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| They were a lot more snuggly when they were puppies |
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| You can't tell, but in three minutes she is going to jump up and insist that she will ACTUALLY DIE unless I let her into the hallway, which she will sniff once before deciding to come back to bed. |
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| I hate clothes on animals, but her first winter Kuri's undercoat didn't grow in and she couldn't stay warm, so we had to put this coat on her. I promise it was necessary! |
to America's (version of Japan's) Hachiko
.To me, the drooping ear is an emblem of the years of hardship that Hachiko suffered on the streets. He did not turn his back on any happy home to keep the flame alive for his dead master. The fact is that there was no other home for him to go to. All parties involved were more interested in maintaining the myth of the downtrodden wanderer who had nothing else other than the memory of his master; his impoverishment only heightened the tragic poignancy of the story, and that’s why it had to be maintained. The pedagogical value of Hachiko’s story did not have to be steered towards imperialistically-tinged notions of unerring devotion towards a singular, grand master. It could have been a lesson in humane charity, in animal welfare, in collective social responsibilities towards homeless pets, or really, any needy living creature. But the fact that any alternative interpretations were drowned out by the dominant ideology of loyalty and national unity in a time of heightened militarism is represented by that single, falsely pricked ear.In this interview, well worth watching, Malcom Gladwell talks about the hubris behind the human creation of dogs:
And that's the thing. We made dogs to love us, to be devoted to us, to DEPEND on us. And we let them down, often and catastrophically.Dogs were evolved to pay attention to us...
They are this extraordinary example of a species that we have bred on the basis of how much attention they pay us; how closely they look us in the eye and hang on our every word. I mean, it's the most narcissistic thing we have ever done as human beings.
A dog pays more attention to your face than a human being does.
I'm joining Authentic Parenting and Hobo Mama for Sunday Surf. Share your best reading of the week, and link up your post at either blog!Kids give so much negative feedback, so much of the time (I won't / I didn't / I can't / I don't want to) that it's positively thrilling, at times, to know that there might be a tiny adult somewhere, inside my phone, who is going to say something encouraging to me, send me a nice email, do something that will make me laugh or maybe just give me ten seconds of respite so I don't yell. I need encouragement through my day, and often the place I get the most is through my phone. I don't think this is anything to be sneezed at.
And yet I've read and heard a few people saying some pretty judgy things about mothers who spend too much time on their phones, and it bothers me. I don't disagree that probably, lots of us could do a better job to get the balance right between boredom, engagement and distraction (I talked about pushing kids through the boredom barrier recently, and I'm all too aware that sometimes I use my phone as a way to avoid pushing through my own). However, this attitude always, always makes me uncomfortable, and not (just) because it makes me feel guilty.http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/sep/26/science-teaching-japan-video
I don't know. I think that most mothers who I see idly thumbing on their phones are probably bored; bored and tired and wondering how much longer they have to stay at the swings until they can legitimately claim it's time for dinner. And if you think they shouldn't be bored and tired, if you would prefer to see them engaging their children more actively, I have a solution - offer to babysit and give that mother a bit of time to herself. Yes, that's right - walk up to her and say 'hey there, mama, you look like you could do with a break. How about I push that swing for you while you take an hour or so to read a book in that coffee shop?'
Is this too weird? Is it impossible? Would nobody ever, ever, do it, because they would seem like some kind of crazy kidnapper, offering to look after a stranger's children? Well, maybe this is right, but my opinion is: if we don't know a person well enough to offer to babysit her kids, we don't know her well enough to judge the fact that she is on her cellphon
In literary fiction, like Dostoyevsky, “there is no single, overarching authorial voice,” he said. “Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”http://www.theveryworstmissionary.com/2013/10/would-jesus-be-cool-with-keeping-poor.html
Dr. Castano added that, in many cases, “popular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot.”
“Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described,” he said.
http://mamalode.com/story/detail/sugar-rushWith limited resources and the hospital an hour away, the family did not know what to do. They loved their granddaughter and wanted to find her help so they approached the leaders in their community about the situation. The leaders contacted some missionaries in town and told them about this family.And just like that, this little girl was brought to an orphanage, where she would be separated from her family for the next 3 years.The family wasn't offered transportation to the hospital, or advice on nutrition for a malnourished child, or high caloric foods or help paying hospital bills. The only option presented was the removal of their child.So for the next three years a child with a family that loved her sat in an orphanage. She became one of many children cared for by multiple caregivers a day that came and went and picked up their paychecks at the end of the month. She got three nutritious meals a day and toys donated from America to play with and the occasional trip to town for ice cream, but she lacked a child's greatest need- a family to love her. She watched adoptive parents arrive to take their kids home and was left wondering where her family was and why she wasn't with them.Essentially, an orphan had been created.While this little girl wondered, an hour away a family in a village was left missing their daughter.
We—collectively, as a society—are teaching our kids the very thing that so many of us spend an entire adult lifetime trying to unlearn.
Sweets = happiness. Sugar = fun. Cupcakes = love.
The celebration hasn’t happened until we feel sick and our teeth are coated in sugar residue.
Our bodies naturally crave sweet things because of their easy energy content. Encouraging a psychological attachment to sweets as a shortcut to positive feelings is unwise. And yet, we reinforce this message constantly to our very young children with a flashing neon sign that says JUNK FOOD = FUN PARTY.
I can’t help but believe that in doing so we will pass on all of our negative patterns. When I’m sad, frustrated, depressed about the winter, cold, tired, or overwhelmed, I want SOMETHING CHOCOLATE WITH FROSTING. It’s a test of my will power not to eat crap when I feel strong negative emotions, searching for a certain level of happiness and satisfaction in sweets. I usually win, but it’s hard and I know I’m not alone. I see this kind of complaint posted everywhere.
We were taught that whether we want to admit it our not. That’s a lesson we learned at the knee of this idyllic childhood-party-sweets-holiday mentality. If we don’t want to raise kids who struggle with the food issues of our generation we need to stop the constant association of positive social events and sugar.
今回、母子手帳を再交付してもらう
ことはまーにとってだけでなく、今後
S市で特別養子縁組をするかもしれ
ない人にとっても大事になってくるこ
とかもしれない…と思ったので、どう
してもやってほしいと思いました。
I’ve written before that I grew up in the south, in an area intensely battling racism and homophobia. The area is odd. At the “yamboree” as we called the county fair, the Ku Klux Klan had a booth each year, and also sometimes the Ku Klux Klan would parade down town and give out candy to all the kids.http://www.connie-zhou.com/asian-american-awakening/
When I was five I was put in a different school because there was an ESL (English as a Second Language) program there. You may be wondering, “what’s wrong with that?” Well, for starters, I was born in Ohio and English was my native tongue. I was reading novels by kindergarten (totally spelled that wrong the first time, fail) and I prided myself on the fact that I had an extensive vocabulary for a toddler. I had been speaking English with exquisite finesse up to that point in my life (okay, that may all be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point). So I didn’t know why I was being put in an ESL program, but I didn’t argue because who’s going to listen to a five year old? At that age, you don’t question things, you just accept. I carried forth with my days throwing raisins at the teacher and drawing cartoon characters on the desks. It wasn’t until later in life I tried to analyze the situation and came to this conclusion: I was put in that program for one reason, I was a shy Asian girl and everyone jumped to the conclusion that I couldn’t speak English. I know I tend to joke about this story, but there’s a lesson to be learned.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10370243/The-last-of-the-Viking-whalers.html
As a young child, I didn’t understand race or skin color. I assumed everyone was white, including me. I hope I can speak for most Asian-Americans here, but there is that earth-shatterning [sic] moment in our childhood when we realize we’re not white.
It isn’t a scarcity of whales that is bringing down the curtain, or even the complicated politics of whaling. It is something far more prosaic and inexorable: Norwegian children, even those who grow up in the seafaring stronghold of Lofoten, simply do not want to become whalers any more. Nor do they want to brave storm-tossed winter seas to net fortunes in cod, as their forebears have done for centuries. Instead, they aspire to safer, salaried jobs in distant cities or with the offshore oil industry, and they have been leaving their island communities in droves.http://marshmallowsensei.com/2013/10/14/tokyo-2020-an-honest-introduction/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/10/the-homosexual-deathstyle-or-a-fixation-on-gay-sex.htmlWhat a legacy Japan could achieve if it not only celebrates the things that make Japan distinct and unique but openly looks to share that with the world and in the process widen the definition of what it is to be Japanese to include the best of other cultures too. Because some of those other cultures are already here, they are already making significant contributions to Japanese life. They raise families, they participate in the local community and they contribute in myriad untold ways to the growth of the nation.In 2020 Japan will seek to introduce itself to the world.Hopefully it’ll be an honest introduction.And unlike Britain the rest of the World will be welcome for more than just the summer.
