What does an invisible woman know about passion?

Melinda Coxhead, below, is in a sad state. She finds great difficulty in being single in her 50s. She should try being single in her '70s. I have been there. The sad truth is that the older you get the less likely you are to form new intimate partnerships. I have no good news for her. It is only going to get worse. So she should grab even a half-suitable partner if she can.

I practice what I preach. There are epic incompatibilities between my present partner and me but we still have a good interpersonal relationship with lots of laughs during our times together. I look to the good and smile at the incompatibilities

It is no longer possible to deny that I am turning 50. I’m not just turning 50, I’m hurtling unwillingly into its devastating path.

Fifty has taken my once-heaving breasts and tenderised them into schnitzels. Forlorn nipples facing my knees in defeat. Middle age has slackened my jawline, lined my neck and deepened my wrinkles overnight.

I’m trying to love myself whilst dealing with being less attractive. It’s true what they say about becoming invisible as I notice people see me less and less.

Even insensitive algorithms can’t help themselves, with ads on menopause belly, retirement villages, exercising for the middle-aged, bowel cancer checks, embrace the greys. Apparently, even the emojis I use are old.

The disturbing fifty shifts are many but perhaps the most onerous is the shift of love. Being single at 50 has presented a new landscape. It’s barren and desolate but also rife with a few unexpected landmines.

There are two major differences about being single at 50. The first is the shift in popular opinions about what I’m searching for.

According to these opinions, at this age I’m no longer looking for the love of my life. I’m looking for a “companion”, like I want a golden retriever. Does middle age mean I don’t deserve love or passion? Can I no longer expect to meet the love of my life?

My search for love means I still want butterflies, flirting, anticipation and desire. You don’t get that with a “companion” – you get the early-bird special at the RSL.

Which leads me to the next shift. What has happened to the men in my demographic? Collectively they have left me scratching my head. I’ve racked up my fair share of pathetic first date stories, but these most recent experiences have me rattled.

The first is fairly mild. Chatted online, shared some messages then a phone call. He seemed interesting and normal, so we agreed to meet. Now let me remind you, I’ve been single for 15 years and I’m not used to a man in my space. It was a cold Melbourne night and I was all rugged up. I had just greeted him when he said “let me take your coat”.

I wasn’t ready, it was meant to be my security blanket for the first few minutes before I took it off when I felt comfortable. He rips it from my back, one of my arms gets caught and I’m flapping it about in the intimate, dimly lit restaurant. He pulls it free, along with my scarf and runs off to hang it up ... I may as well be naked. I left my hat on to compensate.

We have a polite conversation, there’s not a lot of laughter, but the conversation flows and he is interesting. Until it also becomes apparent that he is quite rich. And refers to it to the point where I become uncomfortable with my poor status. I mean every girl wants to meet a millionaire but, in the end, his big talk is just tedious.

Then we got up to go. He runs to get my coat which he helps me with. But then he positions his arm in a way so I must loop mine through it. It’s so forced and awkward I walk stiffly out of the restaurant. Suddenly, I’m cast back to regency England like we are taking a turn about the room before the men retire to the drawing room for cigars.

I managed to get my hand out as we bought gelati after dinner. He offers his arm again, but I say, “Sorry, no I can’t do that. Um, don’t take it personally.” Insert nervous laughter. I see him grimace. Cue few minutes of discomfort, thank God we are walking back to the car.

Next there was a guy, let’s call him Bob. We shared some lighthearted banter about how we were both on to our second coffee for the morning when he sends a photo of his coffee cup. Suddenly, I’m struck with doubt, confusion and repulsion. Can I reject a man because of a dirty coffee cup? I ran the problem by a friend who is equally repulsed but advises to at least proceed with the phone call. Sadly, it is not a success due to his poorly timed humour. I bring up the coffee cup – he explains he only washes it about once a fortnight to enhance the flavour. Next!

Unfortunately, it gets worse. The next guy sounds genuine and pleasant. Jovial chat ensues. I mentioned to him that I work with a team of podiatrists. He immediately pipes up that he has an injured toe. I remind him I’m not a podiatrist, I just work with them. “That’s ok,” he says, “if I send you a photo you can show them.” I’m half laughing as I think he must be joking.

We bid each other good night and just as I’m considering a date there it is. A photo of an injured, gross-looking toe. I’m exasperated, disappointed and sad. What is going on? I thought he wanted a date, not healthcare. Have men given up? Or is there such a man shortage they think they can get away with this lacklustre behaviour? My hands are in the air. I give in.

So, I’m baffled. I know what you’re thinking, I must be fussy, unrealistic, indecisive. What is wrong with me? I’m not desperate, lonely, or sad. I have a full life. But these experiences have galvanised my resolve to search for nothing less than butterflies, desire and anticipation.

