Why Men's Friendships Are Different

"Studies show that in their late 20s and 30s, women have a harder time staying in touch with old friends. Those are the years when they're busy starting careers and raising children, so they don't have time to gather for reunions. Money is tighter, too. But around age 40, women start reconnecting. Before the 1990s, researchers assumed this was because they had more time for friendship in their 40s, as their children became self-sufficient. But now researchers consider this middle-aged focus on friendship to be a life stage; as women plan the next chapter of their lives, they turn to friends for guidance and empathy.

Men, meanwhile, tend to build friendships until about age 30, but there's often a falloff after that. Among the reasons: Their friendships are more apt to be hurt by geographical moves and differences in career trajectories. Recent studies, however, are now finding that men in their late 40s are turning to what Dr. Grief calls "rusted" friends—longtime pals they knew when they were younger. The Internet is making it easier for them to make contact with one another."

Why Men's Friendships Are Different - WSJ.com

The front fell off

Abortionist Loses License for Killing the Wrong Twin

Didn't Obama warn us, when trumpeting his health care take over, that evil doctors make mistakes, and perform unnecessary procedures? Lookee here. The guy aborted the wrong baby! He left the one that had Down Syndrome. Obama was right!

Abortionist Loses License for Killing the Wrong Twin » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

Clinton blames peaceful protesters not his actions at Waco for Oklahoma City

It's the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings when Timothy McVeigh, a wacko enraged by the Waco incident two years before, decided to kill the way the government under Janet Reno had killed at Waco. Now Clinton chooses the anniversary of the Murrah Building bombing to absolve himself of any blame and to caution today's peaceful protestors. It's either convoluted thinking, or just thinking like a Democrat.

With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing approaching, former President Bill Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between the antigovernment tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today, saying government critics must be mindful that angry words can stir violent actions.

Recalling ’95 Bombing, Clinton Sees Parallels - NYTimes.com

The Clintons and our current President all participated in not-so-peaceful protests; in fact, Obama's friend Bill Ayers who helped launch his career in Chicago is a domestic terrorist who bombed buildings in the 60s, and his UCC Chicago pastor preached inflamatory, racist, and anti-semitic sermons, but he stayed in the church year after year. So why can one group listen to all this anti-government language, but others can not? What are they afraid of? That it might work? A conservative takeover? Why wasn't Clinton chastising the SEIU protestors who actually got arrested in their protests on Tax Day?

Cleaning up the cat hair

On the one hand, we have more time these days, and on the other, I seem to be less interested in cleaning. But we were going out Friday night with relatively new friends--my husband knows her through their artsy groupsy stuff and their common interest in Haiti. So we went out to eat at our favorite spot, with plans to come back here for dessert and to watch a DVD my husband had made of his last trip to Haiti. Having company is the best reason I know to clean--sometimes I'll invite someone just for that incentive. The plant we got for Valentine's Day had died (I forgot to water it), so that was probably my last big event. And we have a small cat--she's under 7 lbs, but loses about 10 lbs. of hair a week. So I really went over the furniture with my wide 2" painter's tape so they wouldn't go home covered with hair.

As I said, we really didn't know these people well. I had no idea they had seven dogs--six Goldens and one Lab. All house pets. I guess I needn't have worried about a little cat hair.

A fun cookbook--Desperate Housewives

Yesterday at Marc's I found this cookbook for $2.00. I glanced through it wondering why in the world I needed yet another cookbook I probably wouldn't use, and then saw two pudding recipes! That's all it took.

I think I've only seen this show once, but I think I got a hint of the story line by following the different chapters with the characters and their recipes in this 2007 title.

Bree: Basil Purée Soup, Braised Duck, and Chicken Cutlets Saltimbocca. Lynette: French Toast for Breakfast (or Dinner) with Blueberry Syrup; Warm Turkey, Muenster, and Coleslaw Wraps; and Potato Casserole. Susan: a Salad of Roasted Peppers, Fresh Mozzarella, and Arugula; Foolproof Macaroni and Cheese; Chocolate Butterscotch Bars; and Garlic Mashed Potatoes. Gabrielle: Shrimp with Chorizo and Red Pepper, Guacamole with Warm Chips, and Pineapple-Peach Smoothies. Edie: Oysters Poached in Champagne and Cream, Sausage Puttanesca, and Ambrosia.

