My Son Is All Boy. And That’s Just Fine With Me.
One of these women is normal, fully engaged with others, the other is not, fully engaged only with herself. "In many ways I am a girly-girl. I love pretty dresses and going out for afternoon tea. I could sit with a book for hours, snuggled under a blanket, without feeling the need to move. Pink is one of my favorite colors, second only to powder blue. I’m not a huge fan of getting dirty and my relationship with bugs is strained. But my son is all boy. Yesterday I watched him sit on the ground, placing handful after handful of dirt methodically into his lap. Then he stood up, grinned, and fell over onto a plant that, somewhat inexplicably, covered him in black soot. He picked himself up and toddled off to investigate a manhole cover from which he extracted a clod of dirt and grass which he sniffed and then put into his mouth. Like I said, he’s all boy." Cool, the world loves contrasts. "I worried that I wouldn’t know what to do with a boy. I didn’t want to be one of those mothers constantly racing after her son with a baby wipe yelling, “Don’t touch that! It’s dirty!” But would I be able to handle his perfect little face all covered in mud? I didn’t want to be one of those mothers holding his arm as he climbed to the top of the jungle gym, screeching, “Not so high! You’re going to fall!” But would I be able to stand down below as my fearless boy catapulted to the top of the climber with no regard whatsoever for the length of the drop? I didn’t want to be one of those mothers ripping the pots and pans out of his hands while sternly saying, “Not so loud!” But would I be able to handle the racket? So he grew and I worried, and I worried and he grew. And then, a funny thing happened. I realized I love the boyness of him. Of course, I love him -- he’s my baby. But I actually, truly, love all the things I worried I would hate." She is worried she would be too selfish to be a good parent. Actually that's a good sign. All good parenting takes it the willingness to subsume the self and make most-important the other, er, one's children. "He revels in the sounds things make when he bangs on them. This sofa cushion sounds different from the tabletop, the tabletop sounds different from the wall. We drum on things together, his joyful enthusiasm rubbing off on me. He experiments with the sounds his voice can make, sometimes a high-pitched squeak, sometimes a primal yell. And I whoop and holler, too, as we run through the grass. He thinks the sounds of words are funny. “Tissue” is a favorite and “idea.” I discover I think they’re hilarious, too, and we say them over and over and roll on the floor giggling. We look at bugs and birds and dogs. We examine dirt. We look into holes in the ground and peer through fences. We chase airplanes and make “whoosh whoosh” noises. He hands me wood chips and leaves and sticks for safe-keeping. I point out ants marching single-file along a tree trunk and garbage trucks roaring stinkily by." Success! She was able to subsume the self. Her son will be better for it. "I love the boyness of him. And thank goodness I do. Because it’s who he is. No matter how I feel about it. So I hold my breath as he learns to climb. And I make sure he has a good long soak in the bath at night. And I watch his face as he dreams, wondering what mischief we’ll get up to tomorrow. My son is all boy. And that’s just fine with me." Don't expect me to comment, it's perfect.
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Woman goes on romantic trip to Paris to marry HERSELF
How much would shelve to hate herself to need to change her name, and marry herself? "A 42-year-old American woman has revealed she spent up to $7,000 (£5,000) on a trip to Paris - so she could marry herself. Beautiful Existence - who changed her name from Desiree Longabaugh - from Seattle, splashed the cash on a romantic ceremony under the Eiffel Tower, flights to France, accommodation for a week, and a birthday celebration while there." I once had a litigation where the plaintiff had changed her name to Ellen Earth. She was. What a whackjob! "Now the mother-of-two is encouraging others to marry themselves ahead of her first anniversary in June 2016. 'It was hugely emotional,' Ms Existence said. 'Looking at myself on that screen as I Skyped the officiant, saying exactly what I wanted to say to myself was soul-shifting." Talk about revealing a lot about one's self! I wonder how many mirrors she wears out each year? "Ms Existence was previously married for ten years and has two sons - Edge, 16 and Epic, six. During that time, friends would confide in her that they thought she had lost her spark. They told her she 'wasn't herself' when she was married, and questioned what had happened to the independent, optimistic woman they knew. A painful divorce then left her wondering if traditional marriage was for her." This story would have been infinitely better if the "reporter" had taken the time to track-down and interview the exes. That would have been a rollicking good time! "She was further discouraged when she met a new partner and they decided to cohabit but not marry, only to find he wasn't right for her either. She discovered self-marriage on social media and spoke to other women who had done it. 'After years of exploring different theories on how to understand myself, self-marriage felt right,' she said. 