When I do meet my life partner, I know it will feel like coming home. I need it to feel like coming home. We just haven’t found the way home yet.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/what-does-an-invisible-woman-know-about-passion-20221212-p5c5ma.html

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The DEI religion

SUMMARY

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become the guiding principle and dominant focus of many foundations, corporations, and the federal government. At the heart of these multi-billion-dollar efforts—both public and philanthropic—are certain key assumptions: America is systemically racist; white America harbors unconscious racism; and equal rights, meritocracy, and the law itself reinforce a regime of white supremacy. Most of DEI’s practices violate the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. Numerical quotas, government race-conscious policies, and speech codes do nothing to close the real disparities of achievement, because they do not address the root causes. DEI eradicates the best aspects of the American experiment, which have brought prosperity and opportunity to so many—the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and equal treatment under the law.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Major U.S. philanthropies are a driving force in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) paradigm, which promotes the lie that America is systemically racist.

* The implementation of the DEI paradigm, which is gaining speed in the corporate world and government, runs counter to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act.

* Americans are right to push back against this Marxist-inspired ideology that seeks to eliminate the best aspects of the American experiment.

The language of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) now infuses the grantmaking of the majority of America’s largest private foundations. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in organizations and programs shaped by the assumptions that underlie DEI. At the same time, because foundation dollars provide early-stage research and development for solving societal issues, whatever philanthropies are supporting today has the potential for widespread implementation in the future. This means that philanthropic dollars have an outsized influence on American culture and society. It is therefore essential to understand the assumptions that underlie DEI, the problems that funders are working to solve, and whether the DEI approach that many mainstream philanthropies are advocating and funding is achieving the desired results. This Special Report sets out to answer those questions.

Definitions

Already, the premises of DEI pervade the actions of the Biden Administration. In his first act as President, on January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden signed Executive Order 13985,1
The White House, “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” which required all federal agencies and departments to root out policies that could have a disparate impact on members of the different racial and sexual population categories that are deemed “underserved.” Since then, the Administration has made the promotion of DEI one its highest priorities.

The private sector is also completely submerged in DEI. A 2021 study of 65 of the largest universities found that the average American university has 45 DEI personnel—with the University of Michigan sporting 163 of them. That means that universities have 40 percent more DEI staff than they have history professors.

The study also examined campus climate survey results to see if the number of DEI staff made campuses more welcoming or inclusive, and found that the opposite was the case. Why is that?

It is essential at this point to examine what exactly the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion means,” and why it has become so prevalent.

An examination of DEI in 21st-century America and its relationship to the major philanthropies must tackle two issues. The first is definitional: What exactly do people mean by diversity, equity, and inclusion?

The second is historical: Any discussion of DEI must take full account of the evolution of racial discrimination, exclusion, and oppression in American history.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definitions of the three words can be of some help. For diversity, Merriam says that it is “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements: variety.” It then adds that diversity especially means “the inclusion of people of different races, cultures, etc. in a group or organization,” and gives the sole usage example of “programs intended to promote diversity in schools.”

The first entry for equity says it is “justice according to natural law or rights.” Merriam’s third definition for equity says it also means “remedial justice under or by the rules and doctrines of equity, a body of legal doctrines and rules developed to enlarge, supplement, or override a narrow rigid system of law.”

These two definitions are in fact diametrically opposed understandings of justice. Lastly, inclusion also evinces these dualities in language. The first definition gives the neutral meaning that it is “the act of including,” but then adds that it is also “the act or practice of including and accommodating people who have historically been excluded (as because of their race, gender, sexuality, or ability).”

These definitional dualities exist because the meanings of the three words have evolved. The English language, lacking a controlling authoritative body, such as Spanish has with the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, is more democratic in its acceptance of evolutionary changes, with the various private-sector dictionaries making independent decisions about which terms to include, Merriam-Webster being but the most famous one for American usage. Definitional evolutions can come organically from the grassroots or ideologically from the grass tops of the academy, the media, or other institutions engaged in making meaning. Because most Americans do not know that the meaning of these specific terms has changed (and, in fact, they ascribe to them the traditional definition, which is why some may be generally supportive), while academics and journalists are conversant in the new meaning, one can assume whence came the pressure for the words to drift. As Amy Harmon put it in The New York Times, “The new lexicon has become a kind of inscrutable code, set at a frequency that only a narrow, highly educated slice of the country can understand.”

