The War on Doves

Do you believe in omens?

Yesterday Pope Francis released two peace doves from a window in the Vatican. Immediately, the birds were attacked by two larger birds, a sea gull and a black crow.

The Washington Post has the story, with photos.

Does mean something?

I report; you decide.

The Big Feminist Lie

In this day and age it’s impossible to imagine that anyone would dare lie to women. It’s inconceivable that anyone would systematically give women bad advice in order to deceive them. OK, maybe some male scoundrels and sociopaths might try.... 

Today’s women are smarter, better educated and more conscious of all matters sexual. No one could possibly get away with lying to them.

And yet, when Tanya Selvaratnam tried to get pregnant in her late 30s she discovered that she had been lied to. To her chagrin she learned that the stories about how science had made it easier for women in their late 30s and early 40s to get pregnant were untrue. They were all a pack of lies.

Tricia Romano sums up Selvaratnam’s experience:

So imagine Tanya Selvaratnam’s surprise when she had her first miscarriage at 37, and then another, when she was 38, and yet a third when she was 40. Like a lot of women, Selvaratnam, a film and theatre producer, actress and activist based out of New York City, thought that 40 was the new 30 and that she could have a baby whenever she wanted. And if she couldn’t, well, there was IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) for that. Her new book, The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock, chronicles her own personal journey through three miscarriages, her trials with IVF, her shocking cancer diagnosis, and her own personal tribulations with her marriage. But it also delves into the deeper issues surrounding infertility in America, namely that women’s pursuit of career first, family second, may come back to haunt them. 

Who was it who told women to put career first and family second? Take a guess:

In The Big Lie she [Selvaratnam] writes: “I have found myself wondering lately about the connection between feminism and my generation’s decision to delay motherhood. Did feminism devalue motherhood? Did it lure us to impossible expectations? Did it lull us into complacency? Or did it create a world full of new possibilities that enticed us to wait until it was too late?”

If this is true, feminism has a lot to answer for. It seems to have tricked large numbers of women out of having children in order to enlist them in an ideological crusade.

If you think that feminists are pro-women, think again. Feminism is an ideology. It is pro-feminism, no more and no less.

What’s surprising here is that any of this is surprising. Many people, including yours truly on this blog, have been writing about this for years.

As might be expected, Selvaratnam manages to exculpate feminism. Not for nothing is she an activist. Romano explains:

Though, said Selvaratnam, it’s not necessarily feminism’s fault. “I don’t blame anyone for this situation. Advances in reproductive science dovetailed perfectly with the liberating messages of feminism and made women feel they could do things on their own timetables…. Our biologies do not bend to feminist principles, and science can’t work miracles,” she said. “It is very feminist to arm women with knowledge so that they can make better decisions about their futures.”

Naturally, she does not want to be judgmental. But still, how about some honesty? Feminism has actively promoted the life plan that has led many women to this impasse. It has shamed women who did not follow it.

Feminists might not have wanted to cheat women out of their children, but childlessness is the direct and foreseeable consequence of the life plan that they have been selling to young women.

Just watch what happens when someone, some day comes out, yet again, with the idea that women do better to marry young and to have children young. The shrieks and howls from the sisterhood will drown out the message.

Need I mention that feminism spends far more time railing about how best to prevent conception and gestation than it ever has about the joys of motherhood. In the feminist playbook motherhood is the new “curse.”

How common is this problem? Romano answers:

What’s striking about Selvaratnam’s story is not how unusual it is, but how common it is. She talks to dozens of women who went through one miscarriage after another or who tried for years to get pregnant using IVF. But one of the biggest ways women are failed is by their own doctors, many of whom do not advise women correctly or early enough.

Naturally, good progressives will shift the blame to the media. But, ask yourself, who is running the media? Who is crafting and editing the message that is being communicated to young women? Do you think it’s the Tea Party or feminists?

