Generosity Of Spirit
Thursday, December 18th, 2008How often do we do something, say something, share something–not because we will get something in return, but just because we want to give a gift? If there is one trait we value in other people, it’s generosity of spirit. These are the forgiving types. They really truly listen to you, even when you’re telling the same story again. These people emanate kindness. You just want to be around them.
I’ve known a couple people like this. Their goodness just came from some authentic place from within. They have a certain decency. One of these people died this last year from cancer. I didn’t write about him. I just couldn’t. I’ve been too ticked off about it. He was one of the good ones. Sweet-natured, loving and giving. Everyone loved and admired him. I’ve come to believe that the old idea that only the good die young may well be right. (In that case, I can expect to live for a very long time.)
I guess I bring up the whole “generosity of the spirit” thing because it is particularly important during times of economic difficulty to find that generous place–for ourselves. When we live miserly, withholding, stingy lives, we tend to draw that sort of energy into our lives, too. It isn’t about money, either. It is possible to have this spirit with lots of money–Old Ebeneezer Scrooge, right? And it is possible to be generous, charitable, with next to nothing.
It’s something that I’d like more of in myself. I would like to be more genuine and possess the expansive kindness that makes other people feel good about themselves. Too many people and experiences are just difficult and mean, I don’t want to contribute to that world and make another person’s day diminished by my own smallness.
So, in honor of Mark, rather than focus on his passing, I want to focus on what he brought to this world and emulate it. There are too few people like Mark. Maybe he was innately good. I don’t know. But I suspect he had to work to be loving and kind and make choices to be generous like everyone else does. I think he made those choices so often, it became a habit, a way of life, his character. He touched many lives with his generosity of spirit and is proof that good guys do win.
Long Hair & Men
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008Long Hair & Men
A hair-cut once created relationship misery.
The Sky Isn’t Falling Quite Yet
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008So I put up a link that makes it seem like the United States is bankrupt–like bankrupt now. Turns out that the data The DC Examiner reported on is manipulated and essentially crap:
The United States of America is bankrupt. Don’t believe it? Consider this: Federal obligations now exceed the collective net worth of all Americans, according to the New York-based Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Washington politicians and bureaucrats have essentially mortgaged everything We the People own so they can keep spending our tax dollars like there’s no tomorrow.
The foundation’s grim calculations are based on Sept. 30 consolidated federal statements, which showed that Americans’ total household net worth, diminished by falling stock prices and home equity, is $56.5 trillion. But rising costs for unfunded social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security increased to $56.4 trillion – and that was before the more recent stock market crash, $700 billion bank bailout, and monster federal deficits chalked up in October and November.
“Given more recent developments, it’s clear that America now owes more than its citizens are worth,” said Foundation president David M. Walker, the former Comptroller-General of the United States who has been trying to warn Americans of the coming financial tsunami for years, to no avail. So, after Uncle Sam bails out bankers, Wall Street gamblers, carmakers and over-their-head homeowners, who’ll bail out Uncle Sam?
They palmed a card, actually two cards: the first one is they’re using household net worth … but that leaves out corporate net worth, so they’re ignoring, eg, Exxon. The second is that they’re comparing future obligations to pay with current assets, so it’s like saying you’re “bankrupt” because the total of your expected future living expenses exceeds your net worth.
I wrote about the same comparison in PJM early in the year — can’t link it usefully, PJM has hosed something — making the correct comparison of total US assets per person versus total US obligations per person, and it was about $300K assets vs $160K obligations, or over the whole population, about $90 trillion versus $48 trillion. Most of that wealth is real stuff — land, houses, factories, etc — and hasn’t gone away in the last year.
You know, things are bad enough right now. Much of the economic stall these days is because companies are just sitting and holding. That is, they aren’t taking risks to grow, expand and innovate because they don’t want their cash tied up if the whole shebang is going to implode. Well, it starts to become a self fulfilling prophecy.
There is no question that people have lived beyond their means and some have gone so far that they can’t get it back. It is going to take some time to correct this cultural problem. People are going to have to cut back and pay off debt.
There is no question that the banking industry and the people on Wall Street played with funny money and in some cases outright defrauded people. It is important to remember that stocks and funds are only as good as the businesses they back and the people who are in those businesses. The pressure to perform and profit at all costs creates an environment ripe for fraud.