Many Americans instinctively embrace DEI because the words diversity, equity, and inclusion each have dual meanings. Indeed, each of these concepts, in its original meaning, is central to the American ethos. The notion that “all men are created equal,” to quote from the Declaration of Independence, is the most profound commitment to diversity and inclusion that any nation has made. The Declaration’s words, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” is a direct expression of the first meaning of equity: “justice according to natural law or rights.” But the fact is that each of these words has been distorted to mean the very opposite of its original intention. As a result, these words as they are now understood in the DEI paradigm are taking the United States in a direction opposed to what the Founders had originally intended.

https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/the-radicalization-race-philanthropy-and-dei

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Failure is actually good for kids. How you can get out of their way and foster their resilience

There’s no way around it: Things don’t always work out for your kids. They fail the test; they don’t get the part; they don’t make the team; they don’t get into their first choice of college. As a parent, watching the sting of these defeats in real time can be tough to stomach. It’s a natural instinct to want to step in when failure happens and “fix it.”

Parents’ desire to protect kids from failure is so common, in fact, that the English lexicon has added a whole set of catchy labels to describe it, says David Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute.

“From ‘helicopter parenting’ to ‘snowplow parenting,’ these terms tend to relate to parents who want to either plow the land in front of their kid to ensure they don’t hit bumps or obstacles or want to remain engaged in so much oversight that they can manage situations for their kid before they become really challenging,” he says.

Studies have drawn links between helicopter parenting and anxiety and depression in kids. The idea is that by swooping in to cushion kids from blows, parents send the message that they aren’t capable of overcoming struggles on their own.

The truth is, not only can kids deal with failure, they need to experience it in order to develop the determination that will serve them throughout life, where success isn’t guaranteed.

Cultivating a growth mindset

Parenting styles that center on removing difficulties from kids’ lives are in direct opposition to a field of literature in psychology that focuses on the concept of a “growth mindset,” which is directly related to qualities like grit and resilience. The idea behind a growth mindset is that your abilities aren’t innate. Instead, you can always improve yourself through effort, learning, and persistence.

“It’s the idea that failure is a stepping stone to success,” says David Schwartz, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. “Educators and people who are in contact with kids talk about the value of kids facing challenges, so they begin to create their own solutions. That kind of perseverance is an incredibly valuable character trait to develop for relationships, for careers, and for just in general facing the challenges of life.”

Scripts for setbacks

Next time your kid is faced with a flop, try these strategies to nurture their motivation to get back up and keep trying:

Be less reactive and more curious. When your child comes home with an F on a paper, take a moment to ground yourself so you’re not leading with your first reaction. Instead of immediate punishment, or expressions of how their failure makes you feel, focus on their thought process so you can foster the resilience that may already be happening there.

“Sit in that space with them for a moment, and say, ’Talk to me about how you’re thinking about this situation,’” Anderson says.

One study on how parents’ views of failure predict kids’ mindset showed that focusing on how your child performed instead of what their failure might teach them leads to a “fixed mindset.” In other words, when parents react as if failure is devastating, kids’ takeaway is that they need to avoid failure instead of learning from it.

Avoid the blame game. It’s tempting to foist a failure on someone or something else in an attempt to mute hurt feelings, but keep the focus on what’s next, says Anderson.

“How we talk through failure matters,” he says. “If our tendency is to say that their setback is because that coach has something against my kid or some system was unfair, you’re telling your child they’re powerless to change a situation in the future.”

Don’t step in to relieve struggle. At the heart of several schools of thought such as Montessori or RIE is the creation of a “yes space,” or a place where kids can try to solve problems in a safe way without someone else telling them how to do it.

If you see your child having difficulty with a project, or even opening a package, just observe from a distance. As long as they’re able to keep a clear (if frustrated) head, the hard work will pay off later.

“That’s really kind of the key for younger kids is if you can see that you can keep them at a level of distress that isn’t completely disorganizing,” says Anderson. “It can be really helpful to try to take a couple of moments a day to let them work through solutions to problems and see if they can solve it on their own.”

Remind them that failure is a moment. Differentiation is key. Remember that your child is not defined by the action they took (or didn’t take) that failed. They may not have been successful, but that’s not who they are. The same goes for when they succeed. Celebrate, but don’t turn it into a personality trait.

“Resilience is about learning that success is a process, not a birthright,” says Schwartz. “Instead of teaching kids that they’re so wonderful that everything they touch will turn to gold, cultivate the message that they’re the kind of person who pursues their goals, continuing to work toward them even when they don’t come immediately or easily.”

Be available. It’s hard to watch your kid struggle or fail. But while it’s difficult to witness, it also creates a beautiful opportunity for connection, says Anderson.

“It’s in those moments where we can say to somebody, ‘I may not be able to fix it, but I’m sitting with you right now.’”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/failure-actually-good-kids-way-120000697.html

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Is Racism to Blame for Healthcare Disparities?

Dr. Murray Feldstein.

I was a surgeon for over 50 years. I challenge anyone to come into an operating room after the patient’s entire body has been surgically draped so that only the gaping open wound is exposed. Look deep inside the body. Take note of the tan kidneys, brown liver, greenish gall bladder, and glistening pale intestines. Marvel as the mighty aorta pulsates down the length of the abdomen, carrying gallons of life-sustaining bright red blood to the pelvis and the legs.

