Internet dating is big on disappointment

Some excerpts below from a long article about internet dating that discusses "scientific" dating. A scientific approach ought to be helpful but the prevalence of sad stories about failures of internet dating casts doubt on that. The existing matching strategies seem not up to expectations. Why?

I don't have a magic answer to that but since I have been using dating advertisements of one sort or another for around 60 years, maybe my experience could have some lessons. Before the internet there were of course newspapers and they have always carried advertisements seeking relationships. I started using such advertisements when I was around 20 and I am now just months away from 80.

I must add that I have not used advertisements exclusively. I have been married 4 times and I met the first 3 ladies concerned the "old fashioned" way -- through personal social contacts. Sadly, none of the marriages proved permanent so I have had plenty of use for advertisements before, after and in between the marriages.

I like women and get on well with them so I hope to have one in my life at all times. And I have managed that with not much in the way of gaps. I have had long relationships of seven years, ten years and 14 years but in between those long arrangements there have been many shorter relationships. And advertisements have given me both long and short relationships.

And I have in fact found that looking for matching characteristics between myself and a woman has always been a good way to start a relationship. The approach outlined in the excerpts below is correct in my experience. I have met many fine women that way. Matching ideas, ideals, values, opinions and experiences with a woman works as a preliminary to meeting.

But appearance also comes into it. I have only ever had average looks so I have had to have other advantageous qualities. Fortunately many women have liked some of my other qualities. I had to have looks good enough to get a pass and after that other factors came into play

And that worked very well up to and during my 60s. But it has been more difficult in my 70s. I had a significant breakup around 3 years ago and that was not easily remedied. Through internet advertisements I did meet up with about a dozen women but most of them did not wish to continue seeing me. There were also a couple of "near misses" -- women with whom I had a short friendship that did not last.

But finally, almost a year ago, I met my present partner -- via Match.com. And it's a good relationship which looks hopeful for the long term. She looks good too! So advertisements offer hope even to old guys like me. I have met women the old way and the modern way and think both are worthwhile.

So what do I have to say to people who have undergone an inferno of disappointment from internet dating? Mainly some very old-fashioned advice: Persistance pays and it also pays to keep a positive attitude. Don't rush to judgment about another person. Don't go by first impressions. Good qualities can take a while to become evident.

Some less usual advice could help too. As Oscar Wilde may have said: "Life is too important to be taken seriously". And the Hagakure had that idea too: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly". So relax! Approaching a prospective partner in a cheerful, relaxed way is usually best.

There is a recent picture of me below. If someone as rough-looking as I am these days can get a girl, there is hope for everyone





This is how Helen Fisher, the 77-year-old chief scientific adviser for Match.com and one of the best-known, most-often-quoted experts on romance and “mate choice,” understands life: Personality is a cocktail of hormones; love comes from the buzz of mixing them just right. The human sex drive hasn’t changed for millions of years, she argues, nor has the human capacity for long-term attachment. If, as a cautious, conventional technology journalist, I’m preoccupied with the question of how we live now, Fisher has spent her career exploring the story of how we’ve lived (and loved) always.

Her confidence in this reality—in the static nature of our coupling behaviors—makes Fisher a notable source of comfort in an era of constant worry about the state of romance. Dating on the internet, writers and therapists and mothers and comedians say, is both too easy and too hard. Our social skills are eroding; we are having far too much sex (or maybe far too little); we are suffering from a profound and modern alienation. Fisher is the woman to calm us with the news that actually, we’re fine. Dating apps can’t possibly kill romance, she argues, even if they do make us feel a bit uncomfortable by showing us so many options. “It’s the same old brain,” she told me, as she’s told many other journalists looking to reassure their readers (or themselves) that smartphones haven’t ruined us forever. “The brain hasn’t changed in 300,000 years.” ....