Romano writes:

“One of the things that women really do believe, because of the media and because they want to,” said Whelan, “is that IVF is what you do when you can’t get pregnant. You’re 42 and IVF will get you pregnant. And that unfortunately is very far from truth,” she said citing a success rate between 1 percent and five percent for women over 40. “That’s the ballpark,” she said. “It’s not a good ballpark.”

Is the World Economy Melting Down?

Every Cassandra has her day. Some of us believed, wrongly, that 2013 would not be a very good year. We imagined that the American economy would run out of fumes and that the bear market would reemerge.

As everyone  knows, we were wrong.

The question now is: were we just plain wrong or was our timing off, by a year or so?

Obviously, the stock markets had a bad time of it last week, but, just as the weather is not the climate, one week does not a market trend make. By all accounts America is not really doing that badly.

But now, Michael Snyder looks at the world scene and sees signs of major trouble, especially in emerging markets:

Have you been paying attention to what has been happening in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Ukraine, Turkey and China?  If you are like most Americans, you have not been.  Most Americans don't seem to really care too much about what is happening in the rest of the world, but they should.  In major cities all over the globe right now, there is looting, violence, shortages of basic supplies, and runs on the banks.  We are not at a "global crisis" stage yet, but things are getting worse with each passing day.  For a while, I have felt that 2014 would turn out to be a major "turning point" for the global economy, and so far that is exactly what it is turning out to be.  The following are 20 early warning signs that we are rapidly approaching a global economic meltdown...

I will not list all of the calamities that are befalling these countries. Snyder’s list is very sobering indeed.

He concludes:

And I have not even mentioned the extreme drought that has caused the U.S. cattle herd to drop to a 61 year low or the nuclear radiation from Fukushima that is washing up on the west coast.

In light of everything above, is there anyone out there that still wants to claim that "everything is going to be okay" for the global economy?

Sadly, most Americans are not even aware of most of these things.

All over the country today, the number one news headline is about Justin Bieber.  The mainstream media is absolutely obsessed with celebrity scandals, and so is a very large percentage of the U.S. population.

A great economic storm is rapidly approaching, and most people don't even seem to notice the storm clouds that are gathering on the horizon.

In the end, perhaps we will get what we deserve as a nation.

Of course, Michael Snyder runs a blog called: Economic Collapse. Since he is a chronic Cassandra, he tends to be a glass-half-empty guy.

What then to make of this editorial from Bloomberg View, a more sober news source:

Emerging-market economies had a brutal week. For years, during the crash and its aftermath, they did well as the advanced economies slumped. Recently, not so much. Many developing countries are seeing their currencies drop and their bonds and equities hammered. Just as the global recovery appeared to be strengthening, a fresh source of instability has presented itself.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bloomberg View believes that what with the Fed taper and the promise of higher interest rates in the United States, capital no longer needs to seek out better returns in the higher risk developing world.

Bloomberg explains:

 In a way, this was not an unexpected development: The recession in the advanced economies caused central banks to push short-term interest rates to zero and buy assets to drive long-term rates down as well. Capital flowed to the developing world in search of better returns. As investors prepare for a resumption of normal monetary policy, demand for emerging-market assets is bound to fall. The question has always been whether this adjustment would be smooth or abrupt.

The Bloomberg solution: the Fed should print more money and stop the taper that it had begun prematurely.

If Bloomberg is right, the fate of the world economy is now in Janet Yellen’s hands. Don’t you feel better already?

Of course, this assumes that Wonder Woman can continue to keep the bond market under control. If not, all bets are off.

Bloomberg adds that it’s not just a matter of monetary policy. Some emerging economies are suffering from horrendous fiscal mismanagement.

Take Argentina, a test case for Michael Snyder. The Bloomberg view:

 Argentina, which felt the full force of the storm with collapsing bond and equity prices and a steeply devalued peso, is a textbook case of economic mismanagement. No mistake has been left unmade -- including cooking the books about the true rate of inflation.

There you have it, from one Cassandra and from one more sober source.

Surviving Cancer

If it were a new Superdrug that could extend the life expectancy of cancer survivors for an extra year or two the news would be on the front page.

Things being as they are, the latest cancer treatment only made the Daily Mail, and will therefore be ignored.

