Another way to enhance the body's response to cold-fighting remedies is to ensure that you feel loved: Social support reduces vulnerability to all types of illness, including colds and flu, by cutting stress. In fact, when exposed to a virus, parents are about half as likely to develop a cold as exposed non-parents. And the bigger a parent's brood, the stronger her resistance, a Psychosomatic Medicine report showed. (Scientists think that social support, not just increased immunity thanks to constant exposure, is behind the effect.) Even if you do succumb, feeling understood and cared for, either by your doctor or by family and friends, can reduce the severity of your symptoms. A study by Barrett and his colleagues found that people who felt that their physicians were more empathetic had slightly shorter, milder colds as well as greater immune responses.
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What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive? - - 0 views
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"Given the emphasis that researchers place on "secure attachment" to a parent, it was striking to me how much kids used the word "family" when they talked about Lincoln. The school made them feel like "part of [a] family," some said. "In a family," one young woman told me, "nobody gets left behind." Sporleder talks the same way: "I'm not shy about saying that we tell our kids we love them," he says. "We're a family. The kids here are getting love and two meals a day.""
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The Nothing Cure | Whole Living - 0 views
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"The kind of remedies and comfort measures your grandmother used -- in my family, it was honey and lemon juice in warm water -- has a big impact on cold symptoms," says Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland. Since these reassuring associations are built during childhood and are probably at least partly subconscious, it doesn't matter whether Mom or Grandma is actually there to administer the remedy. "Pills might help," she says, "but mind-body approaches are a critical tool in symptom management."
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"Another way to enhance the body's response to cold-fighting remedies is to ensure that you feel loved: Social support reduces vulnerability to all types of illness, including colds and flu, by cutting stress. In fact, when exposed to a virus, parents are about half as likely to develop a cold as exposed non-parents. And the bigger a parent's brood, the stronger her resistance, a Psychosomatic Medicine report showed. (Scientists think that social support, not just increased immunity thanks to constant exposure, is behind the effect.) Even if you do succumb, feeling understood and cared for, either by your doctor or by family and friends, can reduce the severity of your symptoms. A study by Barrett and his colleagues found that people who felt that their physicians were more empathetic had slightly shorter, milder colds as well as greater immune responses. "The kind of remedies and comfort measures your grandmother used -- in my family, it was honey and lemon juice in warm water -- has a big impact on cold symptoms," says Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland. Since these reassuring associations are built during childhood and are probably at least partly subconscious, it doesn't matter whether Mom or Grandma is actually there to administer the remedy. "Pills might help," she says, "but mind-body approaches are a critical tool in symptom management.""
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shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13
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The physical reality of mental illness | The Incidental Economist - 0 views
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politics science mental health illness society psychology health
shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13
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So mental illness isn’t just about happiness: Mental illness kills. Sometimes by suicide, of which mental illness is a principal cause. But most of the excess deaths among the mentally ill are caused by diseases such as cardiovascular disease or cancer. In a sense, mental illness amplifies the risk or lethality of physical health problems. This occurs for many reasons. Mentally ill people are more likely to develop tobacco, alcohol, and substance abuse addictions. Mentally ill people also experience high levels of stress from the loss of jobs, marriages, and families. Chronic diseases such as diabetes require intensive daily self-care routines and mental illness undermines a patient’s ability to carry these out.
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shared by James Goodman on 26 Sep 12
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Harold Meyerson: The party that truly believes in redistribution - The Washington Post - 0 views
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society politics economy health wall street
shared by James Goodman on 26 Sep 12
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Indeed, the United States has experienced an upward redistribution so profound that it affects far more than incomes. Whole sectors of the economy and regions of the country have been decimated by these economic changes. The descent in all manner of social indexes is most apparent among poorly educated whites. Conservative commentator Charles Murray has documented in his new book the decline in marriage rates and family stability within the white working class. And now, as the New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise has reported, that decline includes longevity as well. While other Americans' life expectancy has advanced, the life expectancy of whites without high school diplomas has declined since 1990 - by three years among men and five years among women. The market is not just redistributing income in the United States, then. It is redistributing life.
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shared by James Goodman on 01 Dec 13
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How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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gender equality inequality roles male female work career
shared by James Goodman on 01 Dec 13
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"The restrictions on women's lives that prevailed in the early 1960s today seem draconian; removing them was an obvious extension of basic rights to half the population. But there was fierce opposition to such reforms, and their success was never guaranteed. Someday we may come to see paid family leave, reduced work hours, and public child care as part of our natural suite of rights. And with them, gender equality may not be as far behind as it looks today."