She’s famous for her science books: five volumes, published from 1982 to 2009 (plus a 2016 reissue of her most famous book, Anatomy of Love), that together lay out a theory of how partnership evolved and which parts of human biology are responsible for its particulars. “In short, romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry of the human brain,” she wrote in 2004’s Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. That book may have been the one that brought her to the attention of Match.com, which had launched about a decade earlier as one of the first online-dating sites. (The Match Group, with its dozens of subsidiary dating apps, would develop later.) A representative of the company called Fisher two days before Christmas in 2004 and asked her to come in for a meeting, which turned out to be an audience with “everyone from the CEO on down.” They were looking for insight, they told her. Why does anybody fall in love with one person and not another? Well, people tend to pair up based on where they live, and on having similar education levels and socioeconomic backgrounds, she explained. And as she was sitting there, it hit her that this was not very insightful. You can walk into a room where everyone is of your background and you don’t fall in love with all of them, she thought. “It dawned on me in that moment,” she told me: “Could we have evolved biological patterns so that we’re naturally drawn to some people rather than others?”

Other dating sites already said they were using science to calculate a couple’s compatibility. One of Match’s rivals, eHarmony, was offering a new and allegedly better way of finding people dates: Instead of pairing users according to, say, shared favorite foods or times of year, eHarmony promised to apply a “proprietary matching model” to make “scientifically proven” assessments of compatibility based on a personality test with hundreds of questions. The site even had its own relationship expert: Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist and the author of a book called Date or Soul Mate?

Fisher thought she could come up with a better system, using what she knew about evolution and the human mind. (Match would market her system as being more inviting than the one offered by eHarmony, which was specifically built by its Christian evangelical founder to facilitate heterosexual relationships.) In Why We Love, she’d argued for the existence of “three primordial brain networks that evolved to direct mating and reproduction.” The first was responsible for lust, the second for romantic love, and the third for a specific “male-female attachment” defined by “the feeling of calm, peace, and security one often has for a long term mate.” But this wouldn’t help with suggesting matches. She would have to look elsewhere in the brain.

Her first task, she told me, was to sit down with four sheets of paper, one each for the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin and the hormones estrogen and testosterone. Then she listed personality traits that she thought were associated with each one, according to what she described to me as research from “hundreds of academic articles,” thereby creating four personality styles. “Builders,” high in serotonin, would be logical and traditional. “Explorers,” high in dopamine, would be spontaneous and daring. “Negotiators,” high in estrogen, would be empathetic and imaginative, and “directors,” high in testosterone, would be decisive and competitive. Those categories soon became the basis for Chemistry.com, which was Match’s first entry in the race to build an objective and empirical dating app. Users filled out a questionnaire written by Fisher and were assigned primary and secondary personality styles. These, in turn, were provided to users to help them sift through their matches and find the ones they were more likely to click with. According to Fisher’s system, builders match well with other builders, explorers with explorers, and negotiators with directors.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/helen-fisher-science-online-dating-apps-tinder/672419/

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Court Permanently Blocks Biden Administration’s Transgender Mandate

A federal appeals court has permanently blocked the Biden administration’s bid to force doctors and insurers to perform or pay for gender-transition procedures even if they object on grounds of conscience and medical judgment, with the court basing its decision on constitutional protections of religious freedom.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a unanimous ruling (pdf) on Dec. 9 blocking the controversial U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) transgender mandate.

Issued in 2016, the mandate interpreted the Affordable Care Act in a way that required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures on any patient, including children, even if the doctor was convinced the procedure could harm the patient.

Controversial Mandate

The mandate also required the vast majority of private insurance companies and many employers to cover the costs of gender-transition therapy or face penalties.

The HHS’s own panel of medical experts acknowledged that gender-transition procedures can be harmful and in many cases not medically justified, with HHS determining that Medicare and Medicaid should not be forced to cover such procedures.

Research has shown that gender-transition procedures carry significant risk for children, including loss of bone density, heart disease, and cancer.

‘Do No Harm’

Religious organizations and states sued to block the mandate, with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the North Dakota Attorney General’s office representing some of the groups.

“The federal government has no business forcing doctors to violate their consciences or perform controversial procedures that could permanently harm their patients,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said in a statement.