If it doesn’t fit our narrative of a war on cancer,  how important can it be?

The news: cancer survivors who do a lot of exercise increase their life expectancy significantly.

The Daily Mail reports:

We all know exercise is good for us but now scientists have found that physical exercise significantly increases the life expectancy of cancer survivors.

Men who beat cancer and who burned more than 12,600 calories a week exercising, almost halved their risk of death, a new study found.

The research supports a previous study that found the most physically active cancer survivors are much less likely to die of cancer and heart disease.

Scientists from the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine studied 1,021 men with an average age of 71 who had been previously diagnosed with cancer.

They found that men who burned more than 12,600 calories per week by exercising, were 48 per cent less likely to die than those that did little exercise and expended less than 2,100 calories a week, Medical Express reported….

While there has been plenty of research that shows regular exercise boosts the life expectancy of healthy people, this study is among very few that show exercise also extended the life of cancer survivors.

It’s news worth sharing.

Going Down With Wendy Davis

I among others have suggested that feminists should not make Wendy Davis the poster-woman for their cause.

Do feminists really want to be identified with a mother who abandoned her children in order to go to Harvard Law School and then gave up custody because it wasn’t a good time for her?

Apparently, they do. Even the thoroughly estimable and often praised (on this blog) Kirsten Powers is rushing to defend Davis.

Her argument goes something like this: you would never accuse a male who left his children with their mother in order to go to law school or to serve in the military with child abandonment.

Let’s not call it a real argument. It sounds like it comes from a high school student who is learning how to play the double standard game.

Why do so many otherwise intelligent people torment themselves over the fact that men and women are different and that, to some extent, regardless of the culture, customs and habits affirm the difference.

Apparently, it’s just too much for some people to grasp.

The next thing you know they will want to ban “mother” and “father.” The new formulation will be gender-neutered parental person.

For the edification of Powers and others similarly tormented, it is true that males are normally not excoriated for abandoning their children when they go to war, but, then again, how many males do you know who are mothers?

Besides, if men are never said to be abandoning their children when they go to war, perhaps that means that everyone— except a few recalcitrant feminists— understands that they are not abandoning their children. They are protecting and providing for them.

After all, Naomi Schaeffer Riley’s column, quoted in a post yesterday, speaks for mothers who think less of a woman who abandons her children.

And Powers could also have read up on the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter, formerly head of policy planning in the State Department who chose to resign her post because her children, one of whom was a teenager, could not cope with her absence.

And, let’s not forget Sarah Palin. For all of her considerable political talents, Palin could not run an effective campaign for the vice-presidency and eventually could not do a good job as governor of Alaska because she was the mother of small children, one of whom was a baby with Down syndrome.

Obviously, Palin should have known this before accept her party’s nomination. And John McCain should have known it, too.

Obviously, mother and father are two distinct roles. A father might be a good caregiver, but he will never make a good mother. You do not have to have read too much Darwin to understand that a mother’s nurturance is of fundamental importance for a young child.

When a child loses a mother, human communities have universally replaced her with a substitute mother. As psychoanalyst and feminist Nancy Chodorow once explained: “Only women mother.”

Powers should put her high dudgeon in a lockbox. Her argument would be more persuasive if she did not indulge in intemperate rants, like this:

For crying out loud, she didn’t leave her children on the side of the road.  She left them to live with their father. It’s fair to criticize Davis for her misleading bio that implied she had been a single mother during law school. Instead, a misogynistic mob is determined to punish her for her parenting choices.

The fact that Davis did not leave her children on the side of the road is not a great recommendation for her moral character. She did leave them with a man who was father to one of them and step-father to the other. Apparently, Powers does not care that one of the Davis children had been abandoned by both father and mother.

Naturally, Powers calls out those who are criticizing Davis as misogynist. When reason fails, you can always fall back on name calling.

