reading my posts. Perhaps if you just stopped responding to them it would be sufficient.