It seems to me that a lot of the worst homophobia stems from looking at a gay person and seeing the “disgusting” sex they have, rather than seeing a person, a person with passions and interests and likes and dislikes and dreams and, well, a life. So much of the discussion of “the homosexual lifestyle” centers on this idea that gay people spend their lives obsessed with going from bar to bar for sex rather than, well, having a range of interests and forming a range of relationships.
...according to recent studies, animals really do have regional accents. Yes, that’s right. Dogs generally tend to have a different pitch, tone, and display a variety of vocal mechanisms depending on where they are from. The Canine Behavioiur Centre in Cumbria explained that Scottish dogs bark somewhat more lightly than dogs in Liverpool, for example. It gives me unspeakable pleasure to envision a dog speaking with a brogue.
Cows were also found to have regional dialects by John Well, professor of phonetics at the University of London. This is interesting, as in English they tend to be capable of producing one consonant. In Mongolia and parts of India they are capable of producing complex plosives by bursting forth with a gutteral umboo in Mongolian and hambaa in Bengali.
Unfortunately, this theory does not hold water across the animal kingdom. Cats make a sound very similar to meow around the world. In France they go miao, in China they go mao, in Sweden they go mjau, and in Turkish mijyav. Could this be attributed to cats’ universal not-giving-a-fuckage? Probable.
http://tenthousandthingsfromkyoto.blogspot.jp/2013/10/alone-in-zone-naoto-matsumura-caretaker.html
Naoto Matsumura and his elder parents lived on a rice farm in Tomioka, a coastal town in Fukushima prefecture, known for having one of the longest cherry blossom tunnels in Japan.
After hearing the hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, eight miles away from their home, the Matsumuras attempted to evacuate. However, they were turned away from a relative in Iwaki, a coastal town in southern Fukushima prefecture. She feared they had been radioactively contaminated. Afterwards, they were turned away from a shelter because it was full.
So they returned to their home, where his parents stayed until his mother became ill in April 2011. She then moved to her daughter's home in Shizuoka where there was no room for the Matsumura's animals. Therefore, Naoto Matsumura decided to stay—to take care of them.He told filmmakers Jeffrey Jousan and Ivan Kovac that he gradually took on the task of caring for cattle, pigs, cats, dogs, and an ostrich (the sole survivor of a flock of 30 birds) throughout Tomioka, all left behind by owners who were initially told the evacuation would be temporary and short-term:Over a thousand cattle and hundreds of thousands of caged chickens died from starvation in Tomioka. Then on May 12, 2011, the Kan administration ordered the euthanasia of surviving cattle. But a bright spot for animal survivors was that Japanese authorities have allowed Matsumura to remain to care for animals since the return of the town's other 15,000 residents is unlikely.Our dogs didn’t get fed for the first few days. When I did eventually feed them, the neighbors’ dogs started going crazy. I went over to check on them and found that they were all still tied up.
Everyone in town left thinking they would be back home in a week or so, I guess. From then on, I fed all the cats and dogs every day. They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck. Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, ‘we’re thirsty’ or, ‘we don’t have any food.’ So I just kept making the rounds.
http://awesomedogs.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/are-you-positive-ask-your-dog/
You do not necessarily punish a dog by ignoring it. If a dog wants you to go away, ignoring them is a carrot. Even the happiest married couples probably realize it’s nice to see your spouse leave so you can have a bubble bath. Love you – go away – come back later. Do not assume your presence is always a gift to the universe. You’re special, but not THAT special. None of us is.
The point being that in order to aspire to compassionate – to be more humane and kinder, we need to stop talking so much and we need to start listening.
We listen by watching the dog’s reaction. When you reach to pat a dog on the head and see that slight ducking and shying away, then take note. Look for escape and avoidance behaviours. They can be hard to spot. Relief can look oddly similar to joy.
Avoid a technique-centric approach and choose communication. When you stop – really stop – and listen, you realize that all dogs respond to positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, too often, the human thinks they are being positive and the dog firmly disagrees. You must truly hear what the dog is saying.
