Attack of the Killer Turkeys

The story comes to us from Brookline, Mass. Nothing says Thanksgiving better than a band of killer turkeys attacking the homes and property of the good citizens of Massachusetts.

Here's a link to the local news story, with SFW visuals.

It's Not the Infidelity, Stupid

Several weeks ago I commented on a new study about divorce.  Norwegian researchers discovered that when couples share the household chores they are 50% more likely to get divorced. Call it the price of gender equity at home.

Naturally, we do not want to plight our troth to a single study. Rational creatures that we are, we seek more confirming evidence

Today, the London Telegraph reports that a British law firm has discovered that marriages most often fail over issues like dividing household chores.

The failure to reach a satisfactory household division of labor causes more divorces than, say, infidelity.

The Telegraph explains:

According to analysis of divorce cases by Gateley, a UK law firm, seven in ten marriages fall apart because couples fail to reach an agreement on decisions relating to the home, such as how monthly finances are arranged, where couples live or how household responsibilities are carved up.

Only one in five marriages ends because of infidelity, the law firm said.

Married couples can solve the problem, the British lawyers say, by thinking of marriage as a “business merger,” or, as I would call it, an alliance.

Conducting a marriage is best considered to be a complex negotiation. Assuming that everything will work out because two people love each other is a formula for divorce.

Today, people marry later than they ever have. No longer are young marrieds teenagers in their salad days.

In principle, life experience teaches negotiation skills. The older you are the better you should be at working out differences without resorting to drama.

Therefore, we should expect that mature adults would best be able to negotiate the terms of their merger to everyone’s satisfaction.

Yet, this is apparently not the case.

Attorney Elizabeth Hassall explained:

Yes it’s romantic to be walking down the aisle, but the realities of a ‘merger’ are a little more cut and dry, It is often the case that people simply don’t think about it, or feel comfortable discussing life choices, but what is apparent is that going into a marriage blind could be a recipe for disaster.

Most people today believe that marriage is an expression of love between equal partners. Of course, it isn’t. It never has been.

Blind romantics sometimes believe that any discussion about how to divide up household responsibilities will sully their love.  As Hassall suggests, they are “going into a marriage blind.”

Strangely, enough, in the old days when people married younger they did not have these problems. Today’s older married couples do. How can that happen?

The mystery is more apparent than real. In the past roles were clearly defined. Husbands and wives knew what they had to do, knew what was expected of them, knew what their responsibilities were and were happy to fulfill their roles.  

Different cultures defined rules differently, but most were defined by gender and most created separate spheres of authority and responsibility.

In most cases the home was a woman’s domain. She held the power and the authority.

This did not mean that she did everything. It did mean that everyone knew who was in charge. 

When both parties to the marriage know and understand this division of household labor there is less chance for confusion and encroachment.

Today’s young women consider household chores to be a form of  domestic servitude. Too many of them have accepted the mindless feminist dictum that being a suburban housewife is akin to being in a concentration camp.

These women see men as adversaries and potential oppressors. They do not discuss the division of household chores because they are afraid that the ensuing fight will diminish their marriage prospects.

When they get married they discover that their husbands were brought up by mothers who taught them not to do household chores. And they also discover that, often enough, having two people in the kitchen is a formula for chaos.

Ultimately, the problem seems to come down to finance. One might note that Japanese couples do not have as many problems over household finances because wives have complete control over them. They do not argue about where to live because a wife’s decision is final.

In a culture where wives are homemakers, many of the problems that bedevil contemporary marriages diminish.

The Telegraph reports:

Of the seven in ten marriages that fail because people can not agree on simple domestic issues, by far the most common cause is lack of agreement over finances. One in eight of these marriages disintegrate because couples are unable to agree on where to settle down.

Having broken down the traditional division of household labor, modern couples often face the task of reinventing the wheel.

They refuse to respect tradition and insist that they can do it better than anyone else. Too often they pay for their arrogance with their marriages. 

Hillary Clinton's Accomplishments

Now that she is about to leave the political stage Hillary Clinton is being embraced and fawned over by the media.

It has been left to Ann Althouse to ask the only relevant question about Hillary’s political career, first as United States Senator; second, as Secretary of State:

My question: Has Hillary Clinton ever registered an actual accomplishment? She's been given some positions of responsibility, and now she's stepping down (perhaps to return). But tell me: What are her achievements, if any?

How to Save Your Marriage

Young people are good at dating. Some are good at hooking up. Some have even mastered the skills required to conduct a relationship.

Yet, many young people do not have the skills required to sustain a good marriage.

Laura Doyle is addressing women, and we will maintain her rhetorical posture. She sums up the problem:

Unfortunately most women didn't have good relationship role-models. We are largely the product of single parents, broken homes or marriages that we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy -- the equivalent of learning oral care from parents with false teeth.

Surely, Doyle is correct.

