The other side of parenting

I've enjoyed being a parent, though it has sometimes been a lot of work. I'm proud of who my two daughters are turning out to be. They teach me many things, including humility. Recently I read this post at Huffpo, an extraordinarily sad post, or at least that is how I reacted. This website features the comments of people for whom parenting is a sad, and sometimes dismal experience. It includes a "confessional" where people often openly express their dark thoughts regarding their own children. Here's the post, and here's the "Scary Mommy Confessional."

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Bernie Sanders sums up what we can learn from Denmark

At Reader Supported News, Bernie Sanders notes that Denmark and the United States are very different countries, but insists that there are lessons the U.S. can learn from Denmark:

While it is difficult to become very rich in Denmark no one is allowed to be poor. Health care in Denmark is universal, free of charge and high quality. . . . They spend about 11 percent of their GDP on health care. We spend almost 18 percent. Danes understand that the first few years of a person's life are the most important in terms of intellectual and emotional development. . . [M]others get four weeks of paid leave before giving birth. They get another 14 weeks afterward. . . . [B]oth parents have the right to 32 more weeks of leave during the first nine years of a child's life. The state covers three-quarters of the cost of child care, more for lower-income workers. [V]irtually all higher education in Denmark is free. In Denmark, adequate leisure and family time are considered an important part of having a good life. Every worker in Denmark is entitled to five weeks of paid vacation plus 11 paid holidays. The United States is the only major country that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation time. The result is that fewer than half of lower-paid hourly wage workers in our country receive any paid vacation days.

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New Pope jumps over a very low bar

Non-believers have been villainized for so long by religious leaders that it leaves us flummoxed when a religious leader fails to take an unfair swipe at us. The religious leader I'm referring to is Pope Francis, and what he said was resoundingly refreshingly ordinary, though it sounded so good coming from the leader of the Catholic Church:

"Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis has said in his latest urging that people of all religions, and none, work together. "Just do good, and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical reply to the hypothetical comment: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."
The new Pope has thus jumped over a very low bar. One small step for a man--one giant leap for a religious leader.

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A breast is a breast is a breast

According to PolicyMic,

Ladies of New York , you are free to walk bare-breasted through the city! New York City's 34,000 police officers have been instructed that, should they encounter a woman in public who is shirtless but obeying the law, they should not arrest her. This is a good step towards gender parity in public spaces.
So, a woman's bare breast should be treated no differently than a man's breast under the law. Nonetheless, the fact that this NY law is so contentious (or at least newsworthy), means that a breast is not the same as an arm or a leg, especially a woman's breast. I explore the existential connotations of breasts here.

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The credibility problem of the Fed

What is the Fed good at? Not much, according to Jessie Eisenger of ProPublica:

Investors . . . have almost no confidence in the Federal Reserve or the economics profession. And for good reason. It's impressive that the Fed and many economists have successfully predicted the path of interest rates and inflation in the wake of the worst financial crisis in a generation. But neither the central bank nor academicians managed to predict or prevent the crisis in the first place. The failure dwarfs the accomplishment. The Fed's track record is out-and-out abysmal.The Fed began its lender-of-last-resort role in 2007, but did little to avoid or minimize the financial crisis. Once it hit, it did the right thing to flood the markets with money, but — along with the Treasury and a passive Justice Department — let banks and top executives off the hook. And now, asset prices are going wild. Junk bonds are up. Stocks are up. Housing in Phoenix and Brooklyn is going mad. This prebubble euphoria only undermines the Federal Reserve's fragile credibility. It reinforces the notion that it seems to know only two things: how to inflate bubbles and how to studiously not recognize them.

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