Tens of thousands of minors live in children’s homes in Japan, but cultural and legal issues keep most of these youngsters needing caring homes from being united with couples who want a child to love.http://www.crnjapan.net/The_Japan_Childrens_Rights_Network/res-ado.html is an overview of the legal issues around adoption as it currently stands.
A Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare survey shows that 29,399 children were living in orphanages in 2012. But while more than 7,000 couples applied to adopt or become foster parents every year between 2006 and 2010, only 309 children were adopted in fiscal 2010, according to ministry figures.
This week’s “Document ’02″ (Nippon TV, Sunday, 12:55 a.m.) will profile the Sakamotos, a Tokyo couple who are raising five foster children, ranging in age from 5 to 9. In the entire city of Tokyo, there are only 200 registered foster families. According to specialists, most orphans grow up severely traumatized, which is why family-type foster care is so important. But almost all of these orphans are forced to spend their entire childhood and adolescence locked up in institutions.
http://www.onceatraveler.com/adoption-in-japan describes experiences as a volunteer at an orphanage and is really worth reading:
Research shows growing up in an institution often leads to disadvantages in emotional development as well as education and employment, which is why many say attitudes towards adoption need to be changed in Japan.
"I used to have a very negative image of adoption and I think a lot of other people do too," explained 38-year-old housewife Tomoyo Suzuki, adding that her thinking changed after she went to a seminar about it. She and her husband went on to adopt two babies now aged three and one.
"I think a lot of people are concerned about blood ties."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe -- who criticized the "baby hatch" for encouraging parents to opt out of their responsibilities -- and his wife, Akie, themselves rejected the idea of adopting.
It’s still difficult. To imagine what it’s like without a real home. One of the volunteers is literally in tears as we pull away, bidding farewell to the staff and thanking them for the opportunity to visit. We can escape. We can return to our apartments, Skype our parents, and continue on with our lives. They will wake up, go to school, and return to a place not unlike school, where they will most likely live for the next few years, until reaching 18 or 20.http://openprivatelife.blogspot.jp/2013/01/japanese-orphanage-orphan-foster.html
We saw one day. One atypical day. They live it for years. It’s not horrible, it’s not cruel, but it can’t be what’s best; even a mother shouting and screaming for ten minutes because you forgot to call home is a sign of love. Something that just can’t just duplicated without a home, a family.
I volunteer at an orphanage in Japan. When people hear about my volunteer job, they often ask me a lot questions. A lot of people are curious about Japanese orphanages since it’s something that is hardly ever discussed openly. I decided to write answers to the most common questions I’m asked about Japanese orphanages.
andIs it strange that so many unmarried Japanese people aren’t in relationships or interested in being in one? Not really. A Pew survey this year, concerned mainly with online dating, began by asking Americans who are not married or living with a partner whether they are in a “committed romantic relationship.” Seventy-one percent said no. Seventy-five percent of those who are not in a romantic relationship said they are currently not looking for one, numbers that are much higher than in Japan. About half of single Americans said they haven’t been on a date in the last three months. The number of Americans in their late teens and early 20s who have never had sex is also rising: about 29 percent of women and 27 percent of men, according to the National Survey of Family Growth. (That survey of Japanese people under 30 refers to “dating,” not sex.)Nearly 40 percent of American women have never been married, according to one survey, and nearly 20 percent of American women in their 40s have not had children, according to another. Both those numbers are steadily rising.The “were not interested in or despised sexual contact" number does seem very high, though the “or” seems to be doing a lot of work in that sentence. A 2008 survey of found that 10 percent of American women between 18 and 44 reported “low sexual desire.” And plenty of people living in any culture who do experience sexual desire don’t actively look to fulfill it with another person for various reasons.Yes, I’m cherry-picking numbers to make a point here, but so are these Japan articles. For instance, the Guardian doesn’t note that the Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research study it cites also finds that almost 90 percent of unmarried Japanese people intend to marry and that “the proportion of singles who are consciously trying to delay marriage is waning.”
This recent Vice video on sex in Japan made some interesting points about commercialisation and compartmentalisation of relationships, but mostly it just made my skin crawl. The disdainful, entitled superiority of the guy in the video as he pays for services that he says disgust him while belittling the women who provide them really pissed me off. So did the 1950s overtones of his meeting with the yakuza, where he "gains their trust" by participating in their primitive customs (tattooing and drinking turtle blood). He then asks for the weirdest thing they have to offer, and is *shock horror* pretty grossed out by it. As if you can't find kinky "specialist" services anywhere else in the world.