Then there's also recipes by the neighbors like Mike, Felicia and Mrs. Huber. The formatting is elegant, the text delightful, and the recipes look devine. The recipes are by Christopher Styler and the text by Scott S. Tobis. The final section tells how food is presented on TV by April Falzone Garen, a food stylist, and Melody Miller-Melton, the property master. And for the character (Susan) who is a bad cook, they actually have to simulate poorly prepared or burned food!

For those of you who live in towns that don't have a Marc's, well, too bad. It's such a fun store.

How to raise taxes on everyone--

particularly those making less than $250,000 a year--one of the many, many campaign promises Obama intends to break. The first tax on the poor he imposed was the cigarette tax. The European style value-added-tax is really an oxymoron, of course, because it doesn't add a thing--it just hides it. It's not the same as a flat tax, or a fair tax that conservatives and libertarians are suggesting as a replacement for the income tax, the death tax, or the capital gains tax. We get to keep all those and add more with a VAT. It just takes your money and creates another fund for government to waste. It's a tax at every stage of the production process.

And of course, it's all George W. Bush's fault. If it hadn't been for his tax cuts pulling us out of the last recession, there wouldn't have been huge sums of tax money funnelled into the government coffers creating a lust for more programs from both parties. . . Well, whatever the reason we need this, it certainly couldn't be Obama doubling the deficit or his hasty, ill-thought out health care take-over.

Did you hear him ridiculing the peaceful Tea Party gatherings on Tax Day? (But not the SEIU protesters who actually got arrested?) He can't imagine why they aren't grateful to have the future of their children and grandchildren stolen. Such ingrates!! Sixty-two percent of Americans call themselves conservatives. Some of them helped elect him. No more. Let the liberals act like the long abused wife who is afraid to stand up and say NO. I think conservatives have learned a lesson.

Obama insiders buzz over possible Value-Added Tax

How important are small businesses?

Today my husband attended an all day continuing education program to keep up his architectural license--got 4 credits and lunch. He saw a lot of guys he knew when he was a partner in a small firm (Feinknopf, Macioce, Schappa). They were all out of work. A "small business" is one with fewer than 500 employees. Architectural firms usually run about 15-20 if they are "big." The big firms are scrambling and eating up the smaller jobs they used to ignore just to keep their staff. Most small businesses are unincorporated, so business income is treated as personal income. This means Obama's plan to tax the high income earners (the top 1% pay 71% of the taxes) hit small businesses the hardest. So while 47% of Americans are paying nothing or getting big tax credits once a year on government payday, they are are helping to kill small businesses which are what usually lead the way out of recession.

How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?

Small firms:
• Represent 99.7% of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic
product (GDP).
• Hire 40% of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52% home-based and 2% franchises.
• Made up 97.3% of all identified exporters and produced 30.2% of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census and International Trade Admin.; Advocacy-funded research by Kathryn Kobe, 2007 (www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs299tot.pdf) and CHI Research, 2003 (www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs225tot.pdf); U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Did you ever ask yourself in 2008 just what Obama wanted to transform this country into?

Thank you, Uihlein family

At lunch today I read through the most interesting catalog (I am usually reading something)--Uline Spring/Summer 2010 [interactive]. If you ever need to ship, store, wrap, tape, strap, preserve, label, mail or secure something, this is the company for you! Somewhere I noticed that "Uline" is the phonetic spelling of the family name, "Uihlein" and that there are real people standing behind and in the warehouses of these products.

Liz Uihlein addresses the "made in China" problem:

". . . About 20% of what we sell today comes from Asia. This has never bothered me in the past. We all know that many products are not made in the U.S. anymore. What bothers me enormously is American jobs. During most of Uline's history we have scrambled to hire enough people. We learned how to do job fairs. We spent a ton of money on Monster and other career sites. But that was then and this is now.

And so, in this catalog, we've worked hard with some American firms to get a product that's made here versus being made in China. . . [costs more]

It would be nice if the Commerce Department or some government agency would put out some positive news on what can be made right here in the U.S. If we all think and talk about it, maybe we can do better. Also, the playing field is not level; a tennis court is. Personally, I am an American first. I care about American jobs."

Well, Liz, I'm not from the government, but here's 3 cheers for your excellent catalog, products, and your desire to keep Americans employed. The variety is breathtaking, the layout is outstanding, and the indexing excellent.

