Okay, folks. If you’re reading this early in the morning, and you forgot it’s Mothers’ Day, you may still have time to run to a store for one of the leftover cards and some chocolates or flowers.
Following is a piece that ran in the Boston Globe yesterday. I thought it was pretty funny, and often right on the mark, and that any moms reading the blog today might enjoy it, too, so I shamelessly copied it here for your enjoyment.
Truth in Toons will return next week.
Happy Mothers Day!
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The lesser-known maladies of motherhood
Do you suffer from pre-playdate stress disorder? Multi-taskaria? If you’re a parent, you might.
By Beth Teitell
Was J.D. Salinger right? Are mothers all “slightly insane”? As lovely as motherhood is, most moms do suffer from a malady — or 20. Moms in the grip of Post Partum Paranoia feel judged at all times, by other mothers, teachers, medical professionals, in-laws, spouses — children, even. The compulsion that makes mothers e-mail endless pictures of their children? That’s Uploadorrhea. Christmas Cardiac Attack makes working moms feel inadequate at the arrival of others’ cute — and punctual — holiday cards. Dads suffer from diseases too, of course. Fatherhood Onset Sensory Loss renders men unable to detect the sound of a baby’s cry or the odor of a dirty diaper. But in honor of Mother’s Day, we reveal the most common diagnoses.
Napo-monomania: The sufferer can think of nothing but the timing and duration of her child’s nap. Symptoms include the posting of passive-aggressive signs reading “Shhh . . . nap in progress” and the loss of friends whose children have incompatible nap schedules. Napo-monomaniacs exhibit hostile behavior toward grandparents and other caregivers who let the child fall asleep at the wrong time, a misstep the napo-maniac fears will cause the child to give up his nap — a catastrophic event.
Loco-vora Extremis: Moms with this disease flip out if a non-organic, non-locally grown, blueberry touches her beloved child’s lips, reacting as if it will lead to instant poisoning death — or worse. At picnics, birthday parties, and family gatherings she quizzes the hostess over the origin of the food served, and, in severe cases, forces her child to go hungry rather than eat a conventionally grown piece of fruit. The disease is related to the China Syndrome, which causes similar stress about toys made overseas, and clothing fabricated from non-organic cotton.
Post Art Project Stress Disorder: An anxiety condition resulting from a severe visual trauma, such as the appearance in the home of a large, impossible-to-store art project. Clay figures, life-size self-portraits, dioramas — all can trigger PAPSD. In the throes of it, a victim alternately feels the need to move to a larger home with more storage space or to surreptitiously toss out the art in question, leading to fear of eventual discovery, and, down the line, possible psychosis in her children.
Homework-aholism: Homework-aholism can ruin the life not just of the mother suffering from it, but from the child whose homework she is obsessed with. The disease turns normally sweet, easy-going mothers into unrecognizable, tyrannous versions of themselves — interested only in making sure their kids get their homework done, and done perfectly, before any other after-school activity or snack can be enjoyed.
Mom-nesia: Motherhood-induced memory loss. In the early stages, the stricken forgets to send in permission slips, can’t recall why she’s entered a room — (“I was looking for something, I just know it”) — and unwittingly schedules multiple activities for the same afternoon. In later stages, the mom-nesiac puts milk in the cupboard and the Cheerios in the refrigerator, and forgets most of what she learned in school. Beyond adding up donations for the teacher gift or figuring sunblock SPF levels, she can no longer do simple math.
Munch-hausen’s Syndrome: Moms suffering from this disease feel the constant need to snack, almost as if they were toddlers themselves, and are unable to achieve the goal of every new mom: losing the baby weight. Little bags of Cheerios, animal crackers, juice-filled sippy cups are consumed by mom, not the child they were allegedly prepared for, leaving children hungry and cranky.
Goodnight Terrors: This condition makes mothers spend an entire evening out worrying that they’ll mistakenly — tragically — return home before the children have fallen asleep, and, despite spending $60 on a babysitter, or using up their husband’s good will, will still have bedtime duties. Warning signs: peering in the windows of your own home peeping-Tom style, staying out much later than necessary so as to avoid the dreaded line: “Mommy, give me a kiss!”
