Friday, January 15th, 2016
, - CBS News/Associated Press
Stephan: There are major changes going on concerning families in the U.S.. As we increasingly become a post middle class country, individual men and women, with lower incomes, less job security, many still living at home, are marrying later, fewer are marrying at all, and having children later in life. This is going to have a significant effect on their children. If your mother is in her late thirties when you are born, she will be almost 60 by the time you graduate from highschool. and on her way to 70 when you get out of college. Here is some relevant information on this trend.
Credit: mom.girlstalkinsmack.com
NEW YORK — The average age of first-time mothers is at an all-time high in the U.S. – over 26.
The change is largely due to a big drop in teen moms. But more first births to older women also are tugging the number up, said T.J. Mathews of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He’s the lead author of a report released Thursday that put the average age at 26 years, 4 months for women who had their first child in 2014.
The government began tracking the age of new mothers around 1970 when the average was 21. It’s been mostly climbing ever since, and spiked in about the last five years.
The number rocketed immediately after a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, which is used mostly by young unmarried women. Also fueling the rise were improvements in birth control and greater opportunities for women, experts said.
“Women are staying in school longer, they’re going into the workforce, they’re waiting to get married, and they’re waiting to […]
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Friday, January 15th, 2016
, - Education Opportunity Network
Stephan: Of course individual parents love their children, and do everything they can to nurture and support them. But as a society we don't love other people's children. American children are more likely to be physically abused, more likely to be hungry, more likely to be poorly educated than the children in any other developed nation. Here is so information -- it's not pretty -- on this issue.
Credit: AP
When President Barak Obama recently made an impassioned plea to do something about the proliferation of gun violence in America, he drew upon the images of elementary school children gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut to engage our emotions.
“First graders,” he exclaimed, with tears coursing down his cheeks.
His reference to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting seemed like a strong rhetorical tug that should spur citizens and lawmakers alike to take action to reduce gun deaths, especially deaths of children.
But do Americans really care all that much about children – other than their own?
Certainly, conversations with individual Americans still elicit lots of sentiment for the well-being of kids. But it’s increasingly harder to see that sentiment reflected in policy.
As the Southern Education Foundation revealed in a study a year ago, a majority of children attending the nation’s public schools now come from low-income families. And there are more homeless students in American schools than ever before. These developments have huge implications. The impact of poverty on the future well being […]
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Friday, January 15th, 2016
Eric W. Dolan, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Yet another marijuana prohibition myth blows away like a fog. Just speaking as a researcher this is quite an extraordinary story. Here is the latest. It is also worth noting the teen use of marijuana in states where it has been legalized has actually gone down.
Matthew Huron examining a marijuana plant in his grow house.
Credit: Ed Andriesk/AP
A large study conducted in the United Kingdom failed to find evidence of a robust link between cannabis use and lowered intelligence among teenagers.
The study, published online January 6 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, found a statistical association between cannabis use and decreased intellectual performance. However, this association vanished when the researchers took other variables into account. “The notion that cannabis use itself is causally related to lower IQ and poorer educational performance was not supported in this large teenage sample,” wrote Claire Mokrysz of the University College London and her colleagues.
The findings are based on 2,235 teenagers who participated in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a long-term study following children born in the Bristol area in 1991 and 1992. The children had their IQ tested at the age of 8, and again at the age of 15. Nearly a quarter of the […]
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Thursday, January 14th, 2016
WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER, - The New York Times
Stephan: When I hear Republican Presidential candidates talk about using our nuclear arsenal I cringe. I was in government as Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations at the height of the Cold War. The overwhelming concern of geostrategists in the early 70s was nuclear war, and the question we asked was if there was such a war could civilization survive? Could life survive in its present form? The answers were unclear and very problematic. That utter fear (if people were being honest) was what drove the START Treaty. All of that seems to have been forgotten by the conservative cretins running for President.
I had thought the blatant ignorance of the candidates would provoke the more responsible media to talk about nuclear weapons in a rational way, and begin a discussion about the fact that the U.S. and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, at a cost of billions of dollars. Naive fool I. This is the only responsible piece I have seen, and it is written by William Broad, whom I knew even earlier when I was the editor of Sea Power magazine. Broad has been thinking and writing about nuclear forces for decades and understands these issues in a way few do. Read this and think carefully about what he and Sanger are saying.
The new B61 Model 12 nuclear bomb.
Credit: Randy Montoya/Sandia Labs
As North Korea dug tunnels at its nuclear test site last fall, watched by American spy satellites, the Obama administration was preparing a test of its own in the Nevada desert.
A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.
In short, while the North Koreans have been thinking big — claiming to have built a hydrogen bomb, a boast that experts dismiss as wildly exaggerated — the Energy Department and the Pentagon have been […]
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Thursday, January 14th, 2016
Greg Allen, Correspondent - npr
Stephan: There is an emerging trend beginning to grow: a drive to redistrict the blatant gerrymandering that essentially is designed to allow the Republican Party to maintain perpetual control of the House. This is good news if it continues to grow.
Florida state Sens. (from left) Eleanor Sobel, Greg Evers and Rene Garcia discuss a congressional redistricting map on the floor of the Senate in 2014.
Credit: Phil Sears/AP
There was an unusual scene at Florida’s Capitol building in Tallahassee this week. To comply with a court order, legislative staffers used a computer program to randomly assign new numbers to Florida’s 40 state Senate districts.
It’s the latest in a series of moves that have reshaped politics in the Sunshine State. The political ground shifted recently when the courts approved new maps for congressional districts and the state Senate. The maps are the result of laws that aim to eliminate gerrymandering: drawing districts to benefit one political party or another.
It is a time-honored political practice, named after 19th century Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry. In recent years, Florida is one of the states where it has been most rampant.
But now, […]
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