“This is a common-sense ruling that protects patients, aligns with best medical practice, and ensures doctors can follow their Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm,’” he added.

Becket filed the lawsuit in 2016 on behalf of a coalition of Catholic hospitals, a Catholic university, and Catholic nuns who run health clinics for the poor.

A federal district court blocked the mandate from taking effect, leading the Biden administration to appeal the case to the 8th Circuit, which in its Dec. 8 ruling concluded that the lower court “correctly held that ‘intrusion upon the Catholic Plaintiff’s exercise of religion'” justified a permanent injunction.

The Biden administration has 90 days to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or 45 days to ask the 8th Circuit court to rehear the case. There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the ruling.

Goodrich said in a call with reporters that he doubts the “Biden administration will pursue either of these avenues.”

The case is Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra, case No. 21-1890.

Other Case

Besides the Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra, Becket also represents plaintiffs in a separate but related case initially filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

In that case, known as Franciscan Alliance v. Becerra, the Texas court issued a preliminary ruling in December 2016 that the mandate was a likely violation of religious freedom but stopped short of issuing an order that would have blocked the policy from being applied.

After an appeal by the challengers seeking a permanent injunction to block the mandate, the court agreed in 2021 to grant permanent relief to doctors and hospitals.

The Biden administration appealed but lost.

On Aug. 26, 2022, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision and issued a permanent injunction that allows doctors and hospitals to decide whether to carry out gender-transition procedures based on their conscience and medical judgment.

“The government’s attempt to force doctors to go against their consciences was bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for religious liberty,” Goodrich said in a statement.

The Biden administration has made transgender issues a key policy pillar, advocating strongly on behalf of people seeking gender-transition procedures and therapies and opposing policies like so-called “conversion therapy,” as it’s dubbed by critics, and “change-allowing therapy,” as it’s often referred to by advocates.

This type of therapy is basically counseling that helps people who want to change their sexual orientation or who want to de-transition after earlier changing their gender identity or expression.

“The phrase ‘Conversion therapy’ is provocative, pejorative, and ill-defined,” wrote André Van Mol, a board-certified family physician and co-chair of the Committee on Adolescent Sexuality of the American College of Pediatricians.

“It is a jamming tactic that combines both anti-religious allusions (‘conversion,’ implicitly forced) along with intimidation against therapists who allow patient-directed investigation of possible change,” Van Mol added.

Attack on ‘Conversion Therapy’

In a 10-page executive order issued on June 15, 2022, President Joe Biden pledged to defend the LGBT community from various forms of discrimination and expressed opposition to “conversion therapy.”

The order, which was accompanied by a seven-page explanation, describes conversion therapy as “efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

In the order, Biden called for an administration-wide push to eliminate the use of such therapy by therapists across the nation, describing the practice as “harmful” and “discredited” and that it “can cause significant harm, including higher suicide rates.”

Twenty states and more than 100 municipalities have banned “conversion therapy” for minors.

The American Psychological Association, in a report released in 2009, stated that therapies used to try to change sexual orientation can be harmful and that most don’t succeed.

But some in the medical community have criticized reliance on the American Psychological Association’s report in attacks on change-allowing therapy.

“The habitually misquoted American Psychological Association’s Task Force’s 2009 report (on page 43) stated specifically that modern change-allowing therapy ‘since 1978’ was ‘nonaversive,’ meaning free of infliction of pain or shame,” Van Mol wrote in an email to The Epoch Times.

Van Mol said the Task Force’s report explicitly states on pages 43 and 82 that research meeting scientific standards didn’t allow attributing harm or help, inefficacy or efficacy, to change-allowing therapy.

“Banning counseling choice for gender dysphoria condemns already at-risk sexual minority youth to experimental and unproven hormonal and surgical gender-affirming therapy (GAT), which permanently and prematurely medicalizes children for a condition that overwhelmingly resolves by adulthood,” he said.

Van Mol said GAT hasn’t been proven safe and effective. It doesn’t reduce suicides and isn’t the international standard of care for gender dysphoric minors.

