Interesting article from Salon.com. The bottom line is that you're not going to find a lot of the kind of meat you'd buy for your own consumption at a grocery store. Yes, there is a reason that you can get a huge bag of dog food for not a lot…
We like to think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as days when young children give lots of hugs to their loving parents. We don’t like to consider that these days are also days when thousands of innocent children are beaten by their parents, their anguished cries often not heard outside of their dysfunctional homes. Saddest of all, these children are condemned to be beaten and screamed at by the people they trust most.
In 1988, I was waiting for an elevator at the State office building where I worked as an Assistant Attorney General. Many social workers had their offices in the same building, and several of those social workers were also waiting for an elevator.
All of a sudden, a middle-aged man started yelling at a three-year-old boy, who started crying. The boy weighed about 40 pounds. The man quickly got angrier and started smacking the boy violently with the palm of his hand-maybe it was his fist. Whump! Whump! Whump! The little boy was now breathless and whimpering. Like the other half-dozen people waiting for an elevator, however, I did nothing but stand there horrified. The man cocked his arm back to strike the boy yet again when one of the social workers jumped forward and yelled at the man: “Stop hitting that child!”
With that, the man looked confused, then angry, then more confused, then meek. The social worker further instructed him: “follow me.” The man followed the social worker, presumably to the social worker’s office. …
This disturbing article about the school crisis in Iraq highlights just one of the many long-term disastrous results of George Bush's decision to invade Iraq. While Bush pushes his failing "No Child Left Behind" policy here in America, his mess in Iraq is ensuring that an entire generation of children is…
This is the proposal by Dave Johnson of Huffpo: "If the COSTS of the occupation were actually being paid by the public-at-large -- instead of borrowing the money and making our kids pay it off -- it would end tomorrow." Here's the plan: 1) A huge-ass whopping tax on everyone…
As a general rule, simple questions, especially simple questions with purportedly obvious answers, are the most interesting questions.
While I attended a wedding this weekend, I noticed all of the sex partners seated together, you know . . . husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends (and a few gay couples).
Why do sex partners sit together at public rituals, I wondered. The obvious answer is that it’s because most sex partners live together, right? Other people thus see sex partners as couples and feel that they should be invited to important rituals together, especially to important rites of passage, such as weddings. But why do so many sex partners live together (and hence get invited to prominent social events as couplets)? After all, instead of living with her sex partner, maybe a woman would rather live with (and then potentially be invited to go to weddings with) a non-sex partner friend or neighbor, or perhaps even her non-sex-partner plumber or accountant. Or maybe she’d rather attend public gatherings by herself, so that she could freely mingle. The norm, however, is obvious to anyone who bothers to scan the crowd at a wedding: the great majority of people who attend such gatherings attend them as sexually-paired couples.
Someone who followed the SSSM model might say that this behavior (of attending prominent rituals with your spouse) is simply learned, or that it is “social convention” or that it “feels right.” There is a compelling story that can be told about paternity …