'Why couldn't I have a fun, fantastic ceremony the way that I wanted it to be without somebody else's approval? * * * Within a month of finding out that self-marriage was an option, Ms Existence decided to have a ceremony herself." It took an entire month? That actually surprised me! "She explained: 'The highest measurement of success society pretty much has is whether or not you're in a couple, but it shouldn't be that way." Sure self-indulgent wankers should be measured as well. Sadly, I think she will find that marrying herself will be just as unfulfilling as living with herself before she married herself. I am not sure how dropping $7,000 on a Paris trip made her a better person. "Currently, self-marriage is not legally recognised. However, Ms Existence believes that this won't always be the case." Oh, I am sure there is a lawyer out there somewhere willing to take your money to "make it legal, " and to "fight for your rights." How can someone be this stupid and still remember to breath once in a while? "'It's not like I'm going to get a marriage certificate. Nobody recognizes it right now, unfortunately, but I do think that's something that will be on the horizon,' she said." Yeah, I get your point, today they would just laugh at your inane stupidity. "'There are a lot of people - women especially - who are not subscribing to the regular definition of marriage anymore.' Since announcing her marriage, Ms Existence said people's reactions have been positive, save for a few who don't really understand the concept." There are two kinds of people in the world, the those who laugh in her face, and those who pat her on the head and act like they understand level 11 narcissism. "'My six-year-old is too young to be anything but supportive. I talked things through with my eldest, but he's used to the fact that his mum doesn't subscribe to normal life protocol. 'I mean, I have a Mohawk. My name is Beautiful Existence." Strike 2 . . . strike 3 . . . yer, outathere! I thought she was done, but no, there's more! "Now, she is looking ahead to her first anniversary, when she plans to get a tattoo on her ring finger to celebrate." The gift that keeps on giving. I wonder if after reading this her exes would like her back? No, I don't think so either! "Currently, she occasionally wears a ring but would prefer something more permanent." I think a piercing would be nice, perhaps a 16d nail through the forehead, proving to all there is nothing to damage inside her vacuous cranium! Although she might want to go with a 30d to really hammer home the point! She is from Seattle, what can I say? GPAs Rising, Rising, Rising . . . how is it possible to achieve higher GPA's when 75% of the high school student body matriculates to college, compared to the days of yore when only 25% of the student body matriculated? My children argue it is because the students of today are more intelligent! Even a cursory review of YouTube would prove this theory questionable (links at the end). "This inflation does not reflect an increase in student achievement. Instead, according to Rojstaczer, colleges have felt pressure to reward students more and more lavishly for the same performance as higher education transformed into a “consumer-based culture” starting in the 1980s. “Students are paying more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the reward of a good grade for their purchase.” This explanation is complementary to Ross Dothan’s 2005 observation that neoliberalism produced a kind of “crisis of confidence” in academia, especially in the humanities, as its purpose changed from imbuing students with lifelong truths to maximizing their advantage in a competitive marketplace." I agree with Mead's solution. "This further strengthens the case, which we have been made more than once, for a standardized testing system to measure student performance across colleges. In addition to undermining intellectual standards, the lack of a rigorous college assessment system probably also favors students from elite schools at the expense of everyone else—if employers can’t count on student GPAs to deliver valuable information, they are more likely to defer to the quality of school attended. So a carefully constructed system of exams could help beef up standards, restrain inflation, and level the playing field by helping the many determined and ambitious students from West Texas State prove that they are just as capable as their Ivy League counterparts." Making Work Work in the 21st Century
"These new forms of work are going to continue to expand, and under the right conditions they can mean more flexibility for both workers/contractors and the businesses that bring them on. But we still have a system of benefits and regulation based on the old model—the paternalistic corporation. Benefits ranging from health insurance to retirement savings to unemployment and disability have yet to be established in a sustainable way for this new class of workers. There’s an opening here to create a new kind of financial services firm that can process payments and manage benefits for contractors and businesses in the gig economy, but this will be difficult to accomplish without changes to state and federal employment law." The fault line breaks between the Millennials and the Boomers. Ask a Boomer and he will tell you how everyone wants to work an 8-5 job 40 hours per week. Ask a Millennial and she will tell you she wants more flexibility, not a rigid 8-5 routine, but hours which suit her schedule, and days too, and she might not want to work the full 2,000 hours per year. Instead she might want to spend 6 weeks in Europe. "Over time, more and more Americans will likely operate in the gig economy, mixing part time and temporary employment with independent contractor jobs. People who work in this world should not be second class citizens, and they should not be inundated with the crazed paperwork requirements of an employment system that is oriented to old-fashioned long-term employment. Taxes need to be collected, retirement savings need to be accumulated, and