But, let’s not overlook the role that the culture plays.

As a culture we are much more interested in marital dysfunction than we are in marital success. The former is dramatic; the latter is boring.

We have been that the right way to improve things is to identify problems and obsess over them.

The more we focus on problems, the more we are blind to what is right about marriages.

The culture also tells women, in particular, that true love and good sex will solve all marital difficulties.

Many women have also been led to believe that in a good marriage all tasks are shared equally. Yet, as a recent study has pointed out, marriages where men and women share chores equally are 50% more likely to end in divorce.

If your goal is to make your marriage work, you do best to ignore much of what the culture is telling you. You do better to take a close look at the skills that Doyle defines.

Doyle begins by telling women to be good to themselves by spending some time every day making themselves happy.

That sounds innocuous enough.

She explains that if a wife does not do this, she will be placing the burden of making her happy entirely on her husband.

If a man comes home to a wife who is in a good mood, then he is more likely to want to make her happy. If she is always in a foul mood he is going to feel like she is seeing him as medicine.

Second, Doyle advises wives not to try to control their husbands. That entails not criticizing, not complaining and not trying to make him over into something that he is not.

Criticism is corrosive because, Doyle explains, a wife who finds fault with her husband is telling him that she believes him to be incompetent.

Imagine how your put-upon husband is going to react when he runs into a woman who tells him that he looks great, is clever and should be running the company.

Doyle’s third skill involves the expression of gratitude. When a husband offers his wife a gift or when he offers to help her, she should accept the gift or the help graciously even when it is not exactly what she wants.

In Doyle’s words:

When your husband gives you something that's not what you had in mind, receive it anyway by saying, "You're so thoughtful. Thank you." Deflecting a gift or a compliment is rejecting the giver and the emotional connection you could have had. When your husband offers to bathe the kids, accept his help graciously no matter how imperfectly he does it.

Gift-giving is at the basis of good relationships. If a wife is happy to receive a gift she will receive more. If she criticizes the gift she will receive less.

Doyle states correctly that rejecting a gift is rejecting the giver. Rejecting your husband will not make him want to be a better husband. It might make him look for acceptance elsewhere.

Doyle’s fourth skill is a variation on the themes she has been developing: respect your man, see the best in him. After all, you married him, so he must have many good qualities.

Too often women have been taught to see the worst and to believe that they are doing men a favor by trying to correct them.

Unfortunately, if you see the worst in your husband—or in any other human being—he will unconsciously try to fulfill your expectations by doing poorly.

Doyle explains:

You're too smart to have married a dumb guy, so if he seems dumb now, it's because you're focused on his shortcomings. It's not that you made a mistake in marrying him, it's that you've been focused on his mistakes since you married him. A man who feels respected by the woman who knows him best also feels self-respect, which is far more attractive than cowering and hostility.

Lack of respect causes more divorces than cheating does because for men, respect is like oxygen. They need it more than sex. Respect means that you don't dismiss, criticize, contradict or try to teach him anything. Of course he won't do things the same way you do; for that, you could have just married yourself. But with your respect, he will once again do the things that amazed and delighted you to begin with -- so much so that you married him.

When wives criticize, complain, contradict or try to teach their husbands something, they are showing disrespect.

Next, in time for Thanksgiving, Doyle restates her thought about gift-receiving. She advises  wives to express gratitude three times a day.

Make a habit, she is saying, of thanking your husband. A man who feels appreciated will do more for you than a man who is being attacked for not doing enough.

Doyle describes her own experience:

Today I thank him for washing dishes, replacing light bulbs and working hard at his business. The more grateful I am for what he does, the more inspired he is to do things I appreciate, which makes me feel cherished and adored.

Her last skill involves vulnerability.

Many women will recoil from the suggestion to show vulnerability. Isn’t it just another sexual stereotype? Hasn’t the culture taught young women to be fiercely independent and autonomous?

Doyle disagrees. Allow her to express her thought:

When you're vulnerable you don't care about being right, you're just open and trusting enough to say "I miss you" instead of "you never spend time with me." It means you simply say, "ouch!" when he's insensitive instead of retaliating. That vulnerability completely changes the way he responds to you.

Vulnerability is not only attractive, it's the only way to get to that incredible feeling of being loved just the way you are by someone who knows you well. There's nothing like the joy of intimacy that results from vulnerability. It really is worth dropping the burden of being an efficient, overscheduled superwoman to have it.

It sounds simple, but there is a world of difference between “I miss you” and “You never spend time with me.”

The latter is an accusation and a criticism; it is whiny and complainy.

Would you want to spend more time with someone who criticizes you and complains about you? You would probably be thinking that you are right not to spend too much time with her.

Finally, Doyle suggests that wives drop the façade or the burden of being a superwoman. If a woman is constantly on the move, constantly in action, and never has a minute for herself she will have nothing left to give her husband.