The BBC article is condescending about them, dismissing them with: “It seems they no longer have the ambition of the post-war alpha males who made Japan such an economic powerhouse and no interest in joining a company and becoming a salary man.” Well good god, I wonder why not. Look at the economy. Look at the lack of job security. Look at the suicide rate. Look at the global “happiness” polls. No offense to the hard-working salaryman who enjoys his job, but it’s about time for there to be a societal backlash against the kind of life that is expected for men in Japan. Suited up and out the door by 5:30 AM. Breakfast is a plastic package of white bread from a convenience store and a small can of coffee. An hour-long commute in a packed train, standing the entire time. A 9 to 5 office job that doesn’t end at 5 but continues until the boss decides to leave the office, which means usually working 9 to 9 without overtime. Obligatory drinking with co-workers after work. Usually a lot of social pressure to visit prostitutes after the drinks. Back home late at night, reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Your children are already asleep. Your wife makes you sleep in another room. Set your alarm for 5:00 AM and start the whole thing again the next day. A lot of modern Japanese men see the lives their fathers led as bleak and depressing.
A more typical case is probably my former student Masahiro, who’s an executive at a famous beverage manufacturer. He works from 9 a.m. until to midnight, six days a week, with a 15-minute lunch break at his desk. He has Sunday off, which is when he studies English.
“I have it easy,” he said, “since I work at an international company. Japanese places are a lot worse.”
“Do you ever see your wife?” I asked.
“I see her on Sunday,” he said.
“But Sunday’s when you come here to study English,” I pointed out.
“Ah, good point,” he said.
For most people, it comes down to two choices: work like mad as a single person and have a tiny apartment full of dirty clothes and half-eaten Cup Ramen containers, or get married. That way, the man goes off to work, and when he comes home after midnight, his dinner is sitting on the table covered in Saran Wrap, and there’s hot water in the tub. His wife and daughter are already asleep. Shopping, ironing, cleaning, paying the bills, everything’s taken care of for him. All he has to do is bring home a paycheck. The woman gets to do all the fun, fulfilling things like taking care of baby, grocery shopping, cleaning, and cooking meals. Sometimes I’ll ask my adult students how often they see their spouses, or ask the kids when they see their fathers. The answer is roughly on par with how often I’ve seen the Easter Bunny. I am, however, a big fan of marshmallow Peeps, so maybe it’s not as infrequent as you think.
死んじゃえば楽になるのに。[It would be easier if I died]October 27th shows his bleeding arm and a cut-throat razor in a bowl of thick blood.
[...]早く死んじゃえばいいのに。[It would be better to die quickly]
The Norwegian town of Rjukan is situated in the bottom of a valley and from September to March not a ray of sunlight reaches them, until now.
Is obesity a serious issue? Yes. But obesity is just one symptom of the real issue which is unhealthy living. By focusing solely on obesity, we are turning a "lifestyle" issue into a "fat" one and are completely missing out on giving people the information they need to be truly healthy.
The dangerous part about this is that instead of encouraging people to get healthy we are demanding that they get skinny and the truth is, skinny is not always synonymous with healthy.http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marci-warhaftnadler/child-obesity_b_2863398.html
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| Yes, that is a Battlestar Galactic uniform and yes, the seams aren't pressed. I only finished sewing it the morning of the wedding >.< |
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| This lovely little waterfall is about 5 km from our house |
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| Local river |
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| #onlyinjapan |
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| These, in Japan, are wieners. |
“Teach children anatomically correct names for their body parts. Research shows that when children are taught the anatomically correct names for their body parts, it enhances the pride they feel about their bodies. Just as you teach your children that a nose is a nose, they need to know what to call their genitals. Encouraging kids to use a correct and “universally” recognized word assists in other adults recognizing statements that could be abusive or worrisome. Additionally, providing correct language helps a kid understand their bodies and lets them know it’s okay to talk about and ask questions about all of their body parts.”I grew up in a Christian, homeschooling family with an overworked mother and four siblings. This combination of factors resulted, by casual neglect rather than parental intention I should add, in my learning nothing about human bodies (including my own). I was in university and had been sexual active for several years when I first learned of the existence of the urethra. I’d never thought about it, but if you had asked me I suppose I would have said that women peed from their vaginas. I invite you to take a moment to think about how appalling that is. Needless to say, my menarche was more than a little traumatic. So, with my adult freedom from religious baggage, I planned matter-of-fact and open discussions about the body and sexuality with my children.