Mama Mea Culpa: The most pervasive disorder among mothers, those suffering from Mama Mea Culpa worry that because of their failings, their children will not be happy or well-adjusted adults, or athletic enough, or proficient at the piano, or get into Harvard. In milder stages — which, to be frank, are rare — MMC can lie dormant, until sparked by a seemingly minor trigger: learning of another child benefiting from a great sports coach or music teacher; the sight of other kids playing outside when hers are inside on the computer, complaints from the children themselves that “other mothers aren’t always working like you are.”
Overactive Volunteer Disorder: OVD compels those afflicted to agree to any school-related volunteering request that comes their way. When confronted with the horrifyingly loaded question, “Can I ask you a huge favor?” they always say yes, and as a result, end up leading the magazine drive, acting as class parent, organizing the teacher-appreciation luncheon, chaperoning field trips, and running the fall fun festival. OVD victims age prematurely, burn out completely, or become insufferable.
Carpool Tunnel Vision: Mothers suffering from this syndrome make all decisions about what extracurricular activities their kids will do based on the possibility of a carpool. The afflicted spend more time making spreadsheets, gossiping about other carpoolers, and driving to distant homes to pick up children than they save by being in a carpool.
Pre-Playdate Stress Disorder: This renders a normally confident mother insecure when asking another mom if her child can come over. Flashbacks of the “dating world’’ overwhelm the victim, and she’s plunged into fear of rejection — but not for her child, the catalyst for the social interaction, but for herself. Some mothers respond by taking themselves out of the “mommy dating” game all together, denying their children playdates, while others buy new outfits and clean their homes excessively pre-playdate, stocking the fridge with snacks suitable for a high-end cocktail party.
Grouchus Interna: This involuntary mental reflex — an internal Tourettes — results in the afflicted mother muttering or thinking unpleasant things about their husbands or other alleged co-caretakers. It strikes most often when the partner in question is shirking some parenting duty, or is seen relaxing while the mother is changing a diaper, unpacking groceries, or doing laundry.
Schlepp-orrhea: An obsessive condition that compels mothers to treat any travel, even a trip to the corner store, as a major expedition requiring enough food, water, and other supplies to make it through a desert. Schlepp-orrheacs can be recognized by their large back and fanny packs, Purell-on-a-rope, and strollers packed like Conestoga wagons.
Multi-Taskaria: This stress disorder has worked its cruelty on virtually every working mother. Symptoms include grocery shopping while texting while pushing a pre-schooler in a shopping cart while listening to an older child talking about his day while trying to keep the dry cleaning from falling on the supermarket floor, while trying to remember if the lettuce in the fridge is fresh (enough) or if new lettuce is needed, while mouthing “hello” to a friend she hasn’t seen in a year because they’re both too busy to get together.
Vanishing Identity Disorder: Causes the mother’s given name to be lost, forcing her to answer, or at least nod, when a medical professional, salesperson, or teacher calls her “Mom,” as in, “How does Mom feel about bringing in 200 gluten-free cupcakes to tomorrow’s bake sale?” Or: “Mom, we need to talk about Ethan’s flossing.”
Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO
Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill.
Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website whoownsfacebook.com. At the high end of the proposed IPO market capitalization, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. His holdings aren’t listed in Facebook’s regulatory filings.
Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship ahead of a possible increase in tax rates for top earners. The Brazilian-born resident of Singapore is one of several people who helped Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook in a Harvard University dormitory and stand to reap billions of dollars after the world’s largest social network holds its IPO.
“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin, in an e-mailed statement.
Saverin’s name is on a list of people who chose to renounce citizenship as of April 30, published by the Internal Revenue Service. Saverin made that move “around September” of last year, according to his spokesman.
Besides helping cut tax bills stemming from the Facebook, the move may also help him avoid capital gains taxes on future investments since Singapore doesn’t have a capital gains tax.
There was once a time when talented, wealthy individuals, and many others, fled their home countries for the security and freedom the United States offered. Now, thanks to three or four generations of creeping socialism, intrusive laws, burdensome regulations, and confiscatory taxes, the trend has reversed. Now, the successful find it more advantageous to live anywhere but in America.