Who is Powers calling misogynistic? Why, mothers, of course. That was why I quoted Naomi Schaeffer Riley and why Riley quoted Anne-Marie Slaughter. If Wendy Davis turns off mothers, her political career, as Riley says, is over. Why would we not respect the views of mothers? They, more than anyone else, know how important it is to nurture a young child.

And they, more than anyone else will hold Davis in contempt because she abandoned and gave up custody of her children.

Here is the way Powers sees it:

But Davis never has said exactly why she made this decision, except to say that, “It’s not a good time for me right now.”  It’s reasonable to assume she made the best decision she could for her children. Which is probably why, in the end, both of Davis’s daughters are supporting her candidacy.

You do not need to know why she made the decision. She stated explicitly that her decision was not about her children it was about “me.” True enough, she did not lose custody of her children. She relinquished custody voluntarily. Perhaps she knew that if she didn’t the court would have taken them away from her. After all, she had abandoned them to go to law school.

What kind of mother believes that her children will be better off not being raised by her? Even by Powers’ reasoning— such as it is— Davis’s heroism consists in declaring that the best thing for her daughters was not to be brought up by her.

The fact that the girls are now supporting their mothers’ candidacy means nothing. There is no such thing as politicians children who do not support their parents.

Yesterday, I suggested that it would be a bad idea for feminism to jump aboard the Good Ship Wendy Davis. That ship is sinking fast. If Kirsten Powers is indicative, the efforts to bail it out are becoming increasingly desperate.

My advice: take your losses and move on already.

Positive Feelings and the Search for Happiness

I have always had a positive feeling about positive psychology. Compared to Freud’s negative psychology, positive psychology felt, and still feels like a needed correction.

This does not mean that those who theorize about positive psychology always get it right. Like the rest of us, they occasionally get it wrong.

Case in point: a famous study of human happiness by Barbara Frederickson and Marcial Losada. It’s portentous title:  Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing,

Apparently, the paper uses statistical analysis to prove that people who have positive thoughts are more likely to be happier.

Of course, for all we know, people who are happier have more positive feelings—doesn’t that constitute happiness—but, not having read the paper, I do not know whether the authors consider that possibility.

In the meantime, before getting lost in the thorny issue of how correct or incorrect the statistical analysis is—not to create too much suspense, but it has recently been shown to have been incorrect—we need to underscore the conceptual basis for the study.

First, the study seems to care more about how people feel, and less about how they function in the world. The difference between the two is stark and striking.

Second, the study defines happiness in terms of “flourishing” and contrasts it to “languishing.” I have no objecting to the notion of languishing—it seems akin to the old sin of sloth-- but flourishing, the latest buzzword in the world of positive psychology, seems more fitted to plants and flowers than to human beings.

When a team wins the Super Bowl or a marketer wins a new contract or a politician wins an election you would not normally say that any of them are flourishing. The term is too flowery to describe success in competitive enterprise.

Whatever the tests and the surveys show, one needs to use great caution when formulating concepts. Aspiring to live like a flower or a potted plant takes you out of the competitive arena and puts you on a windowsill… there to flourish or to languish.

But that is the least of the study’s problems. According to the Guardian, a psychology graduate student named Nicholas Brown has discovered that the math used by Frederickson and Losada is, to be kind about it, bunk.

I will not regale you with their mathematical mistakes. I do not know enough to do so cogently. The Guardian article summarizes them and offers some references. Instead, I note Brown’s epiphany about the new path that positive psychology has recently taken.

The Guardian reports:

There was a slide showing a butterfly graph – the branch of mathematical modelling most often associated with chaos theory. On the graph was a tipping point that claimed to identify the precise emotional co-ordinates that divide those people who "flourish" from those who "languish".

According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. If your ratio was less than that number you were languishing.

It was as simple as that. The mysteries of love, happiness, fulfilment, success, disappointment, heartache, failure, experience, random luck, environment, culture, gender, genes, and all the other myriad ingredients that make up a human life could be reduced to the figure of 2.9013.