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| Thinking about wieners |
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| Hooking up with http://carnivalofatheistparenting.blogspot.com.au/ |
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| Every two weeks I get the class schedule. I know what he is studying every period of every day. |
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| The teacher sends me a note every day in this book, and I respond. If anything happens at home or at school, we both know what is going on. It also tells me what his homework is and what he needs to pack the following day. |
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| Excuse the fuzzy photo... his school lunch menu for the month, complete with calorie count, protein content in grams, and list of nutritionally significant ingredients. |
I'm joining Authentic Parenting and Hobo Mama for Sunday Surf. Share your best reading of the week, and link up your post at either blog!Don't seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get some as a side effect.We didn't evolve to be constantly content.
I am not here to judge those who have faced very hard choices, because I know what it feels like to try to get your child to sleep for two and a half hours, while she screamed and cried and raged, every night for I-don't-even-remember-how-long, and I know that none of the pre-adoption training mentioned that possibility. I know what it feels like to be unable to do anything else for an entire day because the one thing my child needed was to be strapped on my back and taken for a very long walk outside, or else she would scream her lungs out. I honestly cannot imagine what it would have been like to manage that if she had not been an only child at first, and had I not been able to be home with her. I know I speak from a position of privilege. But I think that privilege was something that Zinashi needed and benefitted from, and there was no way to know before we brought her home with us if she would need more intense help or not. We need to be preparing families for the possibility that their child, regardless of age at the time of adoption, might end up having some very big needs.
Dear Lady Judging Me At The Playground,http://www.nohandsbutours.com/2013/09/05/dealing-with-grief/
You seem to be reading a lot into the very tiny slice of my life that you see. You see me vacantly tapping on my phone, and are apparently filled with sadness for my children, whose lives you assume are slipping away without me noticing. (I wonder what your own kids are doing that you're missing while you sit in judgment of me?) You see my daughter twirling in the sunlight. You see my son smiling and cooing. You see me not noticing.
Would it be okay if I filled you in on some things you didn't see?
You didn't see this morning, when I greeted my waking daughter with a smile and a kiss. You didn't see when I painstakingly helped her pour her cereal and milk, then help her wipe up the spills. You didn't see me cut up her fruit. You didn't see me dance like a ballerina while doing so. You didn't see me smiling and baby talking to my son while I changed the nastiest diaper you could imagine. You didn't see me grit my teeth when he bit my breast, testing out the new teeth on the way, then sing a silly song about how we don't bite Mama.
You didn't see me do all that before I'd had even a drop of coffee.
But one thing that doesn’t get talked about very often is how an adoptive parent should respond when they find themselves grieving. Because…no matter how happy the adoptive parents may be or how much they love their new addition…when a new child enters the family oftentimes a part of their old life is “lost” for the adoptive family as well. Suddenly the home that made sense and ran like a well-oiled machine is thrown into chaos and confusion by things like a grieving child, orphanage behaviors, attachment struggles, processing disorders, medical needs, night terrors, or other children in the home regressing due to the addition of a new sibling. If an older child joins the family, then things like language barriers and cultural differences come into play. It can feel like the magic trick where a magician quickly pulls the tablecloth away…only you’re left wondering how and when the pieces will fall into place again.http://www.thelostdaughters.com/2013/09/equality.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/23/mark-joseph-stern-and-the-conversation-he-wont-have-about-circumcision/As a feminist, I should make clear that I believe in the true definition of feminism … “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” But this assumes that men have rights.In the case of Baby Veronica, her father did not have the rights that her birth mother did. He was misled. Birth fathers should have equal rights and protections, especially in the welfare of their children.If a birth mother decides she cannot parent her child, and the birth father wants to raise his child, he should be given the opportunity to do so. No other adult should be given that right unless both birth parents have relinquished it.Dusten Brown has proven that he loves his daughter. He has provided for her, cared for her, cuddled her and nurtured her for almost two years.Baby Veronica knows he loves her, and she wants to stay with him. Her right in all this is paramount. She deserves the love of her birth father, the man she will never forget.