We lose much more than tax dollars when the best and brightest, and even the luckiest, abandon the nation that sees them as little more than a revenue source for social engineering fantasies. We lose their drive, their work ethic, their capacity for innovation, and their ability to create much-needed jobs, to name a few things.
While those on the left seek to gather power by giving away the store to the disadvantaged and those on the right seek to give it away to the already wealthy and powerful, those of us who sit between them find ourselves squeezed tighter and tighter, our standard of living decreasing, and our security, rights, and freedom threatened from within.
What would you do if you discovered one of your favorite stores was supporting organizations with ties to terrorist groups?
Former U.S. Marine James Canning, after learning that Best Buy was donating money to CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group the FBI has identified as supporting radical Islamic terrorists, made the one-minute YouTube video below and began a boycott of the store chain.
Former U.S. Marine James Canning
Although I think that corporate support for a variety of social and charitable groups is commendable, I also think the company should know to whom their money is going and what they represent.
I imagine there are any number of Islamic organizations to which they could donate that have not been named unindicted co-conspirators in supporting and funneling money to terrorist organizations.
Somebody at Best Buy dropped the DVD player on this one, but rather than admit their error, they’re sticking to their guns according to this quote from the below-linked article:
“Best Buy’s customers and employees around the world represent a variety of faiths and denominations, and we respect our employees’ efforts to constructively promote diversity and education in their communities.”
While expertly crafted to sound politically correct so as not to offend anyone, the statement completely avoids the true issue — their support of terrorist supporters, essentially telling their outraged customers where to stick it.
I don’t spend a lot of money at Best Buy. I might shop their once a year, so my support for the boycott is likely to have next to no impact. But I suspect there are a lot of ex-marines and soldiers and sailors and airmen and others who do shop there regularly. And those folks have families and friends who can choose where to spend their money
Best Buy’s decision about who not to offend in this matter would seem to mean they’ve decided their future lay with an ever-growing American and world-wide Muslim population.
Public school students in Maryland’s Montgomery County know they’d better not even think of holding a bake sale to raise money for the football team or math club. Selling sweets is outlawed during the school day, and officials make the rounds to ensure no illicit cupcakes are changing hands. “If a bake sale is going on, it’s reported to administration and it’s taken care of,” says Marla Caplon of the county’s food and nutrition services. “You can’t sell Girl Scout cookies, candy, cakes, any of that stuff.”
An innocent child is about to buy some cookies! Quick! Call the cops to arrest that fat and sugar pusher.
Montgomery is one of a growing number of school districts around the country that have in recent years declared the humble, beloved bake sale a threat to children. Schools in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas have regulations aimed at limiting bake sales to nutritious food. Massachusetts will soon join them. Beginning in August, it will prohibit fundraisers that sell non-nutritious foods in school, and take it one step further: Kids will no longer be allowed to hand out sugary cookies—or other treats deemed unhealthy—to classmates on their birthdays.
With so many overweight kids, it’s easy to see why schools want to discourage high-calorie snacks. Only, they sometimes have a funny idea of what “nutritious” means. New York City public schools prohibit students from selling unapproved home-baked goods, but allow some packaged, store-bought sweets that meet the schools’ restrictions on calories, sugar, salt, and fat. Under the rules, grandma’s fresh-from-the oven banana bread can be declared contraband, while some Kellogg (K) Pop Tarts are deemed wholesome. “You know what’s allowed? Junk food,” says Elizabeth Puccini, a filmmaker in Manhattan whose son is in first grade. “It’s a ridiculous regulation and should be overturned.”
Yes, it’s those few-times-a-year bake sales that are making our kids fat. Not the sitting around with cellphones, video games, and jumbo bags of Doritos.
It’s the availability of Girl Scout cookies that is adding all those extra pounds, not the hours spent in front of a TV or computer screen while they eat two or three boxes of them at a time.
Here we have yet another example of society blaming everyone and everything except those actually responsible.
Guns kill people, not bad guys who pull the trigger.
Cigarettes jump out of the pack and land between people’s lips, then light themselves before forcing their victim to inhale.
And we all know that sugar and fat, especially the most-evil saturated fat, have joined forces in a conspiracy to destroy the health of Americans by sneaking into their mouths and forcing them to chew and swallow.
