I was just reading comments to a question put forth by TBC about the benefits, or lack of, of changing the time twice a year to gain more daylight.  I have to chuckle when I read things like that since it's Mother Nature who determines the number of daylight hours and not man.

I also have to wonder what the benefit is to getting up in the dark as opposed to sitting around in the dark in the evenings.    I realize that the late daylight benefits merchants and gardeners but where is the real benefit?  If I had my druthers, I'd opt for keeping the DST as I really do enjoy the longer evenings.  On the other hand, I love the early morning hours which I tend to lose with DST.

It's odd how our perception of time works.  Five in the evening to eleven at night when the average person goes to bed (my statistic..not official) is the same number of hours and yet it seems interminable during December as opposed to the blink of an eye in June.

TV in December becomes boring on a looong winter evening, but in June I miss watching the early shows like California's Gold and the Six O'clock news.  Give and take, Back and forth.  I guess we're never happy.

The one thing I truly wish they (whoever "they" are) would make up their minds and leave one or the other in place year round.  Nature will automatically lengthen the days without our help and my internal clock could finally stabilize without spending the first month after the change saying "this time yesterday it would be....."

What's wrong with this picture?  A woman on widows pension and a grown son with no income and two dogs living in a car in Oildale saying they can't afford a place to live.

Photo courtesy of TBC from Sundays paper AND link to the story on the home page of this blog.

You won't believe this.

http://www.collegehumor.com...

larger view

This Grammy winner made up a criminal past just to sell records singing about experiences he didn't have.  What's next?

http://www.blackvoices.com/...

As you all know, I frequently post Jeff Jacoby's politically based columns but today it's a change up.  This is a letter written to his 11 year old son Caleb. I really enjoyed it and hope you do to.  (It just shows conservatives are people too.. :-))))

TESTING THE SAILS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

My beloved Caleb,

     Not long ago I stumbled upon a document you created on our computer. It was titled "Rules and suggestions for stealing candy," and, sure enough, what followed was a series of pointers on how to filch sweets and get away with it. Rule number 4, for example, advised: "Clean up after yourself: Don't leave a big mess or others will know that you took something. Remember to close doors, cupboards, drawers, and containers."

     It was certainly a brazen piece of writing. (It was also, I couldn't help noticing, well-organized and carefully spell-checked.) To your credit, you didn't deny authorship when I confronted you with it. Unfortunately you didn't seem the least bit remorseful, either.

     Your penchant for pinching treats is not exactly a news flash -- you've been caught at it more than a few times, most recently when I came across a full-size box of Froot Loops stashed under the covers in your bed. Mama was aghast when I showed it to her -- by now she's decided you're well on your way to a criminal career. I can sympathize with her dismay. But as a former 11-year-old boy myself, I'm not quite ready to pronounce you incorrigible.

     When I was a kid, one of my mother's favorite maledictions was that I grow up to have a child who would be just like me. Well, apparently I followed her advice. More often than you know, your infractions and misdemeanors remind me of things I did and the ways I acted when I was your age. No, I never smuggled Froot Loops into bed. But I can recall similar sins: sneaking down to the basement freezer, for example, spoon in hand, to gorge on ice cream when no one was looking. Or pilfering chocolates from the food locker and refusing to 'fess up, even though it meant letting suspicion fall on my siblings.

     Nowadays, it's what comes out of your mouth, not what goes into it, that is more likely to get you in trouble: At times you seem to go out of your way to give offense, spouting ill-mannered comments or mocking gibes that you know quite well are going to provoke a backlash. As a "tween" I could be like that too. Time and again I would pop off, pushing my teachers' buttons with obnoxious remarks or inappropriate wisecracks, and frequently getting kicked out of class as a consequence. I wasn't nearly so insolent at home, where my parents believed in corporal punishment -- and lived up to that belief.

     With you it's the other way around: The backtalk and insubordination you save up for your parents, while at school your teachers sing your praises and tell us how courteous, mature, and pleasant you are.

     To tell the truth, Caleb, I prefer it that way. I'm quite willing to live with your occasional pique and petulance if it means that the rest of the world sees you at your best. I can't say I enjoy our tug-of-wars, but I understand them. With the approach of adolescence, you sometimes find yourself feeling irritable and resentful, aggrieved by perceived indignities, beset by fools and charlatans whose only skill seems to be to get in your way, or on your nerves. Believe it or not, I've been there too. And if you think your parents excel at finding ways to annoy you now, just wait till you're 14 or 15. We'll be *really* good at it then.

     When you were a baby, I loved watching you sleep. Sometimes I would stroke your tiny hand as you lay in your crib, and you would instinctively wrap your fingers around one of mine, clinging to me even in your slumber. Could you sense somehow that I was a safe harbor, a snug refuge from the world's storms and stresses? For more than a decade, Mama and I have tried to be that haven, and to furnish you with the physical, emotional, and spiritual resources you'll need as you journey through life.