Lets [sic] look at incentives Stern (and others) may have for wanting to avoid confronting the realities of the procedure.
Like most circumcised men, Stern probably does not want it to be true that his circumcision means that he is missing out sexually. Or that as he ages, he will likely notice diminishing sensitivity in his glans. Or that profit incentives played a role in the push to remove his erogenous tissue; or that other people altered his sexuality in a permanent way when he was still too young to do anything about it.
But the facts are what they are.
Over 50% of penile nerve endings are removed during a circumcision, including one-hundred percent of the Meissner’s Corpuscles, the unique fine touch nerve receptors found only in fingertips and on the ridged band of the penis.
Mucous membrane exposed to the air for decades does callus.
Many physicians earn sizable compensation for performing circumcisions.
And it is true that your circumcision means that someone surgically altered your body in a permanent way without first having obtained your consent.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to believe that all of these sacrifices were not in vain, that they bought you some greater good? It would, but we can’t just believe things because they are appealing. We can’t in good conscience marinate in denial when that means asking future generations to pay the price by allowing a harmful practice to continue to play out on their flesh.
According to a recent story in the Japan Times the city’s Board of Ed has recalled a junior high school textbook due to its “descriptions of the mass lynching of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.”This one isn't a blog post, but it leads into one. Bear with me.
During the aftermath of that massive temblor, fear mixed with old hatreds to create a tornado of violence that swept up Yokohama’s small ethnic Korean community in a path of death and destruction. In his book, Yokohama Burning, Joshua Hammer writes that army commanders “whipped up rumors about Korean well poisonings.” The lies added more fuel to the fire as vigilantes roamed the streets, hunting for human prey.
To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:And
It's pretty straightforward -- when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy.
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."There's a lot I like about this article, but there's a lot it glosses over too. After-all, every generation this century has bemoaned the terrible failings of the next. It isn't a new story. The following blog post gives a very nice reply:
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, "Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?" He says that "if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the 'why,' there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief."
I graduated in 2008. Remember 2008? Oh, right. The housing market collapsed. Global stock markets plummeted. The Great Recession happened. I had $25,000 of student loan debt and a liberal arts degree in English and Theatre.And, furthermore
In other words: Oh, Hey, Real World. I’m Katherine. I’m HERE! What’s that, you say? We’re all kinda fucked? Oh. Okay. Neat.
I exist in a world in which I don’t understand what a 401K is all about.Speaking of the future...
Social Security will not likely exist by the time I will need it.
I will never have a pension.
I’ve never even filed for unemployment. Because as a freelancer, I’m never in one place long enough to qualify.
This is not unique to my job description.
This is unique to my generation.
I live in a world in which the teachers in the city of Philadelphia are on strike because their budget issues are so rampantly unresolved that they are returning to work without contracts, paper, or desks. I live in a world where we’re slashing budgets so that the kids of the next generation won’t know a childhood with art or music classes.
I’m a woman in a generation fighting insane battles for reproductive rights that we didn’t even know until recently that we needed to be fighting, because we had simply assumed that we had already won them.
I live in a world in which we have a black president and yet we say hateful racist shit on Twitter when an Indian-American woman takes the Miss America crown. I live in a world in which we give a fuck about Miley Cyrus.
I live in a world in which we perpetuate the unpaid intern system.
I live in a world in which, since 1979, the average American worker has seen a 75% increase in productivity, and yet wages remain flat.
I live in a world where the top 1% of earners have seen their income quadruple since that exact same year.
I live in a world that simply seems too crazy for me to handle some days. I live in a world that sometimes makes me simply want to hide under the covers and not come out until it’s fixed.
And here’s what’s super fucked up:
I live in a world in which I still believe there is hope for the future.
http://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/the-skeleton-in-the-closet/Let’s hope Third World War doesn’t break out and that Akira doesn’t destroy the stadium.