Does it never occur to these zealots that treating people like they are helpless idiots is what makes them helpless idiots? How did mankind manage to survive for so many centuries without a Federally approved food pyramid and busybodies standing ready to tell us what’s good for us?
As with evil, all it takes for stupidity and self-righteousness to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
Far too many of us have been doing nothing for a very long time. See what it got us?
What’s your take on this story?
Is banning bake sales and removing sweets from school cafeterias a good idea or not?
Are you thankful that government and other watchdogs stand ready to tell you how to live your life?
We all have them. Many of us even know what they are. But how did we acquire these rights?
Judging by the number of times I read and hear people referring to our “Constitutional” rights, darned few people with a public platform know the answer.
The correct answer to how we get our rights is, of course, by being born. Some would say our rights are secured at the moment of conception and I wouldn’t argue the point — the point being, our rights are given to us by God or by Nature, depending upon whether you believe in the former or not.
This simple, most inconvenient of truths for those in government, was well-known to the Founders, who made it crystal clear in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…
My guess is that, if you are reading this blog post, you already knew that. But I’d also guess that most of the people you know don’t know, that they believe our rights are granted by our Constitution. So let me get to the point of today’s blog post.
I think it is incumbent upon those of us who do understand the truth of the matter to gently remind others, especially those in the media, whenever we read or hear them refer to “Constitutional rights.” We need to remind them that rights granted by a Constitution can be taken away by changing the Constitution as opposed to our rights, which can never be taken from us, only suppressed and denied by the power of government guns.
Whenever you encounter someone in media referring to “Constitutional rights,” please, take a few minutes to send them an email or a letter asking that they alter their language in the future to help educate folks about the true nature and source of our rights. Take your friends and relatives aside when you hear then make the mistake and spend a minute respectfully reminding them. And by all means, talk to your children about rights and where they come from.
Will it make a difference in the long run? I hope so, but only time will tell. But I can say for sure that if we continue to allow ignorance to prevail, the point will become moot by the time soon-to-be-born grandson begins voting.
Drug companies are easy targets for the outraged among us. They make these little pills or capsules or bottles of liquid for pennies and sell them for outrageous prices. They regularly make billions in profits. How can they possibly justify selling a pill that costs a few pennies to produce for ten or twenty or a hundred dollars?
Here’s how.
Roche ends tests of cholesterol drug
Associated Press May 08, 2012
TRENTON, N.J. – A second experimental cholesterol medicine in a once-promising class of drugs meant to replace blockbusters such as Lipitor has failed in testing, casting doubt on whether any of the drugs will ever make it to pharmacies.
Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG said Monday it has halted testing of its dalcetrapib, which the company had hoped would become a blockbuster, with eventual annual sales of more than $1 billion. The drug was in expensive late-stage patient testing as a treatment to raise HDL, or so-called good cholesterol, in heart disease patients.
Basel-based Roche said it decided to pull the plug on the recommendation of its independent data and safety monitoring board after an interim analysis, in a study called dal-OUTCOMES, found no “clinically meaningful’’ benefit.
The best-known drug in that class, called CETP inhibitors, was Pfizer Inc.’s torcetrapib. It was scrapped five years ago due to safety problems. Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly and Co. both are developing drugs in the class. Merck’s anacetrapib is in a huge late-stage study, and Lilly’s evacetrapib will soon begin late-stage testing.
The CETP class once was seen as successors to the cholesterol-lowering statins taken by tens of millions of people to prevent plaque from building up in arteries and later triggering heart attacks and strokes. Those drugs include Lipitor and Crestor, plus the older drugs Zocor, Mevacor, and Pravachol.
The odds are good that Roche spent hundreds of millions of dollars to identify and test dalcetrapib. All that money is now lost.
The odds are equally good that Roche has similarly lost other hundreds of millions on other once-promising molecules that turned out to be duds, pharmaceutically.
It’s pretty easy to see that if a company loses many hundreds of millions of dollars on products that don’t make it to market, they need to recover those costs as well as earn enough profits to reinvest in research for new drugs. And they only have twenty years in which to do it. Yes, they reasonably quickly recover the costs of some drugs, like Lipitor and Viagra, but other, less used drugs for rare conditions may take considerably longer. And given the time it takes for all the testing and to secure FDA approval, if they patented the drug when they discovered it, they may only have eight to twelve years remaining on the patent by the time they actually begin selling it.