Also, all that packaging stuff sold at the U.S. postal branches? Where are those made? Just asking.

Icelandic volcano is shutting down air travel

Yes, I can see why the airline industry is concerned about the Iceland volcano affecting air quality and vision. But what about the long term affects? Remember the little ice age? Millions of Europeans froze or starved to death when the climate changed--it got colder because of the amount of ash in the air. And here we've been shutting down or over regulating the very industries that could help us if this were to happen again. Ah, the wisdom of Big Brother.

Icelandic volcano is shutting down European airspace : The Airline Zone

My caballo is prettier

Their "caballo" (art horse)


My caballo (horse art)

From Dick Blick web catalog

"Made of oak and handcrafted in the USA, the Caballo is a bench and an easel in one. It folds easily for travel or storage — its attached wheels and poly straps make it easy to move anywhere.

When you're ready to paint, just unfold the Caballo, and you've got an instant studio space complete with a place to sit, a supply drawer, a storage compartment, and a sturdy easel for sketching or painting.

Perfect for working on location, it's also a great space saving solution for anyone who has to share "studio space" with the rest of the family."

Why bother?

When I find an important library, depository, repository or archive website (almost always academic) with broken or inaccurate links, I often look for the "contact us" link and notify them. Often, that link is broken. Silly me, I keep looking--click, click, sigh, click. (I don't swear.) When someone gets back to me I'm asked, where is this link, I can't find it. I e-mail back. They (usually he) reply that it's not their fault, they are underfunded, or they just have too much to do to add dates to research or clean up broken links, yada, yada.

Now we know why the college kids that invented Google and Facebook are billionaires, and librarians are among the lowest paid civil servants.

Sugar free desserts

Jello-sugar free pudding snacks are creamy, low calorie, low fat and very tasty. There’s almost no down side--until you read the ingredients and can’t pronounce some of them. Definitely better living through chemistry. Also, I don’t think coconut and palm oils are good for your body, swallowed or spread on your skin.

INGREDIENTS:
Water, xylitol, modified food starch, cocoa processed with alkali, milk protein concentrate, contains less than 1% of hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut and palm kernel oils), salt, sodium stearoyl lactylate (for smooth texture), sodium alginate, sucralose and acesulfame potassium (sweeteners), natural and artificial flavor, artificial color.

My husband eats one or two puddings a day, so I’ve been experimenting with homemade pudding--again. I used to always serve home cooked puddings, but got out of the habit as the processed products improved in texture and taste. Here’s what I tried recently, called interestingly enough, “Homemade Vanilla Pudding.” Pretty simple list of ingredients. 2 cups milk, ½ cup white sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, ¼ teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 tablespoon butter. (See allrecipes.com)

But of course, I changed it. The first time I added two eggs, changed the sugar to Splenda, added lemon juice and used 2% milk and only a dash of salt. Then to make it fluffy, I added sugar free Cool Whip. So by the time I was finished and it was in a pie shell, all I had done was reduce the cost, not the strange ingredients.

Yesterday I made it pretty much as the recipe card said, but still used Splenda instead of sugar (sorry, Gayle). It looked a little wimpy and pale, so I added a few tablespoons of sugar free strawberry jelly. It has a nice texture, color and taste, and if I’d had fresh strawberries I would have used that instead.

I’ll keep trying. Besides, for some reason I have 3 boxes of corn starch in the cupboard.

Hank Johnson fears Guam might tip over

No wonder Congress has fallen so far in the polls, even lower than the President. This man was certainly wasting everyone's time. I'm surprised Admiral Robert Willard, who commands the Navy's Pacific Fleet, didn't laugh out loud.

A fortune to elect Obama--Andy Stern

Yes, it was expensive, but [Andy] "Stern’s access to President Obama has already paid huge dividends including: an $862 billion stimulus that prevented states from having to cut-back government union jobs or wages; $2.5 trillion in new government health care spending, much of which will go to unionized health care providers; and the appointment of SEIU associate general counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. The NYT describes the SEIU under Stern’s tenure as “the nation’s most politically active union, with 1.9 million members.” The marriage of politics to union organizing has been great for SEIU membership, making it the fastest-growing union in America.