Now…can you tell me the race of the patient?

Trick question. You cannot—because we are all colored the same inside.

As a surgeon, I did not ignore genetic, cultural, or socioeconomic factors associated with race when they related to the patient’s disease, but I never wavered in attempting to treat each patient as an individual. After all, while science instructs us as to what might occur if we treat a disease in a particular way, the art of medicine involves applying the most appropriate treatment for one particular person.

But today, a growing movement casts aside our civilization’s strides toward respect for the intrinsic value of each human as a unique individual. It ignores the real progress we’ve made toward true racial equality, instead demanding that a patient’s group identity—his or her “community”—take precedence over the individual.

Of course, there have always been significant disparities in health outcomes for various population groups. Only women die in childbirth. Only men die of testicular cancer. More people living in hot climates die of heat stroke. The children of Ashkenazy Jews are more likely to die of Tay-Sachs Disease. Black people are more likely to suffer the complications of Sickle Cell Disease.

But these group disparities aren’t a result of racism; they’re related to sex, geography, religion, and specific genetic traits. Their causes are easily discernable, and progressive activists can’t wish them away by proposing “reforms” aimed at achieving outcome “equity.” Yet these activists want to take the serious and numerous disparities and blame racism rather than doing the more complicated work of diving into the numerous and complex factors, which are often not easily discernable, and where there is scant evidence backing up these flimsy claims.

No one denies that racism has been a major source of injustice throughout history. But progressives assume that racism is a major cause of current unfavorable disparities in healthcare outcomes, using evidence largely derived from retrospective studies associating outcomes with demographic data. Importantly, these studies suffer from the presence of confounding variables that are unevenly distributed across different groups—factors like educational level, income, place of residence, family dynamics, and cultural practices. Tricky statistical manipulation can be conducted to better understand the role each of these variables plays, but there is no way to justify the assumption that racism is the most important cause of the disparities.

In claiming that racism is to blame for disparities in healthcare outcomes, progressives also use evidence derived from aggregate studies. In other words, they lump together people from all types of backgrounds (age, income, education, rurality, nationality) and use those findings to inform healthcare decisions for entire populations, which is highly misleading.

When federal health organizations communicate their health outcome data for each race group, they group together people living in rural and low-income areas, high-income professionals in large metropolitan cities, and even those who have recently been resettled from war-torn countries—despite the fact that these subgroups have very different health outcomes and pre-existing conditions.

This misuse of aggregate and retrospective studies has created sweeping narratives and assumptions about white Americans and minorities. White people actually make up the largest proportion of Americans who reside in poverty (42%, followed by black Americans at 28%), but their struggles and poorer health outcomes have become a mirage, particularly in rural areas, where white individuals make up 76% of the population.

Consider that the infant mortality rate is 16% higher in Appalachia than in the rest of the nation. But it’s not because of racism, it’s because of factors like high poverty and uninsured rates, a lack of physician availability, and pre-existing health conditions.

Progressive reformers also believe mistrust of the established medical system is one important cause of a lack of minority access to competent healthcare. The infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, which treated black men as guinea pigs and led to hundreds of unnecessary deaths in the 20th century, is one of many reasons cited for this mistrust.

But now in the 21st century, a multitude of published articles promote the notion that patients are reluctant to see healthcare providers who don’t look like them. Patients are advised to seek out practitioners who belong to their own racial, ethnic, or gender-preference groups—and group identity is emphasized over individual professional competence. It’s true that associating with people with whom we have things in common is often easier and more convenient, whether we’re choosing physicians to treat us or neighborhoods to live in. But making blanket assumptions about wide swaths of people—like saying that all heterosexual white male physicians are too insensitive to meet the needs of all black or LGBTQ patients—ignores each person’s individuality. In other words, this progressive vision of diversity and equity treats Americans with unique needs and differences as if they’re nothing more than faceless, identical members of a given group.

I was born into a family of immigrants. I have been a physician for nearly sixty years and have practiced in extremely diverse environments, including the military, veterans hospitals, Native American reservations, rural areas, underserved inner city communities, and some of the finest academic institutions in the country. I had the privilege of training several generations of medical students and residents. I am optimistic that this period of progressive intolerance is a temporary phase, because I know from experience that intelligent, hardworking men and women of talent and goodwill are found in all races, ethnic groups, and economic classes. Most people still agree with Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream that the content of one’s character will count for more than the color of their skin. Hopefully his dream of the melting pot will triumph over the nightmare of neo-segregationist identity politics—because, in the end, we are all colored the same inside.

https://townhall.com/columnists/goldwaterinstitute/2023/01/05/is-racism-to-blame-for-healthcare-disparities-n2617912

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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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