The bottom line is that if we want companies, and their stockholders, to invest the time and money necessary to produce new “miracle” cures, we have to be willing to bear the costs of discovering, testing, and manufacturing them, and returning a profit to those who risked their capital to produce them.
Agree? Disagree? Am I missing something important?
Why are so many religious folks so scared by science?
It’s a question I’ve pondered many a sleepless night, like tonight.
Are they afraid science might stumble upon something that would provide incontrovertible proof that there is no God? If so, they can rest easy. Science does not work that way. Science deals with the real world, not the spiritual world.
I guess the biggest bone of contention between science and religion is how humans came to populate the planet – evolution vs. creation, observation vs. words, evidence vs. faith.
At first glance, it might appear creation and evolution are mutually exclusive, but nothing could be further from the truth.
God may well have created the universe. He may even have taken six days to do it. Six of his days, which could be a billion years long for all we know. And he may well have created us, and everything else, not by crafting each individual species of plant and animal, but by crafting an environment where bits and pieces of what he created could come together and evolve into us and the myriad life forms around us.
Think about it. A being who can do anything can certainly create us whole. But where’s the fun in that? All life on Earth shares a common core – DNA. And what an elegant commonality it is. Four molecules repeated over and over in varying arrangements. One arrangement makes a rose and another makes the pretty young girl who’s admiring it. And it has the ability to change over time. How freaking amazing is that?
If you believe in God, then you must believe God created DNA. And he must have created evolution since the process so clearly exists. And just as God gave us food to eat, language to communicate, and brains with self-awareness and the ability to observe, think, and reason, so too, God gave us Science – a method of learning about the universe He created.
Indeed, to deny our abilities and dismiss out of hand that which God put before us to discover would seem to deny his very existence.
The bottom line is this – it’s okay to believe in creation and evolution. God created the universe and the laws that govern it. Those laws led inevitably to the creation of solar systems and planets and life as we know it.
What better tribute to His omnipotence than a creation capable of taking itself from random bits of energy to random bits of matter to what we see before us, today.
Whether you believe in God or not, you have to admit, it’s a darn impressive universe we live in, and a darn good method He, or we, developed to learn about it.
Until I ran into this today, I thought I was the only one who was annoyed because Our Dear Leader was taking all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden.
The fact is, of course, Obama didn’t kill anyone. At the most, he put the same effort into killing bin Laden that he puts into shining his shoes – he agreed it was a good idea and let someone else do it.
The truth is, Navy SEALS killed bin Laden. They are the people who deserve our thanks, not a megalomaniacal politician who’s probably never held a loaded weapon in his life.
He and his handlers have managed to squeeze a lot of political juice out of bin Laden’s death and some veterans appear to have had enough of it.
Veterans for a Strong America have put together a one-minute video that’s going viral on YouTube and they want to air it on television.
Despite the veterans’ protests, I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of Obama taking credit, news stories and specials touting him for courage and bravery, etc., as the campaign season goes on.
What do you think about Obama taking so much credit for bin Laden’s death?
Is Rush exposing truths that Media Matters and NOW don’t want you to hear?
Do they believe they are the only ones who should have a voice in American culture and politics?
What, exactly, are they afraid of? Their own irrelevancy?
And why isn’t media at all levels barbecuing them for attempting to force him off the air? After all, if NBC or The New York Times or any media outlet happens to take a position the left doesn’t like, they could be next.
I suppose we should not be surprised at this new left-wing campaign to censor speech they don’t like. It’s the way they have always done things. Just try to advance certain conservative arguments on many college campuses, for example, and you’ll find yourself accused of hate speech, or worse.
If Media Matters and NOW and the rest of the loony left really want to smack down Limbaugh, they should do so with facts, on the air. Start and support their own radio shows, maybe even their own nationwide network where they can present their case and make their arguments and…oh, right. Air America. Nobody listened. Didn’t they file for bankruptcy a couple of years ago?
Hmmm…liberal talk radio goes bankrupt…Limbaugh makes millions every year…now I get it.
They’re jealous.
How sad.
Why do you think the left is going after Rush Limbaugh?
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