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All the Single Ladies - Kate Bolick - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families,” Christopher Ryan, one of the Sex at Dawn co-authors, told me over the telephone late last summer. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married, holding down a career and running a household simultaneously, are “swimming upstream.” Could we have a modernization of the Mosuo, Ryan mused, with several women and their children living together—perhaps in one of the nation’s many foreclosed and abandoned McMansions—bonding, sharing expenses, having a higher quality of life? “In every society where women have power—whether humans or primates—the key is female bonding,” he added.
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Shareable: Hacking Home: Coliving Reinvents the Commune for a Networked Age - 0 views
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In today’s America, almost 50 percent of adults in the United States are single, and more than a quarter of “households” are just an individual living alone. An increasing amount of social interaction happens online, rather than face-to-face. Living alone may allow us to focus on our own goals without distraction, but it robs us of the type of communication that only happens when people are relaxed and at home together. The spaces between work and life — which, in decades past, would have been filled with conversations over the dinner table — are collapsing. Coliving hacks this trend, infusing the blurring boundaries of work and leisure with new opportunities for inspiration, learning, and social innovation. Here, “home” is reinvented with a new purpose. It’s a community, an ethos, a series of opportunities for collaboration. And while most young professionals are flocking to urban centers like San Francisco to live in modest apartments, some are building a new American dream in once empty suburban McMansions and luxury downtown digs. In this new scheme, your network isn’t just your Facebook friends or business contacts; It includes your friends, influencers, ad hoc family, and your shared home.
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The coliving movement may freely use terms like “commune” and “cooperative”, but this ain’t your grandma’s commune. Contemporary coliving builds on communal living practices, embracing a networked tech, business and science-fueled culture built upon innovation and realizing a better world through collaborative design.
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Coliving has clear similarities to traditional communes and co-ops. Langton Labs, in particular, bears a strong resemblance to 20th-century cooperative living. It has a flat organizational structure, and most decisions are made on a group email list. “In building a community, we didn't pick an existing model and emulate it,” says Todd Huffman. “We designed everything from the ground up, and in doing so, have ended up evolving in parallel and developing mechanisms that are very similar to cooperatives or communes.” Unlike many prior communal living experiments, coliving spaces are externally oriented. They’re generally located in urban areas, often open to the public on a regular basis, and easy to move in and out of. The ideas brewing behind these doors are quickly realized and implemented in the world outside. Much of this is related to the 21st-century vision of sharing, which allows for a high level of individualism and experimentation. Previous community models were focused on equality, with participants renouncing privileges to adopt a group-oriented mentality. In today’s open-source world, collaboration relies on contributions from a diverse pool of individuals, and welcomes exceptionality.
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This phenomenon occurs across human culture: As our social organization has morphed from tight-knit groups to loose, technology-driven networks, we are supporting each other more and competing less. Sociologist Barry Wellman calls this networked individualism: our newfound ability to work together without losing sight of our internal goals. Accordingly, the coliving movement seeks out exceptional people, asking them not to give themselves up to a single cause, but to support each other’s exceptionality. This may be the key to a new definition of “home,” one which provides comfort and friends along with inspiration and innovation. As our social and professional landscapes shift, our concept of home is shifting too. By rebuilding their homes on a foundation of creative collaboration, coliving participants may next redefine the world by the same terms.
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shared by James Goodman on 25 Jul 11
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Teenage Sex - The Sleepover Question - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...24schalet.html
society health sexuality sex families children teenagers parents Americans Europeans
shared by James Goodman on 25 Jul 11
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Here, we see teenagers as helpless victims beset by raging hormones and believe parents should protect them from urges they cannot control. Matters aren’t helped by the stereotype that all boys want the same thing, and all girls want love and cuddling. This compounds the burden on parents to steer teenage children away from relationships that will do more harm than good. The Dutch parents I interviewed regard teenagers, girls and boys, as capable of falling in love, and of reasonably assessing their own readiness for sex. Dutch parents like Natalie’s talk to their children about sex and its unintended consequences and urge them to use contraceptives and practice safe sex. Cultural differences about teenage sex are more complicated than clichéd images of puritanical Americans and permissive Europeans. Normalizing ideas about teenage sex in fact allows the Dutch to exert more control over their children.
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shared by James Goodman on 24 Jul 11
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The Secret Life of the Polyamorous « Relationships « Health - 0 views
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relationships sexuality poly polyamory family tribe group community
shared by James Goodman on 24 Jul 11
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As with any atypical lifestyle, the day-to-day running of a poly household is filled with those little details its inhabitants take for granted, forgetting to even mention them to those who ask. I don’t pretend to speak for everyone in this article; there are as many ways to run a poly household as there are to run a monogamous one — okay, maybe quite a few more!
