Myth of the opt-out mom

"Like most myths, the opt-out mom story contains a kernel of truth. It's hard to combine work and parenthood, and more moms than dads take time off from work while their kids are young. But also like most myths, the kernel of truth is surrounded by a comforting lie that relieves social anxieties without solving them, in this case by feeding the illusion that women will resolve our work-family conflicts by reversing the growing commitment to lifelong employment that they exhibited in the 1970s and 1980s."

The things we lose

Cicisbei played by set rules, generally avoiding public displays of affection. At public entertainments, they would typically stand behind their seated mistress and whisper in her ear[9]. Customs of the time did not permit them to engage in relationships with any other women during their free time, making the arrangement rather demanding. Both parties could decide to end the relationship at any time, a woman's former cicisbei were called spiantati, or cast-offs.

Sad

"WASHINGTON - A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters."

It is so the little people!

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Small children, long blamed for being little germ machines who spread colds and flu every year from nurseries and classrooms to the rest of the community, may be only a minor factor in the annual influenza epidemic, U.S. researchers said on Thursday."

Catholic Church Gets 783 New Abuse Claims - Yahoo! News

"WASHINGTON - The nation's Roman Catholic leaders received 783 new claims of sex abuse by clergy in 2005, with most of the allegations involving cases that are decades old.

The new claims, reported Thursday, bring the total number of accusations against Catholic clergy to more than 12,000 since 1950."

Fake College For Final Four Tickets

Smart Kids' Brains May Mature Later - Yahoo! News

"The brain's outer mantle, or cortex, gets thicker and then thins during childhood and the teen years. The study found that in kids with superior intelligence, the cortex reaches its thickest stage a few years later than in other children.
Nobody knows what causes that or how it relates to superior intelligence. But researchers said the finding does not rule out a role for environment such as intellectual stimulation in affecting a child's level of intelligence."

hello all

First I want to welcome Joe to the blogroll! He promises to post. Second I haven't posted anything on the huge immigration protests because I don't know that much about them and the issues are really complicated. I'm trying to do some reading and then will compose some sort of useful "here are all sides of a complicated argument" post. Hope everyone is doing well!

Rape Allegation Against Athletes Is Roiling Duke - New York Times

Rape Allegation Against Athletes Is Roiling Duke - New York Times

Great Blog

For those of us affected by globalisation, This is an awesome blog. Really good stuff.

Look who's more likely to have risky sex - Yahoo! News

"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Young men who feel good about their looks are more likely than their peers with a less positive body image to engage in risky sexual behavior, a new study of college students shows."

God please let this be true.

Two drugs already used to treat
HIV' name HIV infection have shown such promise at preventing it in monkeys that officials last week said they would expand early tests in healthy high-risk men and women around the world.

Woman took kids, became husband - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

"RALEIGH, N.C. - A woman accused of abducting her two young children from their father, then dressing like a man so she could assume his identity, agreed Monday to return to Arizona where she faces kidnapping charges, authorities said."

Siobhan Del Mar

Siobhan Del Mar
Originally uploaded by phaedras25.

I am trying to figure out how to post photos. this is one from Fe and i's trip on the socal coast.

The Indians come to white women's rescue

Idea of simple life takes hold

"It's a function of individuals beginning to feel a sense of crisis in their lives," Shi says. "The frenetic pace of our high-tech society, coupled with the barrage of seductive messages coming from our consumer culture, have
reached a point that many people simply feel like they're about to
self-destruct."
For Pelmas, it's about "avoiding the hysteria that seems to govern a lot of our consciousness right now around consumerism. It's the kind of craze where fathers are beating each other up to get the latest Nintendo for
their kids. It strikes me as some strange kind of 21st-century spiritual lack."
It's not just her. Surveys done by Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College who studies consumer society, have found that 81% of Americans say the country is too focused on shopping and spending, and 88% think it is too materialistic.

Texas arresting people in bars for being drunk - Yahoo! News

Kay that's just mean.

Now I really have to

give up sushi:(

Personality

In a series of studies on the development of gender differences in depression, Gjerde found that young adults who described themselves as depressed had exhibited clear antecedents for the malady during their preschool years. In boys, the characteristics include a lot of anger and interpersonal antagonism. In girls, the early signs are not as strong, but the signals appear to include shyness, kindness, and relatively high intelligence, raising the possibility that smart adolescent girls may be at risk for sadness.

Another section of the study found this:heh

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

Jess has a son!

Jess and Husband welcomed Eli to the family yesterday! Congratulations.

Feeling uneasy about the world?