Doyle is addressing herself to women, but surely husbands would do well to work on their own marriage skills. These need not be identical to those that Doyle prescribes for wives, but they ought to manifest good character, a generous nature and a willingness to see the best, not the worst in one’s wife.

Will 2013 Be 1937 Redux?

As Shakespeare said: “Comparisons are odorous.”

It is probably not the best idea to look to the past for lessons about the future. But, even if history never really repeats itself, it does offer hints into what may lie ahead.

While all left-leaning pundits and politicos have been cheering Barack Obama’s great victory in the election, another group of voters has not been quite so sanguine.

The people who vote with their money in the stock market have hit it hard over these past three weeks. Everyone’s favorite stock, Apple, has been down over 20% from its high.

As I write, the market is rallying, but do keep in mind that no market goes straight up or down. A bear market will use all manner of head fakes to separate you from your money.

A lot of people are hunkering down in the stock market because there’s nowhere else to go. Like people who had survived Hurricane Irene, they assume that they can survive the oncoming storm. Besides, bond yields are so low that stock dividends have become the only reliable source of income.

And yet, this makes investors especially vulnerable to market declines. More so since very few people, and certainly not the press, are alarmed about the dangers that might lie ahead.

Everyone is chattering about the fiscal cliff, but everyone seems to agree that it will be avoided. Few seem to recognize that any deal will be detrimental to the investment climate.

Whatever you think about the fiscal cliff, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that business investment has already fallen off a cliff:

U.S. companies are scaling back investment plans at the fastest pace since the recession, signaling more trouble for the economic recovery.

Half of the nation's 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders have announced plans to curtail capital expenditures this year or next, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of securities filings and conference calls.

Nationwide, business investment in equipment and software—a measure of economic vitality in the corporate sector—stalled in the third quarter for the first time since early 2009. Corporate investment in new buildings has declined.

At the same time, exports are slowing or falling to such critical markets as China and the euro zone as the global economy downshifts, creating another drag on firms' expansion plans.

Famed investor Jim Rogers has long been predicting that 2013 would be a bad year for stocks. It’s probably not a great idea to bet against Jim Rogers.

This morning Amity Shlaes, an authority on the Great Depression, author of the book, The Forgotten Man, suggested that 2013 was beginning to look a lot like 1937.

If Barack Obama is the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt and if his policies attempted to duplicate the success of the New Deal, why wouldn’t his second term look like FDR’s second term.

If you don’t recall, in 1937, the year after Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected for the first time, the stock market and the economy fell off a cliff.

FDR, like BHO had used massive government spending to gin up economic growth before the election and had ridden it to a great electoral victory. But, after the dust had settled FDR decided that it was time to start paying the bills.

Shlaes describes the results:

Will 2013 be 1937? This is the question many analysts are posing as the stock market has dropped after the U.S. election. On Nov. 16, they noted that industrial production, a crucial figure, dropped as well.

In this case, “1937” means a market drop similar to the one after the re-election of another Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1936.

The drop wasn’t immediate in that case; it came in the first full year after the election. Industrial production plummeted by 34.5 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by half, from almost 200 in early 1937 to less than 100 at the end of March 1938.

It’s hard to imagine stock indexes dropping by half today, or unemployment rising past 15 percent, as they did in the “depression within the Depression.” But the parallels are visible enough to be worth tracing. They have to do with the danger of big government, and can be captured in a few categories.

It’s hard to imagine the markets dropping by a half today because the Federal Reserve has been willing to support them.

Yet, government expenditures as a percentage of GDP are much higher than normal. The twin pillars of Obama’s first term, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank have not yet been implemented. And FDR, like Obama was more than happy to try to solve it all by punishing the rich.

Let’s accept that it’s not going to be the same. That might mean that it won’t be so bad. But that might also mean that it could be worse. 

Unsafe Oral Sex

We live in an age of oral sex. Young people are apparently having more sex with more partners than ever before. Very often that means that they are having oral sex.

What could be safer?

Besides, NPR reports, most young people do not consider oral sex to be sex. You can have all the oral (and even anal) sex you like and still be a virgin.

And oral sex is foolproof contraception. It feels risk free. In our new egalitarian age it is almost as likely to be performed by men on women as vice versa.

Now comes the bad news. Oral sex has just surpassed tobacco as the leading cause of mouth cancer.

You thought tobacco juice was bad. It turns out, oral sex is worse.

It seems self-evident, but the more partners a person has had the higher the risk of getting cancer.

Our source is unimpeachable. NPR reports:

If you're keeping score, here's even more evidence that HPV causes oral, head and neck cancers and that vaccines may be able to prevent it.

Researchers studying the human papillomavirus say that in the United States HPV causes 64 percent of oropharynxl cancers. In the rest of the world, tobacco remains the leading cause of oral cancer, Dr. Maura Gillison of Ohio State University told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this past weekend.