This is the rather unpleasant skeleton in the closet that the police would rather keep hidden. A bygone era of intensive, frequent protest in which mistakes were made on both sides. Scapegoats and quick fixes were found, and then people were quick to move on. Injustices and false convictions happen in every justice system in the world. However, the Japanese state has a lot to lose and will only backtrack and grant retrials through firmly gritted teeth. It took mild-mannered bus driver Toshikazu Sugaya over seventeen years to win his freedom in the Ashikaga murder case of 1990. Years of campaigning to get DNA evidence re-examined were only begrudgingly acknowledged, since the prosecutors knew that then the truth might come out — that Sugaya’s “confession” had been bullied out of him. He had been an easy target: divorced and a bit of a loner. Hours of interrogation and physical abuse, and the police had their confession. It was not until 2010 that the flawed DNA evidence was accepted as proof of innocence, in spite of the fact that Sugaya’s stories of his apparent multiple crimes — made, he said, in order to assuage the duress from the police — did not concur with the witness accounts, and that he had failed to identify the sites where other purported murder victims’ bodies had been found.
Although there have been some vocal scandals recently and a few very belated victories such as the Sugaya case, the situation remains essentially unchanged. For one, Hosei University, long a site for radical student activism in Japan, has recently been suffering under the fist of the police, who would arrive and pick out the activists they had already pre-planned to arrest. Campaigners say that over 100 have been unlawfully arrested in the last few years.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the country of no crime, the police and judiciary rule supreme. Heaven help you if you get arrested.
We set out with torn out pages from a Rand-McNally map of the USA (pre-smart phone days!), tents and sleeping bags on our bicycles, as well as big packs of Clif bars and 2-3 changes of clothes. Around an hour before sunset each night, we'd start eying homes for nice yards. We'd knock on their doors and ask if we could set up a tent, that we'd be out in the morning. Every night after setting up our tents we'd sip on some homemade whisky from a mason jar we'd received in Kentucky and plan the next day.
Five years later I want to have that feeling again.and some more at
Milan Kundera has this amazing book called "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The main gist is that we feel free and light in certain points in our lives .. free from the gravity of our decisions... but this lightness is unbearable. We have a need for something heavy, something dark to anchor us to the world. That is why lightness is unbearable.
http://shamozal.blogspot.jp/2013/09/louise-sassy-and-yorgenorgen-women-at.htmlA: So, what are you studying?B: French language.A: Oh, that's cool. (Awkward pause, look around the room, shuffles feet) Uh,what are you going to do with that?I am pretty sure that dialogue is repeated approximately every 18 seconds on every American campus. It's trite. Anyhow, three years out of college I found an appropriate response to this commonplace: “I am going to travel the world, learn a ton of languages, drink my weight in local beers and eat amazing food, meet beautiful people and make lifelong friends. Et toi?”
Plans for after college. Makin' ya proud mom! I've had a few friends and relatives ask me about how I am doing it, how I am financing the trip, other practical details. I was working on a farm in Poland and talking with my friend Craig from England (Hi Craig!) as we cleaned the goat stalls. He said a lot of his friends back home had this real wonder about how he was able to travel, have these experiences. He gets the vibe from them that it is this unattainable opportunity, this secret skill that he has.Well, we both agreed that it was baloney!
The Australian Schoolhttp://thisjapaneselife.org/2013/08/22/1772/
Your friends will be called Cheryl and Angela. You will drive badly because you are on the wrong side of the road. You will need a big enough back seat for the esky and the keg of beer. When you drop your child off at school you'll hear someone yell out "Hey, bloody sit still while I tie your shoelaces back up will ya?" There is no embassy, you will create your own informal embassy in the tuck shop which now has a bar. It's highly possible a few bottles of champagne will make their way to the PTA coffee morning and the participants will need to catch the bus home with the kids at the end of the day. The school is littered with pictures of Opera Houses, Kangaroos and Aboriginal art. All fundraising will involve a keg of beer and a sausage sizzle.
The central force behind all profitability is supply and demand, and child exploitation isn’t an exception.
Nobody would buy an “I Heart Nepal” T-shirt knowingly produced by an exploited child, and likewise, neither should we buy the “product” of begging children.
This sounds, and feels, inhuman. We want to do the right thing, we want to help the orphanages. We feel good when we fundraise from friends and family, when we connect with children and use our wealth to improve their lives. We want to soothe our conscience by putting money into the hand of a begging child.
This feeling of doing the right thing, however, through the force of a dark human ingenuity, is precisely the illusion that child begging rings are selling.
When we hand 500 rupees to a child with a sick baby in her arms, these guys profit, and then reinvest. They recruit more kids, and earn more profit.
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