     But harbors aren't only places of sanctuary and shelter. They're also the stable places you push back from when it's time to head out into the world. You're 11 now, growing steadily more independent and beginning to test your sails. Increasingly you push back instead of clinging, insisting on your way instead of following mine. The day will eventually come when you're ready to head off on your own. Wherever the voyage takes you, Caleb, we'll always be your home port.

All my love,

Papa

 (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

PREGNANT, YES -- BUT NOT A MAN

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, April 13, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     Tracy LaGondino is pregnant, and that news has drawn a fair amount of attention. It's been in People magazine, on “Oprah,” all over the Internet. Tracy's baby, due in July, is doing well. But Tracy has a serious problem, and the rest of us do, too.

     A 34-year-old who grew up in Hawaii and used to compete in beauty contests -- she was once a finalist in the Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant -- Tracy, who now calls herself Thomas Beatie, apparently suffers from Gender Identity Disorder, syndrome 302.85 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association. According to news accounts, she has felt uncomfortable with her female identity since adolescence. When she was in her 20s, the Telegraph of London reported, "she became more masculine," began a lesbian relationship, "and researched what it meant to be a transgender male." There followed breast-removal surgery and testosterone injections. Tracy/Thomas grew a beard, changed her legal identity to male, and married her partner, Nancy.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/... s_oidt="0" />

 Pregnant 'man' Thomas Beatie in an appearance on Oprah Winfrey's show

     But it takes more than a mastectomy and hormone treatments to overturn biology. Thomas may be a man in the eyes of the law, but she remains physically a woman, with a woman's reproductive system, a woman's genitals, and a woman's chromosomes. So when she and Nancy decided to have a baby, she had little trouble conceiving through artificial insemination. The result is the spectacle that has drawn so much attention: a bearded pregnant woman named Thomas, who dresses and identifies herself as a man, and has a lawfully wedded wife.

     What you make of all this most likely depends on your political outlook. Transgender activists, radical feminists, and others at the cultural extreme who insist that sex differences between men and women are patriarchal constructs, not hardwired facts of life, will applaud Thomas and Nancy as gender-bending pioneers challenging an oppressive male-female dichotomy. Those of us for whom gender is not a spectrum of possibilities but a matter of either/or are more likely to regard the whole situation as profoundly aberrant and detrimental -- especially for the baby about to be brought into the world.

     This story of the pregnant "man" hasn't materialized in a vacuum.

     The news out of Texas last week was of the police raid on a polygamist compound in which underage girls have been forcibly "married" to abusive older men. From Australia came word of John and Jennifer Deaves, the 61-year-old father and his 39-year-old daughter who have had two children together and pleaded guilty to incest, but say they just want "a little bit of respect and understanding" for their illicit relationship. These are only the latest in an endless series of reminders that sexual urges and appetites can be powerful and perverse and lead to harmful consequences, above all to the young and vulnerable. That is why human societies have always constrained sexual behavior with equally powerful taboos and moral standards.

     Increasingly, though, anyone who upholds those taboos and standards is denounced as a narrow-minded bigot, while those who defy them are celebrated for their nonjudgmentalism and tolerance. (Come to think of it, why do the people who insist gender is fluid and subjective so often argue the opposite when it comes to race? If it is progressive not to pigeonhole human beings into just two sexes, it should be equally progressive to insist that no one be judged on the basis of race or color.)

     It was Tracy/Thomas who took the story of her pregnancy public, writing it up for The Advocate, an online gay magazine.

     "How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible," she exulted. "Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant."

     Could anything be more incoherent or sad? Gender Identity Disorder is not "incredible," no matter how politically fashionable it has become to claim otherwise. It is not just another lifestyle choice, or simply one hue in the rainbow of diversity. It is a dysfunction. It should be met with sympathy, counseling, and therapy, not with five-page spreads in People and appearances on "Oprah."

     The headlines notwithstanding, there is no "pregnant man." There is only a very confused and unsettled woman, who proclaims that surgery, hormones, and clothing made her a man, and who clings to that fiction with determination even as the baby growing in her womb announces her womanhood to the world.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

http://www.politico.com/new...

CHOICE AND THE DISAPPEARING DAUGHTERS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, April 6, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     The unfettered "right to choose" is a progressive value, we are instructed by the abortion lobby -- one indispensable to the empowerment of women. But a new study in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) prompts an awkward question: How exactly are American women empowered when abortion is deployed to prevent the existence of American girls?

     Population experts have documented for years the use of abortion for sex selection in regions of the world where sons are more highly prized than daughters.

     The problem is particularly acute in Asia, and especially in China and India, the world's two largest countries.