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There’s a familiar poly adage that goes “Whatever problems two people have in a relationship, three people have in a relationship, only squared.” This is true, but the same goes for the positives as well. There are more pros, more cons, and more everything to the poly experience. If you’re lucky, though, there’s more camaraderie, and that kind of compassionate we’re-in-this-together emotion can carry you through any number of life’s problems — even when they’re squared.
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The true cost of 9/11: Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, an... - 0 views
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The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by al-Qaida were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama Bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.
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The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaida—as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive—orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning—as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.
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Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America's future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2 percent of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion—$17,000 for every U.S. household—with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50 percent.Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America's macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the U.S. The Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.
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Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America's war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50 percent of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health care costs will total $600 billion to $900 billion. The social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.AdvertisementEven if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.
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Ironically, the wars have undermined America's (and the world's) security, again in ways that Osama Bin Laden could not have imagined. An unpopular war would have made military recruitment difficult in any circumstances. But, as Bush tried to deceive America about the wars' costs, he underfunded the troops, refusing even basic expenditures—say, for armored and mine-resistant vehicles needed to protect American lives or for adequate health care for returning veteran
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The Better Angels of Our Nature - By Steven Pinker - Book Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Why Violence Has Declined
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The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.
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Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th — deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”
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It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “civilizing process,” a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond more strongly to insults than Northerners.)
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The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)
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Net Worth, Self-Worth and How We Look at Money - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Mr. Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance. How does he define them?
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Those who are in the money avoidance camp share beliefs that make them distance themselves from money. Mr. Klontz said this group may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger. People who fall into the money worship camp would seem to be the opposite, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things that money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others.
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“They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Mr. Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.” Anxiety about money status occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.) The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future was money vigilance. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Mr. Klontz said. Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents. But what may be surprising is that the study found few links between who held what belief and their family background, race, gender, education level or income.
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shared by James Goodman on 01 Jul 11
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The real causes of the economic crisis? They're history. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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economic crisis washington history republicans lies wall street meltdown conservative reactionary regressive society wealth privilege
shared by James Goodman on 01 Jul 11
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They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street — arms outstretched in triumph — is racing toward the finish-line tape while millions of American families are struggling to stay on their feet. With victory seemingly in hand, the historical rewrite is in full swing. The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010.
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Meanwhile, more than 24 million Americans are out of work or can’t find full-time work, and nearly $9 trillion in household wealth has vanished. There seems to be no correlation between who drove the crisis and who is paying the price.The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission detailed the recklessness of the financial industry and the abject failures of policymakers and regulators that brought our economy to its knees in late 2008. The accuracy and facts of the commission’s investigative report have gone unchallenged since its release in January.So, how do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.
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If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. You disregard the reality that two-thirds of the deficit increase is directly attributable to the economic downturn and bipartisan fiscal measures adopted to bolster the economy. Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.
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If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. Now, you condemn reform efforts as “the current ‘anything goes’ regulatory ethos” — a phrase that paradoxically recalls your own failed policies at the Federal Reserve. In short, after driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” You revise your opinion on the causes of the crisis to instead focus blame on government housing policies. The source for this newfound wisdom: shopworn data, produced by a consultant to the corporate-funded American Enterprise Institute, which was analyzed and debunked by the FCIC report.
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If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses that savaged communities across the country and pledge to block the appointment of anyone to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless its authority is weakened. You ignore the evidence of pervasive excess that wrecked our financial markets and attempt to cut funding for the regulators charged with curbing it. Across the board, you refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.Does historical accuracy matter? You bet it does. Traveling down a road unfettered by facts will take us far from where we need to be: prosecuting financial wrongdoing to deter future malfeasance; vigorously enforcing financial reforms to rein in excessive risk; and rooting out Wall Street’s conflicts of interests, abysmal governance and badly flawed compensation incentives.Worst of all, it will divert us from the urgent task of putting people back to work and creating real wealth for America’s future. Over the past decade, we squandered trillions of dollars on rampant speculation rather than on making investments — in technology, infrastructure, clean energy and education — that increase our productivity and economic strength. The financial sector’s share of corporate profits climbed from 15 percent in 1980 to 33 percent by the early 2000s, while financial-sector debt soared from $3 trillion in 1978 to $36 trillion by 2007. With tens of millions still unemployed, isn’t it time to shift from an economy based on money making money to an economy based on money creating jobs and genuine prosperity?