‘State-Sanctioned Viewpoint Discrimination’

Elizabeth Woning of California is a co-founder of the Changed Movement, an international network of people who no longer identify as LGBT.

“So-called conversion therapy is a pejorative phrase that is being used to promote state-sanctioned viewpoint discrimination,” Woning told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview. “LGBTQ-identifying people deserve the right to follow their conscience, even when it means receiving support to diminish unwanted sexual feelings.”

“Such bans dramatically oversimplify the lived experience of anyone who identifies as LGBTQ. They offer only one route for people to follow, no matter their faith or conscience,” she said.

Nevada therapist Robert Vazzo told The Epoch Times that he’s opposed to the Biden administration’s pushback against “conversion therapy,” a concept he said is not clearly defined and so opens the door to government overreach and abuse.

“Don’t ban anything that is poorly defined and can lead to a witch hunt among therapists whose world view regarding homosexuality is different from the mainstream,” he said.

Vazzo said the courts have consistently affirmed a therapist’s right to give his or her opinion during a session as part of free speech.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/court-permanently-blocks-biden-administrations-transgender-mandate_4915913.html ?

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Retired Navy SEAL Chris Beck, who came out as trans, announces detransition: ‘destroyed my life’

A retired Navy SEAL who became famous nearly 10 years ago after coming out as transgender announced he is detransitioning and called on Americans to “wake up” about how transgender health services are hurting children.

“Everything you see on CNN with my face, do not even believe a word of it,” Chris Beck, formerly known as Kristin Beck, told conservative influencer Robby Starbuck in an interview published earlier this month. “Everything that happened to me for the last ten years destroyed my life. I destroyed my life. I’m not a victim. I did this to myself, but I had help.”

“I take full responsibility,” he continued. “I went on CNN and everything else, and that’s why I’m here right now, I’m trying to correct that.”

Beck gained notoriety in 2013 when he spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about transitioning to a woman.

“I was used … I was very naive, I was in a really bad way, and I got taken advantage of. I got propagandized. I got used badly by a lot of people who had knowledge way beyond me. They knew what they were doing. I didn’t,” he said during the interview.

Beck served in the US Navy for 20 years, including on SEAL Team Six. He was deployed 13 times and received more than 50 medals and ribbons for his service.

Beck said he’s speaking out about transgenderism to protect children in the current political climate, where there are gender clinics “over all of America.”

“There are thousands of gender clinics being put up over all of America,” he said. “As soon as [kids] go in and say, ‘I’m a tomboy or this makes me feel comfortable’ and then a psychologist says, ‘oh, you’re transgender’. And then the next day you’re on hormones – the same hormones they are using for medical castration for pedophiles. Now they are giving this to healthy 13-year-olds.”

“Does this seem right,” he asked. “This is why I am trying to tell America to wake up.”

Beck said that when he began transitioning, it took just an hour-long meeting at Veterans Affairs to be offered hormones.

“I walked into a psychologist’s office [and] in one day I have a letter in my hand saying I was transgender. I was authorized for hormones. I was authorized all this other stuff,” Beck said.

“I had so much going wrong in my system when I started taking those,” he added. “Some of that was paid for by the VA, and I’m sorry to the American people that I did that.”

Beck said he has been off of hormones for about seven years now.

“This is a billion-dollar industry between psychologists, between surgeries, between hormones, between chemicals, between follow-up treatments,” he continued. “There are thousands of gender clinics popping up all over our country. And each of those gender clinics is going to be pulling in probably over $50 million.”

https://nypost.com/2022/12/11/retired-navy-seal-chris-beck-who-came-out-as-trans-announces-detransition-destroyed-my-life/

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The Terrorist Attack On America No One Is Talking About

The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer, McClatchy’s well-regarded North Carolina regional newspaper, recently reported that, “Thousands of people in Moore County, NC are without power after vandalism of electrical substations.” The article detailed how two Duke Energy electric system substations were damaged by gunfire sometime during Saturday evening. On Monday, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper called the attack a "criminal act" in a press conference.