     The natural sex ratio at birth is slightly male-biased at roughly 1.05-to-1, meaning that about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But in China the current ratio at birth is about 120 boys per 100 girls -- and in more prosperous parts of the country, such as Guangdong and Hainan, the imbalance has reached an even more lopsided 135-to-100.

     In India, census data from 2001 show that among children younger than 6, there are just 927 girls per 1,000 boys. There too, the greater the prosperity, the greater the discrepancy: In the high-income state of Punjab, notes Joseph D'Agostino of the Population Research Institute, there are only 793 girls for every 1,000 boys. He cites a report by UNICEF, which calculates that "7,000 fewer girls are now born in India each day than nature would dictate, and 10 million have been killed during pregnancy or just after in the past 20 years." In 2006, the Boston Globe reported on the growing “girl deficit” in India; researchers, it said, estimate that 500,000 unborn females are aborted in the country each year.

     There is nothing new about the high cultural premium placed on sons in developing countries. What is relatively new is easy access to cheap ultrasound scans for determining the sex of an unborn child, and the availability of inexpensive abortions for parents who don't want a baby of the "wrong" sex.

     Consider Vietnam, where a decade ago the sex ratio of newborns was a normal 1.04-to-1. Today, with the rise of ultrasound and abortion clinics, the number of newborn males has surged ahead of females.

     "Vietnamese women who find they are carrying an unwanted female baby often head immediately to an abortion clinic," the Straits Times of Singapore reported last fall. "A walk-in abortion at a state hospital can be performed for $10, and at private clinics for about $20." The story went noted that there are now as many abortions in Vietnam each year (1.35 million) as live births, and that “the number of aborted female fetuses greatly exceeds the number of aborted male ones.”

     Most Americans rightly regard sex-selective abortions as odious; in a 2006 Zogby poll, an overwhelming 86 percent of Americans agreed that such abortions should be illegal. But they're not illegal -- and as economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund indicate in the latest issue of PNAS, they are now occurring in the United States, too.

     Almond and Edlund examined the ratio of boys to girls among US children born to Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents. For the first children of these Asian-American families, the sex ratio was the normal 1.05-to-1. But when the first baby is a girl, the odds of the second being a boy rose to 1.17-to-1. After two sisters, the likelihood of the third being a son leaped to 1.51-to-1. This is clear "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage," the authors write. Prenatal sex tests for pregnant women are now available earlier, more cheaply, and more conveniently than ever, "raising the prospect of sex selection becoming more widely practiced in the near future."

     The destruction of unwanted daughters is appalling everywhere, but at least in places like India and China parents may have rational reasons for preferring a son. In China, for example, daughters routinely join their husbands' families and parents rely on sons to take care of them as they age. In India, families are often expected to pay crushing dowries when their daughters marry. Facing intense government pressure to have no more than one or two children, many parents resort to sex-selective abortion (or infanticide).

     But nothing can excuse such abortions in the United States -- nothing except the unwavering theology of "choice," which elevates the right to an abortion above all other considerations. You don't have to be a feminist, after all, to know that being a girl is not a birth defect, or to be horrified by a practice that lethally reinforces the most benighted forms of sexism and sexual discrimination. For what kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/...

"CHICAGO (Reuters) - Barack Obama hauled in more than $40 million in campaign donations in March, keeping up a breakneck pace of fundraising that gives him a big advantage as rival Hillary Clinton raised only half that amount"

"The $40 million raked in last month by the Illinois senator was less than the $55 million his campaign brought in during February. The February total was an all-time high for any presidential candidate during a primary and the March number, while lower, was the second highest."

You were saying we're in a recession?

I was browsing through the paper a while ago and ran across the Wed. Business Directory where I found this ad.

Dentistry In Tijuana.  Save a true 50% to 70% on all of your dental needs.  11 English speaking dentists and s[ecialists in a modern American style clinic.

Smile makeover (2-4 days), Crowns, Veneers, Bridges...and it goes on.  Call 24/7 for info and appts.  No passport needed.

Coincidentally, there was a tv show/news blurb, something,  on a while back about this and I failed to watch it.  Now I regret that.  With all the talk about people crossing the border to get medicine, how common is it or will it become, to get affordable dentistry?

Two people I know had a lot of work done to save the teeth and the smile and one paid out $7000 and the other, over 5 grand.  At one point a few years ago, I was quoted over 5,000 and that was WITH insurance.  When I told them I didn't have that kind of money, it was suggested that I use their credit system.  And then when I told them I wasn't about to go in hock for my teeth the gal asked in a shocked voice :you mean you wouldn't spend that kind of money to save your teeth?"

Has anyone else had this experience?  Or had to make that kind of decision?  Would YOU go to Tijuana for dental work?