"Co-Sleeping" Kills 3 Infants A Month In City Of Philadelphia

Yesterday, I read this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that reported 57 infants have died since the start of 2006 due to co-sleeping! That refers to where an infant and an adult sleep together. In the article, this practice led to the death of 57 in 20 months or about three deaths per month! That is disgraceful and I am astounded the police have not arrested any of these idiot adults for criminal negligence! Instead, the city health department is running an "education program".

Think about this- in 2005, the state reported 291 deaths in Philadelphia for children under five years old. The co-sleeping article indicates in the average year 36 of those deaths would be due to co-sleeping. In other words, more than one out of ten deaths (of kids under four years old) were probably preventable. This is a crime IMHO. Below I have posted the article for your reading horrification:

City effort targets safe sleeping for babies
By Robert Moran
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
With Philadelphia infants dying because parents are sleeping with their babies, the city has launched a campaign to warn against the dangerous practice.
At least 57 infants have died since the beginning of 2006 as a result of parents and babies "co-sleeping" or infants sleeping in unsafe places such as sofas, cushioned chairs or cluttered cribs, city officials said today.
Arthur Evans Jr., acting director of the Department of Human Services, called the numbers "very alarming" and said the problem was immediately apparent when he took over the agency a year ago.
"I noticed that there were a number of reports - sometimes multiple reports in a week - of adults sleeping with infants where the child died," Evans said.
A television and radio campaign, called "Sleeping Safely," began this week to teach parents proper sleeping practices for infants. The city is looking for funds to expand the campaign to buses, Evans said.
Evans said the parents who suffer these tragedies often "were trying to do the right thing" and would bring their babies to bed, for example, if they were crying.
"It's only when you sit in an agency like this that you see this is a dangerous practice," Evans said.
Officials also said that the city would help provide cribs for parents who need them. Parents seeking help getting cribs can call 215-972-0700 or visit the Web site www.momobile.org.

Adrian Balboa

Headstone marked "Adrian Balboa" at Laurel Hill Cemetery??

I was at this old cemetery in Philly on Saturday and saw a headstone for an "Adrian Balboa". The headstone was just inside the gate and I guess it could be a movie prop but did not expect it to be sitting there just like one of the real headstones. I googled it an saw someone else (Fliker) asked the same question.

Btw, if you are ever in Philly, I recommend you take a walk around this old cemetery (it goes back to 1836) and has a bunch of immense obelisks as grave markers.

Mark Steyn At His Best

It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that liberals and conservatives are mentally wired very differently. Libs don't think logically or critically- they just parrot whatever they want to believe or whatever they want desperately to be true.

Below is a great example and Mark Steyn takes this as an opportunity to mock the logic of a young CNN star (but mental lightweight) and an old NY Times fossil, Thomas Friedman:

From Steyn's column of Oct. 14, 2007 :

"To take another example, on CNN the other night Anderson Cooper was worrying about the homicide rate in Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love is the murder capital of the nation, and CNN had dispatched a reporter to interview the grieving mother of a young black boy killed while riding his bicycle in the street. Apparently, a couple of cars had got backed up behind him, and an impatient passenger in one of them pulled out a gun and shot the kid. Anderson Cooper then went to commercials and, when he returned, introduced a report on how easy it is to buy guns in Philadelphia and how local politicians are reluctant to do anything about it. This is, again, an argument only the expert class could make. In the 1990s, the number of guns in America went up by 40 million, but the murder rate fell dramatically. If firearms availability were the determining factor, Vermont and Switzerland would have high murder rates. Yet in Montpelier or Geneva the solution to a boy carelessly bicycling in front of you down a city street when you're in a hurry is not to grab your gun and blow him away. It's the culture, not the technology. ....

Very few members of the transnational jet set want to hear this. They're convinced that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words – "globalization", "networking" – cure all ills. You may recall the famous Golden Arches thesis promulgated by The New York Times' Thomas Friedman – that countries with McDonald's franchises don't go to war with each other. Tell it to the Serbs. When the Iron Curtain fell, Yugoslavia was, economically, the best-positioned of the recovering Communist states. But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern ("Serbo-Croat"?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.

Idiocy Of Giving Al Gore The Peace Prize

Here is the funniest quote I saw on a blog (www.althouse.blogspot.com) about the idicy of giving Al Gore a Peace Prize. Kudos to Paul Zrimsek for the apt and funny assessment. See Paul's blog post below:

"...The best thing to do with the Congressional Medal of Honor now would be to give it to the person who did most to bring peace to some war-torn part of the world, since the Nobel Peace Prize is apparently no longer available for that purpose.

War heroes could get the Pulitzer Prize instead. We'd make it up to the people who write the best newspaper stories by awarding them the Stanley Cup.

The best team in the NHL would get the donations George Soros used to give to prominent lefty spokesmen before that function was taken over by the Nobel Peace Prize."

World Series Tickets

Hope I get a chance to use these but Phils are trailing the Rockies in game two by 6-3. They better start hitting.

These are the only World Series I ever had; I actually plan to give to my niece for her 21st birthday which is the same day as the game (Oct. 27th)!