Even with these problems, it does not help the economy or the American psyche to find problems where there aren’t any. This behavior causes more problems and its irresponsible.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
Are You Uglier Than A 5th Grader?
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008‘Tis the season of school concerts and behold the cherubic angels sing and play bells and perform vague “winter” music. But I’m not going to talk about political correctness run amok in our schools. No, today, I’m going to talk about the ugliest year in school–the year we all look back on with regret.
Fifth grade is ugly.
There were over fifty kids gathered last night. Individually, the kids are cute in an awkward, pot-bellied, big-pawed puppy sort of way. Collectively, the effect is hideous.
Teeth are too big for heads. Boys don’t care about personal hygiene and they are in serious need of some. Hormones are making bodies bulgy in all sorts of places. Girls are heads and shoulders taller than the boys. Some boys are midgets. Some look like short men. Kids are still coerced by parents, or just don’t care very much, about pants that are too short, hair that’s too straggly and long, glasses that are too big for the face, and shoes that don’t go with the clothes. Fifth grade is a fashion disaster.
And I’m not casting any stones here. I wish I could find the picture so I could scan it and show you people what I looked like in 5th grade. I’ll try to describe it. First, mom put me in a brown plaid shirt–you know, because plaid looks so good in pictures. I think I might have worn one of those bolo ties that were popular in the day. (Who could forget the leather vest stage? You know you had one.) Then there were the big man glasses. Those were awesome. They were the glasses that came with the insurance plan, don’t you know, and looked great on boys AND girls. They were straight across the top and too big with rounded bottoms. Did I mention that I carried a violin case everywhere?
There is a saving grace. In fifth grade, there still seems to be a measure of ignorant bliss. That is, the lack of self-awareness confers happiness. By seventh grade, a kid becomes aware and therefore miserable and that’s kinda sad. Wouldn’t it be great to hold on to nerdy selves and embrace it and not go through thirty years of angst trying to be something we’re not, only to come back around to who we were to begin with? It’s not like our essence changes, but we do try to package ourselves for public consumption–and let’s face it, to mate and be mate-worthy.
5th grade might be ugly, but its the beauty of the age that really makes grown-ups mourn.
Is Twitter Evil, Too?
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008We tend to think that those who run online systems like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and the grand poo-bah Google make them passive robot-like vehicles for democratic action. That’s not exactly true. At the very least someone wrote the code in a certain way to achieve a certain outcome. It doesn’t have to be a nefarious plot to inadvertently cause harm.
Still, there are living, breathing people behind these companies who watch their technology grow and develop and make money. These people have ideologies and philosophies and the ability to manipulate their domain either very specifically or generally. Imagine a developer constructing a neighborhood. He can mess things up passively–use the wrong kind of pipe fittings that causes leaks in all the homes. Or he can mess things up specifically–hang the cabinets wrong, “forget” some special hardware, order the wrong tile for a customer he doesn’t particularly like. Software developers can do the same thing. Heck, hardware developers can too. Sony was found to have put a chip in their machines to collect data.
A couple years ago, there was a big internet stink over a psycho lefty who was harassing and threatening a conservative blogger (Jeff Goldstein). I was watching and writing about the episode. The conservative blogger ended up with a denial of service attack. Around the same time, a DOS attack happened to my blog. And then, my blog just disappeared. Whoosh! At the time, I was using Blogger (hosted by Google). Another conservative blogger, Betsy Newmark, had her blogger domain name taken and given to someone else. Blogger just “lost” her whole archive of blog posts. This is Google we’re talking about. They lose nothing. After two weeks of wrangling, Google “found” her domain and archives and restored them.
So now, a conservative Twitterer is wondering if the same sort of manipulation is happening to him. Remember the Motrin Moms? I barely blogged about it because it seemed like another tempest in a D-cup, typical feminist fare. The women got worked up because they were offended by a stupid (and it was stupid) Motrin commercial. Well, a conservative Tech blogger in California, Brooksbayne shares his story:
It’s purely coincidental that my last post in the public timeline was regarding #motrinmoms, right? Although, theoretically, it wouldn’t be difficult for the devs to create another Bit column in Twitter’s database and keep people’s posts from hitting the public timeline and search by marking them hidden behind the scenes, but that would be censorship. Is @brooksbayne being censored by a liberal at Twitter who is sympathetic to the #motrinmoms? I have a feeling we’re about to find out.