Of course, Brown was right to be skeptical, and not just about the number. The study seems to suggest that if you can learn to think positive thoughts and to feel positive feelings you will be happy. Apparently, it does not tell us how much of a role luck plays or whether negative emotions might make you a better competitor for showing you potential pitfalls. Nor does it ask whether hard work, a key to success in most human endeavors, is accompanied by positive affect or whether it matters.

Brown expressed his greatest skepticism about the number that Frederickson and Losada came up with. After all, it is one part of their study that can be subject to empirical calculation.

The Guardian reports:

Referring to the bizarrely precise tipping point ratio of 2.9013 that Fredrickson and Losada trumpeted applied to all humans regardless of age, gender, race or culture, the authors – in fact Brown, in this sentence – wrote: "The idea that any aspect of human behaviour or experience should be universally and reproducibly constant to five significant digits would, if proven, constitute a unique moment in the history of the social sciences."

Whether or not the study is junk science, it seems clearly to have used junk math.

Of course, positive thinking is not a very new idea. Its modern version seems to have begun when Aaron Beck instructed his depressed patients to learn how to balance the positive and the negative, but, by now it seems to have veered off into the domain of metaphysics.

The Guardian explains:

The concept of positive thinking dates back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Throughout written history, metaphysicians have grappled with questions of happiness and free will. The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that "Your will needn't be affected by an incident unless you let it". In other words, we can be masters and not victims of fate because what we believe our capability to be determines the strength of that capability.

Does the mind really control everything? Is a trauma a trauma because there is something intrinsically traumatic about it or because you have allowed yourself to be traumatized?

True enough, some people are more resilient. They deal with trauma more effectively, but they rarely do so merely by performing mental gymnastics.

Take an example.  What happens if someone insults you in front of a third person? Does the insult become less painful if you have a positive attitude and positive feelings? If you evince positive affect when faced with an insult might that not show that you do not know what just happened or are trying to pretend that it did not?

If other people witness the insult and see you as diminished, your good feelings will not influence the way that they see you or treat you in the future.

The idea harkens to the words of Hamlet. Arguing with his boon friends Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet declared that Denmark was a prison.

His friends disagreed.

Hamlet replied:

… there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Hamlet is saying that if it feels like a prison, it is a prison. And if a prison feels like a pasture, is it then a pasture? And if you think that the prison is a pasture and decide to walk outside, what happens then?

One recognizes that many serious thinkers, both within and without the field of positive psychology believe that reality is what we make of it, and that our powerful minds can create it as we would wish it to be.

What happens when other people are not in on the joke?

Wendy Davis's Unforgivable Sin

It’s one thing to fudge your resume. It’s one thing to enhance your life story. And its one thing to tell a few lies. Candidates for public office have survived such shenanigans.

If that were all Wendy Davis, candidate for governor of Texas had to worry about, she might, Naomi Schaeffer Riley writes, overcome it. Davis’s political career is over, Riley argues cogently, because she abandoned and then lost custody of her children.

In Riley’s words:

According to [Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne] Slater’s account, Davis decided to leave her children, then ages 8 and 2, with their father in Fort Worth while she went off to Harvard Law School. Who could resist the siren call of the Ivy League? Well, I suspect that most women and plenty of men would, if it meant moving across the country from their kids for three years.

But before we get to that, note two things. First of all, that 8-year-old was not her husband’s biological child. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions on Jeff Davis’ commitment to his daughters; in fact, he looks like the knight in shining armor of this story.

He not only took on raising his own daughter alone, but also another girl, who’d been abandoned first by her father and then her mother.

Second: After Jeff finished paying off the last of Wendy’s school loans, she filed for divorce and gave up custody of her children. According to Jeff, his wife just decided, “While I’ve been a good mother, it’s not a good time for me right now.”

Is Wendy Davis the new face of feminism?

Feminists should think long and hard before they make Wendy Davis the new face of their movement. Very few women, feminist or not, will be capable of understanding how a mother can abandon her children. To do so because it wasn't a good time for her is appalling.

Does feminism want the world to think that it is encouraging other mothers to do the same thing?

Riley concludes:

Americans will forgive a lot in a politician. But a woman who leaves her kids is just beyond the pale.