But if Phillips is correct, the coming years are going to be ugly for all of us, not just blithe exurbanites with SUVs and floating-rate mortgages. With oil growing scarce and America unable or unwilling to even begin weaning itself away, we could see a future of resource wars that would inflame jihadi terrorism and bankrupt the country, shredding what's left of the social safety net. As Phillips notes, a collapsed economy would leave many debt-ridden Americans as what Democratic leaders have called "modern-day indentured servants," paying back constantly compounding debt with no hope of escape via bankruptcy. The prospect of social breakdown looms. The desperation of New Orleans could end up being a preview.

I need me some Ambien!

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Strange behavior by insomniacs taking prescription drugs, ranging from binge eating to having sex while asleep, have raised safety questions about anti-insomnia medications like Sanofi-Aventis' Ambien

Pregnancy-a conflict

In the 1970's, Dr. Trivers argued that families create an evolutionary conflict. Natural selection should favor parents who can successfully raise the most offspring. For that strategy to work, they
can't put too many resources into any one child. But the child's chances for reproductive success will increase as its care and feeding increase. Theoretically, Dr. Trivers argued, natural selection could favor genes that help children get more resources from their parents than the parents want to
give.
As Dr. Haig considered the case of pregnancy, it seemed like the perfect arena for this sort of conflict. A child develops in intimate contact with its mother. Its development in the womb is crucial to its long-term health. So it was plausible that nature would favor genes that allowed fetuses to draw more resources from their mothers. A fetus does not sit passively in its
mother's womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother's tissues to extract nutrients. Meanwhile, Dr. Haig argued, natural selection should favor mothers who could restrain these incursions, and manage to have several surviving offspring carrying on their genes. He envisioned pregnancy as a tug of war. Each side pulls hard, and yet a
flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves.

Irish leaving New York

Ten years from now, say activists pushing for immigration reform, there won't be Irish neighborhoods left in New York."Watch the various airlines heading for Ireland," said Adrian Flannelly, chairman of New York's Irish Radio Network, "and you can see the same type of grief and sorrow that there has been in the worst days of our history, where [immigrants] would leave everything behind them."The Irish in America are as old as America itself," he said. "In that sense, this is a disgrace."Before dawn today, 17 buses were scheduled to leave Katonah Avenue for Washington, where Irish immigrants intend to press for passage of the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill. The legislation would allow all illegal immigrants to apply for legal status after paying their back taxes and working in the United States for six years.

Creepy conspiracy

Finally, after seven months of political pressure, the FBI allowed United 93 relatives to listen to the CVR. The feds told the families not to reveal what they'd heard. "They said the information on
the tapes could be possibly used in the prosecution of [alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias]Moussaoui, and anything that we say could affect the case in a negative way," said the brother of one of the victims.
Though they studied the recording, the 9/11 Commission found zero evidence that the passenger revolt succeeded, that they made it into the cockpit and, as Bush claimed, "took the plane into the ground." Tom Kean & Co. offered only conjecture: "The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them."

Sinead O'Connor was right

We have a king

Just two weeks after 9/11, a then-little-known Bush Justice Department official named John Yoo penned a memo with a stunningly broad conclusion. Congress, Yoo declared, may not "place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be
used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make."

I am going to cry

LOS ANGELES - Sushi is more popular than ever before but eating it “has
become the new Russian roulette” in terms of safety, a group campaigning against
mercury in fish said Monday.
Eli Saddler of gotmercury.org, a campaign of California-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project, went to six top sushi restaurants in Los Angeles to test mercury levels in the fish they
serve.
“The level of mercury in tuna these restaurants serve is so high they should be keeping this food off their lists,” Saddler said. “Eating sushi has become the new Russian roulette.”

Long time no write

I spent the weekend in Seattle. Saw my old haunts and the ocean agian. My ocean fixes are befoming dangerously addictive. I missed the Oscars as a result, but the pictures afterwards indicated a fairly boring year dress-wise so I am less than tragic about this.

Gossip says Scarlett Johansenn and Jake Gyllenhall maybe getting cozy. I think that is a great couple, far more convincing than Kirsten Dunst. Tom Cruise.. still mofo crazy.

News from the homefront is well spooky. Abortion going away, birth control going away or becoming less accessible as the Catholic Church considers revising their position on birth control. Huge amounts of desertion in the military and apparently, we are really going to go to war with Iran, cuz we are mofo crazy. Will post fun stuff soon!

it should never come to this

And they wonder why it is hard...

to learn to eat healthy. I get so fed up with the articles that come out, that basically end up saying we know very little about how diet will really affect "you", when you are someone with any sort of predisposition to chronic diseases linked to diet. Or anyone really besides Gwyneth Paltrow. It is very frustrating.