Moore County (North Carolina) Sheriff Ronnie Field said the person who orchestrated the shooting on the North Carolina power stations, leaving nearly an entire county without electricity for a second straight day, "knew exactly" how to disable the stations, Fox News reported on Monday.

Governor Cooper and the reporters at the Raleigh News & Observer seem to be approaching this matter with the same mindset that establishment media almost always applies to acts of terror – it’s a law enforcement, criminal justice matter, not a national security threat.

We think they have it wrong on this – vandalism is spray painting your school team name on the town water tower – and to our way of thinking about what differentiates “vandalism” from terrorism, this was no prank or act of mindless sociopathy.

Calling the destruction by gunfire of two electric system substations “vandalism” is a lot like calling the Russian bombing of Ukraine’s electric power grid “vandalism” rather than what it was – an attack intended to terrorize an enemy civilian population and interrupt the country’s civil society and military organization.

And the attack on the electrical grid in North Carolina did both.

Moore County — which also includes the town of Southern Pines — lies just west of Fort Bragg. Commands across the installation told the Army Times that they were working feverishly to support their personnel who were impacted.

An unknown number of soldiers have been affected by the outage, which created a last-second childcare crisis and poses other risks such as food spoilage in refrigerators without electric power and water outages for rural residents whose homes rely on electric-pump wells.

Sgt. Maj. Alex Licea, an XVII Airborne Corps spokesperson, the unit which oversees the installation and the majority of Fort Bragg troops, told The Army Times, “soldiers and civilian personnel who reside in Moore County and work for the XVIII Airborne Corps and its subordinate units were authorized late report call…”.

And yesterday marked the second day Moore County schools will be closed. About 38,000 households were still without power as the community suffers from freezing nighttime temperatures. The outage has also rendered wastewater pumps in the area out of order, and traffic lights are also out, with numerous accidents reported.

Emergency shelters have been opened to the public with facilities for charging mobile devices, but no announcement has been made regarding charging facilities for personal electric vehicles.

However, while much of the rhetoric coming from elected officials and local law enforcement appears intended to keep the public thinking of these attacks as “vandalism” and a local law enforcement matter, in January, a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security, obtained by CBS News, warned that domestic violent extremists "have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target." But DHS has not issued any statement connecting the current situation in Moore County to extremism.

The U.S. has roughly 55,000 substations. Earlier this year "60 Minutes" reported on how vulnerable they often are.

"There's a very few number of substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock out the entire grid," Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told "60 Minutes" correspondent BIll Whitaker.

Our friends at the Center for Security Policy (CSP) have spent years warning elected officials and policymakers about the vulnerability of our power grid and electric distribution infrastructure.

As CSP Executive Vice President Tommy Waller explained in a recent article, these attacks happen much more frequently than most people realize.

Physical attacks on the U.S. grid occur at a frequency of more than one per week according to Michael Mabee, who tracks data on electric outages reported to the Department of Energy (DOE).

According to Mabee’s analysis of DOE data, from January 1, 2010, through August 2022, there have been at least 919 physical attacks on the U.S. grid and the rate of attacks is increasing.

In some cases, these acts are not terrorism but criminal and involve the theft of copper.

In other cases, such as the well-documented 2013 attack in on the Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Metcalf substation in San Jose – the attackers did not want to steal copper but rather sabotage the grid, causing costly, life-threatening blackouts. Despite promises from PG&E to improve security, the same substation was breached again in 2014.

So far there have been no credible claims of responsibility for the North Carolina attack, which does not appear to have theft as its motive, leaving terrorism as the most likely motive, and certainly the result. While much of the report focuses on cyber threats to the electric grid, we urge CHQ readers and friends to read the Center for Security Policy February 2022 report warning of a potential increase in national security threats to critical infrastructure and to then contact your federal and state legislators to demand that immediate steps be taken to harden the American energy grid against attacks similar to the one just perpetrated in North Carolina

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-terrorist-attack-on-america-no-one-is-talking-about

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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