Media Titan Rupert Murdoch had a daughter when he was 72. Actor Tony Randall became a dad for the first time at 77. When the average life expectancy of the American male was a few months shy of 78, Nobel Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow fathered a kid at 84. Long after a woman’s biological clock stops ticking, most men can still father children. Yet many men say it’s not just women who worry that they are too old to have kids. The physiology might allow for septuagenarians to bounce their beloved bundles on their arthritic knees, but the psychology suggests there is an age to stop bringing another baby on board. Men having children past 40 is generally not a good idea, says Chris Mason, 46, of Danville. The father of three daughters by the time he was in his 30s, Mason says that he wouldn’t consider having a fourth child, even if something were to happen to his wife. ‘When your kids are young, you want to be out on the soccer field running, actually practicing with them,’ says Mason, the co-owner of a firm that out-sources sales. ‘But you get to a point where you […]
NEW YORK — Five Western U.S. states have formed the latest regional pact that bypasses the Bush administration to cut emissions linked to global warming through market mechanisms, according to Oregon’s governor. Oregon, California, Washington, New Mexico and Arizona have agreed to develop a regional target for reducing greenhouse emissions in six months, according a statement from Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski. During the next 18 months, the governors will devise a market-based program, such as a load-based cap and trade program to reach the target. The five states also have agreed to participate in a multi-state registry to track and manage greenhouse gas emissions in their region. The Western Regional Climate Action Initiative comes on the heels of an agreement in the East called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. ‘With the Western states you’ve got a huge part of the U.S. economy that are beginning to regulate greenhouse gases,’ said Jeremiah Baumann, an advocate with the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently passed the country’s toughest greenhouse emissions laws which aim to reduce the state’s economy-wide output of the gases by 25 percent by 2020. Monday’s agreement ‘sets the […]
ORLANDO, FLA. — Robin Boyle arrived in the Florida Keys two years ago, enthused about her new job and new life in paradise. Now she’s moving to Michigan. She imagined that she and her husband, who lived in Key West in the 1960s, would enjoy a slower pace before retirement. But the couple couldn’t afford anything more than a trailer or apartment. When her husband’s medical emergency required a two-hour helicopter ride to a Miami Beach hospital, she knew it was time to go. ‘We thought we would love it,’ says Ms. Boyle, who is giving up her job as managing editor of the Marathon/Big Pine Free Press in Marathon, Fla., for the same job at a newspaper in Hillsdale, Mich. ‘We just can’t afford to live here, but that is happening everywhere. Even doctors can’t afford to live here. The whole middle class is leaving,’ she says in a phone interview. In a state where growth is booming, the Florida Keys are losing residents. Monroe County, which comprises the Florida Keys, lost population every year between 2000 and 2005, dwindling by 4 percent to 76,329 residents, according to the US Census Bureau. By contrast, up […]
Jews are more strongly opposed to the Iraq War – and have been since before it began – than any other American religious group, according to an analysis of Gallup polls conducted since 2005 that was released over the weekend by The Gallup Organization. Asked if ‘the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,’ 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support. The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%. The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, […]
There is a pain — so utter It swallows substance up Then covers the Abyss with Trance So Memory can step around — across. . . . Emily Dickinson wrote those lovely words sometime in the middle of the 19th century, probably after a love affair broke her heart. Over the next century and a half, that same idea found its way into countless books, plays and movies — when a memory becomes too painful to bear, the mind finds a way to seal it off, to ‘step around — across.’ But when researchers recently mounted an exhaustive effort to find examples of trauma-related amnesia in literary works before the 19th century, they drew a blank. If repressed memories are one way the brain deals with painful memories, why would there be no literary examples of the phenomenon that are more than 200 years old? In an unusual study, a group of psychiatrists and literary scholars, led by Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School, recently argued that the psychiatric disorder known as dissociative amnesia (often called ‘repressed memory’) is a ‘culture-bound syndrome’ — a creation of Western culture sometime in the 19th century. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