Here’s the thing. It IS possible for these companies to censor and manipulate and they can do it all behind a technological shroud. I’m not for being a conspiracy theorist, but I do think that it’s wise to realize that the internet and it’s businesses are a sea of people driving technology, not the other way around.
It is in everyone’s interest to keep these operators honest.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews
Orgasms During Childbirth–UPDATED
Friday, December 12th, 2008I guess it’s going to be all sex all the time today at the blog. Oh hell, why not? The Blago scandal is boringly devoid of sex.
Back in the 70s when flower children everywhere were making sweaty, hot, hallucinogenic, pill-protected, STD-infested monkey love, a strange thing happened: babies. I know, it was a shocking side-effect to all the lovin’, man, and some of the parents kicked their wanton daughters out to suffer the indignities of being a single, pregnant, shunned lady. Enter Stephen and Ina May Gaskin who took in these women at a place called The Farm in Tennessee. I actually dig these two hippies. They revolutionized prenatal care and were forward thinking about unnecessary medical procedures like episiotomy, shaving, knocking the mom out during birth, etc.
The Gaskins also introduced the notion of an orgasmic birth.
I’ve read Ina May Gaskin’s books and seen the pictures. She was a revolutionary, forward-thinking woman who cared for many, many women. Her work transformed lives for the better. Now, there is a “new” childbirth movement centered on “orgasmic birth“:
First thing next month (Friday January 2) will be the primetime debut of a film that has been making the “under the radar” rounds of women and film festivals since May. ABC’s 20/20 will air the documentary “Orgasmic Birth”, by Debra Pascali-Bonaro, a childbirth educator and a doula, which asks the question: What would happen if women were taught to enjoy birth rather than endure it?
The message of the film is “that women can journey through labor and birth in all different ways. And there are a lot more options out there, to make this a positive and pleasurable experience,” Pascali-Bonaro tells ABC. “I hope women watching and men watching don’t feel that what we’re saying is every woman should have an orgasmic birth.”
But the title certainly catches attention, referring to what Pascali-Bonaro calls “the best kept secret” of child birth – that some women report having an orgasm as the baby exits the birth canal.
Right.
Having given birth rather easily, sans medication and more than once, the notion that women can experience sexual bliss during birth seems absurd. I’ve seen the videos and I’m not hating on any woman’s experience, but please. All sorts of changes need to happen in prenatal and birthing care, but the wild assertions and expectations of orgasms will defeat the true aims of the natural birth activists by making them look like wild-eyed nutters.
And another thing, I recognize that the birth canal has multifaceted uses, still, I can’t help but to think that this orgasm business is just one more way to sexualize, well, everything. The birthing isn’t about having a healthy baby or a woman surrendering to the primal forces of motherhood. Oh no! It’s selfish and all about a peak experience, man. It’s the narcissism-part of the hippie thing that bugs me.
Motherhood isn’t entirely about self-sacrifice, but giving birth is pretty darn self-sacrificial. Your body isn’t your own. And out of the experience comes an entirely new creature. And yes, some women have babies to be the center of attention and make it all about themselves. They are annoying. They don’t need encouragement. This orgasm business will just add fuel to the self-obsessed culture. It will also delude women into thinking that it’s a likely outcome. Silly-headed women who believe this will often end up with C-sections because they have such inane expectations of birth. It’s called labor for a reason. Birthing is hard work.
One of the most barbaric medical fields in America is obstetrics. For reasons of liability, ignorance and tradition, a process that has existed since the beginning of time is made into a “procedure”. Birthing is a process for woman and child and with different treatment, women would be empowered by motherhood rather than being the recipient of medicine. Babies aren’t a disease to be cured. Right now, that’s often how pregnancy and birthing are treated. That needs to change.
UPDATED:
Fausta adds this:
Certainly, childbirth is the most binding experience a couple can possibly experience. A considerate and supportive husband can and will do a lot of things to ease the wife’s discomfort during labor. In a sense, it is a spiritual experience, too. But take my word for it, having a fully formed, seven and a half pound, twenty-two inch human being squeeze out of a narrow opening doesn’t happen without pain. That’s just the way it is.
Dr. Melissa
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