And the more oral sex someone has had — and the more partners they've had — the greater their risk of getting these cancers, which grow in the middle part of the throat. "An individual who has six or more lifetime partners — on whom they've performed oral sex – has an eightfold increase in risk compared to someone who has never performed oral sex," she said.

The recent rise in oropharnx cancer is predominantly among young, white men, she noted, though she says no one has figured out why yet. About 37,000 people in the United States were diagnosed with oral cancer in 2010, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation.

Why has no one has figured out why young white men, a group of enlightened, liberated males, a group that has now mastered the art of performing oral sex is most afflicted by the new cases of mouth cancer?

Perhaps, some people are not thinking very clearly.

NPR does not want young people to panic. This cancer, it explains, is preventable. A vaccine is now available:

Over the past five years, health officials have been urging parents to make sure their daughters are vaccinated against HPV to help prevent cervical cancer. But these new results suggest that young men could also benefit from vaccination, though the costs would be substantial.

While none of the researchers could say definitively that the vaccines against HPV, Gardasil and Cervarix, would prevent throat cancer, they thought it could was reasonable to think the vaccine could reduce risks as well.

It’s not definitive, but still it’s news you can use… I guess.

Hurricane Sandy: Setting the Stage for Black Swans

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York I was immediately reminded of Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s concept of black swan events.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday Taleb explained them:

Several years before the financial crisis descended on us, I put forward the concept of "black swans": large events that are both unexpected and highly consequential. We never see black swans coming, but when they do arrive, they profoundly shape our world: Think of World War I, 9/11, the Internet, the rise of Google

Obviously, Taleb does not limit black swans to great calamities. His definition comprises events that remake our world in ways that we cannot predict.

In his words:

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term. Still, through some mental bias, people think in hindsight that they "sort of" considered the possibility of such events; this gives them confidence in continuing to formulate predictions. But our tools for forecasting and risk measurement cannot begin to capture black swans. Indeed, our faith in these tools make it more likely that we will continue to take dangerous, uninformed risks.

How then are we to prepare for unpredictable events? Or better, Taleb asks, why do we find ourselves so unprepared for great natural disasters?

He responds by saying that our ability to respond effectively to such events has been compromised by our love of security. We have tried to wring the stress out of life and thus we have become so rigid that when stress arrives we are unprepared.

Taleb applies the principle to everyday life and also to Alan Greenspan’s efforts to use the power of the Fed to smooth out the business cycle:

In his words:

We all know that the stressors of exercise are necessary for good health, but people don't translate this insight into other domains of physical and mental well-being. We also benefit, it turns out, from occasional and intermittent hunger, short-term protein deprivation, physical discomfort and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Newspapers discuss post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody seems to account for post-traumatic growth. Walking on smooth surfaces with "comfortable" shoes injures our feet and back musculature: We need variations in terrain.

Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. 

Inflexibility makes you rigid. Too much inflexibility makes you brittle. 

Flexibility makes you resilient. Too much flexibility makes you mush. 

If you have learned how to deal with minor stresses you will be much more competent to deal with major stresses.

Taleb is not arguing for constant stress or for complete insecurity. He seems to be seeking a middle ground between two extremes—complete security and complete insecurity.

As one of the commenters on the Journal site remarked, we need to find what Aristotle called the mean between two extreme positions.

In the matter of Hurricane Sandy the Huffington Post offered an excellent article explaining how failed government policies made the storm much worse than it had to be.

On the one extreme, governments allowed developers to build anything they wanted on vulnerable beachfront property. Overbuilding in storm areas and flood zones always causes excessive damage.

On the other extreme, the government became so excessively rigid that it could not take the steps necessary to protect the city by burying electrical cables or building sea walls.

As for disaster preparation, government officials knew that the storm was coming but they seriously underestimated the damage that it could cause.

The Huffington Post reports:

Despite ample warning from forecasters that conditions were set for a record storm surge, when Sandy finally swept ashore on the eastern seaboard two weeks ago it still caught many officials and residents badly off guard. Evacuations stumbled in places like Atlantic City, where mixed messages from city and state leaders convinced many to ride out the storm with little understanding of its expected severity.

New York City, which saw the most deaths directly linked to the surge, also faltered in its efforts to get residents to safety. City officials waited until the day before the storm hit to order a mandatory evacuation of flood zones, then told 40 city-run elderly and adult care facilities in mandatory evacuation zones to ignore the order and ride out the storm.

Some residents said the last-minute evacuation order and the decision not to evacuate the city's nursing homes fed a belief that the storm would not be much more severe than Hurricane Irene, which caused only moderate flooding in the city.

Having exposed far too many homeowners to catastrophe and having failed to take steps it could have taken to protect the city, government officials tended to underestimate the storm’s potential to damage the city.