people have to be included in disability, healthcare, and unemployment insurance programs, some of which will need to be redesigned to accommodate job-hopping and gig work. And that structure needs to be flexible and cost effective enough to make it easier for businesses to create jobs and for people to piece together a living from several different activities." The big change here is the need to apply creative destruction to the entire employment safety net. The Boomers will be shocked by this, but the Millennials will understand the need, and with a small amount of prompting will be willing to indulge these ideas. These changes do not need to alter the outcomes for people still in the old programs, although it would be appropriate to offer them buyouts to move to the new replacement programs, which will be, without doubt, better. Many of these changes will likely create strong pressure to eliminate the income, corporate, estate/gift, and payroll taxes, and convert them into some sort of consumption/sales tax. This would be a positive outcome. On the safety net side, the individual should be able to own, and control his own safety net assets, although among the poorer we will likely need to continue some sort of government assistance. The Third Way offers some answers to these issues, and I am sure we will find new arrangements once we begin to discuss these issues more deeply. "All this is part of one of the most important and complicated tasks our society faces: creating an institutional and legal framework for an information economy that will be as different from the industrial economy as that economy was from the agricultural economy that came before it. At the moment, both political parties seem more interested in peddling competing brands of nostalgia than in promoting a workable vision for the post-industrial economy in which millions of Americans already live and work." Yes, and failure means something more like this, Japan’s elderly turn to life of crime to ease cost of living - FT.com Japan has a debt of approximately 240% of GDP. What they spent that money on is unclear, but it is clear it was not on retirement funding for the elderly. "Japan’s prison system is being driven to budgetary crisis by demographics, a welfare shortfall and a new, pernicious breed of villain: the recidivist retiree. And the silver-haired crooks, say academics, are desperate to be behind bars. Crime figures show that about 35 per cent of shoplifting offences are committed by people over 60. Within that age bracket, 40 per cent of repeat offenders have committed the same crime more than six times. There is good reason, concludes a report, to suspect that the shoplifting crime wave in particular represents an attempt by those convicted to end up in prison — an institution that offers free food, accommodation and healthcare." Yikes, Japan's oldsters are breaking into prison?! "The mathematics of recidivism are gloomily compelling for the would-be convict. Even with a frugal diet and dirt-cheap accommodation, a single Japanese retiree with minimal savings has living costs more than 25 per cent higher than the meagre basic state pension of Y780,000 ($6,900) a year, according to a study on the economics of elderly crime by Michael Newman of Tokyo-based research house Custom Products Research." The solution for a fiscally healthy society would be to calculate the real cost of living for these retirees, and then provide financial assistance to alleviate this poverty problem. Prison is a very expensive alternative. But Japan is not a healthy society. It is a society with the worlds largest government debt, and an unbalanced budget which requires the government to borrow more each year. There is simply no more money for such trivialities as old age welfare pensions. Or something. To avoid a similar outcome the US needs to rethink our welfare state, reform our welfare state, and build something better. The progressives on both sides of the political isle will fight this tooth and nail! Mish has a nice piece on the gig economy . . . Yellen Gets Lovey-Dovey in Speech Citing “Other Tools” and More QE | MishTalk
. . . in a very weak speech to the Economic Club of New York. Mish ends, "'In essence the way in which it worked was by signaling that real assets were inferior to financial assets. The Fed, by going into an untested program of QE effectively ended up making things worse off,” said Hunt. At best, the Fed temporarily shifted some demand forward by inflating financial assets. In the process, the Fed created asset bubbles in equities and junk bonds, stimulated oil production via cheap financing to the point of a bust, and exacerbated problems of income inequality. QE wasn’t worth the problems it created. But the Fed is prepared for more of it." This is not quite true, the collapse of oil prices has had a positive economic outcome on the myriad oil despots the world round. However, this could have been accomplished without all the added pain, and problems which arose from the asset bubbles, and other problems. Scripps College Student Body President Says 'Trump 2016' Whiteboard Message Is 'Intentional Violence'
College should be a place, and time where young students are tested by difficult concepts, and harsh ideas, in order to temper the person, and create a stronger more resilient individual. Instead they are coddled, producing weak, malleable child-adults. We are failing our children. Glenn Reynolds: How PC culture is killing higher education The Sun Belt Is Rising Again, New Census Numbers Show | Newgeography.com