But what has been great for SEIU’s membership rolls has not been good for the SEIU’s bottom line. Growing union membership through politics is expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports that as recently as 2002, total SEIU liabilities were about $8 million. But by 2008, the union owed more than $156 million, a 30% increase over the $120 million it owed in 2007. And make no mistake, lobbying government is where Stern believes the future of SEIU is. After President Obama’s election, SEIU fired 75 national field staff and organizers so that the SEIU could “reallocate resources … to lobbying and communications in Washington.”

Morning Bell: Andy Stern’s America

Unions kill private sector jobs, have a history of corruption, and their pensions are underfunded. Where else to go but to the people for bailouts? Stern might be retiring, but he's not going away. Maybe a Czar? Supreme Court?

And of course, you've heard about racism in the rank and file, haven't you? Nasty stuff.

Government calls it an overhaul

Business owners call it overwhelming. That's a great full page, b & w drawing in today's WSJ. Sometimes a drawing is worth its weight in text and photographs. It is sharp, snappy and succinct. Beginning on the left there's a pile of documents--Common law, case law, local laws and state laws. As you move over to the right (although it's really left--it's just that we read from left to right--for now), that pile gets added to incrementally, until the last column is huge with 38 acronyms representing laws and regulations piled on top of the first group. Things like ARRA, HIPPA, COBRA, FICA, MHPA, HIRE, HEART, and so forth, until you get to the biggest, baddest law of them all, PPACA, "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

Did FDR End the Depression?

No, but that's the myth that we were taught for generations in school. And he extended it far longer than it needed to be if he hadn't pushed his socialist agenda. I think finally his own party realized it, but the textbook editors never caught on.

"Let's start with the New Deal. Its various alphabet-soup agencies—the WPA, AAA, NRA and even the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)—failed to create sustainable jobs. In May 1939, U.S. unemployment still exceeded 20%. European countries, according to a League of Nations survey, averaged only about 12% in 1938. The New Deal, by forcing taxes up and discouraging entrepreneurs from investing, probably did more harm than good.

What about World War II? We need to understand that the near-full employment during the conflict was temporary. Ten million to 12 million soldiers overseas and another 10 million to 15 million people making tanks, bullets and war materiel do not a lasting recovery make. The country essentially traded temporary jobs for a skyrocketing national debt. Many of those jobs had little or no value after the war."

And now Obama is fulfilling FDR's incompleted dreams and dragging down the economy.

Burt Folsom: Did FDR End the Depression? - WSJ.com

Therapeutic Clinical Tools for Social Workers

This is a workshop taught at Ohio State University. Can you imagine the outrage if the observances, aims, and good works advocated in Christianity were taught as a clinical tool by a state university? Even something as universal as the 10 commandments, the basis for our entire legal system, would get thrown out. If you read through the announcement, you'll see what many Christians refuse to see--that Yoga isn't just about breathing, flexibility and positive thinking. It is offering yourself to another god.

"YOGA AS A THERAPEUTIC CLINICAL TOOL FOR SOCIAL WORKERS

Yoga philosophy is healing and therapeutic. It is an excellent tool kit for motivating clients to live in the moment and cultivate change in a positive way. This beginner, intermediate or advanced training, depending on your level of enthusiasm and flexibility, will explore the Yamas (ethical codes), the Niyamas (observances or restraints) and the four aims of life, the Purushartas. These three practices will channel human fulfillment, lead you to success and balance, and provide you with a guide for awareness in our actions, thoughts and deeds. This training will provide you the clinician, a different perspective to instill to your clients."

For a further explanation of the Purushartas, check out the Hinduism web page.

Yoga as a Therapeutic Clinical Tool for Social Workers :: College of Social Work

Our scary President

"The Democrats mock Sarah Palin's credentials for venturing into anything more serious than moose hunting, but their man's lengthening record in dealing with the rest of the world gets scarier and scarier. . .

"We've avoided World War III so far largely because the United States has been the ultimate guarantor of the security of most of the Free World. This guarantee worked for 70 years because the Free World believed that the United States meant what it said. Now Mr. Obama would eliminate that trust and dismantle the guarantee. It's more of his vision of a Little America, neutered and pacific, like the neutered and pacific little nations of Europe. Some thrill."

PRUDEN: No nukes not good news - Washington Times

Nuclear Posture Review

Ancient human remains found in South Africa

They can't fool me.