. . . and the cities, which were vaccinated by the 2008 Great Recession, are once again zombies, shambling towards their demise. Suburbs, exurbs, and rural living, however, is back on track to become the primary American living arrangement. Good! We have returned to the pre 2009-2011 aberration where it looked like Americans might be moving back to the city. So, how big a trend is this? "These trends predate the recession. Since 2000, the biggest migration winners in percentage terms are Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Orlando. In total numbers since 2000 it’s also a familiar list, led by places like Phoenix (net gain: 705,000), Dallas-Ft. Worth (569,000), Atlanta (547,000), Riverside-San Bernardino (513,000) and Houston (496,000). The biggest losers are also familiar, led by the New York metropolitan area, which has lost 2.65 million net migrants since 2000, followed by Los Angeles (negative 1.65 million) and Chicago (down 880,000). Remarkably the two metro areas that have benefited the most from the digitization of the economy are in the loser’s column; between them San Jose and San Francisco lost over 550,000 domestic migrants since 2000." Big! The old line progressive blue model cities are losing population to the new, and much more dynamic sunbelt cities. "The other big finding from the new estimates: suburbs are back. In the wake of the housing bust it was widely predicted that the ‘burbs were doomed by high gas prices, millennial preferences and a profound shift of employment to the core cities. The New York Times NYT -0.08% evenpublished fantasies on how the suburban carcass could be carved up, envisioning suburban three-car garages “subdivided into rental units with street front cafés, shops and other local businesses” while abandoned pools would become skateboard parks. As economist Jed Kolko has noted, the much celebrated era when core cities grew faster than suburbs — the immediate 2009-2011 aftermath of the recession — turned out to be remarkably short-lived. From July 2014-July 2015, only seven out of 53 core cities added more domestic migrants than their suburbs. Of these, the District of Columbia (Washington) could be considered high density urban; the other five core counties are functionally more suburban than urban (Phoenix, Raleigh, Richmond, Sacramento and San Antonio). Overall domestic migration continues from the core cities to the suburbs. Over the last year core counties lost a net 185,000 domestic migrants, while the suburban counties gained 187,000." If other people are hell, then the city is hell on steroids. "These trends are likely to continue as long as the economy achieves even modest growth. One big factor will be the migration of millennials, now headed increasingly to Sun Belt cities and suburbs. Since 2010, among educated millennials, the fastest growth in migration has been to such lower-cost regions as Atlanta, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and even Cleveland. This is largely a product of high housing prices. According to Zillow, rents claim upward of 45% of income in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami compared to less than 30% of income in places like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. The costs of purchasing a house are even more lopsided: in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, a monthly mortgage takes, on average, close to 40% of income, compared to 15% nationally. Millennials are also headed increasingly to the suburbs. According to the National Association of Realtors, 80% of the homes purchased by millennials between 2013 and 2014 were detached houses, and 8% had chosen attached housing. This trend will accelerate in the next few years, suggests Kolko, as the peak of the millennial wave turns 30." Apparently the indoctrination of the Millennial in K-12 and college has not held as well as anticipated. They seem to be able to make rational economic decisions once it is their money, and not the money of their parents, or others. Expect this awakening to continue as Millennials turn to work, and begin families. These trials will result in many of the Millennials being slowly be washed of their inane love for all things socialist. Remember the older Millennials are just now turning 30. Kotkin concludes, "America’s geography will be increasingly dominated by Sun Belt cities as well as suburbs. This challenges the preferred narrative among most planners and the mainstream media, as well as some developers who believe more Americans desire to live in high cost, high density locales. Some day perhaps the facts — as seen both in this year’s numbers and longer term trends — will intrude on the narrative. Dispersion is back, and getting stronger. It’s time that developers, planners and the media adjust to the facts, rather than just reflect their prejudices." Planners will not change. Portlandia is proof that the planner will continue to believe what amounts to religious beliefs regardless of the depth of the facts arrayed against him. These are intelligent people who are sufficiently clever to trap themselves in a belief net which is impervious to reality. ISIS carries out Good Friday crucifixion of Indian priest in Yemen
. . . of ISIS as the anti-God element! How stupid could these wankers be? That stupid. Is Chicago the next Detroit?
The state of Chicago is desperate. The state of Illinois is desperate. Bills Come Due in Illinois: $22 Billion The state of Chicago's schools is desperate. Chicago Is Falling Apart The blue model is done, shouldn't we retire it? I can't imagine the cost of 1,000 "hanger" guns would have been anywhere near the cost of 1,000 FN-FNC's, so just think of the cost savings!
The Belgians are not serious if this is how they treat security, er, security theater! The FN FNC: Affordable Select-Fire 5.56 - The Firearm Blog |
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